Kaplan was head of a soi-disant ’Caliphate State’ in Cologne. In the eyes of German law, the ’state’ was a registered voluntary association, a Verein, like so many others in Germany (I belong to a couple myself, though so far as I can tell none is an Islamist extremist group.). To Kaplan, it was the government of God on earth; his followers numbered a couple of thousand, who paid taxes to their leader’s state. That state’s policy was pretty much what you’d expect: death to the infidel, drive the Jews into the sea, sharia all round, blah blah blah. Kaplan himself had spent several years as involuntary guest of the larger state surrounding his own, convicted of incitement to murder. After his release, Innenminister Otto Schily (who has come a long way from his days defending RAF members*) revoked the Verein’s status, declared it illegal and sought to ship the Caliph back to Turkey.

Kaplan fought hard against the expulsion order, not with the scimitar but with legal briefs. (A pragmatist, he shrewdly chose to engage a German lawyer rather than an imam.) Some of the evidence the Turks had amassed on him, it seems, had been extracted by measures one has come to associate with Abu Ghraib. The courts ruled such evidence could not ground extradition (Germany has taken this sort of thing seriously for the past half century). Lawyers rubbed their hands in glee as the appeals process began.

Wednesday evening, the Superior Administrative Court at Münster ruled that Kaplan could be extradited after all - but permitted a final appeal. When the authorities arrived at Kaplan’s flat (which is, amusingly, across the road from the Cologne offices of the Verfassungsschutz, the agency charged with monitoring extremists), they found that Kaplan had disappeared.

He could be anywhere. His lawyer claims he’s still in Cologne, and that he’ll swing by the police station voluntarily at some point, or maybe send a note from his doctor explaining why he can’t.

The German government has been left looking rather silly, and the Turks are fuming. But there’s more to all this than merely a story that is almost as amusing as it is alarming. Why on earth was Kaplan still free? Why hadn’t he been packed off to Turkey years ago?

The answer is that the present German legal system, for understandable reasons, has a lot of built-in safeguards, and that as a downside people like Kaplan have benefitted from a very long leash. Until quite recently, Islamist (and other) extremist groups enjoyed a good deal of immunity so long as they could characterise themselves as ’religious’ organisations. Schily fixed that shortly after the al Qaeda attacks in the USA. Still, Germany preserves a lot of procedural protections that some think no longer affordable since 11 September 2001.

The state is wrestling with itself on the issue. And it’s doing so in a serious way. John Ashcroft and David Blunkett may have a few Doppelgänger in Bavaria, but these, thankfully, are not in government. Extremists must not be permitted to turn the rule of law into a weapon against those who, unlike themselves, prize it. But nor must the state discard the rule of law when it proves inconvenient. I hope the authorities find Kaplan soon; I hope they succeed against Kaplan’s appeal and bundle him off shortly to the land of his fathers. But I am glad they have had to go by the book in trying to get rid of him.

* No, not the Royal Air Force, but the Rote Armee Fraktion, a terrorist group that developed out of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

You can read more about the disappearance of Kaplan at the Süddeutsche Zeitung; for the full background, follow the links. (Articles in German.)

Tarantino’s films export poorly to Asian markets precisely because audiences who do not share those references do not understand his work. Even Europeans and North Americans who never saw the genre films that he is echoing fail to appreciate him. Tarantino’s widespread acclaim is a sign that the film world has never really been as sophisticated and elitist as it liked to pretend to be.

In the same way, Emmerich’s Godzilla could never have stood on its own. If you did not already know who Godzilla was, if you have not come into the cinema with those expectations, the film would be unwatchable. Independence Day is a genuinely enjoyable film on several levels, but it can only be enjoyed by people who are receptive to its reconstruction of countless alien invasion stories dating back to H. G. Wells himself. And Emmerich’s new film evokes the 70s disaster movies that he is so clearly fond of, like a faded echo of Tarantino’s homage to the Hong Kong action classics of all those years ago.

Emmerich, however, is the Anti-Tarantino because where Tarantino’s films are witty and unexpected, where they appeal to us intellectually and nostalgically, where they force us to examine the real content of genre fiction, Emmerich simply likes to make disaster porn. He appeals to that well-concealed part of every American that knows, in the marrow of his bones, that one day God will reach down from Heaven and smite Los Angeles and New York off the face of the earth. He appeals to that shameful part of our inner couch potato that, on 9/11, kept expecting Arnold Schwartzeneggar to wipe out an Al Qaeda brigade on CNN and save New York. He appeals to those of us who masochistically like to watch the masses die, helpless in the face of forces beyond any but the most heroic of men, but safe in our own seats in air conditioned theatres.

If you get your kicks from seeing that sort of thing, you’ve probably already decided to go see The Day after Tomorrow and if you do, you will certainly get your destruction fix. If you don’t get off on seeing CGI people swept away like so many ants, you probably don’t much like Emmerich’s films anyway and you won’t like this one. However, if gross film receipts are any measure, us disaster junkies have you outnumbered.

I don’t want to focus on the many things that are deeply wrong with this film. Emmerich can hope to one day be an icon of a genre, to live to see the day when his films are praised for their postmodern tackiness, and where film theory students pour over his work looking for the essence of the big budget special effects action extravaganza. God knows, he won’t be remembered as a good filmmaker. If I were to give you a simple review of this film, I would have to say that Emmerich’s latest is, like most of his work, awful by any traditional normative measure. But so what? In my mind I see Emmerich laughing all the way to the bank, saying “Do you know how much money that piece of shit made me?”

So, instead of giving you a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down review of the film, I want to expose you to a slightly different idea in this review, something that won’t change whether or not you want to see The Day After Tomorrow, but which might change how you see it.

Roland Emmerich is desperately trying to be a subversive filmmaker, and he’s failing miserably. He’s not failing because he’s too subtle. You will leave The Day after Tomorrow without any doubt about what the native German director thinks of the Bush administration. Rather, he is failing because as obvious as the subversive elements of his films are, his audience will still miss them nine times out of ten because they will never get past the blunt, clichéd, hopelessly overplayed elements and see them. Any content in Emmerich’s films which is more subtle than a baseball bat to the back of the head is virtually imperceptible.

I have searched far and wide for someone else saying these things about Emmerich, and so far, I have found no one. I think the reason this is so obvious to me is that my favorite Emmerich film is not Independence Day, it’s Godzilla. Godzilla was trashed by critics. It had a mediocre performance at the box office. It has a low rating on IMDB. But I like it. I like the notion of the city as a maze for giant monsters. I like the whole way Emmerich handled Godzilla’s arrival in New York. I like the nod he gave to the critics (Mayor Ebert and his assistant Siskel). I liked the thing that I suspect most people hated the most about the film: the lack of a clear bad guy. Godzilla wasn’t evil, he just was. His death is both salvation and tragedy. Godzilla, like all the best comic book characters, is a profoundly ambiguous figure. I think people like Independence Day primarily because, unlike Godzilla, it has clear bad guys, and the bad guys get their comeuppance in the end in a way-cool giant explosion in space.

I like Godzilla enough to have actually seen it several times and after a few screenings I asked myself a question that seems never to have occurred to anyone:

Why is Jean Reno in this movie?

The surface reason is that Reno is French, and he’s reasonably well known in Anglostan as a French action/comedy actor. But that just begs the question, why the French? It certainly didn’t score Emmerich any points at Cannes. It didn’t help sell the film in the francophone market, and even if it would have, the francophone market is small compared to Japan, Germany and Latin America.

Why France? It wasn’t strictly necessary to the plot. Godzilla is the accidental by-product of nuclear testing in the Pacific. That was true even of the original Japanese version of Godzilla, but in those days it was the US doing nuclear testing in the Pacific at Bikini Atoll. France did do nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 90s, but by the late 90s, even France had stopped testing. I imagine that he chose France simply because the anti-testing movement had targeted France much more recently than it had targeted anyone else. It was nearer to the top of his head.

So, nothing too surprising there. Emmerich is a lefty of the German bleeding-heart Green-Socialist kind. Everybody knows that.

However, having been beaten upside the head with an anti-nuclear message in Godzilla, you miss the part of the film that is the most subversive. France is responsible for creating Godzilla. So what does France do? Well, when France makes mistakes, it take responsibility for them. Specifically, France sends Jean Reno to fix things. Matthew Broderick, Emmerich’s icon of science, reason and caution, is ignored by American authorities throughout the film, right up to the point where it’s almost too late. But who listens to him, and who risks life and limb following his advice about Godzilla? The French. Whose lives are sacrificed to stop the lizard hatchlings from escaping Madison Square Garden? French lives. And who, in the end, is instrumental in saving the world from giant lizards? Why, it’s France. And does France demand to be honored for its sacrifices? Does it expect the world to show its gratitude through obedience? No, they cover up their very involvement.

This, of course, bears little or no relationship to the actual France that exists outside of Emmerich’s imagination, but contrast this with the anti-French rhetoric of the recent unpleasantness and Emmerich begins to sound more and more subversive.

We might apply the same analysis to Independence Day. Quite a few critics caught on to the unsubtle subtext of that movie but very few members of the larger public did. Emmerich does not threaten the earth with incomprehensible aliens whose motives are unknown, nor is the enemy some horror movie construct like in the vastly better Alien movies. No, Emmerich’s aliens are interplanetary capitalists, bent on exploiting an entire “Third World”. He is truer to the tradition of H. G. Wells than any of his contemporaries. Wells’ War of the Worlds was a social commentary, a response to the English genocide in Tasmania. He used science fiction to imagine Englishmen placed in the position of the primitive Tasmanians, driven to extinction by incomprehensibly powerful invaders acting without scruples. Emmerich is essentially channeling Wells, showing Americans at the receiving end of a war by an exploitive, technologically advanced power that wants our natural resources.

He even accidentally foreshadows Abu Ghraib by linking his aliens to the sadistic anal probers of the Roswell legends.

The title - Independence Day - makes precious little sense without this subtext. Humans are not declaring their independence from their invaders. They were never dependent on them in the first place. Instead, Emmerich is calling for the global poor to reclaim their independence by throwing off global capitalism. It’s just that Emmerich isn’t doing a very good job of making that point. John Carpenter’s underrated low budget masterpiece, They Live, does a far better job of exploring this notion.

What I want you to do, if you go see The Day After Tomorrow, is to see the film as the third part of a sort of anti-imperialist trilogy that includes Godzilla and Independence Day. In each case, the message is essentially one of role reversal. In Godzilla, man becomes the endangered species that a more powerful animal simply crushes under its feet, and America is saved by the French. In Independence Day, America is colonized by a ruthless and technologically advanced race of capitalists who are ultimately overthrown by state-sponsored terrorists who slaughter countless millions of non-combatants using weapons of mass destruction. And, in The Day After Tomorrow, America is visited by a disaster of its own making, and driven to throw itself upon the mercy of the nations of the third world.

The film has, of course, a bluntly environmentalist message. It is so blunt that I can almost figure out what Emmerich has been reading lately. Clearly, he has been into Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear, which contains an entire chapter on how LA is regularly visited by tornados. There is also a deeply anti-Bush and especially anti-Cheney message. If he had cast lookalikes in the roles of US president and vice president, he could not have made his intent clearer. We have another Matthew Broderick/Jeff Goldblum figure: the scientist played by Dennis Quaid who tries to warn them, but is ignored until it’s too late. There is also a cheesy family-values subplot involving a divorced couple that hasn’t completely fallen out of love. These elements are becoming Emmerich trademarks.

There is also bad science. The science is hacked together from unrelated bits of climate science coverage in the public press. It is frightfully off-base. But then, anyone going to see a Roland Emmerich film for good scientific extrapolation is too stupid to be worth explaining the real world to. It’s just not that kind of film, and Emmerich does not pretend that it is.

And there are many amazing weather effects. You may well be impressed by them - many of the Belgians I saw in the theatre were - but I have the unusual luck of living through one of the worst hailstorms in US history, with stones the size of baseballs. I’ve been through several tornados, once I even saw one up close. I’ve been in blizzards that would turn most people blue. I’ve not just lived in Canada, I’ve actually lived in the arctic. I’ve even been in a hurricane. Emmerich’s weather effects are a pale reflection, except for the tornados in LA. Those actually looked scarier than the real thing. The symbolic destruction of Hollywood - the annihilation of the famous Hollywood sign - is a cliché of disaster movies.

But, don’t let the blunt, overplayed environmentalist message of this film keep you from seeing the less blunt but unhidden anti-imperialist message. One of the scenes in the film - something I expect is the last shred of a longer movie that didn’t survive the editing process - shows Americans rushing across the Mexican border, immigrating south in droves. He turns illegal immigration on its head by showing images of white folk desperate to cross the Rio Grande. Emmerich’s message here is far subtler and far more interesting than the environmental message: This is what you would look like if you were a refugee. He revisits this theme momentarily at the end of the film, in a cheesy moralistic speech reminiscent of the Bill Pullman’s schlock at the end of Independence Day. In both films, the subtext is revealed at the very end of the movie in a form so abysmally forgettable that the audience usually misses it. I still haven’t decided if Emmerich is having some kind of perverse joke on Americans, or if he just doesn’t realize that this stuff is corny.

I leave to you whether these disparate elements are enough to make you go see this film or to give it a pass. I’ve already said that The Day After Tomorrow is not, in the conventional sense, a good movie. But then, Enter the Dragon is not exactly a classic of cinema either when you look at the writing, the acting or even the martial arts when compared to more recent films. And yet, it is a classic of the genre. The Day After Tomorrow could be a classic of the genre, but if so, it will not reach that status because the director intended for it to be a genre classic. The more interesting question is exactly what genre Emmerich belongs in. Big-budget special-effects action anti-capitalism is almost certainly not what Fox is in business for.

The local consul general added something I thought insightful, which was that the missing piece is a positive vison from the EU of what transatlantic relations -- especially in the military and strategic areas -- should be all about.

According to people working in the corridors, the EU is on its way to supplanting NATO as the locus of transatlantic relations. NATO has survived many premature obituaries in its 50 years, and it’s far too soon to write off an organization with its resources and institutional memory. On the other hand, if this shift gains ground, it’s a big one and will be very uncomfortable for both sides. To touch on only the most obvious point, the US is in NATO but is an external partner for the EU. That’s a huge change.

These tectonic changes make a positive European vision of what transatlantic relations should be about all the more important.

It’s not just a US-Europe question. A staff person from the think tank had been part of a delegation of foreign ministry planning staffs who traveled to Asia recently. They fended off questions about multipolarity, all of which implied disassociating Europe and the United States. saying that Europe and the US will continue to work together in global security. That was good to hear, but the questions won’t go away.

I think we’re still a long way from having definitive answers to the questions that Timothy Garton Ash posed last May, “Are you with us? Are we against you?”

For those new to this story, O’Leary’s operates discount airline Ryanair - one of the new generation of supercheap airlines. Of course, in the old days discount airlines cut costs by reducing on-board services, simplifying boarding and ticketing systems, and generally only operating a restricted service. O’Leary, however, came up with an alternative and complementary approach to lower prices even further.

First, he doesn’t fly anywhere than anyone would want to go. For example, Ryanair regularly advertises very cheap fares from various European cities to “Brussels.” What you have to work out on your own is that when Ryanair says “Brussels”, it means “Charleroi” - a second tier industrial city an hour and a half away from central Brussels. Once the additional transport costs are figured into the price, your ticket doesn’t seem so cheap, especially when compared to low-cost airlines like Virgin Express and SN Brussels that operate out of the much nearer Zaventem airport.

I gather service to Stockholm is even worse - that the airport he flies out of is 3 hours away from the city centre during rush hour.

Second, not only does he scam people into using distant, second level airports, but he also hits up airport owners - usually local government - for subsidies in return for bringing business to their areas.

The European Commission has ruled that the first strategy is legal, but that the second is not. EU anti-subsidies laws are designed to prevent local government from undertaking subsidies that might damage competition within the union. The whole idea is that you can’t use subsidies as indirect trade barriers, and you can’t use them to develop local business without the support of the European Commission. Thus, Ryanair can not accept subsidies from government-owned airports, only privately owned ones.

O’Leary, of course, says this is nonsense and that private airports are banging on his door, begging to give him their money in return for flying into their airports. However, considering the volume of his complaints, one wonders if he isn’t exagerating a mite bit? It seems unlikely that he will find an alternative private airport near Brussels, and he claims to be committed to continuing to use Charleroi.

Put up or shut up, Mr O’Leary. It’s not communism when the government refuses to help you sell airline tickets below cost.

To be fair, Schroeder and Chirac may have a point. I don’t pretend to know enough about EU tax law -- or tax law in general -- to know whether it’s a valid one. Basically the Franco-German logic is, “OK, so the Slovaks are free to offer a low corporate tax rate. Well, Germany’s free to stop giving so much money to the Slovaks.” The question to me is whether these things are apples and oranges, or even whether the Hungo-Slavic bloc really cares than much about EU structural funding. (And to be completely honest, my eyeballs started to glaze over about mid-way through the Spectator article, so if somebody can distill things a bit better than this, I’d be a happy camper.)

In any case, considering the Schroder-Chirac tax harmonization plan has a snowball’s chance in Cyprus of going through -- at least according to this Business Week piece -- you’d think they’d adopt a different rhetorical strategy. (I could be biased in that regard, because I do genuinely think Western European tax rates are simply too high.)

Most concerning is that Germany and France (and Scandinavia, too) seem to be acting out the caricature so often ascribed to them by the Anglo-American right.(See this European Voice article posted on the site of the American Enterprise Instritute: “Schröder tax plan dubbed ‘economically illiterate’.”)

At its core, the Eurovision is based on the same principles it was founded on in the 1950s - a chance for the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to come together and produce a live event for all its member broadcasters to show together. Each country would enter a song, and a panel of judges from each country would vote for their favourite. However, as the EBU has expanded with the frontiers of Europe, so has the Eurovision and the competing agendas at the heart of the contest have turned into a fascinating window on European culture.

The 90s were where the big changes in Eurovision came about, with three events converging to create the contest we see today. First, the end of the post-war divide saw the states of Eastern Europe join the EBU, expanding what had been principally a Western European organisation into something much broader. Second, the advance of technology meant that voting could now be done over the phone with a popular vote replacing selected national juries. Thirdly, and partly as a result of the first two changes, countries were now free to submit songs in any language as long as they were written by a citizen of that country - previously, entries had to be principally in their own tongue. This had led to the situation in the mid-90s where Ireland dominated the contest, winning four out of five contests (the fifth was won by Norway with a song that merely sounded rather Irish) thanks to being able to enter songs in English - the global language of pop music.

(The Irish situation did however lead to one of the funniest episodes of the sitcom Father Ted where Ted and Dougal’s song My Lovely Horse is selected for the ’Eurosong’ contest as it has no chance of winning, thus saving RTE the cost of having to stage the contest yet again.)

(Update: Chris Brooke points out that My Lovely Horse can be downloaded from here)

Suddenly, the Eurovision had more contestants than it knew what to do with and many of them were quite keen on the idea of winning it, having realised that hosting a three-hour television extravaganza was a very good way of promoting themselves to the millions of people watching. With the realisation that the winner would be determined by the viewers, rather than the anonymous juries, there was a sudden rush away from the tender ballads and Abba-esque sounds that had dominated the contest for most of the 80s towards modern international pop sounds.

Sometimes, this worked well, bringing victories to Estonia and Latvia in recent years, and othertimes, it didn’t but watching bad songs is part of the joy of Eurovision. At least it is in Britain, where much of the enjoyment of the programme comes from the commentary provided by Terry Wogan - viewers in other countries, especially those repeatedly mocked by Wogan, may beg to differ.

For me, though, the true delight of Eurovision isn’t musical, but in the voting that determines the winner. Again, it’s very simple and hasn’t changed since votes were determined by juries - each country votes in turn, listing its top ten songs in reverse - 10th place gets one point, up to 8, 10 and 12 points for the 3rd, 2nd and 1st places - though countries can’t vote for their own songs. However, like all simple procedures, it has it’s complications, mainly because every country has its own little musical and cultural idiosyncracies. Put simply, what Estonia likes, Portugal may not, though it gets more complicated than that, be it the tendencies of the Scandinavian and former Yugoslavian countries to vote for each other, Greece and Cyprus giving each other 12 points every year, the large number of Turkish gastarbeiten meaning that Germany usually gives Turkey a high vote, or France (which refuses to enter a song in anything other than French, of course) getting votes from other French-speaking countries, but not many otherwise. Then, of course, there’s always a couple of countries whose votes differ wildly from any patterns seen before.

In fact, it can be more enjoyable to ignore all the actual musical section of the show and just enjoy the vagaries of the voting and this year promises to be even more enjoyable. Unlike previous years, where merely the countries in the final voted, this year all 36 countries who entered (12 were eliminated in a semi-final last night) will vote. Not only does this mean that the voting will likely go on for longer than the singing, but it opens up the prospect of Andorra or Monaco casting the decisive votes.

And, should you wish to make it even more interesting, William Hill will happily accept your bet on who you think will win - Greece (9/4) and Ukraine (3-1) are the current favourites, though I’m tempted by the 20-1 on offer for Bosnia-Herzegovina which, from the 10 seonds of the song I’ve seen, appears to be of the same camp, disco flavour of Israel’s 1998 winner, Dana International. Combining the kitsch and Balkan votes could be the key to victory.

This we may conveniently refer to as the ’ticking timebomb’ problem, and indeed (as afoe’s Scott Martens has already noted) John Quiggin does just that at Crooked Timber.

Quiggin concludes that, while torture might sometimes prove necessary, it is never justified. If a law-enforcement official - absent any other less distasteful means - breaks out the thumbscrews, extracts the required facts and saves the day, then hooray; but to do the right thing, the offical must turn himself over to the authorities nonetheless, and face charges.

A plea in mitigation might be considered in cases like the one described above - a proven urgent and immediate danger, followed by a voluntary confession - but even so, the torturer should be removed from their job and spend some time in prison. In any case where a confession is not made, no claims about mitigating circumstances should be admitted.

[…]

Whether or not torture can be justified as a matter of individual morality in some extreme cases, it should be punished in all cases, and severely punished in nearly all cases, as a matter of public policy.

David Bernstein (Eugene Volokh’s least-impressive co-conspirator) disagrees. ’By contrast,’ opines Bernstein,

I’d give them a ticker tape parade.

[…]

[T]he idea that the physical coercion is so terrible that it should be punished with jail time even when the torturers were in good faith trying to save millions of lives from a ticking time bomb strikes me as one of those ideas only an academic could come up with.

And, I might add, the idea that state officials be given a carte blanche to torture, so long as they act in ’good faith’, is one of those ideas only a different sort of academic could defend. And Bernstein’s carte really is blanche; his torturers get off the hook even if they fail to produce the goods, and even if they’re wrong about the torturee. (Though he does concede that the shaking and battered prisoner might, in such a case, be offered a bit of compensation as he’s taken down from the rack. ’Terribly sorry about all that, old chap; but there’s a war on, you know. Here - this should see you right.’)

It may be that, because I am much closer to agreeing with Quiggin than with Bernstein, I am prejudiced in saying so; but Quiggin has done a pretty good job of thinking this through (though I’d question his characterisation of the confession as ’voluntary’). Bernstein, by contrast, appears not to have thought at all beyond the (unquestionably welcome) result of finding the timebomb. A hint for him, then: in the quest to achieve even undeniably desirable ends, one shouldn’t forget altogether to question the means.

But perhaps you’re thinking, isn’t there something, well, a bit law-schoolish about this whole debate? After all, so far as we know none of the tortured detainees in Abu Ghraib (pace Bernstein’s hypo) has produced information about a ticking nuclear device in the Empire State Building. Isn’t this all a bit like debating when it’s permissible for shipwrecked sailors to eat their lifeboat-mates? The thing is, sometimes shipwrecked sailors are faced with troubling dietary choices. And sometimes policemen are placed in a situation in which an evil deed may appear the only means of averting a deed even more evil.

Here’s one real-life example, though I’m afraid it doesn’t quite reach the dramatic heights of Bernstein’s Empire State Building. In 2002, Magnus Gäfgen kidnapped 11 year old Jakob von Metzler, demanding ransom from Metzler’s father, a rich Frankfurt banker. Gäfgen was quickly caught, and told the police he had hidden the boy, though he wouldn’t say where. The police raced to find Metzler before he died of asphyxiation, exposure or starvation. Frustrated by Gäfgen’s persistent refusal to reveal the boy’s hiding place, Frankfurt’s deputy police chief Wolfgang Daschner instructed his men to ’inflict pain, but not injury’ on Gäfgen to coerce him to talk.

What Gäfgen hadn’t told the police was that he killed the boy shortly after abducting him, and all they would eventually find at the hiding place (in a lake) was his dead body in a plastic sack. (He did reveal this fact shortly after learning he might be in for a bit of whacking-about.) Gäfgen has since been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. In Germany, a term of life normally can mean as little as 15 years, but because the court ruled that Gäfgen’s guilt was ’especially grave’ (besonders schwer), he will be ineligible for parole. That’s that for Gäfgen, then, and I’m sure all of us can join in saying ’good riddance’.

But what about Daschner? Torture is illegal in Germany. Though the police never actually got round to torturing Gäfgen, that’s precisely what Daschner told Gäfgen they would do; and threatening torture is also illegal.

Daschner is a model exemplar of Bernstein’s laudable torturer. Though the torture would have brought nothing (Metzler was already dead), Daschner couldn’t have known that. He really believed the boy was in imminent danger of death. The police had exhausted all lawful means in the attempt to make Gäfgen reveal his whereabouts. Under those circumstances, is it really so difficult to understand why Daschner made the choice he did? I’d hate to have been in his shoes, but if I were, I strongly suspect I’d have done the same. (Indeed, I might not have been as fastidious as Daschner was to insist that no actual injury be inflicted.) Surely Daschner was caught in a situation in which torture was necessary as an ultima ratio?

He was, I think, and it’s awfully hard to think of him as a bad man. But still, the state was left with the question of what to do with him. There was a bit of a national debate about this at the time, and Bernstein will doubtless be disappointed to learn that the upshot was not a ticker-tape parade for Daschner. Instead, he was formally charged, in February of this year, with illegal coercion (Nötigung) . (Had the torture been carried out, he likely would have been charged with battery as well.) The case is winding its way through the courts, but if Daschner is found guilty, he faces up to three years in prison.

There’s no question that what Daschner did violates a norm of the Criminal Code, nor any question that he did it. His defence, then, will be putting all its chips on an argument of justification by necessity. Paragraph 34 of the Criminal Code provides that

a person who commits an [otherwise criminal] act to prevent a present danger to life … does not act illegally if the legal interest thereby protected substantially outweighs the legal interest thereby harmed.

Here’s the ’defence of necessity’, then, that Bernstein would allow his torturers. Daschner has a problem, though. The defence of necessity is a very general rule, and as we all know lex specialis derogat legi generali. That is, a law drawn up to cover a specific situation trumps broader laws that might also cover that situation. And § 136a(1) of the Criminal Code lays down some very specific rules for the police:

The suspect’s freedom of will and decision-making may not be undermined through maltreatment, … physical attack… [or] torture…. Force may be used only to the extent that criminal procedural law permits it. The threat of any measure that is not permitted under such law … [is] forbidden.

It’s absolutely correct that Daschner face trial for his actions. And, though part of me wishes his defence the best of success with what doesn’t look like a winning argument, I could not be too upset if he is found guilty. And, if guilty, he should be punished. I would hope that the court, in meting out a punishment, would take into account the inhumanly impossible position Daschner found himself in (and the Criminal Code does allow for significantly milder penalties for criminal coercion than a three-year prison term). There’s certainly something tragic in the figure of Daschner. But I cannot accept that his deed be dismissed, let alone celebrated with ticker-tape, because he was acting in good faith and sought to achieve a desirable result.

Nor, it seems, can the Germans. Bernstein would probably dismiss them as so many weak-willed Old Europeans. But many Germans will have in mind an earlier regime, one that was not as punctilious as the present state about the rule of law. They’ve been down that road before, and whatever other political differences they may have with each other, most of them are determined never to go down it again.

So moving adroitly from the truly tragic to the totally mundane Ernst & Young have just published a report on the European biotechnology industry.

“Ernst & Young’s 11th annual European biotech report, Refocus published today, reveals that total 2003 European revenues fell by 12% to €11.27 billion, the first time the industry has witnessed a fall in revenues. Cut backs in research and non-core areas exacerbated a 17% decrease in R&D expenses and a 5% fall in employees, which improved the net loss significantly by 52%. Public company revenues decreased 16% to €6.6 billion, with market capitalisation increasing by 17%, gaining almost €4 billion in value.”

Among the findings: companies cut research and development of on new medicines by 17 per cent. The cuts helped reduce losses by more than 50 per cent, but they also meant various projects were put on hold whilst contributing to a 5 per cent fall in employment in the sector.

Amongst the bad, there are, of course, the less bad: the UK still leads the European market by revenues and market capitalisation. However E & Y point out revenues fell from €2.9 billion to €2.4 billion, while market capitalisation increased from €9.4 billion to over €11 billion. UK head of Health Sciences at Ernst & Young William Powlett Smith is quoted as saying:

”Whilst the UK remains the dominant player in the European scene, this is not much consolation for the UK’s position globally, which, like the rest of Europe’s, looks vulnerable. There is no doubt that Europe has plenty of examples of world-beating science, but scientific advances are not enough. The right financial and regulatory infrastructure must be balanced by the appropriate level of management ability. Companies, investors and governments must take bold steps to ensure that they realise all the benefits of knowledge and hard work.”

As the Financial Times wryly puts it:

”The findings will make uncomfortable reading for European politicians, who are faced with almost daily with claims that the Lisbon agenda to reform the European economy is dead. The E&Y report follows a warning by the Economist Intelligence Unit last month that Europe’s large economies will lag well behind the US for the rest of the decade because of their slow adoption of information and communications technology.”

So where’s the point that is worrying me?

Well if each and every time you look at the way we are doing things you find this kind of problem (pension reform, growth and stability pact, 3g phones, internet innovation, applications of IT in business, broadband roll-out, venture capital availability), and you find a political infrastructure that is either unwilling or unable to change, then just what is it that gives everyone so much confidence that all this will have a happy ending? That is what is worrying me.

And, of course I could point out that I’m not the only afoe member to be in worry mode these days: Worried grumbling is a bit of a national sport here in Germany - to mention just one.

Oh, and BTW, since I don’t think it merits a separate post (it is, after all part of the same problem), this would be another example of things that keep worrying me.

“The French government is pushing for a stand-alone solution to the financial crisis at Alstom, but the European Commission is still resisting plans to grant more state aid to the stricken engineering group. Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s new finance minister, on Wednesday said he was “making progress” in his talks with the Commission over a government-backed bail-out package for Alstom.”

Eight senior politicians have now admitted failing to make at least some of the required payments into the country’s mandatory pensions scheme.

“Sixty-two percent of respondents to a poll by public broadcaster NHK had less confidence in the pension system since hearing that lawmakers had missed paying their premiums. Another 26 percent said they didn’t have much faith in the system to begin with.”
The Guardian

Meantime yesterday the Japanese lower house of parliament voted in favour of a reform of the pension system, a reform absent which as the BBC says:

” the scheme could collapse as the workforce shrinks and is outnumbered by retired people claiming pension benefits.”

Now as everyone knows, the numbers of pensioner in Japan is rising dramatically (as it is elsewhere in the OECD), and many Japanese have reservations about paying into a pension scheme which is at best unlikely to afford them significant benefits when they retire (in fact after previous reforms the levels of benefit are already quite low) due to the comparatively small numbers of young people available to contribute.

This time even the ever optimistic Economist isn’t too convinced that the proposed reforms will make the system work judging by the article it had back in December entitled: “Don’t grow old - The government’s proposals will surely fail to fix the public pension system”

All of this should obviously sound ominously familiar to readers in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy etc.

Free Rider Problem?

Now the problem of Japanese public finances is well known. The Japanese government is the most indebted in the world - 150% of GDP and rising was the last figure I saw. Japan is running substantial fiscal deficits, and there really is no end-date in sight for when, if ever, they could return to surpluses and start repaying all that debt. So each year it simply gets worse.

But what I didn’t realise before today was just how many people had already alighted from the about-to-crash bus. From the BBC:

”Either deliberately or by accident, about 40% of the 18 million self-employed people and students aged 20 or older did not pay the obligatory premiums for the National Pension System in 2002, according to the social insurance agency”.

Is this some sort of perverse new version of the ’free-rider’ problem, were you keep the whole system afloat by pretending to pay whilst at the same time walking away from the building before it collapses? Is this going to be yet another example of ’self-fulfilling expectations’? Are we reaching a backward induction point? Will there be a long slow sucking sound?

Next stop Italy? Watch this space.

As everybody knows, the German government (unlike a section of the German people) was quite gung-ho about the EU’s recent eastward expansion. Expansion brings with it a small problem, though. Lots of the shiny new member states are charmingly cheap places to do business. In Germany, by contrast, ’cheap place’ and ’to do business’ are terms that do not normally abut. If, like Germany, you were a country desperate to generate jobs and revenue, you might be tempted to look at your new comrades with a gimlet eye.

And indeed, the German government is stamping its little feet over those vexing easterners, with their low corporate taxes and labour costs. Gerd Schröder has been making noises about the ’unfairness’ of lower corporate taxation elsewhere, and I have just seen a poster protesting against the nefarious practice of ’wage dumping’ (Lohndumping). Schröder has also attacked managers who broach the possibility of relocating their works to cheaper eastern EU countries as ’unpatriotic’.

As a political matter, I suppose he has to say that. And, as in all these matters, a cardinal rule is: it’s not that simple. What’s more, managers threatening relocation are probably engaged more in a ritual chest-thumping exchange than any real speculation about wholesale corporate emigration. Still, they’re closer to right, and Schröder closer to wrong. All else being equal (a crucial assumption, often ignored in TV-soundbite rhetoric), a manager would be a fool, and a poor steward of his shareholders’ capital, if he didn’t consider putting his business where it could be run cheaply.

So, yes, there is something for the government to worry about. (There usually is.) But how does it propose to respond to the threat? What worries me is that they don’t want to respond to it; they want to neutralise it. Wouldn’t it be grand, goes the thinking, if other member states had to tax like we do? If it cost as much to hire a Pole or Czech as it did a German? You can even make this sound rather lofty and noble, by evoking images of level playing-fields and the like.

I can certainly understand why Schröder would be upset about cheap corporate tax regimes. My sympathies for the Germans are limited, though, and my vicarious sympathies for the easterners great. It’s a pity the German economy is sclerotic and all; but the Germans are still richer by miles than the easterners. Now, another EU country (though rather a western one), Ireland, was historically a pretty poor place. It’s much richer now than it used to be. To be sure, part of its recent prosperity is the result of EU cash infusions. But a lot of it is down to having found a way (low taxes, primarily) to persuade firms to come in and set up shop. If the new member states can pull off the same trick, fair play to them.

Ditto for labour costs. Germany has, over the years, made certain choices as a result of which it’s expensive to hire and fire workers (and to employ them in the time in between). Whatever about the wisdom of those choices (and remember, on a historical scale they have served Germany pretty well), other countries may see the wisdom in adopting a different approach. If they do, and it works, more power to them.

What must Germany do, then, in the face of these challenges from the East? The answer is easy: it must make itself more competitive. The hard question is, how? But I don’t think that doing so inevitably condemns Germany to a race to the bottom. Competition will put pressure on the Germans to reduce the cost of doing business. That doesn’t mean that Germany is going to have to, say, match Polish labour costs euro for złoty. The firm I work for is hardly the cheapest place to come if you need the services we provide; but significant numbers of clients come to us rather than going to a less expensive competitor because they are convinced they get good value for the premium. Do our competitors’ rates affect our own? Of course they do; absent competition we’d probably be able to charge much more. We can’t ignore their pressure, but nor must we ape their model to compete. A country is not a firm, of course, but I hope economists will not condemn me as hopefully naïve for thinking that, in a big-picture sense, the same rules apply.

But what I am hearing from the German government is not questions about improving competitiveness; what I am hearing is the monopolist’s whine: protect me from competition. Nice work if you can get it; but Germany should not be surprised to find other countries reluctant to play along. They can offer what Germany cannot. Rather than hobbling them just as they leave the starting gate, let the German government instead strive to provide compelling alternative reasons to invest in Germany. If the Germans can make their country attractive enough, they might find that businesses are willing to hire people and make things here for reasons other than ’patriotism’.

The PNR agreement appears to become a tricky legal issue in the run up to the European elections - no one seems to know exactly what the appropriate legal procedures are in this case. The Parliament challenges the Commission’s decision to only give it an advisory vote on this matter - although, according to a diplomat quoted by EUpolitix, there are precedences for such a decision. But even so - flatly disregarding a Parliamentary vote in a matter of such importance does not just look bad - it significantly strains the EU institutions’ relations. According to EUpolitix, Dutch MEP Johanna Boogerd-Quaak - who wrote the Parliament’s rejection - said

“Should [governments]… decide to conclude the agreement without waiting for the opinion of the European Court of Justice… I believe it would be essential that parliament take legal action in order to protect parliamentary prerogatives”.

I don’t know how the Commission’s and the Council’s adequacy finding with respect ot the draft agreement could alter the Parliament’s de jure case - but law is often powerless in light of established facts. A signed and possibly already enforced agreement with the US may simply prove impossible to change.

Establishing facts. That’s the executive’s prerogative. Yet I have doubts regarding its adequacy. Do I have to mention that the PNR agreement was not the only privacy limiting issue on Commissioner Vitorino’s agenda in Washington?

The reach of the China phenomenon is not, of course, confined to such bizarre activity, nor is it even restricted to the domain of metal. Currently the whole of Latin America could be said to be riding on the back of a China driven commodities boom which extends from soya in Brazil and Argentina, to copper in Chile to zinc and tin in Peru.

The Brazil soya case is an interesting and important one. Brazil will surpass the US this year as the No. 1 exporter of soybeans. The growth in soybean production in Brazil, where farmers this year increased plantings by an area the size of Israel, means that agriculture and related activities now account for 29 percent of gross domestic product, 46 percent of exports and more than a third of all employment, with the consequence that China’s expansion has given a big boost Brazil’s trade surplus and pushed the Real ever onwards and upwards against the dollar. Recent estimates suggest that foreign sales of soybeans last year reached $8 billion, or 13 percent of all exports, and this year they are set to rise still higher. The scale of this impact was graphically brought home to me recently in a mail from a friend living in Curitiba, Brasil who said that the 100 Km truck queue to the port at Paranagu was backed-up right outside his house.

The reason this is happening: the Chinese are getting richer, and eating more and better quality food. According to Lester Brown, president and founder of Washington- based Earth Policy Institute. “As Chinese become richer they are moving up the food chain and consuming higher protein food, especially more animal protein, that requires ever-expanding imports of soybeans to produce soybean meal to supplement grain in livestock and poultry rations.”

Now all of this has it’s good side and it’s bad side. It is one clear example of how global trade is beneficial, with foreign direct investment in China creating factories which then export products via ’Big Box’ US sites like WalMart to help keep down the cost of living for American workers. In their turn the Chinese spend part of the money received on soya and provide, in so doing, work for Brazilian farmers.

But there is another side to this impact, and that is the global chase for what are, at least in the short term, restricted resource supplies. And one immediate consequence of this chase is that global commodity prices are on the rise. This is not good news for a Europe which is heavily dependent on raw material imports: in fact it effectively means that the terms of trade just changed against us.

After a remarkable expansion of grain output from 90 million tons in 1950 to 392 million tons in 1998, China’s grain harvest has fallen in four of the last five years—dropping to 322 million tons in 2003. Putting this in some perspective, the drop of 70 million tons exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada.
However, again according to Earth Watch, the recent price rises may be only the early tremors before the big quake. China’s most recent harvest shortfalls have been covered by drawing down its formerly massive stocks of grain. But these will soon be depleted, and the government forced to cover the shortfall with imports.

The fall in China’s grain harvest is due largely to a shrinkage in the grain harvested area from 90 million hectares in 1998 to 76 million hectares in 2003. This fall is the result of a number of converging factors including: the loss of irrigation water, desert expansion, the conversion of cropland to non-farm uses, the shift to higher-value crops, and a decline in double-cropping due to the loss of farm labour in the more prosperous coastal provinces.

When China finally turns to the world market, it will inevitably turn to the United States, which controls nearly half of world grain exports. This presents an unprecedented geopolitical situation which will see 1.3 billion Chinese consumers who collectively currently enjoy a $120-billion trade surplus with the United States — a quantity large enough to buy the entire U.S. grain harvest twice over — competing with their American equivalents for the right to eat U.S. produced food. The probable consequence of all this: a food price explosion both within the United States and across global markets.

Of course the impact of this in the poorest countries may be very serious indeed.

Here in Europe there seem to be two immediate implications. In the first place the Common Agricultural Policy, whose funds have long been directed to supporting farmers from prices which were considered to be too low, may find them increasingly committed towards protecting urban consumers from the consequences of world foodstuff prices which are considered to be too high. In the process the whole debate about farm subsidies may take a new and unexpected turn.

Secondly the impact is also surely going to be felt in the area of community policy towards GM foods. The pressure to improve agricultural productivity, and to keep down the relative price of key items on the household diet, will doubtless be considerable. Already the signs are there. Gerhard Schroder, recently insisted that his agriculture minister, Renate Kunast -- a member of the Green party, and a resolute opponent of GM crops to boot -- announce that Germany will proceed with trials of GM crops later this year. Soon after this, the Commission announced its willingness to support a proposal to allow imports of at least one type of pest-resistant GM maize -- the Bt-11 variety developed by the Swiss agrochemical giant Syngenta. Further evidence may be garnered from recent discussions surrounding biotech labelling. All in all, it is clear the agenda is changing. Could it be that once more the need for a cheap food policy will be back on the European agenda, and that high on the list of those responsible for this will be none other than those newly affluent Chinese consumers we seem to see so much of in the TV news these days?

The continuing increase in private and public indebtedness in the UK does of course pose an important problem, and the danger represented by the so-called ’wealth impact’ of any hard landing on the property prices front will hardly be the last thing on Mervyn King’s mind right now.

Despite inflation being well below the government’s target, the Bank moved to rein in the rapid growth in borrowing when it pushed up interest rates by 0.25 points to 4.25%.

Industry and the City had been braced for the move and the country’s second and third biggest home loan providers - the Abbey National and the Cheltenham & Gloucester - responded by increasing their variable rates to 6.25%.

The rise will add almost £17 a month to an £80,000 interest- only mortgage and almost £21 a month to someone with a £100,000 home loan.

Analysts said yesterday’s increase was unlikely to be the last; the City is pencilling in a further rise to 4.5% in August.

The National Consumer Council urged borrowers to “think long and hard” about taking on further debt, but the National Association of Estate Agents said the small increase in rates was unlikely to damage the housing market, where prices are rising at almost 20% a year.

Yesterday’s move came in the wake of figures showing net mortgage lending rose by £9.34bn in March.
Source: The Guardian

Sir Mervyn is undoubtedly not alone in this concern, Sir Alan over in Washington has also been busy letting everyone know what a potential problem all the public and private debt currently being acquired might represent in a not too distant future.

Meantime Rodrigo Rato is now nicely installed over at the IMF and will doubtless hard at it burning the midnight oil to ready his speech about how Spain was ’unwise’ not to have acted sooner on *its* housing bubble. Possibly he is secretly praying that the UK also has a hard landing, since that way he will have less explaining to do. Remember, thanks to the Euro, Spain is currently enjoying the ECB 2% rate, which with inflation up around 2.7% means that there is a negative real interest rate of 0.7%. Of course in Spain there is no ’pick up in pay awards’ to be noted, indeed quite the contrary.

Spain most certainly did benefit enormously from joining the EU. Whether or not they spent the EU structural funds ’wisely’ is a rather tendentious point, but one which is without great importance here. The central point is that these two nations are in no way comparable historically in their moment of accession.

In 1986 Spain was facing what the UN calls the demographic ’window of opportunity’. That is the fertility rate was dropping sufficently for savings rates to rise, but the pyramid structure was still sufficiently sound for a large supply of cheap labour to keep arriving on-line.

At the same time Spain was able to make the transition from fairly low productivity agriculture to relatively higher productivity industry, and, leveraging all that cheap labour, develop a development model out of being a sort of ’Mexico’ for the EU.

Now this prospect is simply not available for Poland. The demographics are completely different, Poland has low fertility and a rapidly ageing population. It is a population where many are arriving towards retirement age with precious little in the way of accumulated wealth, and thus where the fiscal deficit can only be reduced sharply by threatening the elderly with increasing poverty.

OTOH the arrival of China and other developing economies on the global scene means the old ’Mexico’ model is increasingly questionable. Poland can compete with China, but it cannot do this and increase per capita income significantly. It faces a different kind of ’poverty trap’ here.

Indeed this ’trap’ once entered, may be difficult to break out of, as the Portuguese and the Spanish are now discovering. Meantime, as the BW article explains, there are really two Polands, and one of them is already much more dynamic than the Spanish ’role model’. Just an anecdote: listening to the radio last night I learnt the surprising fact that the Polish enterprise already invests a higher percentage of net earnings in R&D than the Catalan equivalent does, and the Catalan enterprise, it should be noted, has a much better performance in R&D than the Spanish average. That is to say that one of the two Polands may do much better in the ’value added’ activities than any of the Mediterrenean 3.

One other little detail: there are apparently 100,000 blogs in Poland (see this, and this ). Poland may in fact be the fourth country in the world blog rankings. This may not be entirely devoid of significance when thinking about Poland’s future.

In a recent essay, Stanford philosophy professor Richard Rorty warned that the long term result of operation enduring freedom - the war on terror - might actually result in the opposite. Are the infringements of civil liberties introduced in order to assure public safey in the face of terrorism, the end of democracy, he asked.

Probably not in the way the term is commonly applied in public discourse – as some kind of system to provide a regular check on elites. But Democracy, government by, for, and through the people, is only one crucial element of the complex governance structure we call “liberal democracy”. The rule of law, the protection of fundamental individual rights against private and public infringement by some democratic majority or possibly its (alleged) agent, the government, is another cornerstone thereof – one that is more likely to suffer because of the current concern with public safety and the alleged supreme risk associated with terrorism.

The current issue of German “Neon” magazine features an interesting story about risks. The real risks of life, usually expressed in odds, and their perception, which is usually disproportionate: exaggeration and neglect appear to be the most common human strategies to deal with the unknown. i may come as a surprise, but the risk of becoming a victim of terrorism is negligible. Neon reports that, after 9/11, the US scientist Michael Rothstein calculated the odds of dying aboard a commercial flight in a world in which Osama BinLaden would hijack a plane a month – it was about 1 in 540,000. The risk associated with drowning in the bathing tub is allegedly noticeably bigger.

Of course terrorism has to be fought with all appropriate means - and that may include some measures limiting civil rights - but how are we to determine just what is appropriate in light of our inability to rationally deal with risk? Maybe this is too much to ask of the public - but somehow, faced with the agenda of “security” lobbyists from outside within their administrations, it seems even the political leadership is having trouble to decide just what is appropriate.

Currently, as today’s PNR vote indicates, most governments are primarily concerned with increasing the input variables of their data-mining projects. Yet if I my interpretation of the lessons of 9/11 is not entirely incorrect, more than information, US intelligence agencies lacked, well, intelligence to put the sketchy puzzle together. How this is to be improved by drowning agents in a pool of substantially useless data is not immediately apparent to me. Even a significant number of intelligence experts have stated that more brains are needed, not more information, and certainly not more scans of tourists entering the US at JFK airport.

I agree with Richard Rorty that it is highly unlikely that either the US government or those in Europe are made up of “crypto fascists”. The far more likely explanation is simply a failure of political leadership. A failure caused by a general lack of understanding to which extent individual liberty is actually the cornerstone of “Western Civilisation”, and by the inability to anticipate that the consequences of politically approved civil rights infringements could become more dangerous than fear of terror.

Of course, the counter-argument that imposing some limits on civil rights will not lead onto the slippery slope of a self reinforcing infringements could be correct. Most of the times things are not as bad as they look – chances are that the technology will simply not work as intended and largely lack interoperability.

But when it comes to significant limitations of individual rights, there should be a true public debate – and the burden of proof has to be on those proposing the measures. Yet neither is the case. Much of what finally turns up on the political agenda for ratification has been pre-packaged by largely unknown organisations like, say, ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

Even the measures were only of temporary nature, or would prove less dangerous than is to be expected today - let us not forget that the darker hours of one of the origins of modern societies - the French Revolution – offers a prime example of safety turning into terror. Sure, the Committee for Public Safety’s actions can be explained - after all, the Revolution was endangered by war and civil unrest. But does that justify the policies? Even though human rights prevailed after Robespierre himself had slid down the slippery slope, the Revolution had forever been stained by the episode.

And just as in the case of the guillotine, the mere existence of surveillance technology only makes surveillance possible - it doesn’t justify it. On page 38, last week’s Economist offered a glimpse into a bleak version of a technologically dictated future. British police are secretely, and it seems at least partly unwittingly, preparing society-wide genetic fingerprinting. Since a technology is now available to genetically identify relatives of previously scanned offenders, it will likely only be a matter of time until the inevitable will be asked: if some people can be identified using their relatives DNA, wouldn’t it be necessary to take DNA samples from everyone for equality reasons?

Given such visions of a brave new world, the European Parliament’s decision to ask for a ECJ ruling on the legality of the PNR agreement with the US may sound trivial. But the stakes are high And, almost unexpectedly, the EPs resistance raised public awareness.

This, at least, will be true regardless of the result of the vote.

Update: The result is in - the Council’s strategy fell apart. In the first vote of the enlarged Parliament, MEPs voted 343 to 301, with 18 abstentions, against accepting the urgency request to endorse or reject the PNR agreement before a European Court of Justice ruling on the matter. According to EUpolitix, Dutch Liberal Johanna Boogerd-Quaak, who drafted the parliament’s opinion, said “This means that we have now voted five times to speak out against this agreement with the US. I hope the Council now understands that no means no.”

Following his resignation from the SPD’s chairmanship in early February, it became quickly clear that the price for the left’s relative silence in the face of even mild deregulation would be a tax on businesses failing to employ a certain number of vocational trainees - a measure intended to reduce youth unemployment. However, by further increasing the cost of labour, such legislation would in all likelihood have an adverse effect not just on youth unemployment, while it would certainly increase the transaction costs of the German economy, not least by setting up a new federal agency of at least 600 employees, as some commentators claimed.

And as if this weren’t “funny” enough by itself, other ghosts of the past are now mocking the well-meaning interventionists, too: About three years ago, the coalition introduced legislation that made prostitution basically a job like all others.

Before, it was legal to engage in prostitution and buy sexual services, but it was illegal to promote prostitution. The latter was prohibited to ensure the punishability of exploitative pimps yet had the adverse effect that it was also illegal to provide prostitutes with services other than “protection”, say catering, if the catering service was also owned by the person or entity letting the rooms. The new legislation made the provision of sexual services a job like all others, allowing brothel owners to cater, but also to employ working girls.

However, beyond legalising activities like catering, the law, intended to allow sex workers to enter the public safety net as normal employees does not appear to have been particularly successful. While Ver.di, the giant service sector union, set up a working group to deal with the particular difficulties caused by employment contracts consisting of the employee’s obligation to perform a specified set of sexual services to a usually unknown client, it seems most prostitutes shook their heads in disbelief and continued to work as freelancers - a status that allows them to reject clients at will and, moreover, has significant (implicit) fiscal advantages in a largely cash-based business.

Strangely though, as Spiegel Online reports today (link in German), those brothels which are actually doing what the legislator intended and are actually employing prostitutes will now become subject to the proposed new “apprentice-or-tax” legislation, for it only concerns businesses with employees in the public social security system. And an exemption would be too difficult to manage, as the Ministry of Education - which is in charge of the operation - explains.

Does that mean that the German government is so desperate with respect to the structural lack of jobs in the German personal service market that it has decided to enter the pimping business and ask brothel operators to hire prostitute-apprentices? Not quite. Well, not yet, at least.

The process of establishing the regulation for a formal apprenticeship in Germany is one of the last remnants of corporatist, sort-of-guild-based decision making, and a science in itself. In an ever faster changing economy, it’s not uncommon that definitions are ready when the jobs have already disappeared. That, for sure, would not be a dominant concern with respect to the design of a vocational training scheme for the oldest business in the world.

But at the moment there is no formal apprenticeship for sexual services. Accordingly, for the time being the Ministry’s argument is correct that only the hiring of apprentices for officially recognized vocational training schemes, say waiters, or accountants, would allow to save the tax. That, and, of course, not formally employing prostitutes in the first place, as outlined above and as feared by the Greens. But I suppose the red light district will now try to hoist the government by its own petard and seek the official recognition of a vocational training for prostitutes - if only for adult apprentices.

I don’t think any Chancellor would like to be called “Ueberpimp” in the tabloids for promoting prostitution… But wouldn’t it be hilarious to read the employment agency’s apprenticeship- recommendations? Outgoing person? Like to work with people? Try this…

I wonder what Friedrich Hayek would have told these people.