This development looks very important indeed to me in the context of UK politics. It reminds me of only a few other occasions, all from the Thatcher era, and in conjunction really marking a turning point. The first was the when the Church of England came out openly criticising the apparent lack of concern for the plight of the poor. The second was when the Oxford Dons refused to give her an honorary degree, and, now I come to think of it, there was a third: when the Queen openly sided with the black African Commonwealth states against Ms Thatchers apparent soft-peddling on South African racism.

In this context the words of warning coming from the British diplomatic corps seem to me to mark a watershed. Given the nature of UK society (which is of course, very, very different from the US) Blair will turn a deaf ear to this at his peril.

The organisers of this most undiplomatic démarche are, moreover, Atlanticists. Yet, in essence, what they are telling Mr Blair is: if you really have influence with the Bush administration, now is the time to use it. If that proves “unacceptable or unwelcome” in Washington, they write, “there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure”.

Looking into the tea leaves if this goes on it is hard to see Blair surviving much beyond the next general election even should he win it. As another article in the Guardian makes plain, even the MOD is far from happy:

the concern about British policies is shared by senior military figures. One defence source, referring to the US military attacks on Falluja and Najaf, told the Guardian: “We do things differently.”

“The British should be saying to the Americans, ’If we are to be involved then we’ll do it our way,’” echoed Colonel Christopher Langton, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, referring to the holy Shia city of Najaf.

Despite Mr Blair’s comment that “the advice we have is that we have sufficient troops to do the job”, senior officers are drawing up plans to send more troops to Iraq. They are also making it plain that they do not want to operate under US command. “There are severe worries if we operate under the American way of doing things, and getting all the flack, then it will spread to Basra,” a defence source said.

In all of this I am reminded of one of my favourite phrases from Sophocles’ Antigone: “call no man happy until the day they die”. Tony, the golden boy who could have had everything, who could have re-united the UK and restored to the former colonial power some of its long lost sense of self respect and prosperity seems to be coming remarkably near to throwing it all away if you ask me. But then again, no-one really is.

That this situation exists is clear: what could be done about it much less so. Here in Spain I normally find myself in a minority of one when I try to argue that the Spanish troops should stay. People are pretty familiar with the UK situation, and also with the French one: it is precisely because they wish to avoid this type of extreme polarisation here that they want ’the boys back’. Two names are normally evoked in any justification for the withdrawal: Fallujah and Najaf. The Spanish population got a fright on 11 March. My feeling was that even over and above the 200 dead, what really shocked the Spanish population was the existence of such an extended network in Spain, a nework which seemed to count on the support of small but significant layers of the Morroccan population here.

Every time the image of an innocent victim of the fighting appears on the little screen people fear these networks will grow. We are losing a very important propaganda war right now: not because we show the images, but because the reality behind the images exists to be shown. You will not convince a majority of the population either in Europe, or in the United States, that you have a winning strategy if the quantity of terrorism resulting is increasing rather than declining.

And meantime we have the likes of Abu Hamza.

”On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoe, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the “culture of martyrdom.”

Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.”

The situation with Abu Hamza reached what would have been the height of surreality if it had not been for the tragic dimension during the aftermath of the Madrid bombings. Spanish journalists were seen on the TV news listening to him harangue his ’congregation’ duly seated in a Finsbury Park Street waiting for clues as to who may have been behind the Madrid bombings.

A mixture of innocence, credulity, and madness.

When I look at all this, I can only bless my luck that I am but a ’mere economist’. Sufficient reason is often diificult enough to find in the economic sphere, but in the face of the problems surfacing in the aftermath of the Iraq war, where is the path of reason? I wish I knew.

It is not the first time that Mr Desmond, who became rich by publishing pornography, is making the headlines himself. Allegedly, he planned to print a cover with a naked look-alike of Cherie Booth, Tony Blair’s wife. Despite Mr Desmond’s religion - he is Jewish - the more immediate reason for his outburst is likely the German Springer publishing group’s apparently serious bid for the Telegraph Group, part of Hollinger International, and currently for sale. Mr Desmond had attempted to acquire the Daily Telegraph’s holding company himself but dropped out of the race after his bid of up to ₤600 million was deemed insufficient, according to the Financial Times Deutschland.

Except to those present, I would argue that Mr. Desmond’s words - though clearly absurd - are of minor importance, particularly given the unusually widespread and quick condemnation thereof. It was the Telegraph’s Chief executive, Jeremy Deedes, who made the incident public to MediaGuardian after having been called - according to The Times - “a miserable piece of s***,” for objecting to Mr Desmonds initial remarks and explaining that Springer Publishing is committed to the support of Israel (incidentally, the contractual obligation to Support Israel and the US which Springer places on its German journalists may turn out to be a problem with UK media regulators in the case of an acquisition).

Mr. Deedes may have had a personal agenda to report the incident and later repeating it on air, but the absurdity of this episode may turn out to be more helpful that it appears, even for Springer. It may be a useful test to see how the Telegraph’s target audience - the paper is usually ardently Conservative (as is Die Welt, Springer’s flagship paper), EU-bashing, and always suspicious of a possible secret German agenda to rule Britannia through the European Commission - might react to a Springer owned Daily Telegraph, possibly even to increase the awareness that Springer himself was no Nazi and the British themselves granted him a publishing license after the war, in order to pre-empt future attacks during a possible merger phase.

After all, a few years ago, Springer’s plan to acquire the Daily Mirror was abandoned amidst fears the paper would suffer severely from an adverse reader reaction to a German owner. Meeting in London last week, the FTD reports, Springer executives had wondered whether going forward with the acquisition would be useful thing to do.

Sure, all this is speculation. But the British published opinion’s reaction was probably read with relief in Berlin, even though the company obviously declined to comment officially. Embarrassed silence, by the way, was also the reaction of the Tory party, when asked about their new and prominent endorser’s outburst.

Krauts, Frogs, or Rosbifs - there are certain situations where ethnic slurs are simply unacceptable. Silvio Berlusconi failed to honour this principle in last year’s address to the European Parliament. In many instances, however, they are mostly a testament of ignorance and lack of manners, to be met with disdain - like in this case, or in that of a German tv host calling Italians “spaghetti gobblers” last week. In most cases, however, there is a fine line between humour and harassment, fun and filth.

About a year ago, when the Kraut-bashing issue came up because of some statements by Thomas Matussek, then the new German ambassador to the UK, I tried to walk this fine line of British Kraut Bashing by adding some personal context. Here is the slightly edited result -

Kraut-bashing is *so* passé - that is at least what the British comedian Frank Skinner tried to tell his countrymen when he publicized his support for the German team before the 2002 World Cup final. His arguments have been summarised and endorsed by the BBC, but there was not just enthusiastic support for his stance. The Sun subsequently called Skinner “Franz” and digi-dressed him wearing lederhosen - they had gone Brazil nuts!

No one should have been surprised by this display of journalistic creativity. Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids as well as all other specimen of British quality publishing like to spice up dull English headlines with some Tscherman words from time to time. And it is certainly true that a vicious circle of linguistic militarism is fuelled by them as well as by those English fans whose choice of words demonstrates that football can be so much more than just a game whenever a match between the old Germanic rivals looms on the playground. Their strange confusion of war and sports is very visible on the famous 1918-1945-1966-T-shirts.

But I suppose to some, T-Shirts and Blitzkrieg-laden headlines are only side effects, as Der Spiegel’s suspicion (link in German) that Germans have become “prisoners of history”, at least in Britain, shows. The magazine’s attention had been sparked by an article, published in the Guardian in December 2002, in which the new German ambassador to the United Kingdom, Thomas Matussek, lashed out against the country’s history curriculum - “I want to see a more modern history curriculum in schools. I was very much surprised when I learned that at A-level one of the three most chosen subjects was the Nazis.” - alleging that it contributed to an anti-German sentiment responsible not only for hunny headlines but also for physical and psychological violence committed against Germans in the United Kingdom.

“You see in the press headlines like ’We want to beat you Fritz’. It ceases to be funny the moment when little kids get beaten up…”. The ambassador’s remarks point to an incident in October last year, when two German schoolbays on an exchange programme were assaulted by a gang of British youth in Morden, south London. According to the Guardian, they were heckled as Nazis before one had his glasses broken and the other was shoved into a bush. I am terribly sorry for the pupils’ experience. And I think it is entirely appropriate for a German ambassador to demand a more prominent place for the post ’45 “model Germany” in British textbooks. But I don’t believe that those studying the Nazi dictatorship for their A-level exams will become notorious Kraut-bashers - quite to the contrary.

In Britain - as everywhere else - physical violence against Germans for ascriptive reasons is de facto nonexistent and most instances of verbal Kraut-bashing are likely not of malevolent intent. Although there are exceptions, even in “quality” publishing - I am still rather uncertain about the correct interpretation of “Thinking the Wurst” by Julie Burchill, for example, incidentally published in The Guardian on the last day I worked in Westminster - they are usually simply an element of the commonly acclaimed British humour Germans often have a hard time to find funny.

There are plenty of stories like the one a young German Navy officer told me. When he went to the UK on NATO business recently, he was greeted with a joyful “Heil Hitler” by his British comrades. However, the British soldiers lifting their right arms in all likelihood did not intend to imply he was actually a Nazi or even seriously insult him. In their eyes, it probably was a joke honouring the tradition of John Cleese’s famous “Don’t mention the war”-episode of Fawlty Towers.

Although the young officer was not amused about the incident, I would like to point out that, yes, even for a Kraut, Kraut-bashing sometimes can be fun. I know I may be generalising a bit here, but people have always made fun of alleged ascriptive characteristics of other people. But only very few are serious about them. Being able to tell the difference is what is important - for both parties involved. Quite a few usually well meaning people in the UK do not seem to understand that there are different kinds and styles of Kraut-bashing. And believe me, I know what I am talking about: I have been Kraut-bashed by Brits, too.

We all know that there are inappropriate derogatory terms for people of all ethnicities and nationalities in all languages. And we all know that the same derogatory words can have a very different, sometimes positive, meaning in a different context. It’s exactly the same with Kraut bashing. My British flatmates in Paris were allowed to Kraut-bash me. Just as I kept joking about the British “cuisine”, the Empire they lost and how their German would be much better now if the US had not saved their country’s ass twice. The way we talk to a person depends on the kind of relationship we have and our mutual respect. What may be in order for a friend is likely entirely inappropriate for a stranger. And I know how much being told you are what you want to be least does hurt, especially if you’re not expecting it.

My stranger’s name was Julia. She was the friend of a friend of one of my flatmates and in Paris for a night in Summer 1998. So we all met in a bar somewhere in the Marais. I have to say that her first attack was as much a surprise for me as it was for my British friends. I think you get a useful idea of Julia when I tell you that the only thing she wanted (or was able?) to talk about were her freshly pedicured toenails. But being the gentleman that I am I complimented her, just as expected. Her reply, however, was as unexpected as inappropriate - she told me that she wasn’t interested in my bloody Nazi opinion anyway.

You probably remember - the first time does hurt. And it did. I was stunned. I did not know what to say. No one had ever silenced me by telling me I were a Nazi. And she was serious about it. Not knowing how to deal with the situation, I made the fatal mistake of actually trying to explain to her that I was no Nazi, which clearly provided sufficient incentive for her to keep bashing me until she was eventually silenced by my friends.

However much it hurt that day, I now think of the episode as a valuable experience. It helped me realise the difference between those who joke about beating “Fritz” and those who actually do beat him. It also taught me how to deal with the very few Julias around.

And there are only very few Julias around. Thus, in my opinion, those trying construct a theory of German victimhood around incidents like the the teenage clash mentioned above or negligeable individual experiences like mine are creating an urban myth rather than a useful representation of reality. In a letter to the publisher, a German exchange student in North England told the Der Spiegel that she had spent a year in Britain and never experienced anything like the alleged British anti-German sentiment. She felt “stabbed in the heart” by the article, she said.

When I lived in London, I never experienced anything even slightly reminiscent of the Julia-episode. I walked past the “Bomber Harris” memorial almost every day and never cared about it until a British friend told me how embarrassed he was when the Queen (of German descent…) unveiled a memorial for a person responsible for WW2 area bombing German cities in the early 1990s.

Another interesting encounter I had with respect to the anti-German sentiment in Britain was with an older lady, who had clearly survived at least one, if not two world wars, and who explained to me that, yes, the British fought the Germans in two world wars but, after all, they’re decent people, as opposed to those frog-eating French.

German tourists are still being scared with the myth not to speak German in London Buses to avoid trouble while there are literally tens of thousands of Germans working in the City everyday. When you enter any of the fifty Starbucks outlets between Fleet Street and Monument tube station, chances are, you will hear almost as many German conversations as English ones. The BBC is certainly right to admit that “British hostility to Germany simply isn’t reciprocated… [and i]t could be that by using outdated stereotypes … the British are saying more about themselves than anyone else.” But in my experience, less and less people are seriously thinking in those stereotypes. Kraut-bashing may not be *so* passé yet, but it is definitely passé.

In November 2002, the American writer, Pulitzer price laureate, and Princeton University literature professor C.K. Williams made a very interesting argument in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (link in German) about how Germans had become a group no longer defined by what they actually are or what they actually do - but what they stand for. In his opinion, the eyes of the world see Germans, more than anything else, as a symbol of evil - they have become Ze Tschermans (just as Julie Burchill in the article quoted above).

While my personal experience is largely different, Mr Williams is probably right to some extent - some Tschermans are still out there, on celluloid, in the history books and, most importantly, in the memories of those who suffered unspeakable horrors under the Nazi dictatorship. As long as we define ourselves as German, we have to accept the historic context which we have been handed - just like everybody else. While history does by no means excuse ascriptive prejudices, it can help explain their existence. Time may be a healer, but big wounds heal slowly.

Sometimes it is up to us to explain where we feel things are no longer funny. The young German officer clearly told his British comrades that he did not enjoy their joke. All people but the very few Julias around will not cross that line again.

And sometimes we should just relax. Julia taught me to no longer care if some stupid person believes I am a Tscherman. Why should I? I know I am not. And those I care about do know that, too. What else could be important?

There’s also the pesky Viktor Orban in Hungary, former Prime Minister and now opposition leader. It’s difficult to parse these leaders’ precise positions, because both are nominally pro-accession (although Klaus was notably silent in the lead-up to last year’s referendum on entry). But I think on the pan-European spectrum of attitudes toward integration, these guys are probably in the same neighborhood -- the same area code, at least -- as the anti-EU Tory contingent.

And they can’t be ignored; like Klaus’s club of crony capitalists, Orban’s Fidesz party is whipping the ruling Socialists in the polls.

UPDATE: Just yesterday Doug Arellanes posted a translation of a Klaus essay in Czech daily Mlada fronta Dnes: “We Must Not Get Lost In the European Union!” I feel like I hate the man (and everything he represents about Czech society) a bit too much to say anything remotely objective about this article, but I’d be interested in hearing some comments.

The “Geneva Accord” dismisses the largely ineffective step-by-step processual approach - used for the Oslo agreements as well as for the “Roadmap” - of establishing security, trust, and then a ‘lasting’ agreement in favor of a castle-in-the-sky ‘two-states-first’ approach that was evidently only possible because there’s no chance of it ever being implemented. Despite undoubtedly honorable intentions, it was largely a photo-op.

Consequently, as Mark Heller correctly writes in Monday’s New York Times, Sharon’s realpolitk - the removal of settlers from Gaza – is currently the only promising element in Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is probably as indicative of the tragic state of affairs as the recent warming up to “Jordan is Palestine”, “eat-or-be-eaten” rhetoric by someone like Benny Morris, Israeli historian and author of “The Birth Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem”. Supporting Sharon’s initiative may have been the only viable option available - yet it is also a testament to the fundamental lack of a long term strategy worthy of that name.

Given the understandable absence of trust between conflicting parties, a shared vision of an inevitably shared future is the most important element in any attempt to regulate an ethnic or national conflict. For all the continuing problems regarding the implementation of the Good Friday agreement of 1998, among the political leaders in Northern Ireland there is a common sense of inevitability of power sharing. Their inability to deliver is, in my opinion, owed largely to the consequences of the specific pressures the Northern Irish Party System places on politicians.

But when looking at the Middle East, the absence of a shared vision is striking and makes discounting the future almost impossible. What seems like a trivial realization from a distance - that the two peoples have to find a way to live together eventually, because, well, they do live together already - certainly isn’t trivial at all for those personally involved: neither party is truly convinced that the commonly favored “two state solution” be the eventual outcome of the conflict, despite all the rhetoric intended to convey the opposite.

Too many Palestinians in charge as well as a growing number on the streets believe that demographics are on their side. After all, the population of the occupied territories tripled over the last thirty years to more than three million now. Even within Israel, the percentage of the Arab population almost doubled from 10 percent in the 1950s to roughly 20 percent, or a million, today. Israel’s Jewish population grew, too - but largely by immigration. Too many Palestinians live in a violently vicious circle of being poor and fanatic, hopeless and humiliated. They don’t have real political leadership or much of a civil society to speak of beyond the social networks provided by militant and terrorist organizations – a factor usually overlooked by commentators concentrating on violence. Currently – even more so after having been significantly weakened by Israel - the Palestinian authority resembles a government to the extent that the West Bank and Gaza resemble a state. But even if it were materially able to seriously fight extremist groups, it would clearly not increase its popularity among the Palestinian people, many of whom still are not so sure about the benefits of a political process, as outlined above.

Could such a government enforce peace after a Palestinian state has been founded? Or if all settlements were removed? Not knowing the answer to this question is a good reason for Israeli politicians to not even contemplate taking on the religious and secular settler movements and their political support - which would very likely lead to at least some civil unrest – despite an increasingly intense social debate about the character of Zionism today and the nature of a Jewish democracy. Not knowing the answer to this question is apparently sufficient reason to rely on Israel’s ability to handle the conflict military in the medium run – despite the demographic development and international pressure. Not knowing the answer to this question is even the reason for the indecisiveness of Israeli moderates about how to deal with the ongoing threat of being blown up for boarding a bus or shopping at the wrong store at the wrong time beyond “tightening security”, in turn strangling the economy and particularly hurting the poverty stricken Palestinian population, adding fuel to the fire.

These days, I am often reminded of a brief a conversation I had in early 1993 with the late President of the German Council of Jews, Ignatz Bubis, with respect to the nascent Oslo agreement. His pessimistic outlook was that any Likud government would “negotiate” forever while establishing facts, and the Palestinians’ alternative to negotiated agreement would always be to revert to the current status quo of conflict management by cradle and stones. I hate to say it, but that’s, with minor variations, what happened in the decade after the handshake between Rabin and Arafat in the White House Rose Garden.

But I’m not entirely without hope. In fact, for the moment abstracting from legitimate moral and political concern, the decapitating of terrorist Palestinian organizations could - in the long run – indeed serve the interest of both a future moderate Palestinian authority and Israel’s security. But it seems obvious to me that weakening the more extreme forces of Palestinian resistance will strengthen those on the political front only - only - when there is true hope for a political solution, when joining militant and terrorist organizations would no longer be considered a calling – or the only job prospect - by an ever growing pool of ever younger stone throwers.

No one knows what Mr Sharon’s real intentions are. But for someone with his hawkish political background, an attempt to risk political capital to actually withdraw Jewish settlers (even if only from Gaza) does appear to be an important development. Israel has defeated its enemies with its military power for the last almost 56 years. But the next important conflict - hopefully not too violent – is an internal one. So far Israel clearly failed to send a ray of hope to the Palestinians. Hope that could lead to a shared vision of a shared future. But then - only Nixon could go to China.

About two years ago, the Israeli historian Fania Oz-Salzberger argued in the International Herald Tribune that real “European mediation [alongside the US were] probably the best key to opening the Middle Eastern gridlock” but that, despite European assertions to this effect, it was an unrealistic scenario for a plethora of historical and political reasons. I suppose Ms Salzberger was right - but she wrote in 2002.

In 2004, the US has effectively lost the last remnants of credibility on Arab streets. Last week’s letter is only a reminder thereof. That does not make their policy wrong per se, but when there’s a need to negotiate, to work with local power structures, it obviously becomes an impediment. For Europe, this loss of American clout must be considered not just an invitation but an imperative to assume a bolder role, particularly as the Middle East conflict is one of the few foreign policy areas almost everyone agrees on. Moreover, a more significant involvement in this area could also help to deal with the remnants of the Iraq-policy induced division.

Mr Heller, a research assistant at Tel Aviv university, makes an interesting proposal in his article in the New York Times about how Europe could raise its profile in the near future - and do just what Israel’s assassination policy is not achieving: give hope to the Palestinians. The EU has already attempted to do so by funding the Palestinian Authority for the last years, causing concern that some money was diverted to violent activities. Now Mr Heller proposes that Europe buy and operate the soon-to-be abandoned settlements which would otherwise likely be destroyed to avoid “Hamas flags flying over former Israeli controlled buildings”, however wasteful this may seem to an outsider.

In the long run, moreover, as Fania Oz-Salzberger reminded, a more active European role as a mediator would help Europe and Israel to again look each other in the eye, reminding the other of the common heritage. True dialogue, she said, can only be based on a courageous discussion of history.

And to get from history to hope, Mr Heller’s proposal seems like an important first step.

well if the efficient cause of all this rambling was an earlier mail, the final cause was most certainly a conversation I held earlier this year with Dina Mehta (Conversations With Dina). We were chatting about differences between Chinese and Indian blogging when I asked her whether she new about Muzimei (and here) and Hard Candy. Since she didn’t I gave her the URL’s and sent her over to take a look.

(Interlude: since not enough attention is paid in blogging to the new structure of narrative discourse that is arising in the wake of the new technologies, I will take the liberty of pointing this out here. Shouldn’t we be talking about ’internet time’. I can’t remember when I last heard the expression multi-tasking, like so many novelties it is one of those things which we now simply take for granted. But using IM, and the difference between IM and the mobile phone, this I rarely see commented on. I well remember my first ’initiation’ with the messenger: it was of course a woman who ’initiated me’ - my Bulgarian friend Margy the anthropologist (again IM is arguably the closest form of ’cold communication’ to the ’rather hotter’ oral mode in both its structure and its directness). Anyway, as I was saying IM implies a whole different idea of ’lived time’. I remember my first ’novice’ experiences, eagerly awaiting my interlocutor’s reply. Now I can have a couple of IM windows open and be writing a blog post, at the same time as going off and reading a link that someone has just sent me over one of the messenger conversations. Of course the ’going over’ here is in no way physical, this is simply a convenient physical fiction to enable us to structure how we think about the net: yet another hangover from the ’theatre of memory’.)

Ok so Dina then came back, just like the rest of you now are, and it was what she said next that has stuck in my mind to this day. “You know”, she said, “its as if Chinese women bloggers were obsessed with undressing their bodies, while the Indian ones are busy undressing their brains”.

Now behind this apparently glib comment lies an enormous cultural agenda, on which I could (and will I hope) expound in a later post (as i will with that other pre-post I have floating round my head ’Bangalore vs Chennai). To begin to grasp the dimensions of the backdrop maybe the stereotypical ’did you know that China invented the wheelbarrow, and India the zero’ would help. In fact most Indian villages still don’t have wheelbarrows, and they will probably have a computer before they have a wheelbarrow. But streotypes aside, this is not my subject today.

Now, if you are sufficiently ’horny’ to want to go off now and cast your eyes upon some female Indian bloggers getting their minds ’undressed’ for you, you could try, apart from Dina of course, Priya-B , Priya-L , Nancy, Divya, or Charu (who, appropriately enough as you will see from the URL, encourages you to ’peek into her mind’).

It is not however the pseudo-erotica of cerebral voyeurism that interests me here, but the process of mind-body dissociation/distanciation/dismemberment which seems to be taking place here.

Ok now things get even weirder, lets introduce a topic which certainly few would consider erotic: RSS feed technology. You see all this stream of madness took form when the idea of ’brain undressing’ collided with another: that of a website as a concrete physical entity, with its own spatial location (in cyber space, of course).

My ’co-respondent’ was asking a question about an idea we are working on called ’Living in Delhi’, she wanted to know how this would fit in with Living in India. Would it be a separate site she asked. So I started to ask myself: what does this mean? You see, with RSS technology my experience is that our whole conception of what a site is is changing. Really now a site is just a ’skin’ where you group together material you feel it interesting to bring together. This is what makes the Living ’sites’ possible and easy to do.

Given how easy it is, this should send shudders down the spines of everyone in big media.

At the present time it seems the attention of most of those who are interested in RSS is directed towards individualised ’news readers’, or towards how to bang the biggest possible information stream into a mobile phone. Relatively few people are really into thinking about the Aesthetics of the reading experience, and the non-tech internet user population. So relatively little attention is being given to the ’website as skin’ idea. I don’t know if this obsession with the individual reader is a reflection on the highly individualised US consumption experience, rather like we in Europe rather favour public transport, and in the US people seem to favour the individual car. I don’t know, but this would be worth investigating.

Eventually I imagine there will be RSS aggregators everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, to cater for every taste.

Now this is not a promo, but if you have got this far I imagine you are interested in the topic so why don’t you now go to the Living on the Planet page, where you will see that Michael Darragh (who is the creative genius behind the Living design concept) has been busy playing with RSS from all over the Living net (including posts here at Fistful), so you can get an idea of how powerful all this is. ’Site’ as such doesn’t mean too much these days. We are all just ’brains’ under ’skins’.

So this is why the ’undressing brains’ bit has really stuck with me: it even seems to me that the biggest thing that most of the people who “don’t understand the internet” don’t understand is this. That at the end of the day it is far more interesting to watch someone ’undressing their brains’ than it is to watch them ’undressing their bodies’ (I warned you, this would be whacky).

Now if I can dive off at another tangent to clarify a bit more. Those who study the topic suggest that one of the characteristics of oral cultures is that each word tends to have a mental image (a picture) attached to it (this could be one of the reasons that the earliest forms of script have a pictographic quality). As a society becomes more and more literate this property seems to gradually disappear. Think table, and you don’t have to call to mind any particular table image.

Well now lets transfer this idea to the transition from a world dominated by virtual as opposed to physical contact. When we first enter this world, my (anecdotal) experience is that we tend to imagine a person with defined characteristics (listening to the radio would be the first thing that comes to mind). When I first ’met’ Michael Darragh I somehow imagined him wearing a Chairman Mao type cap. There is a simple reason for this: Michael worked under the pseudonym Chairman Meow, which is in fact the name of his cat.

I was soon thoroughly disillusioned in my naieve fantasising since he set up a thing called Chairma Meow TV, and we were soon chatting away to his live onscreen images. But this is not a typical experience for me.

And in fact the more I think about it, the more I tend to feel that I am not sure I want to keep repeating it. The more virtual people I ’meet’ the less I feel I either need or want the prop of the ’physical image’. I simple want to eat your brains (shades and images of Hannibal Lector at this stage please).

This raises of course a hell of a lot of age old mind body questions (also the question of Freud and neurasthenia comes rapidly to mind). OTOH it does get us away from another bag of age old questions about prejudice based on appearance, and physical identity, and this would have to be something positive.

So at the end of the day there you have it, this is what we are, ’brains’ under ’skins’. And in the internet we get to ’take off’ our skins, and long let it be. So off you go, start undressing right now. Naked brains, wow!

BTW this seems to be forming part of a trilogy of posts. The first of these would be the Warehouses of Brains post I did with Marcello Rinesi, and the last one will be the Triremes of Brains one (somehow I can’t get away from the idea of thousands of bloggers out there rowing away) which will appear when I get the time and the inspriation to write it.

Swastikas drawn on the entry to a Strasbourg mosque

STRASBOURG (AFP) - Swastikas were painted on the gateway to a Strasbourg mosque before dawn Tuesday, according to police sources. Furthermore, the inscription “death to arab” (sic) was printed on the surrounding wall of this predominantly Turkish mosque in the Meinau district [of Strasbourg]. Two outdoor garbage cans were burned without causing damage to the building. The imam of mosque, who lives at the mosque, heard a noise around 2am and was able to put out the fire, according to the management of the Eyyub Sultan mosque at a press conference. They have made out a complaint.

The mosque spokesperson, Cengiz Dogan, said that “We condemn this unacceptable act, which unfortunately is not unprecedented.”

“This odious act targets the entire Muslim community and is a part of an atmosphere in which more and more racist and islamophobic acts are taking place,” added Abdelhaq Nabaoui, president of the Alsace regional council for Islamic affairs, who listed a number of “similar” events in the area.

Last week, a mosque in Hagenau (Bas-Rhin dept.) was the victim of an attempted arson and two swastikas were drawn on the building. A funeral parlour in Oberhausbergen, near Strasbourg, was also the target of an attempted arson and swastika-painting, according to Mr Nabaoui. Finally, at the beginning of April, five headstones - four Muslim and one Jewish - from the military semitary in the Cronenbourg district of Strasbourg were desecrated, notably by marking them with swastikas.

Alsace is a very conservative part of France, particularly with regard to religion. It may not be very representative. However, this sort of news leads me to wonder to what degree the recent upswing in reported anti-semitic acts in France might have to with increased attention as much as an actual increase in anti-Jewish sentiment, and whether anti-Islamic violence is being drastically underreported.

In Kerry’s defence, this is neither unique to him nor to American politics. Jacques Chirac speaks quite good English. Apparently he was a soda-jerker somewhere on the East Coast in his youth. However, I have not found any reference to him speaking English in public in over a decade. It was even worse with de Gaulle, who spent much of WWII in London and had little difficulty speaking the language, but who would publicly admit to speaking only one foreign language: German.

Furthermore, there are many politcians who take advantage of a feigned difficultly speaking a foreign tongue to use the time the interpreter takes to compose better responses. But the biggest reason to behave this way is that there is a big difference between fluency in a foreign language and eloquence in it. There is a lot of tacit knowledge present in political lanaguge. Politicians have to carefully shade their answers and create the precisely correct level of ambiguity - a complex skill even in your native language, and a very difficult one in a second language.

Yasser Arafat, for example, got into considerable trouble for stating in an interview conducted in French that the PLO charter was caduque - a legal term meaning null and void. Arafat was saved by the ambiguity of language and a certain French fetishisation of dictionaries. His later press release claimed that he meant out of date, and provided the relevant reference to the Petit Robert to show that he was, in fact, speaking correct French. Had he used an interpreter, he would have had far more deniablity.

But in Kerry’s case, I suspect that this really is a sign of political cowardice. Kerry’s wife is essentially a native speaker of French and his own fluency is not exactly a secret. It would be unfortunate if provincialism became a prerequisite for high office in the US. It bodes ill for Europe when the only alternative to an openly anti-European president is someone who feels the need to prove his anti-European credentials, especially in such a silly way.

America’s founding fathers included several fluent French speakers. If it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, it ought to be good enough for 21st century America.
 

In any event the outcome would not have been different, but I feel the respect for the democratic process, and respect for all those of us who took the trouble to listen carefully to the arguments during the two day session would have been much greater.

Maybe I form part of a tiny minority, but I can certainly say that on Friday night I went to bed feeling vaguely optimistic, that something significant might have changed for the better in Spain. It was certainly something very new to hear a Spanish president speaking so openly about Spain’s diversity and recognising the importance of respect for all the different identities here. It was very politically correct. Of course I should have known better: this was all before the vote.

Spain is, as the tourist blurb says, ’different’, and I am not sure I will ever get accustomed to just how different it is.

So last night when I returned home from a pleasant day out to discover just what had been going on in my absence, I was, to say the least, more than a little crestfallen.

It is not simply that I think the decision is a bad one, or that I fail to recognise it as a legitimate one (I think there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Spanish citizens support this decision, including many who voted PP in the elections). It is the timing of the decision more than anything, and the absence of the necessity to take the decision right now which wrankles most with me.

Certainly things in Iraq look none to good. This was predictable some will say. Maybe, would be my answer, but the priority right now shouldn’t be to go over who was right and who was wrong last March - there will be plenty of time to do that later - the priority should be to try and find a way to get out of the mess.

Last week was a hard week for all those concerned about Iraq and its future. The general Middle East atmosphere seems to have taken a nosedive. The decision of George Bush to give explicit support to Sharon’s West Bank aspirations before any talks begin surely made things worse, then the inability to condemn the killing of Rantissi simply poured more oil on already troubled water.

Really the US seems to have boxed itself into a position of wanting to have its cake and eat it with its current policy of treating Israel/Palestine and Iraq as two separate, and scarcely related questions. From where I am sitting you can either openly back Sharon (which means you cannot be seen as impartial by the majority of Arab states and their citizens), or you can be the midwife of democracy in Iraq: what you cannot do is be both at the same time.

It may be totally lamentable, but the reality is that the majority of Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites (the Khurds are a different case altogether) identify with the Palestinians, and see Sharon as their enemy. Given this, to be seen to be siding with Sharon means you are not seen as sufficiently impartial to be the guarantor of any provisional authority in Iraq. So you have to choose. I feel George Bush has already chosen.

This means the UN will now more or less inevitably have to assume the central responsibility in Iraq (something which some of us have been calling for from day one of the post-war epoch).

Which brings us back to Zapatero’s timing. Given that there exists now a real and serious possibility of a new resolution at the UN, and of a new relationship post 1 July: why this rush? There is something here I don’t understand.

If this is simply for reasons of pressure from within PSOE and the farther left IU, then I am even more preoccupied, since this would mean that what the new PP leader Mariano Rajoy is alledging, that this government will be weak and unstable, may well turn out to be true.

The real problems arise with the consequences of this decision.

Firstly despite Zappatero’s declarations that he will give a high priority to fighting terrorism, does he recognise that this implies a willingness to act outside the confines of the Spanish state? Is he simply so naive that he imagines that if you sit back and wait, no-one will ever come and do you harm. Does he really believe that the Al-Qaeda problem only exists becuase of the Iraq war? What will he do if Morroccan fundamentalists start to demand the return of Ceuta and Melilla (which by rights do not really belong to Spain, they are in fact Europe’s last colonial remnant in North Africa).

You do not have to sympathise with Gerorge Bush’s feeling that he ’was tired of swatting flies’ to see that a more systematic approach to terrorism is required, and that you cannot resolve all problems locally.

Secondly, one has to be preoccupied about the implications of all this for the other European coalition partners. The pressure on the Italians, Bulgarians, Poles, Ukrainians etc will now only intensify. Certainly the Iraq participation is also controversial in these countries. How will the Spanish feel if there are terrorist attacks in these countries, or if their citizens are kidnapped in Iraq?

Thirdly what about constitutional responsibilty for the actions of your predecessors? Maybe PSOE didn’t agree with the war, but the Spanish state participated on behalf of all its citizens. Now Iraq is a mess. It seems to me you cannot simply walk away (and George Bush please take note) and say either it wasn’t me, or, oh well it didn’t work out. There is too much at stake here for that. Irrespective of whether Iraq was a ’home’ for terrorists before the war, it now is one, and a bad outcome on the type of future government Iraq has would certainly mean this could become much, much worse.

Lastly, what defence is Zapatero leaving himself in the event of a future external terrorist attack on Spain? How will he persuade the Spanish people if he has a change of heart? Where will Spain look for help? These are important and difficult questions for Spain.

Yesterday was a bad day for Spain, a bad day for democracy, and a bad day for the future of Iraq and the fight against terrorism.

Who says this, me certainly, but also Aznar on Fox News:

“That will not be good for Spain, not a good day for the coalition, and a very good day for those who don’t want stability and democracy in Iraq,”

I never thought I would live to see the day I was agreeing with him about something, but there you are, this is what fair and balanced really means.

A bad decision. I only hope we will not all live to profoundly regret it.

Let’s take an example. Mark Kleiman is usually quite perceptive, but he doesn’t seem to realise that anti-terrorism is as much about media as terrorism is:

All together now: Up yours, Osama!

Those of us who remain Europhiles have to hope that the EU can get its act together quickly to repudiate Osama’s proffered “truce.” It would be nice to hear first from the Spanish Socialists.

Update Well, that was quick: The EU (via the President of the EC), Spain, Britain, Germany, and, yes, France all said “No” within hours.

Now I’m waiting to hear from the Europhobes.

Second update Josh Marshall wants to know why this is worth paying attention to. Patrick Nielsen Hayden agrees.

Answer: Because splitting off Europe from the U.S. is obviously an al-Qaeda objective, and not obviously infeasible. Undeniably, there is a strand of European opinion that thinks that Islamist terrorism is a problem due to Israeli and American policies, and that if Europe disowned those policies it could free itself from danger.

It’s good news that the European governments aren’t playing. And those Americans who have spent the past three years coming up with inventive new insults directed at Europeans ought to acknowledge that.

Mark’s got it wrong. This is a big story because no one wants to say that there was never any chance of this “truce” coming to pass under any conditions. Even if bin Laden were capable of offering such a truce - which I doubt - and even if there had been any temptation to accept it, this would be the media equivalent of a tank batallion surrendering to a TV crew. It would have been bad TV.

None of the European leaders to whom this “truce” was offered would have had anything to gain from accepting it. No essential economic or military activity has been directly disrupted by the Madrid bombings or by 9/11. Al Qaeda can’t even threaten them directly. There is little risk to the lives of European politicians. Al Qaeda doesn’t do targetted assasinations in the west because they are ineffective uses of media. Killing thousands of anonymous people creates very productive fear. Killing a single man, even a hated political leader, creates a martyr. The Spanish election was close before the Madrid bombing, terrorism at most brought voters to the polls rather than changing anyone’s vote. Elsewhere in Europe, getting hit by terrorists is more likely to reinforce the existing government than undermine it. There is no risk whatsoever in refusing, and nothing to gain from accepting.

I doubt the idea even reached the conscious level in the minds of European leaders. I suspect deeper political instincts told them how bad it would look to even be perceived as stooping to that level. It was a mistake to even be perceived as organising a response. I suspect that was bin Laden’s goal: to create the appearance that he is so powerful that European leaders have to think before telling him to get bent.

Furthermore, there is no particular value nor any reason for bin Laden to try to split Europe and the US. Remember, this is a media compaign. If the combined military strength of Europe and America could destroy Al Qaeda through ordinary military means, it would have done so long ago. This has to be fought on TV, and having the whole world against him is better TV than having the world divided and creating ambiguity. As long as he appears - at least to some Muslims - to be the only real force in the Islamic world able to put fear into the West, he gains.

That was much of the appeal of the Soviet Union in the old days. People knew that the USSR was far from a worker’s paradise, but in 1917 it was a backwards, ruined country, and by 1950 it had the whole of the developed world scared of it. That had undeniable appeal. Osama bin Laden is playing on the very same thing. Arab nations have gone to war against Israel, what, three, four times? There have been direct wars with the US, France, the UK and India in the last 50 years. What is the Arab world’s record from these conflicts? Lost, every time. But it was the fundamentalists who pushed back the Soviet Union in Afghanistan - or at least, that is how it played out on TV - and it is Osama bin Laden who has them all scared now.

No, Kleiman is wrong to think that dividing Europe and the US is an objective for bin Laden. I suspect that the notion is an entirely fortuitous by-product of the Bush administration’s bungling. Being seen as the only man willing to stand up to America and the West is his objective. Getting Europe to back away might, conceivably, have had some propaganda effect, but I doubt bin Laden ever entertained the idea that anyone would agree to it. This is a different kind of war with a different kind of logic.
 

My initial reaction: What a load of hooey. I’ve seen stories on CNN about similar rumors spreading in, I believe, Estonia or Latvia, and they’re generally not true, and it’s only natural they should repeat here.

Regardless, this seems to confirm my opinion (which I’ve expressed a few times in this space) that the EU is doing a terrible job of selling itself to the accession countries, who genuinely want to believe that integration will bring something good, but are having a harder and harder time seeing past what’s perceived to be an over-regulation of everyday life.

As a Prague restaurant owner, I do know that ground beef is now much harder to come by compared to two months ago. (As a vegetarian, that’s fine with me; as a capitalist, it’s not.) The reason given by suppliers: New EU-imposed rules require meat suppliers to send weekly samples of ground beef to an outside testing agency, because if you’re buying 100% ground beef, you’re likely serving steak tartare, and you gotta be careful with that stuff. Now I’d always recommend our tasty tofu burger over the beef, but am I way out of my league by asking: Has anybody in Brussels ever heard of a hamburger? Who says you’re serving steak tartare just because you’re buying ground beef?

I hate to always be calling attention to the botched aspects of EU expansion, but I do so as a genuinely pro-integrationist non-European observer.

Jew appears, according to Google, approximately 1.5 million times on the web. Jews, in contrast, appears some 5.5 million times and Jewish some 13 million times. The top link for Jews is the website for “Jews for Jesus”, while for Jewish it is a commercial website at www.jewish.com. “Jews for Jesus” is, perhaps, not the ideal choice for the top site at Google for Jews, but at least it isn’t a plainly anti-semitic organisation.

Most English words for group identity appear in at most two forms - singular and plural, with the singular acting as the adjective. The only other comparable case I can think of in English - Turk, Turks, Turkish - has a comparable frequency distribution to what you get for Jew, Jews and Jewish. We feel more comfortable saying He’s Turkish than He’s a Turk, just as people are more likely to describe someone as Jewish than as a Jew. I’m somewhat curious why this should be. I sense little difference between saying someone is American or an American, but saying someone is a Jew or even a Turk always sounds a little bit like a condemnation when compared to Jewish or Turkish.

I have a theory about why. We hear the word Jew used with a pejorative intent more often than Jewish, and thus we are naturally inclined not to use when we have no pejorative intentions. This actually fits well with most theories about language acquistion. But it poses a problem: Why do we hesitate to use the word Turk?

My hypothesis is that the negative meaning we link to Jew, from the use of formulas like the Jew in racist screeds, has actually become attached to the formula itself. The German or the American is perhaps a bit less striking to the ear, but still gives me an expectation that it will be followed by a gross generalisation, stereotype, or piece of pure bollocks. For words like German or American, this has no impact on Google scores because the adjective is identical to the singular noun.

This effort at Google-bombing is harmless enough, but the real problem is in the relatively uncommon morphology of the lexeme Jew/Jews/Jewish. I wonder if a better approach might have been to try to reclaim the word Jew from the racism associated, albeit subtly, with its use. I am fairly sure that the negative connotations associated with the word are no less present in the minds of Jewish anglophones than other people. For instance, Jewish bloggers might prepare list of other bloggers, linking to each with the word Jew.

Perhaps not. The whole idea of preparing a list of people and “marking” them with the word Jew clearly recalls the Holocaust. But then, this is really a question of lexicology, and this is how successful lexicological campaigns have been conducted in the past: “Black is beautiful.” “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” In order to reclaim a word, you have to use it.

Djilas wrote this book - a political condemnation of communism - in 1957, while he was in prison in Yugoslavia. SInce his death, Djilas has become a minor saint of the New Criterion right, although I doubt he would have approved. He was an early refusenik and dissident, one of the first to take his dissidence directly to the western media. At the very beginning of the book where he expresses his disenchantment with “really existing socialism” he says that as he “became increasingly estranged from the reality of contemporary Communism, I came closer to the idea of democratic socialism.”

At any rate, Djilas saw a good deal more clearly what was wrong with the states he helped found than western anti-communists. His analysis, although he does not seem to see it this way, is quite Marxist in nature. As the title suggests, what communist revolutions established was a new class, possessed of a different kind of social relationship to the means of production. This new class established a hegemony over the ideology of the state and acted to entrench its power. This was the grand failure of the revolution - the establishment of a new ruling class with no more - and often less - scruples than ruling class it replaced.

Djilas acknowledges that the better world the revolutionaries preached was something they really believed in and points to something that is rejected, ignored, or simply forgotten in the west: The awful reality of communism did not happen because the communists didn’t try to build a better world, it came about because they were incapable of building it. But they were capable of industrialising the agrarian states they controlled, and they took to that with great gusto and utter realism; justifying the awful means they used by claiming, and even believing, that this was a necessary step to their ideal ends.

Djilas is moderately famous for prophecising the end of communism from within, because by forswearing Stalinist methods, the regime would cast doubt on the goals of its programme. It is now apparent that by 1989, very few people at any level in communist Europe actually believed in the system they lived in. Except in Romania, even the leaders surrendered without a fight.

His book is, forgivably given the conditions under which it was written, full of contradictions. Djilas says that history may well forgive the communists much of what they did, given the circumstances forced upon them, while at the same time condemning communist methods as the negation of its goals. There are also a number of genuinely contestable generalisations, although Djilas in his introduction points out that he is aware of the limitations of his generalisations.

But there is one particular section in particular I wish to highlight:

Throughout history, there have been no ideal ends which were attained with non-ideal, inhumane means, just as there has been no free society which was built by slaves. Nothing so well reveals the reality and greatness of ends as the methods used to attain them.

If the end must be used to condone the means, then there is something in the end itself, in its reality, which is not worthy. That which really blesses the end, which justifies the efforts and sacrifices for it, is the means: their constant perfection, humaneness, increasing freedom. […]

No regime in history which was democratic - or relatively democratic while it lasted - was predominantely established on the aspiration for ideal ends, but rather on the small, everyday means in sight. Along with this, each such regime achieved, more or less spontaneously, great ends. On the other hand, every despotism tried to justify itself by its ideal aims. Not a single one achieved great ends.

Absolute brutality, or the use of any means, is in accord with the grandiosity, even the unreality of Communist aims.

By revolutionary means, contemporary Communism has succeded in demolishing one form of society and despotically setting up another. At first it was guided by the most beautiful, primordial human ideas of equality and brotherhood; only later did it conceal behind these ideas the establishment of its domination by other means. […]

Thus, by justifying the means because of the end, the end itself becomes increasingly more distant and unrealistic, while the frightful reality of the means becomes increasingly obvious and intolerable.

There are things to debate in this statement. Some of the wealthiest and most liberal societies in the world were built at least in part by slaves, and all of them were built by deeply coercive means. But, it is true that no nation that I would rank among the world’s best was built on an ideal, although some of them claim to have been.

What brings this passage to mind is the latest from Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman.

After decades of Saddam’s brutal rule, civil society there was just beginning to come back, and the first threads of trust between the different communities were just beginning to be tied. The whole purpose of the U.S. occupation was to build a constitutional framework in which this center could be developed.

This was always a long shot. But, I believe, after 9/11, trying to build a decent state in the heart of a drifting Arab-Muslim world — a world that is manufacturing millions of frustrated, unemployed youths — was worth trying. But it takes resources and legitimacy, and the Bush team has provided too little of both. […]

I know the right thing to do now is to stay the course, defeat the bad guys, disarm the militias and try to build a political framework that will hold the now wavering Shiite majority on our side — because if we lose them, the game is over. […]

Without more allies, without more global legitimacy — and without an Iraqi center ready to stand up against their Khmer Rouge now posing as their Viet Cong — we cannot win in Iraq. We will be building a house with bricks and no cement. In that case, we will have to move to Plan B. Too bad we never really had Plan A.

Friedman’s retroactive justification for the war - the reasoning in use now that there are no weapons of mass destruction or ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda - is the ideal of building a “decent state in the heart of a drifting Arab-Muslim world.” But the means - making a mess of the few mechanisms that can actually provide some legitimacy to a war against a state that has not broken the peace, lying profusely, suppressing dissent at home and from other nations, resorting to increasingly oppressive mechanisms of social control in occupation - damn the ends just as Stalin damned the ideal aims of revolutionary communism. This effort does not even have the one mitigating justification Djilas grants the communists: America has not been forced into this.

And, as the means grow worse, the ends grow more and more remote. When are they projecting holding elections in Iraq now? When does the US plan to take its troops off the street? Does anyone believe in the dates that are being offered? I’m sure that, like Friedman, many idealistic communists in the years after the revolution must have told themselves the same thing: I know the right thing to do is stay the course, build industry, no matter what the cost, but…

Is it any surprise if people suspect that the ends - “a decent state in the heart of a drifting Arab-Muslim world” - will turn out the same way that Lenin’s ends did?

But there is one element in the current debate that is different from the earlier ones: The usually applied meritocratic “education, education, education-solution” really doesn’t sound too convincing anymore when system developers’ jobs are wired down to Bangalore. And there is a related realization that, suddenly, those possibly affected are our friends - or ourselves -, which makes the analysis and evaluation of the phenomenon a little bit trickier than it was beforehand. Suddenly Ulrich Beck’s quip that there is only one thing worse than being exploited by a multinational corporation - not being exploited by a multinational corporation does not sound too funny anymore.

As for education - the economy does not only consist of system developers. Thus, the “education-solution” is certainly very much valid on the other side of the qualification scale, even in the best known non-tradable industry of all: hairdressing. To be sure, most hairdressers do not a need an advanced degree in chemistry. Yet while the German government is currently attempting to placate the Social Democrat’s loony left by taxing businesses for not employing vocational trainees, local hairdressers, just as other companies, are increasingly angry about the prospect of being taxed for the failures of education policies in addition to having to cope with a pronounced lack of trainees who can count.

With respect to the other end of the education scale, today, Brad DeLong tries to demonstrate by counting some of his fingers that increased pressure on the higher income brackets in advanced economies could actually turn out to be socially beneficial, even if those affected would only make that decision behind a veil of ignorance. It is certainly a thought provoking model, even though I am not too sure about his conclusion when looking at Germany - or much of Europe for that matter. Over here, the labour income spread is, in my opinion, far too compressed already.

But what most people tend to forget when looking at outsourcing is that the foreign beneficiaries, those who are poor now and willing to work hard for much less than we do, do not intend to keep it that way. Far from it.

Last Sunday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung portrayed some SAP programmers in Bangalore who currently work for 8000 Dollars a year. But despite an increasing pool of highly skilled technical workforce in India (and the fact that 8000 Dollars are a real fortune in the country), the upward pressure on their wages is already impressive. Just as their employer, the men portrayed are very much aware that they can leave SAP and work next door at GE at any time should they not receive the expected 15% annual pay rise. At 15%, their current income would double in 5 years, or quadruple in ten. Then, at 16,000, or certainly at 32,000 Dollars, Indian competition would clearly not look too fierce anymore.

How fast can the supply of skilled workers expand and thus limit the upward pressure on these wages? And would their newfound wealth not increase Indian economic growth and thus limit their availability to work in industrial core outposts? Of course, no one knows just what is going to happen. That’s the problem with the future, we don’t know it until we’ve seen it. Brad DeLong’s model might be true, but it could also be an illustration of a rather special case within a socially more disruptive development.

But for now, I’m still claiming that the faster India, and eastern Europe, grow, the better for all of us. For Indians, for Eastern Europeans, but also for outsourced blue and white collar workers in the - current - industrial core. But we do need to teach everyone how to count.

Well of course the answer here, according to both sources, is not really. Frances Cairncross puts it like this:

This survey will argue that the promises governments have made to people retiring today are too large to be met in full. As a result, people will have to work longer, and retire later, than they do now. And the old will have to insure themselves for more of the cost of health care.

Fortunately there is a time window, of about a decade, during which the population of working age will be at a historic high. Projections by the OECD in Paris show that the impact of retiring baby-boomers will not begin to be felt until the next decade, and will culminate in 2025-35. So governments have a chance—but one that they must grab fast.

Indeed S&P’s also reach a similar conclusion: if the bullet of reform is bitten early enough the worst can be avoided:

This scenario is not a prediction by Standard & Poor’s. It is unlikely that governments will allow debt and deficit burdens to spiral out of control in the manner outlined.

Now a number of things could be said here. In the first place Frances Cairncross’s objectives may well be rather different to those of S&P’s. She is concerned, in part, to offer dignity to old age, and respect for societies as they age. In this I agree with her completely. We have converted ourselves into youth-centric societies, and our attitude and self-image need to change.

S&P’s is more interested in fomenting pension and social security reform and they undoubtedy take a much more restricted view of the problem.

However this being said they both share one common rather re-assuring conclusion: acting in time can make the transition painless. Hear I am afraid I cannot be so anodyne: I think this is all going to be incredibly traumatic, and disturbing. As to acting in time, not only am I unsure whether our political systems allow for this, I am not even sure we know what we should be doing.

S&P’s like many analysts produce reams of data - the government debt of country (a) will have reached (b) % of GDP by the year (c) - but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: none of us really know in any detail what the dynamics are going to be. In the end we are all guessing, and these guesses conceal large margins of error. Take the US deficit situation. S&P says the sharp deterioration in US public finances over the past two years has prompted it to revise US debt forecasts sharply higher. “The US debt ratio is now projected to reach 158 per cent of GDP, almost double the 83 per cent projected two years ago.”

Now think about this: it is pretty staggering isn’t it? In two years the numbers have changed drastically, and all with a teensy weensy little deficit like 4% of GDP per annum for a year and a half.

So don’t let them blind you with data: they are as much in the dark as you are, it’s just that pages and pages of figures sometimes make people feel better.

And think of another little statistic: last year the German federal government ran a deficit of 4% of GDP to promote growth (thus emphasising the *growth* side of the growth and stability pact) yet no growth was produced.

Three years from now even the German government promise to be aiming for a zero deficit: I leave each of you to do their own back-of-the-envelope calculations about what kind of growth level they might achieve if they adhere to this line.

And if you continue with the annual deficit but don’t get growth, then at some stage the absolute values (the % of GDP that the govt owes) start to get pretty scary - in Japan they’re already over 150%, and in Italy and Belgium over 100%) - and at some stage someone starts to ask the awkward question whether you can ever pay all this back, and from that moment we don’t quite know what happens, because, like they say, we’ve never been there before.

Now before leaving the topic of numbers completely I would just like to touch on one detail: the one aluded to in the title to this post. The point is what is the ’distance of death’: we simply don’t know, and this is another of those weak spots where all these projections start to get into trouble. We simply don’t know whether the tendency towards increasing longevity which we have enjoyed over the last century or so will continue, or whether the rate of increase in life expectancy will accelerate or decline - and these details are pretty important if you want to get down to it and do the calculations. In fact what can be said is that most of the ’reassuring’ scenarios tend to assume a ’favourable’ evolution in life expectancy (in actuarial terms) and a recovery of fertility, neither of which may be justified: that is to say we are assuming the most favourable of scenarios.

Anyway instead of trying to speculate about numbers, which as I say are bound to be pretty suspect, let’s try arguing from first principles, let’s just look at what advantages and disadvantages an ageing society might have, and I’d like to examine these in the context of two variables which I often mention: technology and globalisation.

In the first place maybe it helps to think of a society as a single person, then what is happening is that with every passing day that person is older. Now in economic terms there must be an optimum age for a society to have. As a crude approximation you might think that the earnings curve is a reflection of this fact (or what we economists like to call a proxy). Broadly speaking, especially for qualified workers, wages and salaries tend to rise, peak and then taper off. This trajectory probably represents a trade-off between two factors: speed and experience. Within certain limits the younger you are the quicker you are (and the more ’risk open’ you are), and the older the more ’wise’ (and more resistant to change). The resistance to change factor isn’t particularly surprising: as you get older the more you probably have invested in ’the way things were’.

So in theory you could make a calculation: for a given level of technology, and a given rate of technological change (x) is the optimum age for a society to have (in strictly economic terms). OK?

But the rate of technological change isn’t constant: it is accelerating. So what does this do to the calculation? Well esentially it gives more emphasis to reaction speed, and less to experience (putting this in Schumpeterian terms the rate of destruction of human capital increases) - ie essentially it brings down the optimum age, and the faster the technological change, the faster the age drops. This essentially is the first important argument I fear Frances doesn’t consider, and I think it is a pretty important one.

Of course socially speaking the image of all those elderly people working more and more years to keep their societies functioning may be extraordinarily laudible, but let us never forget one thing: social worth and economic worth are not at all the same thing. So the extra work that we all get to do may in most cases have a diminishing economic worth.

And this brings me to the second topic: globalisation. In fact I found it rather surprising that Frances doesn’t really get into this, since it is the very ’death of distance’ which she was so prophetic in forecasting which may be the final kick which makes her somewhat ’rosy’ view a rather questionable one.

As she says:

When the baby-boomers start to retire in large numbers, they will empty out workplaces—such as public services—that now have lots of staff in their 50s. To replace them, employers will have to come up with the sort of flexible deals they once used to attract women back to work. That may make it more appealing to continue to work.

Indeed, the workplace revolution that lies ahead may be very like the one that, in the course of the 1970s and 1980s, brought millions of mothers into the job market. Since then, the workplace has been feminised; in future it will be grizzled. A quarter of a century from now, retirement will look different from the way it does now: a mix of work and gardening, rather than gardening alone. For older people, work may then offer some of the charms that have lured so many women into the job market: stimulus, companionship and the freedom from worry that a bit of extra money can bring.

Now what is surprising is that she doesn’t consider another form of flexibilisation here: the one which can be brought about across the telephone line. In fact American consultants McKinsey have been thinking about this. In forecasting that by 2008 IT services and back-office work in India would swell fivefold, to a $57 billion annual export industry employing 4 million people and accounting for 7% of India’s gross domestic product they specifically cited the impending retirement of the baby boom generation in the US.

And of course - what a coincidence - just as the average age of our EU societies edges gently up and away from the decining optimum, many newly developing societies will have average ages which are steadily approaching it from below. So the balance must inevitably shift. In fact as the more mobile information type work moves steadily away we may become a highly polarised zone with a few extremely highly talented and rewarded young people, and an ever growing pole of ’the rest’ accumulating in pretty low-end economic activities (the ones it is impossible to move) with a proportionately lower relative standard of living.

Which brings us back to the government debt, it’s ever growing real value, and our ever diminishing ability to repay it. I’m sorry Frances, I’m sorry S&P’s: somewhere out there lies a tipping point just waiting for us to come and find it, or to use an expression from game theory I’ve borrowed, there is a backward induction point from which todays ’market participants’ may deduce the reality which I am trying to describe, begin the rush for the door and kick the whole machine into motion.

Full Disclosure: while writing this I have been listening nostalgically to a CD from the French folk singer Renaud Séchan (not to be missed as an actor in the film version of Zola’s Germinal). I have just got to a track from 1980: Dans Mon HLM. Certainly prophetic, just how I imagine my old age. My apologies to those who don’t speak French - I daren’t translate!

Au rez-d’-chaussée, dans mon HLM
Y a une espèce de barbouze
Qui surveille les entrées,
Qui tire sur tout c’ qui bouge,
Surtout si c’est bronzé,
Passe ses nuits dans les caves
Avec son Beretta,
Traque les mômes qui chouravent
Le pinard aux bourgeois.
Y s’ recrée l’Indochine
Dans sa p’tite vie d’ peigne cul.
Sa femme sort pas d’ la cuisine,
Sinon y cogne dessus.
Il est tellement givré
Que même dans la Légion
Z’ont fini par le j’ter,
C’est vous dire s’il est con!

Putain c’ qu’il est blême, mon HLM!
Et la môme du huitième, le hasch, elle aime!

The polls, however, have regularly forecast a near certain defeat in the Greek Cypriot zone and a close finish on the Turkish side. So if these polls are confirmed the result would seem pretty clear cut given that about two-thirds of the island’s 800,000 population are Greek Cypriots. Turkish Cypriots control only one-third of the territory in the north and are only recognized as a state by Turkey.

Whilst in the long run the problem may well ’resolve itself’ with Turkish membership of the EU, we should not lose sight of the fact that the ethnic rivalries which surround us are not noticeably diminishing, and that while many of us may now find it hard to remember what the world was like before e-mail and the mobile phone, in the world of ’ethnic cleansing’ things move more slowly. Historic memories make a 30 year time gap (or one generation) seem but a day. (This should also not be forgotten by all those of us whose eyes today are focussed in horror on what is happening in Iraq).

In conclusion I would just like to refer you to David Officer’s pretty ’fair and balanced’ Cyprus blog ’Changing Trains’ where he quoted this yesterday from the Cyprus Mail:

Only when the first version of the plan was submitted did people get a genuine idea of what a federal settlement would be like and it was nothing like it had been described by the politicians over the years. Politicians had been misinforming people for decades about the type of settlement they could deliver, creating false expectations by setting unattainable targets. So when the plan was presented people felt cheated and wronged, not by the politicians, who immediately started slamming it, but by the UN and the international community that were seen as favouring the Turkish side. As usual, the foreigners were blamed.

Opposition to the Annan plan was fuelled by another factor – Cyprus’ imminent accession to the EU. Greek Cypriot confidence has grown ever since the signing of the accession treaty last April, people feeling that as part of the EU the free areas’ security has been taken care of. Feeling that their security was guaranteed, the need of a settlement ceased to be an imperative.

And the politicians are back to playing their old games, creating unrealistic expectations about the type of settlement that can be secured after accession. The human rights of everyone would be guaranteed, there would be no exemptions from the acquis communautaire and the Turkish side would have no choice but to accept the type of settlement that Greek Cypriot side wants, politicians have been arguing. All we have to do is avoid signing a peace deal before May 1, when we will become full members of the EU.

Nobody can say whether this line of argument is correct, but it does seem to feature a large element of the wishful thinking that has always characterised our politicians’ Cyprus problem discourse.

In reading this extract I can’t help being put in mind of a quote I recently took from Trichet:

there is the unfortunate phenomenon that public opinion very often discovers the problems at the moment they are tackled, when governments, parliaments and social partners carry out the structural reforms that are urgently needed.

This phrase has been haunting me rather recently, as it does seem to some up something important about the way our perception of the future may have changed. I don’t think it was always like this. I think there was a time when our political system was capable of generating visionary goals, and then working systematically towards them. It seems today that we are somewhat more retiscent in our attitudes to what the future will bring.

I also like yesterdays quote from Mathew about France being singular in that there ’the voters lie to the politicians’. Could it be that this has a far more general application, and that a game strategy is emerging wherby each party does its utmost to keep their true objectives well concealed from the other?