Well, somewhere around Iceland, the Northern Lights flared up because of the giant sunspot that’s going on right now, and I pointed this out to a few people who rushed to the windows to see. Then, I used the opportunitiy to talk up one of the Amish passengers who went to look.

It turns out that the Swiss Reformed Church invited them to Zurich as part of a reconcilliation effort. You see, the Zwinglians - the founders of the Swiss Reform movement - were the reason the Amish are in America at all. At one time, you could be executed in the Holy Roman Empire for being an Anabaptist like the Amish. The whole history is long and complicated, and frankly not terribly interesting. However, it seems that some form of apology is in the offing.

Why does this matter? For the most part it doesn’t. The Amish aren’t a terribly big group, and the Swiss Reformed Church is just another Protestant sect in a world full of Protestant sects. However, it is an indicator that, at least among non-fundamentalist Protestants, the ecumenical movement is still pretty strong. The Amish are unusually remote and have no important political base. Reconciling with them can only mean a fairly genuine intention to reconcile with everyone who might be viewed as sharing some common values.

This kind of strategy makes a certain amount of sense when you look at how religious politics work in Europe. Nowadays, the Anglicans and the Lutherans have more in common with each other than with mainstream agnosticism or fundamentalism. I notice here in Belgium, for example, a lot of “generic” Protestant churches without specific doctrinal affiliations. In America, the denomination names are much less important than they used to be, but the differences between conservative and liberal churches are very strong and getting stronger. I don’t see much Protestant fundamentalism in Europe, so is it possible that the distinctions within Protestantism are just disappearing here? Does this have an impact on Europe’s remaining state churches?

In the short term, this election is unlikely to have much of an effect on the rest of Europe - the Conservatives’ policy towards EU matters is unlikely to change greatly whoever becomes the leader (the Europhile Ken Clarke is unlikely to run, let alone win after his two previous defeats) - but the plight of the Conservative Party does mirror that of the other parties, both left and right, who dominated European politics in the 80s and 90s. Many parties had extended periods in office, but were then swept out in the mid to late 90s, often in landslide elections, and many continue to find it hard to mount effective opposition today - the obvious examples are the French Socialists and various Italian parties, though Spain’s PSOE and Germany’s Free Democrats (if not the CDU/CSU) also fit the pattern.

There has been discussion in Britain of the possibility of a ’realignment’ of British politics with the currently third placed Liberal Democrats (full disclosure: the party I belong to) passing the Conservatives to become the Opposition. While many Conservatives dismiss this as an unlikely scenario, there are precedents from Europe (and, of course, Canada) of seemingly dominant parties collapsing in a short time. Realignment is occurring in many European countries - there would be a certain irony if the process in Britain occurs because of the actions of the most Eurosceptic of the major parties.

The current arrangement certainly seems excessively complicated. As I understand it (and I didn’t look it up so I may be wrong) Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, France and the UK all have areas which fall under their national sovereignty, but outside the EU. I think all the remaining Portuguese territories are within the EU, since Macao was handed over to China. Some areas are outside the EU for tax purposes, but able to obtain structural funds anyway. Some overseas areas enjoy special trading status with the EU, others are fully part of the EU, and still others are treated exactly the same as foreign states for trade purposes. Several have their own currencies, some tied to the Euro, some to the dollar. Three of Britain’s Caribbean colonies are part of a different economic union. I think citizens of all the remaining European overseas territories have the right to abode in the EU, although I’m not sure about Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles.

I hate to suggest it in these terms, but perhaps the EU ought to have some sort of colonial affairs office. Of course, we wouldn’t call it that. “External territories” might be the way to go. Still, it might make sense to outline whether people in these territories have the right to appeal before the ECJ, and just what terms they have to accept in order to get EU aid and structural funds.

I note, with some small amusement, that there is already a nation outside the EU that seems willing to accept that kind of pseudo-colonial status. Cape Verde wants access to European structural funds, and apparently Spain and Portugal are willing to entertain the idea. Since there already seems to be an Europe à deux vitesses within the EU, perhaps there is room for an Europe à trois vitesses. Perhaps there are other states that might be interested in a similar sort of deal? Like Cape Verde, much of northern Africa already has a currency bound to the Euro and “special relationships” with their former colonial powers, France in particular, and indirectly with the EU.

This leads me to think that maybe there needs to be a debate on the idea of a peripheral Europe? To some degree, it already exists in the overseas colonies and a few highly EU-dependent peripheral states. It would probably be impossible to avoid the label of colonialism, but considering how central the EU has become to some of these places’ economies, it just might be better to drag the whole thing out into the open.

Anyway, I though I might point out some things that coming here reminds me that I miss about America, along with some I don’t:

I miss:

• Having more selection in fast food than McDo, Quick and the local kebab merchants. (Yo quiero Taco Bell.)
• Grocery stores that stay open after six and on Sundays.
• The open road and the sight of mountains on the horizon.
• Pho.
• Bagels. (Damn, I miss bagels. Even Idaho bagels.)
• Buffy reruns.

I don’t miss:

• Crappy American fries.
• The fifteen pounds I lost by moving away from fast food and the four I’ve gained back in the last week here.
• SUV’s, the smell of the Interstate, and the odor of the local rendering plant.
• Biscuits in gravy.
• Fruits, vegetables and cheese that taste like cardboard.
• The words: “Parental discretion is advised”

• The Bible does not predict the establishment of the State of Israel, nor does it predict that the Antichrist will attack it when there is peace with the Palestinians. Yes, I’ve read the entire Bible. I even used to go to Sunday school. Whatever it is you think you’re reading there, it isn’t there. Frankly, if there has to be peace in Israel for the world to end, I wouldn’t start cashing in my stocks yet anyway.
• I don’t care what Jesus would do; I worry too much about about what George W. Bush would do. And, I will accept Jesus Christ as my personal saviour when you accept that you’ve been brainwashed by your cult.
• Yes, I’m from Europe and no, I don’t like Heineken. I also don’t drink Coors because I don’t like the taste of horse urine in a can.
• France and Germany have virtually identical policies towards Iraq and it’s the US that has softened its stance, not the other way around. Yes, it is entirely fair that the US should pay nearly all of the bill for rebuilding Iraq, because if you broke it, you have to fix it.
• They’re euros, not euro-dollars. And they’re not worth eighty cents, they’re worth a buck fifteen. Get used to it.
• I don’t care if you were in Vietnam, you’re still a drunk redneck in a pick-up truck.

Okay, so this hasn’t been a great trip. I hadn’t realised how much these little things annoyed me until I got here.

However, the real crowning moments of disappointment have all come from CSPAN. My mother-in-law doesn’t have the Sci-Fi channel, or FoodTV, or even F/X. I can’t even get CNN. So, I’m stuck with the network news and CSPAN. The network news is pretty bad. I get the impression that news on the Big Three networks reaches mostly people over age 70, and that the producers assume anyone that old can only stay awake about 20 minutes.

CSPAN, however… Wow. First, I watched the confirmation hearing for Bush’s appointee for Secretary of State for Indian Affairs. It’s some guy named David Anderson who owns a bunch of BBQ restaurants in the upper Midwest: “Famous Dave’s.” He starts the hearing with a recording of an episode of Oprah where he was featured, talking about how he dragged himself up from alcohol and drugs on the reservation to become the Harvard MBA and successful businessman he is today.

As soon as I saw the Oprah tape, I figured that the fix was in. This wasn’t a confirmation hearing, it was a formality, and Mr Anderson was confirmed unanimously before the relevant sub-committee. I assume his hearing before the full committee will be just as smooth.

The thing is, there was only peripheral mention of the long running legal troubles that the Bureau of Indian Affairs faces. (They’re getting sued for robbing the tribes they’re supposed to serve of something like half the annual GDP of the US over the course of 150 years.) Furthermore, there was hardly any mention of Indian gambling at the hearing, just a little bit. It turns out the Dave Anderson didn’t make his fortune in the restaurant business, that’s just what he does now. He started out in reservation politics and worked his way up to an executive position in some reservation casino operation. He said that he intended to divest himself of any assets he had in the gambling industry and abstain from any decisions involving gambling permits.

He did say one thing that struck me as worth knowing: He’s for casino gambling as a temporary measure to finance development of more permanent industries on reservations. I’m somewhere between indifferent and against on reservation casinos, so at least his position is one I can understand. But, I was really irritated by hearing about how his personal story was an “inspiration” to young Indians and how his business experience qualifies him to run the BIA. The first is laughable and the second ridiculous. I’m sure his life story is largely as described: that he was an alcoholic kid from the rez with nothing to his name who managed to pull himself together. (Although as the hearing progressed it turned out he was from Chicago, but hey, that’s just details.) I doubt very strongly that knowing the guy who runs the BIA used to be a drunk does much of anything for kids of any background.

I would have liked to have heard the nominee say something like “I’ve run a dozen BIA projects on time, and under budget and without legal problems.” That would have impressed me. Running casinos and grilled cow establishments doesn’t impress me. And, I was on one level completely unsurprised and on another disturbed that someone with such close ties to the gambling industry would be allowed to take over the BIA. I mean, that’s like letting oilmen decide on your policy in the Middle East.

The second disappointing thing I saw on CSPAN was the Democratic primary debates. First, did Joe Lieberman look like Senator Palpatine back in 2000? I swear, the resemblance is uncanny. Well, at least having a Republican in the Democratic primary gives all the other Democrats something to agree on: They all hate Lieberman. Otherwise, who the hell are all these losers? I recognise Gephardt because I’ve seen him run before, Al Sharpton is hard to miss, and I assume the black lady is Carol Mosley-Braun. But the others? Was it just me, or did anyone else need cards to tell them all apart?

I’m not hopeful about this bunch. The one who I think is Kucinich sounds like Jerry Brown. John Edwards is the smiling guy, right? He gets off some good one liners, but is way too Kennedy for his own good. Kerry just sucked. This Dean guy wasn’t too bad, but he certainly didn’t distinguish himself in the debate I saw. I’ve heard Gephardt tell stories about NAFTA that didn’t make sense before, and listening to him take credit for Clinton’s economic record is just pathetic. I had hope for Wesley Clark, but not anymore. Frankly, I think I could vote for Carol Mosley-Braun. I could bring myself to vote for Al Sharpton in a pinch. The rest just make me glad I never did become a US citizen.

I’m a lot less optimistic about the Democrats in 2004 than I was before. If it had just been about destroying Lieberman, well, that would have been okay. Every time he said something, I wanted to sing: “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…” But, if the debate is any sign of what’s going on, the battle lines all seem to be drawn between the pro- and anti-Bush camps within the Democratic party. That not just ridiculous, it’s a strategy for defeat. If the Democrats can’t all come together behind annihilating Bush, there’s even less chance of getting the electorate behind it. I’m beginning to think Michael Moore is right: the Democrats should draft Oprah.

I’m not sure when I’ll next be back in the States. Probably next summer, just as the election is heating up. It’s not something I’m looking forward to.

Remember Jacques Chirac’s intervention in support of Mahathir Mohammed’s anti-Semitic rantings? The one condemned here, as throughout the blogosphere? Well, it seems not to have happened.

The story appears to be as follows. After Mahathir Mohammed’s speech at the OIC summit, it was proposed that a condemnation be inserted in the final report of a meeting of EU chiefs of state. But EU procedures don’t provide for such statements in those reports. Instead, a statement was made, on behalf of the EU, in a formal address by Silvio Berlusconi, who holds the rotating presidency. (The irony of a politician elected with neofascist support denouncing someone else for anti-Semitism was, one assumes, passed over in decent silence.)

But newspaper reports suggesting that Chirac had somehow supported Mahathir Mohammed by suggesting that the condemnation be part of the Berlusconi address rather than the conference report were immediately seized on by Israeli politicians, who have good reason to be annoyed at Chirac on other grounds, and by some Jews in the U.S. including professional kvetch Abraham Foxman of the ADL. That gave the Maylasian prime minister the opportunity, which he quickly seized, to pretend that Chirac was supporting his views.

However, Chirac (unlike another G8 Chief of State I can think of, who waited longer to speak out and chose to hide behind a spokesman in issuing a rather tepid statement that the remarks in question were “divisive and wrong,”) wrote a prompt and fairly tough letter to Mahathir Mohammed, telling him that his remarks had “attracted strong disapproval, not only in France but throughout the world,” and telling him that despite his government’s rejection of claims of anti-Semitism, he remarks “could not but be condemned by those who preserve the memory of the Holocaust.”

Everyone wanted a front row seat for the verdict and sentencing of Britain’s very own Paris madam, Margaret MacDonald.

First to the courtroom door, though, was her ever-faithful friend and glamorous former employee, the raven-haired Axelle Guerin.

Once an escort girl, Ms Guerin has been firm in her defence of her former boss, describing the convent-educated vice queen as “always nice and kind”, and as a woman who had never instructed her employees to have sex with clients.

“But ’escort’ can mean many things,” Axelle memorably once told me with a raised eyebrow during the trial itself.

Unfortunately, the Paris judge saw it all rather differently, and found Ms MacDonald guilty of aggravated pimping, sentencing her to four years in prison plus a hefty fine of 150,000 euros.

The 44-year old British woman - whose birthday it was today - looked impassive as the verdict was announced. But outside the court, her supporters were furious.

Axelle, though reluctant to speak to the media thanks to her own deal with the News of the World tabloid, did shout that the sentence was unfair and hypocritical, before running impressively in her high heels away from the cameras and out of the court.

She and other friends of Ms MacDonald want to know why someone running a discreet escort service should find themselves being prosecuted while blatant street prostitution of women from eastern Europe and beyond continues with impunity not far from Paris city centre.

Management

The answer may lie in the success of Margaret MacDonald’s business. She herself was described by police as a sophisticated and efficient businesswoman, who embarked on an illegal trade.

Escort agencies are not legal in France and nor is pimping.

The court heard that the British woman’s business appeared to be an extremely lucrative one.

With three business degrees and a fluent command of eight languages, Margaret MacDonald used both the internet and the International Herald Tribune newspaper to advertise her escorts’ services.

According to the prosecution, she employed more than 500 women - and up to 50 men - in a business that spanned Europe and the Middle East, with clients charged up to 700 euros an hour for her escorts’ company and more.

It was Ms MacDonald’s meticulous attention to detail - logging the money transactions, as well as the names and other details of the clients and the escorts she brought together - which ultimately led to her downfall.

And in court, at one stage, she did appear to incriminate herself when the judge questioned whether she believed her clients were really paying so much just for the company of her escorts.

Tips

What if, the judge asked, the men or women refused to have sex with a client - would they get a discount?

“Well, rather like a restaurant,” Margaret answered to laughter in court, “you only pay for what you consume.”

Her other handy tips included what excuses to use if a girl did not want to sleep with a client, gleaned from her own experience as an escort.

She admitted that when she didn’t want to sleep with one particular German client, she feigned a headache.

Whether he received a discount was not revealed.

Tonight, back in Fleurie women’s prison, Margaret MacDonald will have much to contemplate.

A tabloid bidding war has broken out for her story, and she says she needs the money - claiming to have saved nothing from her more lucrative times.

According to her lawyer, she is also contemplating a Hollywood film of her life, which may perhaps reveal more of how a home counties convent schoolgirl came to find herself a successful international vice queen.

Below I am reproducing a letter Stephen Una Bandiera Seza Segni George sent me in response to the Pele-Ronaldo point (by a strange coincidence he is currently working in Brazil). Now before everyone rushes to criticise me, I am familiar with the lump of labour argument. But this isn’t what is in question here. The US and European labour market problems are increasingly structural in my opinion. On both sides of the Atlantic we are capable of creating more, many more, jobs than we do at present. But what if these jobs involve a move down the value chain? That is the question the coming ’boomer retirement’ in the US and Europe and the arrival of ’high-end outsourcing’ is posing, and it is the one which Stephen is asking. It think it needs answering.

You have approached in this discussion a lot of the concerns that I have about the outsourcing revolution. You’ve made it easier for me, as a non-specialist, to ask some further questions about my doubts that refuse to go away.

One of my concerns was with those left behind. My comment was that a $120k MIT education goes wanting. And I acknowledged that, actually, it probably doesn’t, but the effect probably ripples through the economy so that some guy somewhere with a $60k State Uni engineering degree can’t find a job. The marginal US engineer whose position just went to India for $15k - he’s out there, doubtless.

The number of jobs that the US economy will be short…are these jobs not just being outsourced to others? Those ’good jobs’, as I think of them, aren’t being replaced with new economy good jobs. Maybe as the boomers retire, they just aren’t replaced, or are replaced by others offshore, at a fraction of the cost. Maybe they represented an overhang on unraveling the “productivity paradox”?

Did you see last week how the UK Network Rail was planning to outsource National Rail Enquiries? At what point does the cost savings just not justify the hollowing out of a nation’s workforce any further? These are ’just’ call centre jobs, but I reckon every one of them would be missed. Rotating these people into other responsibilities just masks the idea that there is less work within the economy - and less work that actually serves the UK economy - for UK people to do. But I digress.

Sure, there are places for some in the hierarchy. But I suppose not all. And not for the kind of money they were earning before, most likely. We all just become ’resource managers’ (if you have occasion to use the Amazon help system, you’ll notice replies from the likes of “Kapil Sehgal”, “Pankaj Sharma”, “Nitin Jain”, when you have a “cut and paste” answer, but when it comes to something complicated, “Karen Richardson” steps in. All real names from my correspondence with Amazon customer service, so anecdotal, of course - could just be three nice guys from Birmingham).

Next, the idea of profits coming home. Are those profits really recycling through the US economy, or only into the coffers of the “US” corporations that are benefitting from them. Then what? They aren’t employing US employees, so to what extent should they rightly be seen as US corporations from the workers’ perspective? What exactly happens to that $143 that comes back?

- dividends, to the owners? are these, generally, spent, or do they accrue sidelined in the hands of the wealthy, relatively lightly taxed by new (thankfully ’sunset’) tax legislation. I suppose that a goodly tranche of dividends paid actually winds up in American pension system, so at least they might be captured for the present, presuming the
shares they are used to buy can maintain their growth momentum to justify the share prices. But that’s another story. And what of offshore owners? Probably a small percentage of the US equity market.

- taxes? I would suppose that this could at least ensure that they recycle into the economy, but the current US government seems not to be interested in “tax and spend” to generate economic activity.

- growth? Where? Not domestic, I would argue. Hearing Intel’s Andrew Grove speak out about the threat to the economy posed by outsourcing is a little ironic, don’t you think? I don’t know, but I don’t suspect Intel is investing much in the US these days. Probably most of their mfg for years has been built in Asia. “We did it, but you should wake up before everyone else does it!”

The coming wave of boomer retirements interests me enormously. As a person in my mid-30s, I am wondering about opportunities this demographic might create. My father suggests becoming an estate lawyer, which is a pretty good idea, actually. What about a surge in purchase of retirement property? What will the US, or Japan, or W. Europe look like when this comes to pass? “Neutron” cities, where these enormous prices can no longer be sustained? I reckon my own neighbourhood in London is starting to turn over in earnest, judging from some of the places I looked at when we moved there.

I am all for competition and creative destruction. I just argue that the US isn’t thinking very strategically here, and that the government is almost intentionally letting this happen as a backdoor way of cutting costs and globalising the workforce - avoiding paying their share of the costs. The idea of the jobless recovery rings true, but it has to come from somewhere, no? I hate to indulge in conspiracy thinking, but a part of me can be persuaded that the Bush administration really does have at heart the idea of letting their cronies and financiers rake in as much as they can now, then letting the whole mess crater while they live on within their gated communities. Then “hoi polloi” can vote Democrat and let them put up the taxes so everyone feels the pain all the more. The suggestion that the Bush Administration tax cuts are actually good for the economy only helps to fuel these speculations in my mind.

What happens to the Social Security deficit when the “good jobs” migrate and there aren’t enough other jobs left in the economy to prop it up? How many “bad jobs” will it take to fund one “good” retirement? How many “bad jobs” will just slip off-radar into the informal economy?

My other question: what happens to the structure of American education when those who pay for it find themselves unemployed at the other end? Some kind of expectations compression? Those of us on the other side, who have no debt, can treat education like a sunk cost. I can work for peanuts if I want to, or if I have to, or if I can find a job. Those coming up to prop up the system - will they have such a luxury? Will the system itself survive in anything like its present form?

I never had a problem with the influx of talent, if the market will bear it. The likes of Ronaldo are actually good for Brazilian football the way any overseas worker is good for the folks at home in the low-wage country. All the better that he is not being exploited, and brings up Brazil’s street cred in the world. Where the Ronaldo analogy breaks down to me is in what happens when the talent goes home and takes the ball with them. In the analogy this
doesn’t happen, exactly. Pele just came home and became an advertising icon. Maybe a better analogy here is relegation - what happens to a Premiership League team when they fall from the League? My own “home team”, Wimbledon, may serve as an example. Revenues fall. Gate receipts fall. Salaries *must* fall. In the case of Wimbledon, oh, where are they now?

I think of the US workforce as relatively inflexible in their expectations; the American university system that raises them relatively unable to “retool” to produce less-costly, lower-trained, more specialised workers. Isn’t that what this argument of a structural effect comes down to: the whole economy must react to the loss of this sector of employment?

I would argue that this is where Americans should be most concerned. Do (we) want to surrender our standard of living, our education system, our state benefits (however meagre they may be by European standards)? Does this kind of growth improve our economy? Is it, in fact “domestic” product at all?

I think the visa programme is a red herring and that the two phenomena are only tangentially related. White collar job flight - it’s the opposite of brain drain. The brains are still here, earning less, standing around wondering what they’re s’posed to do now. Milton Keynes, anyone?

From Brazil, where as a Yank working for a UK company under contract to a Brazilian one, I no doubt occupy a very hypocritical desk of my own.

Italian minister calls for European immigration quotas

The European Union needs to rethink its immigration policy by setting up a quota system, Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu told the country’s parliament Wednesday.

He was speaking two days after a boat carrying illegal immigrants, believed to be Somalis, sank off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa. At least 13 are known to have died but it is feared the death toll may be as high as 70. There were 15 survivors.

The parliamentarians observed a minute’s silence in respect of the dead.

Pisanu, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the EU, put forward his scheme for quotas at a meeting of EU interior ministers last month.

The idea is that countries outside the EU would be granted quotas in return for undertakings to fight illegal immigration and take back their nationals who were refused admission to the EU or expelled from it. The proposal is being considered by the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission.

“We have a duty to measure the size and complexity of the phenomenon of immigration and to seek to control it with rules and (the necessary) means,” Pisanu said.

“Leaving the phenomenon to itself will cost us a lot more than any reasonable attempt to bring it under control.”

Pisanu said that if there had been no immigration into Europe during the last 10 years it would have lost two percent of its population.

“If Italy has no immigration in the next 10 years… it will lose four and a half million people in the active population, in the 20 to 40 age range.”

The illegal immigrants on the boat that sank off Lampedusa were Somalis fleeing civil war in their country, a news agency reported Wednesday.

The Roman Catholic agency Misna, which has close ties with humanitarian organisations, quoted Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders - MSF) as the source of its report.

“They were fleeing from (the Somali capital) Mogadishu to escape the threats of the clans that lay down the law in Somalia. They were all civilians,” Loris De Filippi of MSF told Misna, speaking from Lampedusa, south of Sicily, where some of the 15 survivors are being cared for.

The deaths have shocked Italy and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called on “a Christian and civilised Europe” to open up to immigrants in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

MSF quoted a survivor, Mohamed Osman, as saying that about 100 people, among them 17 women and seven children, left a small Libyan port on October 3. The boat’s engine broke down almost at once and the vessel began drifting. After two days six people tried to swim to shore. The first death, that of a women, occurred on the fourth day.

On Tuesday the trial of two alleged human traffickers charged with manslaughter in connection with the deaths of 283 illegal immigrants in December 1996 was postponed so technical details could be examined.

As varied as the individual details may have been, one theme clearly predominates the preceding accounts on this website, from the French, Dutch, and the Czech press, of the progress of the EU draft Constitution Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) so far. And that is, of course, that there has been virtually none - indeed, that there is even considerable dissatisfaction over the process currently being used to try to gain common agreement on an EU Constitution.

………..sometimes “decisive measures” are what is needed to forge an enduring Constitution. Look at the American example: A decisive American legal transformation in the 19th century, highlighted by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, raised the power of the federal government over that of the component states, just as increasing industrialization and technological development was making such a political shift desirable. That this legal transformation managed to occur in the first place was precisely because it happened at a time when those who might have voted against it - i.e. the southern states - were not even present in the Congress since they were still under occupation by federal troops in the post-Civil War. In a similar way, just imagine how much faster and decisively this whole EU Constitution process could proceed if not everyone’s opinion needed to be heard, if not everyone needed to be persuaded to agree.

Actually, there was a very real opportunity to accomplish precisely this, but I suppose those in charge were simply not tough-minded (i.e. Machiavellian) enough to carry it out. I’m referring to holding the Constitutional Convention and the IGC processes without the participation of the ten future members (hey, they are after all still not members, not yet). Instead, the eventual Constitution (approved by those who currently are members) would be presented to the electorates of the candidate states for approval, bundled into their EU accession referenda. All of this would not have to be on a strictly “take-it-or-leave-it” basis; there could be as much consultation with the candidate member-states as desired. Still, the important thing in this scenario would be that there is plenty of room to say “It looks like we can’t agree. Well, we’ll just present the Constitution, written up our way, to your electorate and let them decide whether they want to accept it, or whether they’d just as soon stay out of the EU.” I bet the whole constitutional process would have been a lot more swift and successful in such a case. (Frankly, sometimes it seems that there would be a lot more progress had this treatment been reserved exclusively for Poland!)

Still, that’s not the way it is, the EU has insisted on being fair and including everyone, with both present and future interests in the Union. The result, unfortunately, is possibly that people will simply not be able to agree, will not be able to compromise sufficiently, and that the Constitution project will fail. We have to recognize this as a very real possibility, together with its corollaries, e.g. the possible withdrawal of one or more member-states, a relapse to the unsatisfactory Nice Treaty as the EU’s latest legal basis. One thing is certain in such a case: after adding ten new members-states (which will happen whether there is a new Constitution or not) yet failing to adapt its mechanisms to its greatly-increased size, the EU is certain to suffer a collapse of confidence in its collective ability to perform its fundamental function of ensuring peace and economic prosperity for its citizens.

Gianfranco Fini, the Italian politician who has spent the last decade orchestrating the transformation of a party that once claimed Mussolini as its ideologue, on Thursday got one step closer to his goal of refining that party into a moderate conservative voice.

His party, the National Alliance, presented a bill that, if passed, will extend voting rights in administrative elections to all legal immigrants who have resided in Italy for at least six years.

The bill, which will require the amendment of an article of the constitution, essentially gives non-European Union immigrants the same voting rights as their EU counterparts and allows immigrants to stand for municipal offices, though not for mayor.

Fini, deputy prime minister, was not present at the press conference Thursday, because he is at a summit meeting in Brussels with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and other European leaders to discuss the European constitution, nor did he sign the bill. “But without doubt the paternity of this law is his,” said Ignazio La Russa, National Alliance coordinator.

Fini’s absence could also be construed as diplomatic. His proposal, which came out of the blue last week, surprising even party officials closest to him, set off protests in the conservative coalition, most vocally on the part of Umberto Bossi.

So angry was the leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League that one of his aides suggested that Bossi was ready to pull out of the government and prompt a crisis should the bill be presented. Bossi later backed down.

National Alliance, which in 1994 began shedding its loyalties to its Fascist roots, has long campaigned on anti-immigration platforms. For most political commentators, Fini’s overture to immigrants has more to do with infighting in the governing coalition than with a sudden softening of heart. to synagogues and the Auschwitz death camp, and a planned visit to Israel, put off many times because of the uncertain political situation in the Middle East.

But he’s only been partly successful in rewriting his party’s history, at least in the eyes of public opinion, and National Alliance has never taken much more than the 12 percent of the vote it got in the 2001 election.

Fini’s personal approval rating, on the other hand, hovers around 36 percent, at times higher than Berlusconi’s. So many analysts and even members of his coalition suspect Fini of promoting great racial integration as a high visibility vote-grabbing gambit to build up support for a strong centrist party with a broader voter base.

If the center-right majority was caught off guard by Fini’s proposal, the opposition was no less surprised. A headline in the Communist daily Il Manifesto last week greeted Fini’s proposal with :”I can’t believe it.” The opposition, which has already has several proposals giving immigrants the vote in the works, has said that in principle they support Fini’s bill. But after an initial moment of perplexity, Berlusconi has not refuted the proposal, at least in principal, putting off, or at least postponing, the possibility of a government crisis.
Source: International Herald Tribune

2003
Jean Chretien
Jacques Chirac
Gerhard Schröder
Silvio Berlusconi
Junichiro Koizumi
Tony Blair
George W. Bush
Vladimir Putin
John Paul II

The headline is from the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, about the man who has been a gift to the Polish nation, and to many others, this last quarter of a century. Karol Wojtyla was the fist Slav ever elected Pope, the first non-Italian in the better part of half a millenium. An avid skier, active in the theater, a close friend to the Polish Primate identified with resistance to Communism, more open to ecumenism than any of his predecessors, yet dedicated to centralized control and teachings many in his flock ignore. The former Archbishop of Cracow, pilgrim to the world. Can we recall the Italian monopoly on the office? Can we now imagine a Pope who never leaves his palace?

So to a remarkable man, a man who has changed history for the better, a hundred years, in the words of the old song from his homeland:

Sto lat, sto lat,
Niech zyje, zyje nam!

There were few shocks over the weekend - the big upsets in the group matches had already happened in the earlier matches. However, while most of the automatic qualifiers are drawn from the usual suspects - Portugal, France, Denmark, Czech Republic, Sweden, Germany, England and Italy - there are some interesting additions with Greece, Bulgaria and Switzerland all winning their groups, edging out some strong competition on the way.

However, the ten sides that have reached the playoffs contain some of the biggest surprises, notably Latvia, who have never qualified for a major tournament and Wales, whose one and only appearance at a major championships was the 1958 World Cup. Unfortunately, the draw didn’t reward the dreams of the sporting romantics amongst us and provide us with a Latvia vs Wales face off for a place (or even a Holland vs Spain eliminator) but instead brought up this set of fixtures, amazingly without any seeding involved:

Latvia vs Turkey
Scotland vs Holland
Croatia vs Slovenia
Russia vs Wales
Spain vs Norway

(matches played over two legs in mid-November, the first side have home advantage in the first leg)

Some of us are already wondering just how many times Archie Gemmill’s famous goal against Holland in the 1978 World Cup will be repeated in the buildup.

Of course, while the draw would seem to establish certain teams as favourites to go through, playing the games in the middle of November could make the weather an interesting participant in some of the matches - the contrast between Riga and Istanbul or Madrid and Oslo could have an effect on the results, though I can’t help wondering who will be more shocked at the weather in the Russia vs Wales tie - the cold driving rain of Cardiff could be just as hard to play in for the Russians as the Welsh will find Moscow.

After a somewhat listless first half, the Germans came out strong and scored just a minute into the second period. Birgit Prinz, voted the tournament’s outstanding player, sent a pass to the right wing to Maren Meinert, who had three steps on the defense. Her right-footed shot from 15 yards glanced off Joensson and into the net. …

Sweden’s first-half goal was well-earned. Not backing down against Germany’s powerful attack that outscored opponents 22-3 en route to the final, the Swedes pressed forward with a varied offense. Several long passes soared beyond the German defense, only to see the Swedes fail to finish.

Still, they were finding openings, and they pounced in the 41st minute.

Victoria Svensson, Sweden’s most creative player in the tournament, sent a brilliant through pass to Ljungberg on the left wing. Ljungberg had enough time to change from her left foot to her right and slide a shot into the far corner of the net past the onrushing Rottenberg.

Germany came close twice in the opening half. Prinz, the World Cup’s leading scorer, went just wide with a short-range shot in the 31st, about five minutes after her sliding attempt barely missed the goal.

In overtime, the Germans dominated, forcing several corner kicks. Joensson punched out one corner as Sweden played tentatively. She also made a gorgeous kick save on Martina Mueller, but Kuenzer’s first goal of the tournament won it seconds later.

+++

Oh yeah, the German men won this weekend, too.

Who doubts that an age of global interaction needs a way to communicate beyond hands, feet and other body parts’ interactions? Those are clearly sufficient to guarantee human procreation, but as soon as things become a bit more tricky - which is not entirely unlikely in a globalised knowledge economy - they won’t carry the communicative day. And it will still take years, if not decades, for automatic translation to become useful. As long as hands and feet are a more reliable means of communication than electronically created translations, we will actually need to sit down and learn foreign languages – and one above all others.

There is hardly any language which could challenge the English dominance. Given India’s British colonial history as well as her linguistic fragmentation, there’s only one, in my opinion: Mandarin. Assuming a rapidly growing Chinese economy, Mandarin could become a lingua franca, too. But I am not too sure of that - it might simply be too late, as more than a billion Chinese, eager to contribute to the world economy, are equally eager to learn English, whereas the rest of the world is not too keen to learn Mandarin - ask *me* in seven years, as I bet a friend from Singapore that I will be able to speak at least a little Mandarin in 2010. Not least for this reason, Mandarin will become important. But it probably will not rival English in terms of global penetration.

Two weeks ago, in preparation of last week’s “Elysée Treaty” celebrations, the German weekly “Die Zeit” printed an interview (in German and French) with the French education minister Luc Ferry. Mr Ferry interestingly, and rightly, remarked that

“English as a language has to be treated differently.”

It is no longer just a foreign language. It has become a cultural technique, just like using the phone or sending emails. Today, less than 25% of Germans ever attempt to learn French (let alone speak it), less than 20% of the French try to learn German. Most Franco-German cooperation is handled in bad English these days.

And for everyone but the native speakers English, as a cultural technique, is about to solve an important problem that usually arises the more the better one speaks a foreign language. The better your use of a foreign language in a conversation, the more will native speakers assume that you also know the correct social code transmitted by the words you use as well as the correct instance for their application. But in all likelihood you will not be too familiar with a significant amount of semiotic subtleties in any given culture and language. Cultural misunderstandings are much more likely in this case than if both parties speak in a foreign language.

While this is very helpful for non-native speakers, it also means that native English speakers lose some of the advantage they have. They no longer control the development of their own native language beyond its application in their own culture. English, as a cultural technique, is likely to come in different semantic and possibly even syntactic flavours, spiced up with local cultural ingredients - far beyond the subtle problems arising from the use of “fit bird” in the US or “hot fox” in Britain.

As more and more people speak English, it will probably become more and more difficult to imply. A great example illustrating this is a story I once heard about an British woman working for the UN in New York. One day, she went to see her gynaecologist only to realise he had sold his practice to an Italian who called himself “doctor for women and other diseases”. She tried to explain the error but the doctor insisted that it was perfect Italian-English.

Seriously, we will have to explain a lot more in the future. Just think about the current transatlantic communication problems. We might have a rough idea of what is being said – but I can’t help but wonder - do we really understand it? The more we hear from each other in (roughly) the same words, the more our cultural differences will become a nuisance to real understanding - there are also disadvantages to publishing in English. Clearly more noise? But more signal?

Having said all this, I would like point out that I agree with much of what Bjørn Stærk says regarding the value of publishing in English - particularly when he writes that

“[t]o practice linguistic protectionism in this age is cultural suicide.”

[ NOTE: But I don’t believe linguistic protectionism carries the day when it comes to explaining the absence of political blogs from, say, Germany or France, that are published in English. I don’t think there’s a simple explanation for their relative scarcity, apart from the obvious truism that English is not the native language of most European countries - as the discussion regarding Bjoern’s entry amply demonstrates. I think, the most important variables have been named by those commenting in his blog – penetration of internet connection, especially flat-rate connections allowing to spend a significant amount online reading, awareness of blogging as a concept as well as a technology, motivation to put one’s opinion out there– someone mentioned a possible connection between 9/11 and a rise in blogging -, the main topics of the blog in question, one’s native language’s market size, the target audience, and evidently, the ability to write in English in a way allowing to express sometimes complicated issues and thoughts in a (hopefully) clear and mostly coherent manner. Just by looking at this range of factors (and there are probably a lot more), it becomes obvious to me that c.p. only a small fraction of blogs will be written in English instead of their author’s native language. ]

However, he also makes some points I have a hard time to swallow (which he actually expected)). Most importantly, his assumptions that

“[l]anguage isn’t culture…”,

and that

“[m]ost of the _new_ contributions to Western culture are being made by the US and Great Britain…”,

which then lead him to the conclusion that

”…nothing beautiful or sensible should ever be written in Norwegian, if it could be written in English.”

I again entirely agree with him that it is crucial for Europe, especially the larger linguistic markets in Europe, to

”… drop our linguistic pride, get out of the audience and get onto the stage.”

I’ve been saying for years that having a large linguistic market can create problematic incentives if a larger one is around the corner, especially in academia. A lot of German professors still do not publish in English because the German market is sufficiently big to scientifically survive without doing so. Being exempt from competition has never really benefited anyone in the long run. And it doesn’t in this case.

But there are things which can not – and which should not – be said in English. Abstracting from the brain-busting problem what contributions to Western culture actually are, I believe it is far from true that most of them are now being made by the US and Great Britain - certainly not in relative terms. If they are marketed in English, it is probably a sign of quality, as someone has deemed it useful to translate them and put them on the world stage. However, evolutionary variation is what made the Western model of social coordination a success story. Thus, in some respects, and I believe also in the linguistic one, diversity is a value in its own right.

Once again omitting impossible definitions, I would agree that “culture” does not only consist of language. But language is a very important part of culture. Just think of slang, think of thirteen year-olds inventing their own words to represent their own worlds, think of the fit birds and the hot foxes mentioned above. Even British English and American English are quite different today. Differences in language reflect differences in culture and thinking. I very vividly remember a discussion of three Norwegian fellow students at the LSE in a seminar concerning ethnic conflict regulation about which language is the real “Norwegian”. Their discussion was a clear sign to me that, also in Norway, language is an important part of culture.

Using English, the cultural technique, will keep us afloat on the ocean of global interaction. But it will not enable us to see the beautiful maritime vegetation underneath the ocean’s surface. Even in Amsterdam, where almost everybody speaks perfect English (see my entries from December 2002), no one will ever be able to really understand Dutch culture without speaking their language – all the risks of misunderstanding included. Cultural deep diving is never easy, always an adventure, but fortunately, mostly a rewarding one.

English, the cultural technique, will not enable non-German-speakers to find out first hand just why this entry is titled “German is getting sexy again.” Although, luckily, this WIRED article offers some diving advice ;-).

The debate on TV seems oddly familiar to me as a citizen of a nominal monarchy myself - depoliticise the monarchy, modernise, etc. What, I suppose most of you are asking, is the deal? Is something rotten in the state of Holland? The government was, apparently, uncertain if it wanted to approve the marriage, which it has the constitutional power to do. So, Johan has followed in the footsteps of Edward VIII by abdicating his claim to the throne for the woman he loves.

What is it with these Dutch royals? Queen Beatrix caused riots back in the 60’s by marrying a German. Number one prince Willem-Alexander was embroiled in controversy when he married Maxima Zorreguieta, an Argentinean ex-model whose father was a minister in the dictatorship during the 70’s. She couldn’t even invite her father to the wedding. Despite all the trouble at the time, now it seems like everyone loves Princess Maxima - who had the good sense to go away for a few months and learn to speak Dutch before doing a media blitz.

Now, is it just me, or does all this fuss strike anyone else as inane? Why, in nations with the common sense to let people marry who they please, do they impose unique and bizarre restrictions on their royal families? The British royals, of course, get a lot more global press than Europe’s other monarchs, but as far as I can tell, the whole lot seem just as silly.

Insurgents assassinated a Spanish diplomat in Baghdad, José Antonio Bernal Gómez, the Information attaché at the Spanish embassy.. They waited until his night guard left at 7 am, and struck before the next guard shift arrived. One of them, who approached, was dressed in the garb of a Shiite cleric. Bernal grew suspicious and tried to flee. The four assailants shot him in the neck and killed him. Bernal was a sergeant in the Air Force and also appears to have served as a field officer for the Spanish National Center for Intelligence (CNI), according to the Diario de Cadiz. That is, his “information attaché” status was a cover for an intelligence posting, which the Spanish government has admitted.. It seems likely that the remnants of Baath intelligence knew of this role and targeted him for this reason. (Surely the CNI shares anything it learns in Iraq with the CIA).

The incident points once again to the survival of the Baath intelligence apparatus, probably now organized in covert cells (a reversion to the Iraqi party’s origins as a secret revolutionary organization in the 1950s. The Baath had attempted to assassinate then president Col. Abd al-Karim al-Qasim in 1961, and this is one of their old-time tools).

This assassination was clearly carefully planned. The Spanish have the third largest foreign contingent of troops in Iraq, 1300, and they lead several hundred other contingents from Central American countries. The guerrillas are betting that the rightwing government of Jose Maria Aznar can be forced to withdraw from Iraq by such attacks, or perhaps even destabilized so that the left gets in and withdraws. Spanish troop presence in Iraq is enormously unpopular in Spain. An unnamed source in the Diario de Cadiz article suggested that the conservative government would tough it out in Iraq, since such adventures are means by which the Spanish bureaucrats hope to recover the sort of power they used to enjoy under Franco.

The detail that one of the attackers was dressed as a Shiite clergyman should not be overlooked. The Baathists are obviously trying to provoke fighting between the Shiites and the Coalition. If Coalition troops go off manhandling lots of Shiite clergymen looking for the suspect in the assassination, they could further alienate them and even perhaps provoke some violence, especially in Sadr City. My advice is to make a good search of the area for the place the Baathist dropped the clerical robes before speeding off.
LINK

France is set to be given an extra year to comply with the EU’s budget rules, after Francis Mer, finance minister, indicated he will make extra efforts to trim his country’s record budget deficit.

A majority of European finance ministers now admit there is nothing they can do to stop President Jacques Chirac’s government from breaking the EU’s stability and growth pact for a third successive year in 2004.

Diplomats yesterday con ceded that France will have to be given until 2005 to comply with the rules, but they still expect Mr Mer to offer something in return. Paris will escape fines potentially worth billions of euros.

French officials expect Mr Mer to make his peace offering next month, agreeing to European Commission requests to cut further France’s underlying deficit and to make additional structural reforms.

The modest concessions will be a belated signal that France is conscious of its responsibilities to other eurozone countries to keep its deficit under control.

But they do nothing to disguise the fact that the stability pact - once a feared instrument of fiscal discipline - has been exposed as largely toothless.

Diplomats said that Mr Mer gave a “conciliatory” presentation of his 2004 budget to his 11 fellow members of the eurogroup - the informal gathering of single currency finance ministers - over dinner in Luxembourg on Monday night.

“A lot of member states had felt the French weren’t taking it [the breach] seriously … but that’s not the case anymore,” said Charlie McCreevy, Irish finance minister.

By yesterday it was clear that almost all the finance ministers were now resigned to a “flexible” interpretation of the pact in relation to France. Only Austria, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Finland maintained a hard line, suggesting the Commission should apply the pact ruthlessly and press for sanctions against France if necessary.

“The outcome of the dinner was that everyone agreed we must try to find a reasonable solution to this problem,” a French government spokesman said.

Diplomats from other EU countries expect the Commission to propose this month that France tightens its structural deficit by about 1 per cent - slightly more than the 0.7 per cent currently proposed - and to make further economic and social reforms.

They expect Mr Mer to comply with the request before the end of the year, although it will not be enough to bring the French deficit below the stability pact ceiling of 3 per cent of GDP. Mr Mer’s tone, in sharp contrast to some bullishly nationalistic performances at past eurogroup meetings, has persuaded countries such as Spain and Belgium to adopt a softer approach towards France.

Hans Eichel, German finance minister, also welcomed the change of tone. “It is very satisfactory that France has clearly committed itself to the [EU budget rules], to the discussions and recommendations within Ecofin … and wants to do everything to stay within the framework,” he said.

Mr Eichel’s own budget deficit is expected to exceed 3 per cent for a third successive year in 2004, but he has stayed out of the line of fire by making it clear that he would do his best to observe the rules.
Source: The Financial Times

Piaf, ça tue. On sera mort qu’elle continuera à «faire quelque chose», au-delà des modes, des évolutions de langage, des révolutions technologiques. Comme Django Reinhardt ou la Callas, dans un crachin d’enregistrement, lorsque la musique se moque d’être remasterisée pour vibrer. Quarante ans après la disparition d’Edith Piaf, le 10 octobre 1963 à 47 ans, pourquoi ses sil lons, appartenant pour moitié au domaine public, terrassent-ils encore tout sur leur passage ? Parce qu’Edith Piaf remplissait le contrat d’un artiste avec son public : lui exprimer avec une sincérité du gouffre le récit de l’homme dans ses lâches vérités. Avec une gouaille toute parisienne, l’enfant de la balle élevait le langage populaire au rang d’universel, avec cette élégance qui se passe du rince-doigts et du baisemain. La star d’origine kabyle est réellement née dans la rue: 72, rue de Belleville, comme l’indique la plaque à son enseigne. C’est là que la môme Piaf se chauffe la voix, auprès d’une grand-mère dresseuse de puces et d’une aïeule qui tient un bordel à Bernay ­ le père est absent, et sa mère partie vivre la bohème.

European Union trade negotiators say low gas prices give Russian industrial
exporters an unfair advantage over foreign markets and distort trade.

Russia has been negotiating WTO entry for more than a decade. Putin has
made joining the trade club one of his government’s priorities.

Economy Minister German Gref, addressing Russian and German businessmen on
the sidelines of the summit, said WTO entry talks had hit deadlock --
partly because of energy prices.

“Negotiations are proceeding with considerable difficulty. They are
deadlocked,” Russian news agencies quoted Gref as saying. He was referring
to his meeting in Brussels this week with European Trade Commissioner
Pascal Lamy.

But a ministry spokesman said Deputy Economy Minister Maxim Medvedkov still
intended to attend a Geneva meeting of a working group on overall
negotiations on WTO entry, set for October 27-30.

“If something slows down in talks with the EU, it does not mean all work
slows down,” he told Reuters in Moscow.

ENERGY PRICES

Gas prices charged to Russian domestic and industrial users are far below
world levels. Under proposed but repeatedly delayed reforms of gas monopoly
Gazprom, the government plans to raise them gradually.

Prices, however, cannot be pushed up to world levels because Gazprom’s
transportation costs, factored into European gas prices, are considerably
lower on the home market. Europe receives a quarter of its gas supplies
from Russia.

Gazprom effectively subsidises the rest of the economy with its low prices.

Russia’s national power utility, UES, Gazprom’s main consumer, plans to
raise electricity prices in line with inflation, but also plans to launch a
free power market.

“Our position here is not obstinate,” Putin said. “We understand that
sooner or later we must introduce world prices inside the country. But we
intend to do it gradually.”

Putin said Russia, which received its first investment grade from Moody’s
Investor Service Wednesday, had become a stable country -- a fact the
European Union should appreciate.

“Russia’s main advantage today is its political and macroeconomic
stability,” Putin said. “If we move to world energy prices macroeconomic
stability will be undermined.”

+++

Putin’s demonstrating an almost Brusseles-esque use of the word “gradually.” As in gradually phasing out subsidies, gradually limiting the market distortions of the CAP, gradually …

This is the implication of a research report, ‘Dreaming with the BRICs’ released by US investment bank Goldman Sachs. The report notes that on what it calls reasonable demographic and economic assumptions, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will have a combined GDP larger than the G6 (US, Japan, Germany, the UK and France) by 2050, when China will be the largest economy in the world (having overtaken the US in 2041). As early as 2009 the report expects the annual increase in dollar GDP of the BRICs to outstrip that of the G6.

The growth in relative economic power comes from three sources. First the report expects productivity growth in the BRICS to outstrip the G6 as they ‘catch-up’ with the leading economies. Second demographics are in their favour (with the partial exception of Russia) as their working-age populations continue to grow quickly. Finally, and importantly, the report expects their exchange rates to appreciate, boosting GDP when measured in US dollars.

The hurt feelings of Americas and West Europeans, used to being in charge, may be soothed by the fact they’ll still be richer than their Chinese or Indian cousins, given in terms of GDP per capita, the G6 economies will maintain a lead, though it will shrink. By 2050 Chinese per capita income is forecast to be 37% of the US level, though it will be over 50% of the UK level and over 60% of French and German. In any case this only suggests that further catch-up (and hence in terms of overall GDP, a larger lead) is possible.

Such startling conclusions are obviously open to debate. Economic forecasts for next quarter are often spectacularly incaccurate, so over decades one would be right to be a little sceptical.

The report acknowledges that its growth assumptions are generally rosy (I’ll leave the debate on the merits of its economic growth model to those more qualified than I), and that for its projections to come true the BRICs must maintain growth friendly policies, which it says are to have sound macroeconomic policies with a stable macroeconomic background, strong and stable political institutions, openness to trade and foreign investment and high levels of education.

With the exception of China (and to a lesser extent India) the BRICs past economic record does not inspire much confidence. Running their models from 1960, to test their forecasting power, GS found that India, Brazil both fell short (as would have Russia) and even in the last few years Brazil in particular has fallen far short of its potential.

Furthermore none of the countries can be said to have had particularly stable and good governance, though at various times some have had stable and some have had good. The risks of major political and social upheaval cannot be discounted in any of them.

So perhaps Goldman Sachs are being a little optimistic, though even on more pessimistic scenarios it is pretty clear that Europe’s relative economic power is on the wane. All the more important therefore to be top dog within Europe, and the report suggests that the UK, due to a combination of better demographics and growth is expected to overtake the German economy in 2036 (not the next ten years, please note), and by 2050 its GDP per capita is forecast to be around 30% higher than France or Germany’s, and 50% higher than in Italy. Is this realistic? Possibly not, as though the demographic case, barring major changes in immigration or birth rates (and soon) is well established, it seems unlikely that such large differences in per capita GDP will occur in such a tightly integrated economic area.

Germany and France have issued a thinly-veiled warning to Spain and Poland that they risk losing billions of euros of European Union aid if they disrupt talks on a new EU constitution. The tough message came as 25 European leaders began negotiations in Rome on the new constitutional treaty, which they hope to agree by December. The biggest obstacle to a deal is the insistence by Spain and Poland that they should wield similar voting power to larger countries, such as Germany.

José María Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, and Leszek Miller, his Polish counterpart, made it clear on Saturday that they would not accept any treaty which reduced their influence. Their position has infuriated Gerhard Schröder of Germany and Jacques Chirac of France, who both support the draft treaty drawn up last June by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s European Convention. Mr Schroder and Mr Chirac used identical words to connect the treaty negotiations and next year’s debate on future EU funding: “Of course there’s a link,” they both told reporters.
Source: Financial Times

The U.S. government has announced the results of the nation’s latest checkup, and there’s both a silver lining and a cloud. First, the good news: Americans are living longer than they ever have before and the disparity between blacks and whites is narrowing. Now, the bad news: We’re living longer with chronic diseases like diabetes. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of Americans diagnosed with this disease shot up 27 percent. These are just some of the statistics from the report Health, United States, 2003, an annual summary of the nation’s health from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services………….

In 2001, average life expectancy hit an all-time high of 77.2 years, adding two years since 1990. Women’s life expectancy increased one year to 79.8 years, while men’s increased two years to 74.4 years………

And the nation is getting fatter. Almost one in three (31 percent) of the population is now obese, double the rate in 1976-1980. Two-thirds of adults aged 20 to 74 were overweight or obese in 1999-2000.

Among children, the prevalence of those overweight more than doubled, from 7 to 15 percent, between 1976-1980 and 1999-2000. Among adolescents, the rate more than tripled, from 5 to 16 percent.

Americans also proved themselves to be sedentary: 38 percent of female high school students and 24 percent of male students did not do the recommended amounts of exercise in 2001. Twelve percent of adult women and 7 percent of men over 18 were inactive during their usual daily activity. The problem got worse as people got older. Nearly one fifth of men 65 and over and more than one-quarter of women 65 and over were inactive.

Not surprisingly, all of this presages the skyrocketing diabetes rate. In 2002, 6.5 percent of American adults were diagnosed with diabetes, versus 5.1 percent in 1997. The health care associated with the disease has also increased.

“One in five hospitalizations now has a diagnosis of diabetes associated with it,” Bernstein says. “It’s notable, given that hospitalization many times indicates that the proper ambulatory care wasn’t provided.”

“People don’t seem to be getting the message about diet and exercise as much as we had hoped they would,” Bernstein adds. “As people get older and have the opportunity to live longer and take advantage of all the great new innovations in medical care, they also have to take into account that they’re responsible for some aspect of their own health care.”
Source: HealthCentral.com

Of all the European absolute monarchies, the French is probably known best. After all, it was Louis XIV who famously claimed not simply to represent the concept of sovereignty but to literally incorporate it - “L’état, c’est moi!”. Believe it or not, it took legal scholars and political philosophers a good deal of time to come to the conclusion that he was probably exaggerating. And the same is true with respect to absolute power - it’s basically an oxymoron. The ability to govern depends on what the British legal philosopher HLA (Herbert) Hart once called the “rules of recognition”. No one can exercise power without the recognition of at least those within his gang - even a totalitarian system needs to be recognised by those who have invested in the common venture by enforcing it (whatever their reasons may have been).

To misconstrue these origins of power can have dire consequences, as Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde found out for the case of the Bourbons whose family enterprise ran into a vicious circle of eventually fatal financial troubles [ Sargent, Thomas J., Velde Francois R. (1995) Macroeconomic Features of The French Revolution, in Journal of Political Economy, Vol 103, No. 3, 1995. S.474-518 ]. Their problem was that their seeming absolute power could not control the interest rates which people would charge for lending to the French King. As there was nothing in the French legal system keeping an absolute King from fighting wars and later defaulting on his debt, his access to the financial market was significantly limited and credit was more expensive than that of Britain, whose “cost of capital” was lower because the British Kings had to deal with a powerful Parliament after the glorious revolution of 1688 and therefore had established a credible commitment mechanism, the Bank of England, to enhance their credit rating and handle Crown lending.

When something becomes unsustainable, it usually stops. So in 1788 Louis XIV needed fresh taxes to avoid another state bankruptcy and called the Estates General - but when he tried to extract even more from the third estate, “the people” could not agree to this without significant changes to the ancien régime. Changes that would give at least their social and economic elites some say in how the state was run. Changes that would legally limit absolutism in a credible way. These changes weren’t planned in the way things eventually developed. In 1789 very few will have imagined the bloodshed that lay before Paris.

We might not remember this particularly well given our media adjusted shortened attention spans. But earlier this year, there was a smug superpower that believed it could convene “allies” at will because they weren’t really necessary, just good PR. There was a superpower whose government believed that mere determination were a sufficient substitute for long term strategy, and that winning a battle equalled winning a war.

Obviously, America has established facts in Iraq. That’s a superpower’s prerogative. As it was the Louis’ prerogative to send their soldiers fight against the British. While establishing facts is certainly an important power, it is by no means absolute - and as we have seen, it is usually temporary, if the intention is to pay with the money of people not asked beforehand

As weird as it may seem to children on a playground, their behaviour is probably a good proxy for that of state actors. Thus, while it is certainly impossible to ignore the facts that have been established, it is also impossible to ignore the way in which this has been done (and while I agree that there is some responsibility on the part of European leaders, it was predominantly the American administration’s condescending attitude and unwillingness to listen that caused the trouble). If the rest of the world, and Old Europe in particular, would just say “fine, just don’t do it again without even listening to anyone” that would actually amount to saying “fine, do whatever you want, despise us on the way, and be sure to count on us when things don’t quite work out.” This is obviously impossible. So Old Europe in particular is finding itself in the position of the Third Estate: Somehow still believing in absolute monarchy, weak, but forced to legally bind the monarch for the common good.

Thus, in my opinion, the future of transatlantic relations will be about credible commitments. More than anything, the United States need to convince their refound allies that they are willing not establish facts without consulting first; that they have understood they overstepped the rules of recognition for their power. It is difficult to say which institutional form this commitment will take. Maybe this could be the new job for NATO. But whichever form it will take, I hope they will be doing a better job at it than Louis XVI did. I might like talking about the French Revolution. I would not like living through one.