The Tories (and however many Britons don't want to be in the "centre of Europeand decision-making", as Tony Blair put it) can turn to Switzerland and Norway for reasons why it's not necessary to join the EU.
The Swiss are prosperous and content with its relationship with the EU, its major trade partner. NOrway, as this Telegraph article points out, has grown twice as much as the UK in the last 30 years.
They don't have to deal with their business being over-regulated, they don't have to deal with the burden of rebuilding Eastern European countries like Poland and the Czech Republic and they don't have to balance what some consider the teetering weight of 25 member-nations.
Telegraph - 'The EU? It's political suicide to mention it in Switzerland'
'The EU? It's political suicide to mention it in Switzerland'
(Filed: 08/05/2004)
Last week, the European Trade Commissioner had a grim warning for Britain: if we vote against the EU constitution in the forthcoming referendum, we could end up like... Switzerland. Graham Turner asked the Swiss exactly what this would mean
Lack a day! Lack a day! News that the British might actually be allowed a say on the EU constitution has brought predictable auguries of doom and woe from the Euro-federalist brigade. Should Britain vote No, it would become no more than an impotent shadow on the margins of Europe - relegated to the "rearguard" of its nations, according to Pascal Lamy, the Brussels Small Trade Commissioner.
Others of the same ilk hinted darkly that Britain might even be forced to leave the EU. At the very least, declared Mr Lamy last week, we would end up like Switzerland.
All of this, not surprisingly, provoked a certain amount of discreet mirth in both Switzerland and Norway, which happen to be the richest countries in Europe. Both have only an arm's-length relationship with the EU. Both have prospered exceedingly; Norway, for instance, has grown twice as fast as Britain over the past 30 years. Neither looks likely to join the EU for some considerable time.
In Switzerland, the EU is definitely on the backburner. "You should know," said Professor Franz Jaeger, who was a member of the Swiss National Council (their equivalent of our House of Commons) for 24 years, "that for the next 15 years at least, you will not be able to convince the Swiss to enter the EU. We just don't need it."
Nor is the professor's timescale by any means the longest on offer. "I was asked to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Treaty of Westphalia, which created Swiss neutrality," recalled Dr Hugo Butler, chief editor of the prestigious Neue Zuricher Zeitung, a paper that is broadly in favour of membership, "and I said that, if the EU develops well and is able to guarantee the sort of freedoms we have, then in 50 years' time, maybe the Swiss will join."
Others are thinking in the same sort of timeframe, though they wonder whether the EU will still be there to join. Michel Dérobert, general secretary of the Swiss Private Bankers Federation, felt that the Swiss probably would become members in 50 years' time - "just before the EU finally disappears."
Klaus Wellershoff, chief economist of the Union Bank of Switzerland - the largest wealth managers in the world, with £800 billion of client assets under their wings - also thinks Swiss membership extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. "It's way out there," he declared, "if at all."
The issue is so dead that the prudent prefer not to speak its name. "It is now political suicide to mention the EU," said Jean-Jacques Roth, chief editor of Le Temps in Geneva. "No one would dare to take the issue out of the box."
Even the so-called Euroturbos, who two years ago launched a campaign for negotiations with Brussels to begin immediately, confess to having been struck dumb since 75 per cent of the Swiss turned them down in a referendum. "We were completely wiped out," admitted Professor Peter Tschopp, professor of economics at Geneva University and himself a leading Euroturbo. "We don't dare to say anything any more."
Many Swiss are convinced that the EU is more likely to change than they are. "Within 15 years," declared Beat Kappeler, a distinguished columnist, "the EU will have become a free trade area, and then there will be no problem for us to enter."
"I know the people in Brussels," said Robert Nef, president of the Liberal Institute in Zurich, "and they are already afraid of the high degree of complexity they have. They admit privately that even more complexity - now that the 10 East European countries have joined - could result in a disaster."
Even Europhiles believe that if the extension into Eastern Europe is not handled well, the EU could collapse altogether. "If I am honest with myself," said Peter Tschopp, "I think there is a 50-50 chance of the whole thing imploding. I may be considered a Euroturbo, but I was not in favour of this extension. The Marshall Plan will be nothing compared with the job of rebuilding these countries. The Czech Republic, for example, may look nice but, inside, it is just painted ruins. Somebody will have to pay for all that."
"The whole thing is getting too big," agreed Theo Phyl, a mountain farmer in central Switzerland. "It was like that in Russia. They became too big and then collapsed. I think it'll be the same with the EU."
So, the Swiss have settled for the kind of semi-detached relationship that many people in Britain would prefer: a series of bilateral deals with the EU - easily their largest trading partner - which ensures the free movement of goods, capital and labour as well as common security arrangements. So far, they have made no financial contribution whatsoever to the EU. They have retained their own political system, currency, tax regime and labour market laws.
The only downside, so far as the majority are concerned, is having to accept many EU regulations which they have had no part in shaping. It is, they think, a small price to pay. "When you are organising a free market," said Franz Steinegger, a leading Christian Democrat MP, "you have to accept the regulations of the bigger one."
The fact that Cristoph Blocher's Swiss People's Party made the greatest gains in last year's elections on a platform of total opposition to EU membership has only confirmed the prevailing mood.
So how, and why, have the Swiss arrived at such definite conclusions? They are, after all, notoriously slow in coming to judgment - and joined the United Nations, for example, only after decades of hesitation. (The Swiss themselves tell the story of the man from Zurich who took a walk with a friend from Berne. The man from Berne trod on a snail. "Why on earth did you do that?," asked the Zuricher. "I couldn't help it," his friend replied; "he was overtaking me on the inside").
To begin with, the Swiss want to keep the EU at arm's length because, in many ways, their political system is the exact opposite of the Union's. While the EU has a massive democratic deficit, Switzerland has an equally massive democratic surplus. Whereas we in Britain have what Lord Hailsham called "elective dictatorship," the Swiss have direct democracy. They vote about anything and everything, at national and local level. And their ardour for the polling booth leaves foreigners utterly bewildered. "They are voting all the time," murmured a German pastor who works in Winterthur. "I just can't keep up with it all."
There have been no fewer than 46 national referendums in the past four years. The Swiss voted on whether to cut working hours, and turned the idea down. They voted on whether to have minimum national holidays of four weeks - and turned that down, too, because they could not see why such things needed to be set in stone. In a fortnight's time, they will even vote on their finance minister's tax proposals. It is as if Gordon Brown's Budget had to be ratified by the people.
All it takes to call a national referendum is 50,000 signatures gathered within 100 days of a new law being proposed.
Much the same applies in each of Switzerland's 26 cantons. "When a new law is proposed here," explained Josias Clavadetscher, editor of the biggest local paper in the canton of Schwyz, "people are given two months in which to collect 2,000 signatures - we only have a population of 130,000. And if people vote in the referendum against the law, it is thrown into the rubbish bin. The number of signatures required depends on the population of the canton.
"In 2002, for example, the cantonal administration said they wanted to build a new, very modern prison at a cost of 35 million Swiss francs (£15.5 million). The previous estimate had been 25 million francs. So people launched a referendum and decided that they didn't want such a luxurious prison for criminals in our canton. Now, the government has to come up with new proposals."
At communal level, similar rules apply. "In my community," said David Syz, Switzerland's secretary of state for economic affairs, "we have 4,000 people, and they decide what the local tax rate for the next year will be. There is usually a meeting of about 200 citizens in the town hall. They look at the budget which the administration has put up and then they say: 'We don't want either the new school or the 10 new roundabouts you're proposing, so forget them."
What would happen in Switzerland, I wondered, if they had been members of the EU and had been told - as Tony Blair told Britain until his recent U-turn - that they would not be allowed to vote on the new EU constitution? "It could not possibly happen in this country," said Theo Phyl, the mountain farmer. "If it did, the Swiss would demonstrate en masse and the prime minister would be fired. Poodle [Tony Blair's nickname in much of Switzerland] would simply have had to go."
For most Swiss, the idea of giving up this profoundly democratic system in exchange for a stream of mandatory directives from Brussels is simply unthinkable. "I see no chance that Swiss people will accept less power," said Michel Dérobert, "because they do not want to lose the right to have the final say. There is not going to be less democracy in this country; in fact, we are going to have more because the Swiss like it."
"We want to preserve our very democratic system," agreed Jean Bouregois, director of the Swiss Farmers Union. "Much more decisive than anything which might happen to farming if we joined the EU is a general belief that we have a political system which is sacred to us - and that it would not be possible to keep that system in the EU as it stands today."
"Just take VAT," said Lutzi Stamm, a Swiss People's Party MP. "The second we joined the EU, we would have to increase it from our present 7.6 per cent to at least 15 per cent. You could collect a million votes, never mind 50,000, and you still would not be able to bring it down even to 14.9. That is the opposite of direct democracy."
Indeed, the Swiss have no intention of sacrificing any part of their unique political system, whose aim is to disperse power rather than concentrating it in any one individual or party. They have no prime minister. Their president holds office only for a year. Very few can even tell you who he is. As for their "cabinet", the Federal Council is made up of seven representatives from the four main parties. And their job is to come up with an all-party compromise on every issue.
The Swiss have what Robert Nef calls "a strong anti-leadership instinct". They do not like big figures. Big figures, they feel, can make big mistakes - so a Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair would be inconceivable in Switzerland. I asked Hansrudolf Kamer, the deputy chief editor of the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, whether the Swiss wanted leadership. "No," he replied flatly.
"Even the president is not the leader of the government," said David Syz. "The members of the Federal Council are widely respected, but they ought not to appear on the media too often because people would not like it. We have a culture that does not want prima donnas.''
"The seven have to argue as a collective" agreed Robert Nef. "If an individual politician, such as Tony Blair, were to say, 'Trust me!', people here would feel there was something very wrong. That would be altogether too personal."
In Switzerland, the citizen really is king. "We elect our parliamentarians," Nef went on, "not to have a policy, not to have a programme, but to frame laws which we, the people, can then challenge and, if necessary, repeal through a referendum. The citizen rules the state and not vice-versa." In Switzerland, remarked Hugo Butler, it was the people who were Her Majesty's Opposition.
This belief in the primacy of the people is one reason why the EU's sometimes high-handed behaviour has gone down so badly. "The first thing we didn't like," said Edouard Brunner, a former secretary of state for foreign affairs and ambassador in both Washington and Paris, "was the way Chirac treated the Haider question in Austria, trying to put him in quarantine and making a pariah of the whole country. We are not particularly fond of Haider, but he had been elected by the people.
"The second was Chirac's remark to the Poles after they had signed a letter, along with others, supporting the US and Britain in the Iraq war. Chirac told them that if they wanted to join the EU, that was not a particularly clever thing to do. Well, we don't want to be dictated to in that way."
The Swiss put an almost equally high value on their economic freedoms. Their taxes are lower than the EU's, and money is much cheaper. "Our interest rates," said Beat Kappeler, "are about half theirs and our mortgage rate is only three per cent compared with six per cent or more in the EU. In many cantons, there are no inheritance taxes."
When the Swiss held a referendum on bank secrecy, no less than 80 per cent of the public voted in favour. It is not only foreign investors who like their privacy.
The country is also blessedly free of Brussels's red tape. There is little support for a 35-hour week here. "The Swiss," Kappeler went on, "work an average of 41.5 hours a week, and there are more of them still working at the age of 64 than in any other country. They actually like work.
"If you're an entrepreneur, what's more, you don't ask if you want to make a change - you just do it. You pay the wages you want, according to people's performance. You can hire and fire at very short notice for economic reasons, without judges intervening as they would in France or Germany. There's also very little in the way of worker participation. So we have all the advantages of being in a common market, without any of the disadvantages."
Taxes, both local and corporate, are held down by fierce competition between cantons. "If you take the average tax level as 100," said Hugo Butler, "it is around 50 in the canton of Zug and 144 in Graubunden. So businesses and individuals can always threaten to move. Without that competition, taxes would undoubtedly rise - and there's no doubt that, if we were in the EU, Brussels would be pressing for them to be the same everywhere." The result is that, while France and Germany wallow in recession, Switzerland has survived remarkably well.
For the past 15 years," said Klaus Wellershoff, "our growth rate has been rather dismal; and unemployment is rising somewhat, though, at four per cent, it is still fabulously low compared with places like Germany. We've also kept a remarkable stability in prices - they've only gone up between zero and one per cent a year for the last decade.
"As for income per head, it is still among the highest in the world. Just look at the cars in this city: BMWs, Mercs, Jaguars. Their average age is very low and a lot of them are brand new. We are still doing excellently and the bank is rather optimistic about the future."
"Everywhere in Switzerland is flourishing," agreed Hugo Butler. "You will find wealthy people wherever you go. There are no suburbs with only the poor living in them. We have difficulties - prices are far higher than in France or Germany - but they are the problems of a country with a very high standard of living." This is what Jean-Jacques Roth of Le Matin, describes as "une crise de luxe." Had Switzerland been in the EU, said Butler's deputy, Hansrudolf Kamer, who is in favour of membership, "we would definitely be worse off - far more regulations, higher taxes, higher interest rates."
For the moment, then, the Swiss are very happy to keep the EU at a distance. If the Union asks them to stump up to help meet its expenses in Eastern Europe, they will say that they are willing to contribute - but only directly to the country concerned. They will not put a single franc into the EU's common pot. "We never know what happens to that common pot," said Edouard Brunner.
"We do not," declared Ueli Maurer, "want to be a colony of a government somewhere in Brussels which decides what happens here in Switzerland." Perhaps the Swiss, slow though they are, are the ones who have got it right.
Very brief and clear introduction by the BBC to the ideas in the draft of EU Constitution. I found it useful, as I didn't really know all these issues before. Take a look...
It's an interactive page on the BBC
An American columnist goes back to Europe after many years, and is surprised by Europeans feelings about the US, and Bush in particular. Sensitive to a traditional understanding of power (he cites Kagan) he writes that: "Europe is too weak to lead and too proud to follow." Nevertheless, he understands that Europeans attitude towards netotiations comes from their capacity to "control historical hatreds through the EU."
There a re a lot of interesting considerations in this column, starting with the basic one which is that "we are drifiting."
The Washington Post - Drifting Apart
Drifting Apart
By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page A29
BRUSSELS -- This ought to be a moment of great triumph for Europe and America together. Instead there is mutual disenchantment. On May 1 the European Union accepted 10 countries -- most of them remnants of the Soviet empire -- into membership. The EU is now a massive free-trade area and loose political union with 25 countries, 455 million people and an $11.6 trillion economy. After World War II, farsighted Europeans and Americans promoted European unification to end a history of ruinous continental wars. The vision has succeeded spectacularly, and yet there's no common celebration.
You can see this in coverage of the "enlargement" (the new members are Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta). The U.S. media paid scant attention; it was no big deal. In Europe it was a gargantuan deal. But the self-congratulation virtually ignored the huge American role in European unification: in encouraging it after World War II; in providing a defense shield against Soviet invasion and intimidation, permitting the EU to grow; and in maintaining the military and economic pressure that led to the Soviet Union's ultimate collapse.
This was my first European visit in several years. I knew, of course, that widespread opposition to the war in Iraq had darkened opinion toward America. In a March poll, the Pew Research Center found that only 38 percent of Germans and 37 percent of the French had "favorable" views of the United States. In mid-2002, the comparable figures were 61 percent and 63 percent. Still, I was not prepared for the depth of feeling. "Even my parents, who are part of the World War II generation and always supported the United States, think Bush is a war criminal," a 48-year-old German, a mid-level EU official, told me. War criminal?
It's not just that many Europeans oppose Bush's Iraq policies. They mistake the motives -- and that's scarier. The implication is not simply that the United States made an error. It's that something about Bush or America (it's not clear which) represents a permanent menace. One view is that Bush went into Iraq for oil. About 60 percent of the French and Germans believe that, says Pew. Another view is that U.S. foreign policy has fallen hostage to Bush's religious fervor. Militarism becomes a heavenly mission.
"We've been much more used to a distinction between the state and God," says John Palmer of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think tank. It's "deeply worrying . . . for the major superpower to be deriving its strategy from fundamentalism." By labeling these views distorted, I don't mean that Bush is bound to prove his critics -- at home and abroad -- wrong. The outcome in Iraq is unknown; the administration may fail. What I do mean is that prevailing European readings of Bush represent dangerous misunderstandings.
His motives were upfront: finding weapons of mass destruction, fighting terrorism, ending tyranny -- and not oil. Although Bush advertises his religious faith, his good-guys-and-bad-guys rhetoric remains firmly in the moralistic tradition of U.S. foreign policy. Enemies (the Nazis, the Japanese, the commies, al Qaeda) represent evil. Wars become moral crusades -- to save the world for democracy, to establish universal peace. Missionary zeal is routine. Indeed, it buttressed the post-World War II U.S. enthusiasm for European unity.
Bush, it's said, created this rift -- and can end it by embracing cooperation or (involuntarily) retiring. There's something to this. Love him or hate him, Bush has a knack for offending critics. But the roots of disagreement, I suspect, go much deeper.
In his book "Of Paradise and Power," Robert Kagan argued that Americans and Europeans have divergent views of military power. Americans believe that only raw power can defeat evil, he wrote. Having controlled historical hatreds through the EU, Europeans prefer negotiation and compromise.
Not surprisingly, Europeans and Americans see Sept. 11, 2001, differently. "Americans felt this was the beginning of a war," says Roland Koch, a leading German politician. "This is not the feeling of Europeans." The terrorist threat is seen as "more or less far away." In the Pew poll, 57 percent of the French and 49 percent of Germans said Americans overreacted to terrorism. Even the Madrid bombing didn't much change opinion, Koch says.
Opposition to the United States also distracts from Europe's own problems. There's a growing collision between generous welfare benefits and poor economic growth. From 1996 to 2003, economic growth averaged 1.3 percent annually in Germany, 1.5 percent in Italy and 2.2 percent in France (the U.S. rate: 3.3 percent). Many EU countries have taxes between 40 percent and 50 percent of national income. Aging populations intensify upward pressures on benefits. From 2000 to 2020, the over-65 population in the 15 countries of the "old" EU is projected to rise 38 percent, while the number of people between 25 and 49 falls 14 percent. These economic tensions even affected the "enlargement" process. The 10 countries received membership on grudging terms: Economic aid and farm subsidies were limited; immigration rights were curtailed.
The truth is that Europe is too weak to lead and too proud to follow. It doesn't want to undertake costly new commitments. It's already got more than it can handle. In some ways, George Bush is a political godsend. His style and language offend so many Europeans -- he seems simplistic, trigger-happy, uneducated -- that opposition to him camouflages more basic conflicts. I've been repeatedly reminded here that Europe and America share too much (common cultures, political systems and economic interests) to drift apart. Maybe. But we're still drifting.
This article by Roger Cohen, on The New York Times' Week in Review of Sunday, May 2nd, explains the changing attitudes of the US towards "Europe at 25".
'WHOLE AND FREE' AT LAST
By ROGER COHEN
WASHINGTON — The expansion of the European Union this weekend from 15 members to 25, marking the formal end of Europe's postwar division, presents America with a choice. Should it embrace this new union that stretches to the Russian border or try to foster Europe's many fissures in order to divide and rule?
For the moment, there is scant official comment, but perhaps Europe should not take this personally. The United States has shifted paradigms: Europe is old news. Still, the less-than-benign neglect surrounding the European Union's addition of 10 members, 8 of them once part of the Soviet bloc, reflects a moment of great difficulty.
"The situation has never been so bad in 50 years," Gunter Burghardt, the union's ambassador in Washington, said in an interview. "It is a fact of life that America is a hegemonic power, but the question is how that power is used. We need to know that America is open to a confident relationship, not just with certain member states but with the E.U. as such."
This assessment reflects the enduring wounds of the Iraq war and the feeling among many European officials that an American administration has determined that its interests may lie more in division within Europe than in unity, more in forging improvised coalitions of the willing than in honoring a partnership of the wedded.
"This is an administration that simply does not care about Europe," said Philip H. Gordon, an expert on European affairs at the Brookings Institution. "I don't think they do anything solely to divide Europe, but if that's a consequence of an action, fine, because they don't want a counterweight to American power emerging."
In many respects, the new European Union is a potential major power. Its highly educated population of 455 million people is far larger than America's and it accounts for 28 percent of world trade.
But it is also divided between formerly Communist states in Central Europe that are enthusiastic about Atlanticism, and other countries, led by France, where dislike of President Bush's America is intense. This is the basic ideological split that America could choose to quicken or quiet.
America might, for example, try to use the sympathies of Poland, Slovakia or Hungary to undermine European unity and pursue its own goals, which may include the establishment of military bases in at least one of these countries, quiet attempts to assure that Europe's military identity remains muted or the obstruction of moves toward a more federal United States of Europe.
But Iraq has been a sobering experience, and American officials seem, for now, to have dropped talk of "old" and "new" Europe in favor of a rediscovered pragmatism.
"Whatever the differences over the past year, we know that a Europe that is open, at peace, broadly united and reaching out toward Turkey is in the American interest," one State Department official said.
The mention of Turkey is significant. Faced by the union's expansion, many Americans respond by asking why Turkey is not included.
The question, of course, reflects America's shift from a focus on uniting Europe to the overriding quest to change the Middle East. Admitting Turkey, a Muslim country, to a core institution of the West like the European Union would, in the American view, provide an important example of bridge building to the Islamic world. It is therefore vital, American officials argue, that the union decide at the end of this year to begin negotiations on membership.
But the impatience over bringing Turkey into Europe also betrays enduring American misunderstanding over the nature of the European Union. The immense complexity and cost of offering membership to a country as big and poor as Turkey are not widely appreciated here.
The extent of integration within the union, and the surrender of sovereignty involved, are blurry ideas in America, perhaps because the notion of such transnational merging is anathema to a country at or close to the apogee of its power. If America, Mexico and Canada were as integrated as Europe's states, it would be possible to have a Mexican in Ottawa setting United States interest rates. But that, of course, is unthinkable.
This European indivisibility, despite all the continent's difficulties, makes it inevitable that new members like Poland will tend to seek shared European positions, whatever their strong American sympathies.
At the same time, these institutional differences complicate trans-Atlantic understanding because a sovereign America run by an administration for which power is the coin of the realm faces European states that have put their faith in international institutions like the European Union or the United Nations or an international criminal court.
But a lot is at stake in trying to overcome the current crisis of confidence. Between them, the European Union and the United States account for 40 percent of world trade. They are each other's largest trading partners. Business transactions between them run at close to $3 billion a day.
This web of economic interests is so rich that it tends to compel a quest to resolve differences and harmonize regulations. The problem is that, in the strategic area, the common purpose that long drove America's broad support of European unity - delivering stability to a continent with a debilitating penchant for war - has been lost.
It is not delight but some dismay that is accompanying the arrival of the Europe "whole and free" sought by the elder George Bush and reiterated as an objective by President Bush, who said in Warsaw in June 2001 that "our goal is to erase the false lines that have divided Europe for too long."
Europe has worked hard on eliminating those divisions. But Mr. Burghardt believes recognition of this is scant in an America whose attention has moved elsewhere."The E.U. delivered on Nov. 9, that is the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said. "But we got hit by the geopolitical earthquake of Sept. 11." In other words, 9/11 trumped 11/9.
In his Warsaw speech three months before Sept. 11, President Bush also said something else: "When Europe and America are divided, history tends to tragedy."
The fate of a little grocery in Budapest is a symbol of anxious times as the EU grows.
By András Szántó on the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, May 2nd.
NEW YORK — The little grocery shop in the building where I grew up in Budapest closed Friday. A trivial event, perhaps, but one connected to momentous transformations in Hungary.
On Saturday, Hungary became one of the 10 new members of the European Union. The shop's owners couldn't afford the upgrades needed for "Euro-conformity," including separate freezers for meat and dairy and a new bathroom with a shower for the staff, whose size would have to double. So, they decided to shut it down.
Such are the trade-offs of EU membership, and they point to why so many Hungarians are uneasy about joining "Europe."
As every tourist knows, you can tell a lot about a country by visiting its food shops. The little grocery at No. 27 Veres Pálné utca has been a barometer of Hungary's evolution through the decade and a half since the fall of communism.
It opened before the big changes, during an early wave of private enterprise creation. The undercapitalized business pioneers of the late 1980s were shopkeepers and taxi drivers — people long on ambition and short on cash — who could get by on little more than sweat equity.
As trade opened up with the world after 1989, the shop saw many changes. Exotic fruits, unfamiliar cheeses and fine wines filled its shelves. One by one, familiar Hungarian brands were replaced by Western ones, or they reappeared in prettier packaging — and at higher prices.
In recent years, as its surrounding buildings were renovated from bullet-pocked half-ruins into elegant, pale-yellow apartment houses, the grocery shop became an anachronism. The storekeeper still knew you by name, and she would even make change for the new, high-tech parking meters lining the street. But the place seemed shabby and a little dirty, a remnant of a bygone world that Hungary, or at least the downtown street where the grocery was located, had nearly left behind.
Now it's over — or rather, it's finally beginning. The pale blue flag of the European Union has been ceremonially planted in the Budapest parliament adjacent to a Hungarian flag that has seldom stood alone in the last century — its serial cohabitation with the Austrian, German and Soviet flags marking the usually tragic compromises Hungary has made to prosper, or to survive.
Which is why you don't hear the sounds of rejoicing in the streets, even though the country is finally getting what it has yearned for: "a place at the table," "club membership in the civilized world," the chance "to take our place where we rightly belong" — to quote the clichés that for decades have echoed in the coffeehouses and the newspaper pages of Budapest.
There is something ironic about a nation that has struggled with mighty powers for so long, only to willingly throw itself into a multinational mega-state whose affairs are organized in capitals of other countries. When I asked a friend, who is a member of the Hungarian parliament, whether his colleagues were prepared for what it meant to follow directives from Brussels, he simply answered, "We have no idea."
The long-term consequences of the big bet on Europe will take years to play out. All signs indicate that although Eastern Europeans came late to the party, they are likely to profit from it. Meantime in Hungary, where you can still find street signs from the communist years crossed out with red paint, the changeover is the latest in a series of Tarzan-like leaps toward what, one can only hope, is a more promising future.
Until then, the transition to EU membership will boil down to little daily adjustments. They say the price of milk will plummet as Slovak dairy farmers flood the market, but the price of sugar may skyrocket as Hungarian producers go bust. You may look in vain for the chocolate bar that you've loved since you were a kid, but you'll be able to fly to London on a discount airline for the cost of a restaurant meal. And for those lamenting the loss of the little grocery in Veres Pálné utca, a shiny, clean, Euro-conforming supermarket is opening down the street.
(András Szántó is deputy director of the national arts journalism program at Columbia University)
This New York Times story is about a small group of young Pakistani-British who have turned openly simpathetic to Al Qaeda. It evokes exactly what many Europeans fear most: that Muslim immigrants may become (or already are) "the Inside Enemy". This fear seems more acute in Europe than in the US.
By PATRICK E. TYLER
and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
LUTON, England, April 24 — The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say.
In this former industrial town north of London, a small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street.
They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19" and regard the Madrid train bombings as a clever way to drive a wedge into Europe.
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce — provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months — Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death — that is what they are looking for."
On working-class streets of old industrial towns like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open.
In Hamburg, Dr. Mustafa Yoldas, the director of the Council of Islamic Communities, saw a correlation to the discord in Iraq. "This is a very dangerous situation at the moment," Dr. Yoldas said. "My impression is that Muslims have become more and more angry against the United States."
Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of militant groups affiliated or aligned with Al Qaeda, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.
Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" — communications among people suspected of terrorism and their supporters — has markedly increased since Mr. bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning for another strike in Europe is advanced.
"Iraq dramatically strengthened their recruitment efforts," one counterterrorism official said. He added that some mosques now display photos of American soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside bloody scenes of bombed out Iraqi neighborhoods. Detecting actual recruitments is almost impossible, he said, because it is typically done face to face.
And recruitment is paired with a compelling new strategy to bring the fight to Europe.
Members of Al Qaeda have "proven themselves to be extremely opportunistic, and they have decided to try to split the Western alliance," the official continued. "They are focusing their energies on attacking the big countries" — the United States, Britain and Spain — so as to "scare" the smaller states.
Some Muslim recruits are going to Iraq, counterterrorism officials in Europe say, but more are remaining home, possibly joining cells that could help with terror logistics or begin operations like the one that came to notice when the British police seized 1,200 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in late March, and arrested nine Pakistani-Britons, five of whom have been charged with trying to build a terrorist bomb.
Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks.
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.
Also this week, over Mr. Blunkett's vigorous objection, a 35-year-old Algerian held under emergency laws passed after Sept. 11 was released from Belmarsh Prison. The man, identified only as "G," suffered from severe mental illness, his lawyers told a special immigration appeals panel, which let him out of prison and put him under house arrest.
Mr. Blunkett insisted that that should not be the final judgment on a man already found by one court "to be a threat to life and liberty."
In an interview on the BBC over the weekend, Mr. Blunkett advocated a stronger deportation policy, initially focused on 12 foreign terror suspects held without charge since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990's.
One chapter in Sheik Omar's lectures these days is "The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing."
The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. "In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not easy," an official said.
At a mosque in Geneva, an imam recently exhorted his followers to "impose the will of Islam on the godless society of the West."
"It was quite virulent," said a senior official with knowledge of the sermon. "The imam was encouraging his followers to take over the godless society."
While such a sermon may be incitement, recruitment takes a more shadowy course, and is hard to detect, a senior antiterrorism official said. "Believers are appealed to in the mosques, but the real conversations take place in restaurants or cafes or private apartments," the official said.
While some clerics, like Abu Qatada — said to be the spiritual counselor of Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 hijacking team — remain in prison in Britain without charge, others like Sheik Omar, leader of a movement called Al Muhajiroun, carry on a robust ideological campaign.
"There is no case against me," Sheik Omar said in an interview. Referring to calls by members of Parliament that he be deported, he added, "but they are Jewish" and "they have been calling for that for years."
Among his ardent followers is Ishtiaq Alamgir, 24, who heads Al Muhajiroun in Luton and calls himself Sayful Islam, the sword of Islam. He says there are about 50 members here but exact numbers are secret.
Most days, he and a handful of his followers run a recruitment stand on Dunstable Road much to the chagrin of the Muslim elders of Luton.
Mainstream Muslims are outraged by the situation, saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to be singled out for surveillance and making the larger population distrustful of them.
Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque here, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque here and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.
"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I don't want these kids in my mosque."
Other community leaders look to the government to do something, if only to help prevent the demonization of British Muslims, or "Islamophobia," as some here call it.
"I think these kids are being brainwashed by a few radical clerics," said Akhbar Dad Khan, another elder of the Central Mosque. He wants them prosecuted or deported. "We should be able to control this negativity," he said.
In Slough, Sheik Omar spent much of his time Thursday night regaling his young followers with the erotic delights of paradise — sweet kisses and the pleasures of bathing with scores of women — while he also preached the virtues of death in Islamic struggle as a ticket to paradise.
He spoke of terrorism as the new norm of cultural conflict, "the fashion of the 21st century," practiced as much by Tony Blair as by Al Qaeda.
"We may be caught up in the target as the people of Manhattan were," he told them.
And he warned Western leaders, "You may kill bin Laden, but the phenomenon, you cannot kill it — you cannot destroy it."
"Our Muslim brothers from abroad will come one day and conquer here and then we will live under Islam in dignity," he said.
Patrick E. Tyler reported from Luton, Slough and London and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Germany.
European's know their common cultural past, but they ignore each other's contemporary artists and intellectuals, writes Alan Riding who adds: "As Europe moves toward "ever closer union," unless it also communicates culturally, popular taste will become ever more American."
The article mentions a number of limited efforts, explaining that they are unsuccessful, while failing to underline that they are numerous. This could be an excellent image of what we are seeing in other fields: myriads of small things contributing unsatisfactorily to a greater integration because they pale in comparison to the idea of Europe. These perceptions are not incompatible, and we should learn to deal with them if we want to better understand what's really happening.
The New York Times - A Common Culture (From the U.S.A.) Binds Europeans Ever Closer
A Common Culture (From the U.S.A.) Binds Europeans Ever Closer
By ALAN RIDING
PARIS, April 22 — As 10 new countries prepare to enter the European Union on May 1, it is not so much economic weight or political tradition that has earned them the right to join the regional bloc. Rather, it is a certain cultural identity forged by Christianity and a common artistic heritage. In one crucial sense, then, the lingua franca of this expanded Europe remains that of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Mozart and other giants of the past.
Turn to the contemporary arts, however, and a different picture emerges. Here the union's old and new members alike know surprisingly little about one another's artistic inventiveness today. Creative life may be flourishing in widely different ways across Europe, but the most common cultural link across the region now is a devotion to American popular culture in the form of movies, television and music. In a Europe committed to seeking "ever closer union," where a dozen countries already share a currency, culture seems to have fallen out of step. Even as Europeans visit one another's cities and beaches more than ever, national self-obsessions prevail in the visual arts, new plays, literature, contemporary classical music, pop music and movies.
Does this lack of cohesion matter? Is it not enough for European culture to be sustained by the masters of the Italian Renaissance, the Spanish Golden Age and French Impressionism, by composers from Bach to Janacek, by writers of the stature of Cervantes, Goethe and Voltaire, by thinkers like Erasmus, Locke and Hegel? In their day these heavyweights also had only elitist audiences.
Since World War II, however, has come the massification of culture. In response Europeans have tried to reinforce national and regional identities, to hold onto their languages, foods and folkloric traditions. But given the option of American-style entertainment, they show little interest in one another's arts. It may simply be lack of information: European newspapers offer poor coverage of their neighbors' art scenes, and television is not much better, with the exception of the French-German network Arte. Whatever the reason, artistic endeavors that do cross borders today reach few people.
In movies European artists know whom to blame. The region's movie industries constantly bemoan the power of Hollywood, which for the most part leaves local films less than 15 percent of the box office even in cinephile countries like Italy and Germany. France in turn uses Hollywood to justify generous government subsidies and other privileges that enable its movie industry to control about one-third of the local market.
Yet three decades after the wellsprings of Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut, Europeans now rarely choose to see one another's films. In 2002, a good year for French cinema, 50 percent of the box office went to American movies and 35 percent to French movies, but only 4.9 percent to British films, 0.8 percent to German and 0.2 percent to Italian. And in Spain last year, Hollywood had 67 percent of the movie market, Spain 15.8 percent, Britain 5.7 percent, France 2.6 percent and Germany just 1.2 percent.
The failure of Europe's contemporary arts to enter the mainstream may help explain the plethora of the more rarefied arts festivals in the region, not only the film jamborees of Cannes, Venice and Berlin but also myriad dance and music festivals. (Dance and music, not requiring words, are more exportable.) Similarly summer theater festivals in Edinburgh and Avignon, France, invite productions from throughout Europe, yet few shows that are not local become commercial hits. In 1996 Yasmina Reza's "Art" was the first play by a living French writer to reach London's West End in 40 years.
Organizations like the British Council, the French Association for Artistic Action, Germany's Goethe Institute and Spain's Cervantes Institute actively promote their countries' cultures. And Europe's performing arts can be seen at, say, the Barbican Center in London, the Centro Cultural de Belêm, Lisbon, and the Théâtre National de l'Odéon in Paris. Yet these efforts touch a minority.
The visual arts are a case in point. Europe's museums may be crowded, yet many Europeans would struggle to name the leading living artists of France (Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Sophie Calle) or Spain (Antoni Tàpies, Miquel Barceló) or Germany (Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer). Even Lucian Freud, generally considered Britain's greatest living painter, speaks little to Continental Europeans.
Many Britons have at least heard of their own Y.B.A.'s — Young British Artists — because of clever marketing by the collector Charles Saatchi. Yet Damien Hirst of dissected shark renown and Tracey Emin of the "slept-in" love bed have become household names in Britain more as "enfants terribles" than as artists.
In the case of books, "Harry Potter" is everywhere, but best-seller lists in Europe are generally dominated by national authors. A few have a European audience, like Italy's Umberto Eco, Germany's Günter Grass and recently Spain's Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose "Shadow of the Wind" comes out in English this month. But most nonnational best sellers come from popular American writers, currently Dan Brown with "The Da Vinci Code," but also frequently John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell or recently Michael Moore.
American and British writing clearly profits from the English language: European publishers can read books in English, while those in other languages must usually be translated before being judged.
More surprisingly, while modeled after American "sound," even European pop music rarely crosses the region's borders, as if Europeans were accustomed to lyrics in English but not in other languages. The Rolling Stones can fill stadiums across the region, but no other European rock group could do so outside its own country. And France's undying love for its aging rock star Johnny Hallyday still mystifies other Europeans.
Does this separateness matter? Perhaps it represents the cultural diversity that Europeans continue to covet. Yet if Europeans remain focused on the riches of the past and ignore one another's contemporary work, there may also be a price. As Europe moves toward "ever closer union," unless it also communicates culturally, popular taste will become ever more American.
TRIESTE, Italy – From the battles of ancient Greece to the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Europeans have generally seemed more intent on clubbing each other than on clubbing together. The Romans walloped their neighbors. Catholics and Protestants shared God but couldn't agree on much else. The French and British irritated each other nonstop. And that was before the world wars and genocide of the 20th century.
This article doesn't say many surprising things about identity, but I think it pulls together many themes quite well. For example, did you know the Pope is against European unity?
Nations Struggle to Find Common Threads, Associated Press
By Tom Rachman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Associated Press
April 18, 2004
Italian businessman Stefano Morgan looks on as he sits in the historic San Marco cafe in Trieste, northern Italy. From the battles of ancient Greece to the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Europeans have generally seemed more intent on clubbing each other than on clubbing together. Now the expanding European Union looks for common threads.
TRIESTE, Italy – From the battles of ancient Greece to the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Europeans have generally seemed more intent on clubbing each other than on clubbing together.
The Romans walloped their neighbors. Catholics and Protestants shared God but couldn't agree on much else. The French and British irritated each other nonstop. And that was before the world wars and genocide of the 20th century.
After centuries of dispute, these notoriously fractious folk have begun to unite under the European Union, with a common currency, a planned constitution, and talk of a joint foreign policy and army.
The various names for this place – from Europe to Europa to Evropa – are the buzzwords of the day. The name, born of Greek mythology on ancient Crete, proclaims itself everywhere, from euro bank notes to the Eurostar train burrowing under the English Channel.
On May 1, the European Union expands from 15 to 25 members, tying ex-Soviet bloc states to Mediterranean islands to Western European powers – 455 million citizens, 20 official languages, age-old resentments and memories of war, not to mention a blinding number of ways to cook dinner.
But do Europeans really have anything in common? Interviews in several European countries indicate that few here feel foremost European, in part because it's so tricky defining what "a European" is.
An EU poll of the 25 countries published in February bears this out. Asked how they will see themselves in the near future, 86 percent said being European would come second to their present nationality or wouldn't figure at all.
Traditionally, people strive for a state; here in Trieste, crossroads of the Slavic east, Germanic center and Latin south, the invented European state must strive for a people – not an easy task in a city as historically muddled as this.
It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Mediterranean port in the 18th and 19th centuries; Italy incorporated it in 1918; the Nazis occupied it near the end of World War II; Yugoslavia took brief control after Germany's defeat; the British and Americans bumped them out; and now, it's part of Italy – and by extension the European Union.
Librarian Lisbeth Stiger was born in Austria, works in a German cultural center and speaks fondly of Trieste, her adopted city, where people eat pasta but sip coffee in Viennese-style cafes, a custom harking back to Austro-Hungarian times.
Her setting didn't appear to make her feel much more European.
"Between an Irishman and someone from Malta there's a huge difference, both culturally and in the way of thinking," Stiger said. "I'd never say I feel European. ... Deep down I'm Austrian."
At the University of Trieste, in Piazzale Europa – Europe Square – students hanging out between classes indicated that Europeans do share values, but not a common identity.
A 24-year-old law student, Alex Tardivo, puffed a cigarette and suggested that "tolerance could be our strong point." A 22-year-old engineering student, Omar Tullio, said European culture "is fairly embryonic now."
Certainly, Europe isn't a melting pot, a shared allegiance, a "United States." That was never the intention of the six countries that started the partnership in the 1950s as an economic bloc to lift them out of the wreckage of World War II.
That said, outlines of European identity can be sketched, with admittedly imperfect strokes:
–Europeans share pride in their stunningly creative past, their art and science, whose ancient markers are still evident in centuries-old frescoes dabbed onto the ceilings of village churches and in the stunning architecture of great cities.
"Europe means common tradition regardless of the many historical antagonisms," former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski said in Warsaw. "It's a Europe of common history, tradition, and civilization, which leads to human rights and finally to democracy."
–Europeans also tend to believe that their governments have an obligation to care for the weak, and they pay high taxes to finance generous health, welfare and pension systems.
"That's different from the American conception where there's much more stress on individual effort," said Heather Grabbe of the Centre for European Reform in London.
–Totalitarianism in the 20th century – Nazism, Communism – has bred a reluctance to engage in military conflicts.
"I suppose compared to the Americans we are all depressives – but then they haven't suffered so many wars and ethnic conflicts on their own soil as we have," 35-year-old Hungarian Cornelia Sarkozi said in Budapest.
–At times, they agree less on what they are than on what they are not – not African, not Asian, and not American.
"As a European, I feel much more open to changes, open to new interests, cultures and countries. I see Americans as much more limited in the way of thinking and seeing things," said Stiger, the librarian.
EU proponents tout their project not only as a way to help nations prosper. The conditions for membership – market economy, democracy, human rights – have brought considerable changes in countries still struggling with the legacy of dictatorships.
With all that, do Europeans need to feel like brothers and sisters?
The EU would be stronger if they did. The idea of "being European" is sometimes mixed up with being in the club itself. The danger is that when EU-building hits a rough patch, people forget the benefits of open borders and tariff-free trade and turn sour on being European.
The euro, the most obvious sign of unity, is a case in point. Some EU citizens complain that the new currency brought huge inflation. Costs have certainly shot up in Italy since the euro was introduced in 2002, with many accusing shopkeepers of greedily rounding up prices in the new currency.
"I don't want Europe. I want Italy. I want a return of the lira and all that," grumbled Trieste furniture salesman Mariano Gianella, lighting cigarettes with a matchbook inappropriately emblazoned with the blue-and-yellow EU flag. "They've doubled the prices and that's it."
One strong proponent of European unity outside the EU is Pope John Paul II. The Polish-born pontiff argues that this continent's Christian history helps define Europeans.
Several countries don't like the sound of that, especially those trying to appear inclusive to growing populations of immigrants, many of them Muslim. The issue is one of many that have deadlocked the proposed constitution.
Awkward as it may be, debate over religion and European values has become unavoidable. France and Germany are struggling over allowing Islamic head scarves in public settings, while Italy was scandalized when a court ordered Christian crosses removed from a school – a ruling later overturned.
Immigration and the expansion of the EU both throw doubt on whether it's possible to define "Europeans" as their numbers and nature shift.
Trieste businessman Cheng Tsu Jung is an immigrant from China and an Italian citizen, firmly rooted on this continent and holding strong opinions about it.
He argued that Europe still has to win over its own people – offer something tangible and sweet to sell the idea of being European.
Cheng looks to his 14-year-old Italian-born son, fluent in this country's language but struggling with Chinese.
"The new generation," he says, "will feel more European than we do."
EDITOR'S NOTE – AP writers Monika Scislowska in Warsaw and Karl Peter Kirk in Budapest contributed to this report.
Here are a few different newspapers spinning the same story: the Arabic European League (AEL)--lots of membership in Belgium and Netherlands--has "warned" traders in Antwerp that they could be the next target of a terrorist attacks.
The majority of traders in Antwerp are Jewish with strong ties to Israel.
Newspaper accounts differ from calling it "Islamic fundamentalist threat" to "Hamas" to a general "terrorism threat"
This was an aspect I didn't expect to cover in Antwerp initially, but from my reporting there, tensions at the business person-to-person level between Muslims and Jews was very little. But so is the interaction. The majority of traders are Hindu, not Muslim. Though these supposed threats are not from the immediate community.
For the most part, people felt (obviously i'm not there now) very safe and had little to say about March 11. September 11, was tragic, they said, but far away.
This is a blurb from a diamond industry trade magazine published by the International Diamond Exchange.
Antwerp's diamond traders fear terror attacks
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=24&story_id=6478
This is the belgium expats mag's take
Antwerp Security Tightened Following Threats
http://www.idexonline.com/start.asp
Reuters
Belgium Investigates Email Threats Against Jews
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4794541
Israeli news
Belgian Jews Threatened By Euro-Arab League
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=60711
Antwerp Security Tightened Following Threats
(April 8, '04, 10:56 Edahn Golan)
Antwerp police has beefed up security after the Arab European League (AEL) said it could become a target of a Hamas terrorist attack if the local Jewish community did not denounce Israel and its policies.
Ahmed Azzuz, the AEL's local leader, was quoted in an interview saying Hamas planned to attack foreign targets following the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin adding that Antwerp was an “obvious target”.
“The diamond sector openly supports the Zionist regime,” Azzuz said in the interview, adding, “Every year 200 Belgian-Israeli reservists leave for Israel to kill innocent civilians”.
The Diamond High Council (HRD) has filed a complaint against the AEL, accusing the group of “intimidation” and “threatening behavior”.
“It is the first time the diamond sector has been named as a target in such an explicit manner,” HRD Managing Director Peter Meeus told Reuters.
Antwerp's diamond traders fear terror attacks
BRUSSELS - Businesses in Antwerp's famous diamond traders' district fear they could soon be targeted by an Islamic fundamentalist terror attack, the Belgian press reported on Thursday.
The majority of Antwerp's diamond traders are Jewish. They say have been particularly concerned since the Arab European League (AEL) warned they could be considered a terrorist target.
"Ever since the AEL made its statements, we have obviously been asking ourselves questions," diamond industry spokesman Peter Meeus told La Libre Belgique.
"The quarter was already targeted in 1981, when terrorists attacked a Portuguese synagogue," he added.
Meeus wants the Belgian government to step up even further the already tight security measures in place in the diamond sellers quarter, which is near to Antwerp's main station.
The AEL insisted that it was not trying to threaten Antwerp's diamond traders but warn them.
"We want to warn Antwerp's Jewish community in its entirety to be on its guard. The community's support for Israel is no secret," Ahmed Azzuz, head of the AEL in Belgium told La Libre Belgique.
"It could therefore be targeted because of its support for Zionism, in the same way that innocent people in Spain paid for their leaders' pro-American policies during the war in Iraq.
"We are not anti-Semitic. It is recent events that have led us to sound the alarm bell," he added.
Belgium Investigates Email Threats Against Jews
ANTWERP, Belgium (Reuters) - Belgium is investigating a series of e-mail threats against the local Jewish community to avenge Israeli attacks against the Palestinian militant group Hamas, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
Investigators were looking into the e-mails sent to the prime minister's office and several newspapers that threatened attacks on Jews in the northern port city of Antwerp.
"We have opened a file and we are checking it out," Lieve Pellens, spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office, said.
"We don't really give it that much importance," she said, adding the office received such reports regularly.
The daily Gazet Van Antwerpen reported that e-mails sent on April 1 threatened to attack the Jewish community, as well as buses, trams, and shops.
The messages contained the name of Abdelkarim el Mejjati, suspected of being one of the masterminds behind the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people, it said.
Mejjati is also suspected of being the operational leader of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which investigators blame for last year's bombings in Casablanca.
Gazet Van Antwerpen said the e-mails carried the mobile phone number of a group of Cameroon students. The newspaper contacted the students who denied any knowledge of the threats.
Antwerp is the world's largest diamond distribution center and many members of the port city's orthodox Jewish community of about 20,000 work in the business.
Earlier this week, the diamond sector called for extra security after a local Arab militant group said the industry could be attacked by Islamic militants if the Jewish community did not denounce Israeli policies against Palestinians.
Antwerp police say they have increased protection.
Israel killed the wheelchair-bound Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a helicopter strike on March 22, accusing him of being behind suicide bombings in the Jewish state.
Since the start of the latest Palestinian uprising in 2000, Belgian Jews have complained of a rise in anti-Semitic violence and virulent anti-Israeli propaganda.
Belgian Jews Threatened By Euro-Arab League 15:13 Apr 09, '04 / 18 Nisan 5764
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=60711
Belgium's Jews, in particular Antwerp's Jewish diamond merchants, have been put on notice by the Arab European League (AEL).
"We want to warn Antwerp's Jewish community in its entirety to be on its guard. The community's support for Israel is no secret," Ahmed Azzuz, head of the AEL in Belgium told the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique.
"The AEL calls on the Jewish community in Antwerp to cease its support of, and distance itself from, the state of Israel. If not, attacks in Antwerp are almost unpreventable," Azzuz had earlier told the Belgian Flemish magazine Knack, adding, "Every year, 200 Belgian-Israeli reservists leave for Israel to kill innocent civilians."
According to an Israel Channel 1 television report, the Jewish community is taking the threats seriously, and has already contacted elected Jewish officials, the local police and the nation's justice minister. A member of the Belgian diamond merchant's community interviewed on the program confirmed reports that members of the Jewish community are afraid and at present, refrain from being outdoors during the nighttime hours.
Peter Meeus reminded La Libre Belgique, "The quarter was already targeted in 1981, when terrorists attacked a Portuguese synagogue."
The AEL's Azzuz insisted in the media that his statements were not threats.
A spokeswoman for Antwerp police said rigorous security measures had already been introduced.
O.k., so it's off topic, but considering our travels and our group's encounters with proposals for dates and even marriage, the article seems worth a smile for the play on stereotypes.
It's a small vignette in the New Yorker on a group of NY-based French bachelor businessmen who've started cocktail parties ("French Tuesdays"). The group of French expatriates has grown so big that Playboy magazine sponsored the last one where Rachel Hunter was the guest of honor.
It makes interesting observations about what the group considers a way to socialize in "the French way." The comments of the French men's views of American women and men are the best. ("American girls are very liberated, but the American men are uptight." "We French, we think the Americans are too gentlemen, they are afraid of the girls. So we make sure the girls don't get ignored.")
Some of this rang true in our travels, I think.
It's online!
PEPE LE PEW DEPT.
BRUSH-OFF
By Leslie Schillinger
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040412ta_talk_schillinger
or April 12, 2004 New Yorker (Eggs on the cover). It's page 30.
A year ago, when the French President, Jacques Chirac, declared that France would veto a United Nations resolution in favor of war against Iraq, “whatever the circumstances,” he probably did not consider the potential collateral damage it might do to French bachelors overseas.
But this circumstance was of grave concern to many Manhattan-based French businessmen. And so, on March 18, 2003—the day before the United States started bombing Iraq—Pierre Battu, a textile importer with the compact proportions and purposeful intensity of a Jack Russell terrier, decided to act in self-defense. He threw a cocktail party for French expatriates and the Americans who liked them. Fifty people turned up, mostly men; the evening was such a success that he held another the next month. Battu named the party “French Tuesdays,” and at the second one a lanky young banker named Georges Benoliel, fresh out of business school in Paris, showed up with a dozen young women. After a brief discussion of their mutual aims (more women), Battu invited Benoliel into the French Tuesdays junta, which included Battu and his partner in the textile business, Gilles Amsallem, who runs around snapping photographs.
Battu put up a web site so that he could post the party photos and explain his raison d’être. It reads, “You have a particular taste for red wine, cheese, smokers, you like bubbles, play pétanque, enjoy taking a few days off in Paris or Saint-Tropez, qualify yourself as a Francophile / Francophone, speak French or just enjoy to socialize the French way. . . . You have already qualified to join our happy, trendy, hip ‘French Tuesdays’ parties.”
By this winter, the party had evolved from a small monthly cocktail hour to a biweekly all-night extravaganza that moves among various large night clubs. When the group celebrated its first anniversary last month, at a place called Marquee, a party given by Playboy for its April cover model, Rachel Hunter, was bumped to an upstairs lounge in order to make room for the Frenchmen. Lucas Labat, a party regular, spent most of the evening surrounded by American women. He had theories. “American girls are very liberated, but the American men are uptight,” he said. “They want to be perfect, they get the chest wax, they wear nice clothes. We French, we think the Americans are too gentlemen, they are afraid of the girls. So we make sure the girls don’t get ignored.”
Battu elaborated. “We French have the image of being arrogant and loving women and wine and cheese and all that,” he said. “And, you know, it’s true, we are that way!”
Benoliel poured out jeroboam after jeroboam of champagne. “When American girls go to a party, they’re hoping to meet a man,” he said. “But the men keep to themselves and drink beer, and ignore the women. It is a terrible waste.”
Although the party was going strong, something was troubling Battu and his friends. Up in the lounge, Hunter and some model friends languished, their charms squandered on American men who, presumably, were drinking beer and ignoring them. Playboy guests wore special plastic bracelets that gave them access to the party. “Those girls were separated from us,” Battu said. “For us, the Playboy playmate—it’s an American icon! We couldn’t believe it when we heard Playboy would share this party with us. We thought we would meet our dream in reality! But no. They would not let us in, because of our heavy French accent.”
“I could not go there. I had no bracelet,” Benoliel said sadly. “The man at the rope wouldn’t let us pass.” He paused. “Except for Charles-Henry. Yes, Charles-Henry. He slipped in. Many times.”
Charles-Henry Kurzen, a twenty-five-year-old banker from Paris, happened to know a close personal friend of Hunter’s, and he was able to get past security. “I was determined to go upstairs, because Rachel Hunter was there,” Kurzen said. “She is a woman born in 1969—she is thirty-four!—but she is a beautiful, mature woman; a woman of character, a woman of history, a woman who has lived!” Kurzen tried to persuade Hunter to join his countrymen downstairs, but she declined. “Maybe because her party was a business gathering and she could not leave,” he speculated. “Maybe because she found me too young; maybe because she did not like the idea of a French party.” He thought a little longer. “Or maybe it was a question of chic. I do not know.”
— Liesl Schillinger
Rujun was right to pick-up a story on the 100th anniversary of "entente cordiale" (see below). It shows the strange, and contradictory feelings that exist between the "biftecks" as the French at times call the Brits, and the Frogs. In a sense, it could be a useful metaphor of the contradictory and strange feelings that most Europeans experiment about each other.
I just wanted to add this one from The New York Times. Their Paris correspondent, Alan Riding, knows a lot, and has a great sense of humor. He suggests that the French like the Queen because of her German blood. I wonder if I like what he writes, because (not only) he is a British citizen.
Since 1066, It Hasn't Always Been Cordial
By ALAN RIDING
PARIS, April 5 — If the history of British-French relations had begun with the signing of the Entente Cordiale on April 8, 1904, the record would not look too bad.
The agreement led to an easing of the colonial rivalry, alliances against Germany in two world wars and eventual collaboration, tinged with competition, within the European Union.
The problem is that most of the British and French public know "entente cordiale" only as a phrase — and they do not really believe it.
So Queen Elizabeth's state visit to France this week to mark the accord's 100th anniversary is as much an occasion to remember what divides the neighbors as what unites them. And here history began long before 1904.
Since 1066 for the British and the Hundred Years War for the French, the governments and the peoples have viewed one another with a mixture of envy and hostility. And even today, their cordiality often seems to be more out of necessity than conviction.
Yet, relations have also changed fundamentally, not as a result of the Entente Cordiale, but because the D-Day landings 60 years ago persuaded the French that the United States was now the undisputed leader of the English-speaking — "Anglo-Saxon" to the French — world. And if any doubt existed, that status was confirmed when London bowed to American pressure to end the Suez adventure in 1956.
As a result, since then, a basic asymmetry has shaped cross-channel relations: when France looks west, it now sees the United States, not Britain, as its competitor; but when Britain looks east, it still sees France controlling, at times blocking, its relationship with Europe. So, while the French are obsessed with the United States and somewhat indifferent to Britain, the British remain passionate about their love-hate for France.
Relations today between President Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain tell part of the story. They crossed swords over Iraq, with a surprising number of Britons sharing Mr. Chirac's opposition to the war and criticizing Mr. Blair's pro-American stance. Yet, almost as irritating to government relations is Mr. Chirac's clear preference for a strategic European alliance with Germany rather than with Britain.
The idea that the French cannot be trusted politically is therefore daily fodder for the conservative British press, with the tabloids never missing an occasion to remind readers of "frog ingratitude" at being "saved" by Britain and the United States in World War II. In contrast, French newspapers, rather than becoming exercised about British political behavior, simply take for granted that London is subservient to Washington.
The channel tunnel tells a different story. Britain reluctantly accepted ending its insularity, but today 57 percent of Eurostar passengers are Britons, while only 26 percent are French. Put differently, the British love France — its cities, its villages, its countryside, its art de vivre.
They vacation here in vast numbers and buy second homes, often ruins that they lovingly rebuild.
But for the French, while Britain offers lower taxes and the powerful pulse of London's financial center, it draws relatively few of them as a tourist destination.
Once again, then, it is the British responding to the French, rather than the other way around. And their ambivalence is never far away. Nothing gives Britons more pleasure than beating France in rugby or soccer, yet French players are the top stars of Arsenal, Chelsea and other British soccer teams. Nothing delights Britons more than to head for their Provençal home and stock up on wine, yet few bother to learn French (and feel vindicated since more and more French speak English).
Still, Queen Elizabeth's visit has given British and French newspapers a chance to gauge how the distant neighbors view each other. And the results are not surprising. The left-of-center Paris daily Libération, which published a joint supplement Monday with the London daily The Guardian, ran a front-page photograph of a large green frog under the headline, "I love you, moi non plus." "I love you, neither do I."
More telling, perhaps, were the results of a BVA-ICM poll carried out for the two newspapers. Asked what they most admired, 80 percent of Britons in the poll chose French art and culture, while 69 percent of the French cited English music, presumably pop. Predictably, 64 percent of Britons also liked French cuisine, while only 6 percent of the French approved of English food. And surprisingly, 51 percent of Britons had a good image of Mr. Chirac, while Mr. Blair was liked by 49 percent of the French.
The poll also addresses personal attitudes. Asked to pick some typical characteristics, 76 percent of the French considered Britons "faithful to their principles," while 69 percent of Britons thought the French "imaginative." On other traits, like "seductive," "arrogant" and "cowardly," Britons gave higher scores to the French than the French did to Britons.
How Britain and France are seen to fit into Europe today, however, perhaps says most about the legacy of the Entente Cordiale.
While 85 percent of the French and 73 percent of Britons trust the Spaniards and 84 percent of the French and 69 percent of Britons trust the Germans, only 51 percent of Britons trust the French and 55 percent of the French trust the British. Another poll published last week by Pèlerin magazine said the French feel closest to Germany, with Britain ranking fifth on the list.
And yet the French have always loved Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family. Could it be because they have German blood?
I read this story on the Guardian originally as the starting point of broader research on EU issues. But I really like this story and decide to post it here even though it's from the mainstream Guardian, as it captures a lot of details of the sentiment among ordinary French people and Britons. A lot of things it said is true based on what I saw in France, but there are surprising moments such as the last paragraph.
It's interesting to see how these two countries, who are deeply embedded with each other, yet diverge on many important issues including the war in Iraq and Euro, interact with each other, especially under the situation that France clearly stresses on the Franco-German relationship.
The story is titled Twenty-one Miles Away, and a World Apart, on the Guardian.
Twenty-one miles away, and a world apart
On April 8 1904, Britain and France signed a historic agreement heralding an end to centuries of bloody feuding. But the age-old mix of distrust, affection, and antipathy between the French and the British was never going to be overcome so easily. In a unique collaboration with the French daily paper Libération, G2 today celebrates the original special relationship. Here, Emma Brockes takes a trip to explore the meaning of the narrow strip of water that separates us
Monday April 5, 2004
The Guardian
"There has never been an antipathy between them, only the desire to surpass. France is the adversary of England as the better is the enemy of the good." - Victor Hugo
On the quayside at Dover, the good and the better compete this morning in the form of two cross-channel ferries: P&O's Pride of Canterbury and, docked beside it, the French SeaFrance vessel, Rodin. (Ships in the SeaFrance fleet are named after the Impressionists - Cézanne, Manet, Renoir. Ships in the P&O fleet are named after places - Dover, Kent, Calais. This may or may not reflect the two nations' respective preferences for figurative and literal thinking.)
English schoolkids spit from the passenger deck on to the car deck 20ft below and yell, "Bye England! Bye England!" and "We're gonna si-ink!" while behind the docks the white cliffs confirm that "we" end here and "they" begin there, somewhere out in the mist, where Vodafone UK becomes France Bouygtel and the Channel becomes La Manche. It is what cultural theorist Homi K Bhabha might call an "in-between space through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated", and what Paul, a 51-year-old teaching assistant from Folkestone, calls "what keeps them out". Paul is standing beside me on deck. "I wouldn't take SeaFrance," he advises. "They're French. I went on one 10 years ago and had to queue half an hour for a drink." A well aimed pellet of spit sets off a car alarm and 11-year-old Rosie from Brentwood, Essex, explains how she feels about the French. "When they speak, they sound angry." She has yet to connect this with the spitting prowess of her classmates or the long and complicated history of Anglo-French relations.
The role of the English Channel in British life could for a long time be summarised by the Times headline "Fog over Channel, continent cut off." Thirty-thousand square miles, 21 miles across at its narrowest, 100 at its widest and stretching from Finisterre to the strait of Dover, the Channel has served as a measure of human courage and insecurity since it first split the continent. "Did the fact that the Channel was there make Britain what it is?" asks Peter Unwin, former English diplomat and author of the Narrow Sea, a history of the English Channel. "And more importantly, did it make the British what they are? I think largely it did."
Dislike for one's neighbours is universal, but the combination of familiarity, contempt and a long-standing trade in insults - which saw protesters in Kent chanting "Froggy go home!" all through negotiations for the Channel tunnel - makes Anglo-French relations unique in the European Union. Each is convinced that it is the other's only worthy adversary. In the 18th century the French philosopher Montesquieu looked at Britain as proof that "the inhabitants of islands have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continent", a sentiment still going strong in 1992, when Norman Tebbit reframed it as "the blessing of insularity which has protected us against rabid dogs and dictators alike". For rabid dogs in this context read rabid foreigners. The Channel tunnel, by bringing Britain symbolically closer to Europe, might have diminished their "foreignness" in some ways, but it has also increased it. An illegal immigrant who stows himself inches from the live rail under a Eurostar train can be put to more sinister use than someone who walks over a land border: his desperation makes him alien.
The image of Britons as protectors of liberty, meanwhile, comes down to an element of what philosophers call "moral luck". That is, virtuous behaviour that comes about not as a result of moral inquiry, but as a by-product of circumstance. The circumstance in this case is geography: the Channel, by saving Britain from invasion, has allowed for its liberty-loving image never really to have been tested. Our insularity makes us at once defensive and superior. A cartoon from Punch dated 1889 features an Englishman and a Frenchman being checked out by two women on the beach. The Englishman thinks they must be laughing at him ("Confound it! Wonder if I've got a smut on my nose."), while the Frenchman assumes that the women are staring because he is hot stuff ("Evidement elles trouvent que je ne suis pas trop mal!").
The traditional British explanation for this, that self-criticism is the highest form of self-confidence, buckles under the amount of slagging we dish out to everyone else, informed by a logic which goes: we might be rubbish, but you're more rubbish. "You'll still get a laugh with a puerile, anti-French joke in Britain," says Jonathan Fenby, author of On the Brink, a contemporary study of France. "It's still acceptable in educated circles to say 'I hate the French,' a dismissive sneering that you just don't come across in France. The average French person doesn't think to the same degree about the English as vice versa."
All the same, the Sun's famous anti-tunnel headline from 1990, Up Yours Delors!, seems like a ludicrous over-reaction now, and since Kent qualified for some €35m (£23m) of EU funding, its residents have stopped shouting "frogs out". Nevertheless, the French remain offensive to the Brits at conceptual level, a necessary evil against which, for want of any more concrete evidence of who we are, we judge ourselves to be English. It is a process of hostile flirtation that is weirdly flattering to both sides. "We think we're better than the French," says Unwin, "but we think France is pretty good too. I was in Germany for a long time, and I used to watch the way the British played up to the French and not to the Germans. The Germans played up to the French and not to the British. The French have done a very good job culturally and politically of establishing that sort of inferiority complex in everybody else. The British Foreign Office people are proud that they speak good French; they don't really care whether they speak German or not."
Les is a truck driver on the Pride of Canterbury, en route to delivering 80 cubic metres of bubblewrap to the Netherlands. He finds it embarrassing, he says, that unlike their peers in mainland Europe, British customs officers rarely speak anything but English. "Lots of places in France accept sterling but hardly anywhere in Britain takes euros. Being European shouldn't threaten us. There's a truck stop at junction 27 near Neuvechateau in Belgium which is very international. We all get along. I took the wife there once."
And yet when asked about the benefits of freedom of movement within Europe, he says sadly, "The influx of foreigners to Britain has changed it all anyway. You can't deport everyone. We've just got to make the most of it." Les recently found three Iranians in the back of his truck at Calais. "They see your GB plates and make a beeline. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for human rights. But charity begins at home."
Travelling back from Calais on the French ferry Manet, I meet Sandrine and Katherine, two French women who work aboard ship as pursers. "The French are so rude," they say winsomely. "No please or thank you. We much prefer the English passengers. Their children are better behaved. The English live on an island and so are used to travelling. They never complain when there are delayed. Whereas the French ... "
This is the French brand of confidence: self-deprecation without attack. It has, perhaps, to do with their having a firmer idea of who they are. "While Britain sees itself as a nation of individuals," says Fenby, "France has this idea of etat, the over-arching state, holding things together. It's an abstract which doesn't exist to the same extent in Britain. In France, the president incarnates the nation and has a particular stature that doesn't apply to the prime minister here."
"I prefer the French to the English," says Stephen, a fireman from south London aboard the Pride of Canterbury. "They stand up for what they believe in: all those strikes. English people just fall over the first time someone shouts at them."
We dock at Calais ("malignant Calais!" as Dickens wrote, "low-lying alligator, evading the eyesight and discouraging hope!") and those on foot disembark and trudge to the bus stop for a ride into town. Paul does not get off. He is what the ferry companies term a "non-landing passenger", that is, one who takes the ferry and comes back without disembarking. "I like it as a day out - have lunch, a couple of pints then turn round and come home. I wouldn't get off the boat. Calais: horrible place." It gives him a sense of having travelled without the discomfort of actually being abroad. From this vantage point, he concludes that France is "a nice country, shame about the people. They'll take an hour and a quarter for lunch whereas I'm lucky if I get 15 minutes."
Two women stand before me in the bus queue. The driver asks them in French for the fare of €1.50, just over £1. "Wa'ss that in English?" snaps one. With the tiniest pause, the driver replies, "£2," and politely relieves them of their money.
It is not about the Constitution. It is not exactly a "complot". But there certainly was some pressure exerted on behalf of the US on several European governments. The subject is REACH, a European Plan devised to ask chemical companies (instead of governments) to prove that their products are not toxic before putting them on the market. At stake are jobs, environment policies and US-EU relations.
The second story shows that it is a subject of strategic importance and that the US might have to adopt the European position in order not to duplicate costly testing procedure.
The New York Times - White House Undermined Chemical Tests, Report Says
Stratfor.com - Chemical Industry: Grasping the Implications of REACH
White House Undermined Chemical Tests, Report Says
By ELIZABETH BECKER
Published: April 2, 2004
ASHINGTON, April 1 - A report released by a House committee on Thursday describes how the Bush administration worked with the United States chemical industry to undermine a European plan that would require all manufacturers to test industrial chemicals for their effect on public health before they were sold in Europe.
The administration had said publicly that the proposal last year would threaten the $20 billion in chemicals that the United States exports to Europe each year because the cost of testing would be prohibitive. Five years in the making, the proposal, which was revised and is still under consideration, would shift the burden to prove the safety of chemicals onto manufacturers instead of governments.
Behind the scenes, the administration was working with the chemical industry to devise a plan to undermine the proposal, according to e-mail messages and documents released in the report.
The Bush administration said the proposal was unsound science and an abuse of regulatory authority, a similar accusation leveled against Europe for its demand that genetically modified food be labeled as such before it is marketed.
European officials said the testing plan was necessary because of an increase in health problems like allergies and male infertility. The costs of cleaning up damage from chemicals like asbestos is already in the billions of dollars, they said.
The office of the United States trade representative asked the industry to develop themes the administration could use to discourage the European Union from adopting the new testing program, according to an e-mail message dated April 4, 2003, and obtained by the House investigator.
Catherine Novelli, the assistant United States trade representative for Europe, was cited in the e-mail message, which read: "At the last meeting, Cathy had tasked the industries to come up with 'themes' for their concerns about the proposed legislation. The chemical industry had done a list of themes dealing with the E.U. process."
Other e-mail messages describe the role of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, top Commerce Department officials and officials from the Environmental Protection Agency in lobbying European countries, singling out several countries, especially Sweden and Finland.
One e-mail message from the trade officials urged the chemical industry to "get to the Swedes and Finns and neutralize their environmental arguments."
Richard Mills, the spokesman for the United States trade representative, said Thursday that the administration estimated that "one million jobs are on the line - you're darned right we raised our concerns with the European Union."
"The regulations would not help the environment because they were unworkable," Mr. Mills said. "We want regulations that protect the environment and don't stifle U.S. jobs and economic growth."
The report, requested by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, says that American environmental groups and the general public were kept out of the administration's closed discussions and strategy sessions.
"We were frozen out," said Joseph Digangi of the Environmental Health Fund, an advocacy group cited in the report. "The administration went directly to the U.S. chemical industry and adopted their position whole cloth."
Anthony Gooch, the spokesman for the European Commission in the United States, said of the report: "There would seem to be an inordinate weight given to only one side of a complex argument. Significant concerns about the environment and public health seem to be totally absent from their policy."
The lobbying efforts of the United States appear to have succeeded. The European Union revised the proposal, known as Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, or Reach.
Five months after trade officials sent e-mail messages discussing how to persuade senior European officials to demand new cost-benefit analyses, France, Germany and Britain wrote to the president of the European Commission requesting a new assessment of the effects that the program would have on the industry.
The American Chemistry Council, a trade group, noted in its 2003 annual report that it had "rallied opposition to the draft proposal, including a major intervention by the U.S. government."
"The questions the U.S. government is raising about the global impact of Reach are perfectly sensible," said Greg Lebedev, the president and chief executive of the American Chemistry Council. "American companies have a stake in Europe as investors, manufacturers and suppliers."
Under current rules, about 99 percent of the total volume of chemicals sold on the markets have not been subjected to testing requirements.
One subject of the lobbying proposal was Margot Wallstrom, commissioner for the environment at the European Union. In an April e-mail message, an official of the trade representative said: "But who will take on Wallstrom - the answer is only other ministers or heads of state. The U.S.G. plans to send in our ambassadors to member states and commission to make our case."
Ms. Wallstrom said that the reform proposal was necessary because "there is no control whatsoever of the 400 million tons of chemicals sold in the European Union each year."
Mr. Powell sent several cables on the issue. In one, he warned that $8.8 billion in products were at risk of being banned or severely restricted under Europe's proposed system, a figure from a study by the chemistry council. His cables were sent to trading partners in Latin America and Asia as well as Europe to oppose the proposal.
The main chemical regulation in the United States is the 1976 Toxic Substance Control Act, which has been widely criticized for being weak and too deferential to industry. The vast majority of nonpesticide chemicals are not subject to any required screening before introduction here.
Chemical Industry: Grasping the Implications of REACH
From Strafor.com
Summary
Proposed European Commission regulations -- known as REACH -- would impose significant new requirements on the European and U.S. chemical industries. Lobbying by the U.S. chemical industry has prompted the Bush administration to make the proposal an economic and diplomatic issue. U.S. environmentalists and some senators are pushing to align U.S. chemical policy with REACH. If REACH and REACH-inspired policies are successful, the global chemicals sector might look to a new international testing standard to minimize costs.
Analysis
The European Commission adopted a proposal in October 2003 for a chemicals regulation policy known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals). The proposed regulations would force Europe's chemical industry to conduct extensive health and environmental safety tests for chemicals produced in significant quantity for use in industry. The U.S.
chemicals industry, which would have to comply with Europe's REACH standards in order to export to any European Union country, and the Bush administration are lobbying against its passage, citing the high costs of compliance. Although REACH does not have any near-term prospects for approval -- a vote on the proposal is not expected until 2005 -- the proposed REACH legislation is already serving as a model and benchmark for environmentalists seeking changes to chemicals regulation in the United States.
If REACH is approved in Europe and a similar chemicals policy is passed in the United States, the U.S. chemical industry could face having to conduct dual testing and to absorb double costs associated with testing and compliance. The U.S. government and the chemical industry might choose to shape an international collaborative chemical testing policy to streamline the testing process and minimize additional costs.
Following the release of the European Commission's 2001 "White Paper on Strategy for Future Chemicals Policy," which laid out the ideas that led to REACH, environmentalists in Europe and the United States began touting the program as a way to protect public health against the potentially negative effects of tens of thousands of untested chemicals. The passage of REACH would mandate greater pre-market testing of all chemicals in commercial use, lead to phaseouts of those chemicals deemed most harmful to public health and the environment and lead to testing of chemicals sold to Europe from major trade partners, including the United States. U.S. environmentalists began campaigning to push lawmakers to adopt similar testing programs for chemicals in this country, citing the protection of human health and the environment as their chief concern.
Environmentalist arguments in favor of REACH-like regulations have been heard by at least one senator. According to Inside EPA, a Washington newsletter, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and several other congressmen will introduce legislation this year that would amend the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the main U.S. chemical regulation statute, to resemble REACH.
TSCA gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to request testing data on certain chemicals from industry, but does not require testing of the majority of chemicals in commerce. The amendment under consideration would likely require industry to conduct testing on all chemicals produced in volumes greater than 1 ton, similar to the REACH program. It would also likely strengthen the EPA's role in banning chemicals deemed to pose a public health risk and place the burden of establishing a chemical's safety -- or potential for harm -- on industry rather than on the public or the EPA.
If REACH were approved in Europe, the U.S. chemical industry would face significant costs and challenges in complying with it to access the European market. The most obvious of these would be producing and managing the testing data for large numbers of chemical substances. The European Commission's impact assessment for REACH estimates that testing and registration costs would amount to 2.3 billion euros ($2.8 billion) over an 11-year period. The commission's estimate of the cost to downstream chemical users is roughly 2.8 to 4.0 billion euros ($3.4 to $4.8
billion) over the same period. This would bring the total cost to industry and its downstream customers at roughly 5.1 to 6.3 billion euros ($6.2 to $7.7 billion).
REACH requirements could pose other long-term challenges.
Adopting such a policy in the United States would fundamentally change how industry conducts business by codifying the precautionary principle in U.S. law. The precautionary principle provides a framework for forming environmental regulations based on "preventing harm" to the environment and/or human health.
Europe is more open to precaution-based guidelines than the United States: Europe instituted a defensive ban on U.S. hormone- treated beef because of uncertain health effects on humans, and is hesitant to approve genetically modified food. The U.S.
government places much more emphasis on cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment than on precaution.
Under a precaution-based chemical policy, industry would have to prove chemicals safe before putting them on the market, putting the onus of proving a product's safety on industry rather than the public. A REACH-like U.S. policy could make demands based on precaution -- such as phasing out certain chemicals and preventing the creation of new substances that are chemically similar to those already phased out -- much easier.
Such a policy could also mean the chemical industry would be open to legal claims -- like the pharmaceuticals industry currently faces -- based on "failure to warn" the public. Once extensive testing data are made available, gaps in the warning labels could become the basis for tort litigation.
The U.S. chemical industry is feeling the effects of rising natural gas prices for natural gas, the main source of energy and primary feedstock for many industrial chemicals. The industrial price of natural gas is approximately $5.50 per million BTUs, up from $3.78 per million in March 2002. If REACH is passed in Europe, the U.S. chemicals industry could be forced to look at cost-cutting measures, including increasing the speed with which it relocates production to other countries, possibly in Asia, that have lower gas prices.
The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush and the U.S.
chemical industry are lobbying EU member states to oppose REACH.
In March 2004, the U.S. government expanded its lobbying representatives to include U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, showing that the United States considers the REACH program a serious threat to industry. According to the Financial Times on March 29, Powell sent a cable to U.S. diplomats in the EU member states and 10 countries approved to join the European Union in May. Powell said, "The [U.S. government] continues to be concerned that the proposals will create a costly, disproportionately burdensome and complex regulatory system, which could prove difficult, if not unworkable, in its implementation. U.S. exports in most industrial sectors -- totaling tens of billions of dollars -- would be affected by the new policy."
Powell's intervention in the REACH debate signals the Bush administration's deep opposition to the proposed European regulations -- and presumably any similar program in the United States. It is rare to have a secretary of state intervene in a technical industry issue, particularly when the issue is still European. If John Kerry is elected in the fall, however, his administration could take a markedly different approach to the chemicals testing issue. Nevertheless, TSCA is becoming a battleground issue for chemicals policy; a large and -- sources say -- influential national environmental organization has said that amending TSCA to reflect REACH will be one of its key campaigns over the next year.
If the REACH proposal is passed in Europe -- and if TSCA is amended in the United States -- the U.S. government and the U.S.
chemical industry could spearhead discussion on the creation of an international policy to streamline the chemical testing process. There are several international chemical policy programs currently being discussed. Two are programs under U.N. auspices:
One seeks to meet the World Summit on Sustainable Development's
2002 agreement that by 2020 chemicals should be used and produced to minimize adverse human health and environmental effects; the second program would develop a classification and labeling system for chemicals. A third program, under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, would focus on developing a testing and assessment program for chemicals produced in high volumes.
The United States would likely favor the OECD route because historically the United States has been more willing to join OECD talks than to participate in U.N.-sponsored programs. The United States prefers OECD because of the group's membership, which includes nations with large economies, and also because OECD does not have a permanent bureaucracy. It is also possible that U.S.
industry could choose to form a global chemicals policy -- not based on the precautionary principle -- to defuse the pressure from REACH in Europe in the absence of the passage of similar regulatory changes in the United States.
This is a survey published on the front page of The Los Angeles Times in the anniversary of the war on Iraq. It is an example of how the US media coverage of Europe is evolving. The terrorist attacks in Madrid seem to have somehow increased the attention of US media on the European Union. Will it last?
IRAQ: ONE YEAR LATER
Strained U.S.-European Relations Turn Pragmatic
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer
March 19, 2004
He's as ubiquitous as the Big Mac.
Europe can't shake the bowlegged cowboy peeking out from a too-big Stetson, arms bent and ready to draw. This political caricature of President Bush endures, even as transatlantic relations have improved from the derision and backbiting that one year ago marked the beginning of the Iraq war.
A lot has happened in that year. While the U.S. has been preoccupied with securing Iraq, Europe, in many ways, has set its own course. Perhaps more than the U.S. itself, Europe understands that the Sept. 11 attacks changed U.S. priorities and that Washington's old friends are often overshadowed by new strategic alliances.
The terrorist bombings in Madrid last week — possibly orchestrated by Islamic extremists to punish Spain for supporting the Iraq war — are forcing some European nations to reevaluate their partnerships with the U.S. The leader of the newly elected Socialist Workers Party in Spain has vowed to withdraw the nation's 1,300 troops from Iraq, a prospect that would undermine U.S. efforts to build an international coalition.
The specter of terrorism and differences over world security are turning the Cold War-era transatlantic friendship into steely pragmatism. The continent has a two-dimensional view of the U.S. Although most people in London, Paris, Berlin and other capitals feel an affinity for Americans, that closeness does not extend to a White House seen as rash and militaristic at a time when globalization needs patience and diplomacy.
"The last four years have been hell," said Francois Heisbourg, a foreign policy expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "The Bush administration's view of things is, 'You're either a poodle or an enemy.' The Bushies don't tend to forget."
Such widespread attitudes are softened by nostalgia many Europeans have for U.S. forces who liberated them more than half a century ago.
"If you go to the American cemetery in Cassino or the cemetery in nearby Anzio," said Italian waiter Dario Di Tiello, 40, speaking of his nation's World War II battlefields, "you can see how many Americans are buried there, how many came to save us from hell. We always forget these things. For me, the American people were a great people, they still are a great people."
The spate of across-the-pond name calling — Euroweenies versus cultural bimbos — has largely subsided. But Europeans have been reminded that they are more different from Americans than they once thought. Attitudes toward gay marriage, capital punishment and other social issues reveal the chasm between a liberal-leaning Europe and a conservative-tilting America.
And the Bush administration's weaving of religion through politics — especially when the president invoked God as he was going to war — unnerves European secularism.
"There's an extraordinary element of fundamentalist type of religion in American life," said Roger Duclaud-Williams, a political science professor at the University of Warwick in Britain, adding that he was bemused that Janet Jackson's flashed breast at the Super Bowl caused so much hand-wringing. "It's a kind of Christian-based Puritanism for which our educated governing class doesn't have much sympathy."
Europeans have tried to move beyond rancor when discussing Washington. Conversation is as dignified and proper as a tea party on the Thames. There are the occasional snide asides about Europe's moral authority and the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been unearthed in Iraq. But when the brandy is poured in the anterooms, or pints are hoisted in pubs, Europeans swoon and giggle over John Kerry, the continent's new poster boy.
"Kerry has Europe's Vote," said a headline in the Economist.
The Financial Times Germany has written of Kerry: "His first cousin is a French mayor. His father was a diplomat. He spent school years in Switzerland. He thinks the death penalty is bad and thinks the Kyoto Protocol, intended to protect the global climate, is good. If the Europeans were allowed to vote for the U.S. president this coming November, a triumph for the Democratic challenger John Kerry would be assured. Never has a U.S. president been so disliked in Europe as George W. Bush."
Some Europeans are quick to add that Kerry would be a pleasant change of personality, but that terrorism and shifting world hotspots would prevent him from significantly altering U.S. foreign policy.
The Madrid bombings have given Europe a keener understanding of acting within one's own interests and have raised challenging questions: Does supporting the U.S. mean bringing Islamic terrorism to European cities? If Spain withdraws troops from Iraq, what domestic pressures will Britain, Italy and Poland face to do the same?
"It comes down to fundamental differences in our societies," said Bernhard May, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations. "American society seems to be more inspired, a society with a mission. But Europe doesn't want to go around the world telling people how to live.
"What really is going on now between Europe and America is a working out of a relationship for the post-Cold War era. We should have had this discussion back in the 1990s, but we didn't. The fundamental question is, what kind of world order do we want?"
The iconic images of a gunslinger Texan helped change the political dynamics of the continent.
Antiwar fervor strengthened the Berlin-Paris axis. But it created animosity with countries that supported the war, such as Spain and Poland, and has strained the atmosphere as the European Union prepares to expand from 15 to 25 nations this year. Despite the EU's goal of cohesion, the continent is increasingly discovering that it can be compared less to a chorus than to a jazz ensemble, with each player fighting for his own solo.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair — whose backing of Bush cost him in the polls — these days wants to be known as a statesman "at the heart of Europe." Many in Blair's liberal-leaning Labor Party believe that staying cozy with Washington is political peril.
"We need to get George Bush out of the White House," Anthony Giddens, an unofficial Blair advisor, told a recent Labor Party gathering. Even members of the conservative Tories, who bonded so well with Ronald Reagan, see Bush as an impediment to transatlantic relations.
"Some of it's jealousy, the frustration that after [Bill] Clinton we thought we'd have our own guy in the White House and then it didn't turn out that way," said George Osborne, a Tory member of Parliament who supports Bush. "But the Bush frontier-style talk just doesn't go down well among Tories."
Europe's own problems often eclipse its worry about U.S. relations. The French and German economies are struggling. Health and social reforms are triggering voter anger. Immigration problems are roiling governments. Many wonder what will happen to the EU — once a privileged Western club — when it admits the Czech Republic and other former Soviet Bloc countries in May.
"The relations with the United States should not be our priority today," said Jean-Luc Turcouin, a French retiree. "We have to deal with our own national problems, the elections, the euro, the unemployment, the terrorism. This is what we should worry about."
But the U.S. is the new hyper-power, and Europeans acknowledge that the harsh rhetoric against Bush's military policies should not jeopardize the transatlantic alliance. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, for example, has declined French President Jacques Chirac's suggestion that Europe form a counterbalance to Washington. Analysts say the U.S. and Europe need each other, especially in the Middle East and in fighting terrorism.
For all the recent nastiness, Europe and the U.S. often complement each other. European diplomacy backed by a veiled threat of U.S. military prowess helped defuse the Iranian nuclear crisis and prompted Libya to renounce its chemical weapons programs. The continent and Washington are cooperating on a new role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as strategic interests move eastward. And Paris — the major European capital most estranged from Washington — is working with the Bush administration in Haiti.
"We have come to the conclusion that we went too far in the divorce," said Dominique Moisi, an analyst at the French Institute for International Relations.
It may never be a love fest. Europe and America have had more than 200 years of skirmishes and spats. America has been cast as the ambitious upstart less concerned with high culture than with making a buck, Europe as a bit of a relic that speaks eloquently but is skittish when it comes to action. The Cold War put a veneer over the rifts as Europe and the U.S. faced a common enemy. Now there are more mercurial foes — as the recent Madrid bombing reaffirmed — and the bonds of friendship are being recast.
Moisi said Europe and the U.S. might grow closer in coming years through an ironic twist. Under Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, Moscow is growing autocratic and restive as Europe integrates and becomes more of an economic power. This trend concerns European officials, some of whom believe Cold War ghosts are stirring.
"You suddenly start to be worried," Moisi said, "and you start to want a blend of U.S. and European cooperation."
*
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Times staff writers Janet Stobart in London and Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris, and special correspondents Nancy Meiman in Rome and Bruce Wallace in London contributed to this report.
A surge in the building of mosques is another sign of the transforming power of immigration. But the Islamic centers of faith also prompt fear.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 17, 2004
(Interesting story dealing with Turkey, immigration, and the impact
of Islam on national identities)
BERLIN — The chink and scrape of stonecutters echo through the gray-domed mosque that rises like a glimmer of misplaced architecture in a city where the Muslim call to prayer is a widening whisper.
Dusted in marble, workmen scurry in the muted glow of stained glass. Some paint Koranic verses on the walls; others make last-minute alterations to golden-tipped minarets pricking a drizzly skyline. Anxious Berliners sometimes peek into the courtyard, where Ali Gulcek, a husky, nimble man, assures them his religion is not a threat.
"I need to enlighten the Germans so their prejudice of Islam will go away," said Gulcek, whose Islamic organization is building the mosque. "Our mosque will be completed in May. We've wanted a legitimate mosque for so long. For years, we've been meeting in backyards and basements. We don't want to hide anymore."
Gulcek's mosque is part of the surge in Islamic construction sweeping Germany. The number of traditional mosques with their distinctive minarets nearly doubled in Germany from 77 in 2002 to 141 in 2003, according to Islam Archive, a Muslim research group in the city of Soest. An additional 154 mosques and cultural centers are planned, many of them in the countryside, where vistas are dotted with symbols of crescent moons and crosses.
Like the cultural battles over allowing Muslim women to wear headscarves in European schools, mosques are an indication that immigration is transforming social, religious and aesthetic landscapes. Staccato Turkish and throaty Arabic syllables whirl amid European vernaculars, and where once there was a German bakery there is now a Moroccan kebab stand. In some bookshops, the Koran is as prominent as the Bible, and Islamic worry beads sometimes rattle alongside rosaries.
Mosques are landmarks of faith. But in Europe they are also symbols of change that can instigate fear, especially as congregations at Christian churches steadily decline on a continent with the fastest-aging population in the world. A mosque often means a neighborhood is no longer what it was. Skin hues are darker, customs different, and society's failure at integration is laid bare.
For many Europeans since Sept. 11, mosques are perceived — unlike churches or synagogues — as caldrons of radicalism instead of places of worship. That sentiment is likely to endure if Islamic militants were involved last week's train bombings in Madrid that killed 201 people and wounded 1,500 others.
"Building a mosque won't create integration," said Werner Mueller, a pharmacist in a Berlin neighborhood where proposals for two mosques are encountering opposition from government agencies. "These new mosques will make Islam more visible, and jobless and angry Muslim men will go to them. They can become places infiltrated by political Islam."
Such sensitivity stems from the Al Quds mosque's link to Sept. 11: Mohamed Atta and other hijackers had regularly worshipped at the warren of rooms above a gym with smudged windows in Hamburg before they moved to the United States. Thousands of nondescript mosques, some tucked in alleys, others half-hidden in old factories, are scattered across Europe. There are nearly 2,400 in Germany alone, according to the Islam Archive.
The Berlin government is seeking more control over blueprints for larger mosques. The city's planning office wants veto power on all building projects that may impinge upon a borough's character. The veto proposal is expected to take effect this year and could complicate plans for four mosques in the city boroughs of Kreuzberg and Neukoelln. The government says it is not singling out mosques, but trying to bring uniformity to the skyline.
"Berlin has a large Turkish population," said Petra Reetz, a spokeswoman for the planning office. "That always has to be a consideration. But we are still a Central European town and we'd like to keep the face of a Central European town, not a Turkish town."
Such sentiments have made Mehmet Bayram a patient architect. The projects he treasures most, including mosques and Islamic cultural centers, are yet to be built, tangled in negotiations with government agencies. Bayram splices architecture, folding Islamic nuances into European designs to make Muslim edifices more palatable to the German eye. What could be considered minarets on the facade of one of his proposed cultural centers, for example, are instead spiraling stairwells.
Bayram described one project like this: "The main entrance gate has a European style, and on the third floor you will find Gothic arches. That is Christian architecture. The dome has a Turkish-Seldshuk form, and the little arches at the upper minarets are of Indian style…. It is my intent that the building's street level invites visitors to overcome their fears" about Islam.
Gulcek's mosque is being built south of the city center by the Turkish Islamic Union, one of several Islamic organizations in Germany overseeing construction plans for such projects. Most of Germany's 3 million Turks — the nation's largest minority — belong to the lineage of guest workers who began arriving here in the 1950s to fuel post-World War II reconstruction. This history has made the Turks more entrenched and better organized to finance and build mosques than newly arrived Muslims in other European nations.
Gulcek, a German citizen, moved to Berlin with his parents 24 years ago from the Turkish city of Kayseri. One recent day, as rain fell and the stonecutters sipped tea, Gulcek walked through the courtyard of the new mosque, where a cemetery faced Mecca and the hum of traffic drifted over the surrounding brick wall.
"It's taken 13 years to build," said Gulcek, a smiling, yet exasperated, diplomat of sorts between cultures. "The biggest problem was raising money from Berlin Muslims. Then we found out our minarets were too high, and we had to raise more money for a $100,000 fine from the borough. Why? It came down to a misunderstanding. We didn't know about German law, and the borough didn't tell us.
"It was difficult to explain our idea of the mosque to the Germans. We should have explained it better," he said. "If you communicate, there are fewer problems, but there always seems to be a lace curtain between Germans and Muslims. Europeans have a prejudice and a fear of change."
Communication often seems impossible. Mosque proposals throughout the continent have met with opposition petition drives and street protests. Many mosques and their Islamic clergy exist in parallel, almost sequestered spheres from the larger European community.
"The main problem with integrating mosques into German society is that many mullahs and imams are coming from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries," said Lydia Nofal, manager of Inssan, a multicultural organization battling with government agencies to build a 65,000-square-foot mosque and community center in Berlin. "One of our main goals is to get Islamic leaders from Germany so they know the language and the culture."
Navigating the sensitivities of race and religion can be difficult. On Sunday mornings, church bells peal throughout Europe's towns and cities. But in many mosques, the Muslim call to prayer, which in the Middle East crackles over loudspeakers atop minarets, is almost hushed. The devout check their watches for prayer times, and quietly kneel.
The mosque building boom, mirroring the growth of an Islamic population in Europe that has doubled over the last decade to between 13 million and 15 million, may be most pronounced in Germany. But France, home to Europe's largest Islamic community, has 49 traditional mosques, including nine large ones in Paris. The estimated number of mosques in Britain — most of them converted buildings, apartments or prayer rooms with no minarets — has jumped from 613 in 1996 to about 1,000 today.
In Berlin's Kreuzberg borough, on a street scented with skewered lamb and spices and flecked with women wearing head scarves, Heidemarie Weigand and her husband, Hans-Juergen, were having a going-out-of-business sale at their toy train store. Heidemarie said her old customers had died or moved away and few newcomers were buying engines and cabooses these days.
"There's so many Turkish faces. There are hardly any Germans here, and the foreigners have no use for trains," said Heidemarie, her graying hair brushed back over a mauve sweater. "Many Germans aren't happy about the mosques. I don't think Turkey would like it if we went there and built a bunch of Christian churches."
A few doors down, Burhan Kesici, a soft-spoken man with a round face and a thin beard, sat in a green leather chair and spoke of the mosques his Islamic Federation in Berlin hoped to build. He believes in integration, he said, and even went against the wishes of his Turkish parents and wife by becoming a German citizen. Kesici understands the sensitivities that arise as Islamic culture deepens its imprint on Europe.
"There are a lot of new Islamic projects in the Kreuzberg-Neukoelln area," Kesici said. "The Germans may be saying, 'This is dangerous for us. There's too much of a concentration of religion in a small area.' But we Muslims have to be seen as normal. The mosques will allow us to show ourselves off better to society. We can help with the crime and social problems in these neighborhoods."
The Islamic Federation represents 26 Islamic organizations and 12 of Berlin's 75 mosques — only three of which have minarets. The federation, Kesici said, is in the midst of tedious negotiations with Kreuzberg borough on the design of a $4.9-million mosque and community center project. The government wants the federation to shrink the mosque by 40% so it will not overwhelm the neighborhood.
"The world is changing," said Kesici, who has a political science degree from the Free University of Berlin. "The European Union is expanding, and people are living with different cultures. I am a German and a Muslim. But the head scarf and mosque issues are showing us they don't want to accept our values. They're saying, 'You can be German, but a second-class German.' "
Kesici's dream mosque, designed by architect Bayram, may remain a blueprint for several more years. Gulcek's mosque is stone and steel and colored-glass reality. It will open in two months. Christians and Jews and even secularists will be invited.
"Fifty years ago when the Turks first came," Gulcek said, "they went from their dormitory to the job and back to their dormitory. They would never have imagined that one day a mosque would be built here. And now Turkish businessmen have German employees. So I can imagine that in another 50 years names like Ahmed and Mehmet may sound natural to the German ear and one day may be even sitting in Parliament."
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Times staff writers Petra Falkenberg in Berlin and Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris and special correspondent Bruce Wallace in London contributed to this report.
The EU Internal Market commission has unveiled a new potential regulations for coporations following the book-cooking ways of Italian coporation Parmalat. The multinational dairy corporation collapsed in December after several employees were arrested for fraudulent bankruptcy and criminal association.
These regulations have been inspired by Enron and other U.S. corporate scandals. They have been something that has made the EU more mindful in detection, at least that's what this EU business article says.
This is another way that business exchange is happening between the US and EU.
Brussels unveils auditing clampdown in wake of Parmalat
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040316132355.uif12pga
Brussels unveils auditing clampdown in wake of Parmalat
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040316132355.uif12pga
16 March 2004
Stung into action by the Parmalat scandal, the European Union executive on Tuesday unveiled a raft of proposals to beef up corporate auditing and stop crooks "cooking the books".
The European Commission called on EU member states to adopt the proposals quickly in a bid to prevent accounting skullduggery of the type alleged to have brought down the Italian food group.
Among the headline proposals are a requirement for EU companies to set up audit committees staffed by independent directors, and to switch their auditing partner periodically.
"Auditors are our major line of defence against crooks who want to cook the books. Parmalat was a reminder of what happens when that defence fails," EU Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein said.
"No one is naive enough to think any directive will stop accounting fraud at a stroke. But what we are proposing would inject more rigour and a stronger dose of ethics into the audit process," he said.
Parmalat collapsed in December amid allegations of spectacular fraud to rival the downfall in 2001 of US energy giant Enron, another case that has inspired the EU commission's review.
Auditors Grant Thornton were responsible for checking the Parmalat group's accounts until 1999 and were succeeded as group accountants by Deloitte and Touche, although Grant Thornton remained responsible for auditing some offshore accounts.
Parmalat was declared insolvent on December 27 after money believed to have been in offshore accounts was found to have been missing.
Under the commission proposals, EU governments would require a company to change the person responsible for doing its auditing every five years, while staying with the same accounting firm.
Or, they could require the audit firm itself to be rotated every seven years. The aim is to stop the accountancy giants building too close a relationship with the companies under audit.
The proposals also lay down guidelines to prevent conflicts of interest for an accountancy company, which currently make most of their money from management consultancy and tag auditing work on as a cheap extra.
External directors would ensure the quality of the audit work and prevent untoward pressure being brought to bear on the audit firm by the company's board.
And the commission proposed to enshrine international cooperation with other corporate regulators, notably with the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).
That is recognition of the opaque financial structures favoured by some companies which make it harder for regulators and auditors to detect cross-border wrongdoing.
The commission said it hoped the European Parliament and EU member states would adopt the proposals by mid-2005, underlining the issue should be a priority for the bloc.
An interesting and useful account of recent Spain's history and its evolution from facism to a mature democracy.
Rebirth of a nation
In the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, the election in Spain changed the European dynamic in the war on terror.
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By Norman Birnbaum
March 16, 2004 | The shattering defeat of the conservative Spanish government by the Socialist Party, with its promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq and end Spanish support for the Bush doctrine, was a striking sequel to the terrible act of terror that struck Madrid. What happened at the polls on Sunday in Spain, however, can only be understood by retracing a half-century of Spanish history.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco, victor in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War (with a great deal of help from his allies Hitler and Mussolini), was a survivor. He abandoned his German and Italian friends as the fortunes of war turned against them, and he lived on as head of an authoritarian regime until his death in 1975. His regime was near collapse in 1959, but was saved by cash and support from the Eisenhower administration. The generalissimo may have garroted and jailed the opposition, clubbed strikers and kept women in medieval legal bondage, but he was, after all, reliably anticommunist. He offered the U.S. airports and ports to defend the Christian West.
By the time Franco died, Spain had dramatically changed. For its younger citizens, Che Guevara and Robert F. Kennedy were heroes. The young women who earlier were confined to convent schools went to universities in miniskirts. The aging dictator was seen as an unlovable patriarch whose time had come and gone. The church, meanwhile, was led by the great Vatican II cardinal, Tarracon. After one of Franco's speeches about increases in prosperity the cardinal said, "Spain has produced more of everything except justice." I asked a Spanish friend what it was like in 1975 as Franco lay dying. He said, "All you need to know is that in the entire country, there was not a bottle of champagne to be had in the stores."
The transition to parliamentary democracy was remarkably quick. The younger and middle-aged elites of the old regime recognized that Spain could not be deemed European unless and until it cast off fascism. In February of 1981, the irreducible fascists in the army seized Parliament and attempted a coup. After initial hesitation, the king put himself at the head of the nation and ordered the generals back to their armories. The coup was denounced at once by the European governments. (English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was especially firm.) The U.S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said that it was an internal Spanish matter on which he would not comment. U.S. forces in Spain had been confined to their bases that day, before the seizure of Parliament. Many Spaniards wondered on which side the U.S. had been so neutral.
Democratization continued. Many exiles had returned, and Spanish culture marvelously came to life (think of the films of Pedro Almodóvar and the novels of Manuel Vazquez Montalbán). The country achieved in a decade what took the Western Europeans a generation. They learned to live on the edge of the modern age. In 1982, the great party of the Spanish Republic, the Socialists, won the election under Felipe Gonzalez. The Socialists instituted a Spanish welfare state like the other European countries, but their main achievement was to consolidate the cultural Europeanization and democratic ethos that make Spain a vital modern nation. There were plenty of problems: A segment of the Basque movement that had been so active against Franco demanded total independence, and used terror. The Socialists employed repellent methods against them, death squads, which eventually came to light to undermine the Socialists' moral credentials. There was, too, corruption among Socialist officials, and a series of very public scandals. It is to Spain's credit that the scandals were public, but they certainly dampened the exaltation of the first decade of freedom.
In 1996, Jose Maria Aznar became prime minister as head of the Popular Party. The party was, as most modern parties are, a coalition. It included older elements distinctly nostalgic for the black-and-white (mostly black) days of Franco, liberal Christian Democrats and followers of Opus Dei (the half-secret conservative Catholic movement), high finance, entrepreneurs and technocrats. Its voters were drawn from the vastly enlarged urban middle class. Educated thanks to the Socialist expansion of higher education, their aging parents taken care of by the new social security system, they forsook the party that had made their prosperity possible. The Popular Party was very much in the tradition of the Spanish right; it insisted on a centralized Spain, sought to limit the federalism written into the constitution, and refused any negotiation at all with the Basque movement. Indeed, it treated the moderate Basque Party as no better than the independence movement -- and so undercut the chance for a peaceful compromise. Economically, the Popular Party launched a speculative boom visible in ever more housing construction at ever higher prices -- and a stock market surge.
The Socialists in 2000 warned that the government's failure to make long-term social investments -- in education, health services and research -- would cost Spain dearly. They were right, but their own project floundered. Their internal conflicts, serial changes in the leadership, and inability to find a suitable successor for Gonzalez led to a loss of energy and support among the unions, the young and the educated. Their electorate gradually receded to the groups most in need of social protection: the elderly and the poor. The continuing support of the critical intelligentsia hardly made up for losses in the larger cities.
Aznar won again, and with an absolute majority, which went to his head. He became increasingly contemptuous of the opposition, of his critics in the media, and of civil society. When in 2002 the oil tanker Prestige foundered off the Atlantic Coast in a gigantic ecological disaster, the government refused to accept responsibility for its incompetent management. Aznar's policies in education (a return to obligatory religious instruction, at the limits of constitutional legality), immigration (grudging where not xenophobic), and the economy (systematic deregulation) moved from liberal Christian democracy toward a fundamentalism of the right. He shocked many Spanish sensibilities by using L'Escorial, Phillip the Second's monument to himself, to stage the wedding of his daughter (complete with his friend, the Italian prime minister and conservative vulgarian Silvio Berlusconi in striped pants and a visibly pained royal family as guests.) Spain is a country of old social distinctions with a sense that these ancient inhibitions have outlived their usefulness. Many in the public thought they detected in their prime minister the soul of a parvenu.
Certainly there was something frenetic about Aznar's enlistment of Spain in the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq. He had a major role in obtaining the signatures of Tony Blair and Berlusconi for the letter of loyalty to the U.S. drafted by an obliging CIA agent -- a letter that enraged French Prime Minister Chirac and German Chancellor Schroeder and marked a large success for the Bush White House. Europe had been split.
Aznar refused parliamentary debates on the veracity of the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, denounced his critics as disloyal to the West and to Spain. His U.N. ambassador and his foreign minister read from a Bush script with dogmatic certainty. When on Feb. 15 last year over a million citizens took to Madrid's streets to join the worldwide protest, there was one episode of violence. As the police encircled the protagonists, they were instructed by the Interior Ministry to let them go -- they were, obviously, provocateurs. Aznar's visits to the Bush ranch and the White House, his speech before the Congress (or rather, before congressional staff), meanwhile increased his sense of self-importance. Aznar believed that he had made Spain, through the Bush connection, a major world power. The fact is, he separated his nation from its erstwhile European allies and evoked the suspicions of the Latin American nations. He also threw away, with astonishing casualness, Spain's legacy of close relations with the Muslim nations.
Aznar is, clearly, not devoid of a political sixth sense. Something told him not to run again, and he turned over the party to the more conciliatory figure of Mariano Rajoy. But the arrogance of Aznar and some of his ministers disfigured the campaign. The state TV channel was about as objective as Fox News: The journalists working there made their discontent known.
The Socialist campaign was doggedly consistent. Party leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero stuck to three themes. Spanish troops would be withdrawn from Iraq and the nation returned to a European foreign policy with a renewal of its close ties to France and Germany. Eleven percent unemployment and underinvestment in the future would be attacked by a comprehensive program of social investment. An open style of governance would be his method of conducting public business. Zapatero was intelligent, conciliatory and focused.
Like many others, I wondered if he had the necessary aggression to be a leader. Zapatero, the youngest member of Parliament when elected at age 26, was the protégé of Felipe Gonzalez. Clearly, the old master knew what he had. Zapatero dismayed many of his own partisans and the entire left when he said he would not claim the prime ministership if he did not attain more votes than the government's candidate.
By the middle of last week, the game seemed over. The polls suggested that the government would lose its absolute majority, but still win the election (the figures gave it around 41 percent and the Socialists 36 or 37 percent). Aznar, too, knew what he had when he named the gentlemanly Rajoy his successor: He was distinctly less threatening and irritating than Aznar himself. The Socialists (I talked with a number of persons who will now be ministers) were resigning themselves to another four years of opposition. The government's left and liberal critics in the media were hopeful that Rajoy would change the atmosphere, which they found detestable under Aznar. His hints and his own turns of phrase even led to hope that he would deemphasize the Bush alliance and move again toward Europe.
Then the catastrophe intervened, early in the morning of Thursday, March 11. Commuter trains filled with ordinary persons -- those who, in fact, had no cars with which to drive to work, namely immigrants, workers and students -- were blown up. As Madrid fell into chaos, the government announced that the culprits were the Basque separatist group ETA. Aznar himself telephoned the major newspapers to insist that the government knew this for a fact -- twice he called El Pais, the nation's most prestigious paper and one rather critical of him. The foreign minister instructed the ambassadors to tell foreign governments that this was what the government knew.
However, a vigilant citizen near one of the stations from which the trains had come noticed a van parked by men who were wearing ski masks on a mild March day. It was in the van that the police found detonators as well as a Quranic tape. A telephone in a backpack that contained unexploded bombs provided more clues. As millions took to the streets to protest on Friday, the intelligence agencies were already closing in on Islamist suspects. The government repeated the ETA story -- despite an ETA denial. The public officials involved spoke to Cadena Ser, the radio station owned by the El Pais group. Cadena Ser broke the story, evoking a great deal of abuse from the official media and the sobriquet "wretched" ("miserables") from the interior minister. The minister spent much of Friday and all of Saturday repudiating his earlier pronouncements.
Saturday, the day before the election, is by law a day of reflection -- without campaigning of any kind. Mobilizing by cellular phone, thousands gathered in front of the Popular Party's offices. The first hundreds who came were told by the police to leave and were asked for their identity cards. The crowd grew and the police formed a cordon around the building and did nothing. The crowd's slogans were clear: "We will not vote until we know the truth" and, more to the point, "Your war, our deaths." This was the taunt directed at both Aznar and Rajoy when they voted in Madrid the next morning. There were demonstrations of the same kind in front of the PP's offices in every major city. In the election, participation was 8 percent greater than four years ago. The additional voters were first-time voters and former Socialist voters who had abstained in recent elections or had moved to the Popular Party.
In the final tally, the Socialists increased their share of the vote from 34 percent in 2000 to 42 percent in 2004; the Popular Party decreased from 44 to 37. The Socialists gained 39 seats, and are 12 short of an absolute majority; the Popular Party lost 35. The Socialists actually gained 3 million votes, the Popular Party lost 700,000. Zapatero has the authority of the largest vote total ever recorded in democratic Spain.
Clearly, the Popular Party rightly feared that attention to an Islamist attack would remind the public of its responsibility for war on the side of the United States. Its subsequent attempts at deception were politically suicidal -- the work of leaders in the grip of panic. It enraged many in the public, recalled the government's arrogance in the recent past, and offended a populace that had good reason in familial memory to take democracy seriously. The distrust of the Popular Party, heightened by its response to the bombing, also reminded the citizens of their other grievances, economic and social. Zapatero's straightforwardness, originally depicted as boring, now became attractive.
Zapatero will be dependent upon votes from the smaller formations for his parliamentary majorities, but there is little doubt that he will obtain these. In his first press conference, he declared that the Spanish troops would indeed leave Iraq unless the provisional authority was replaced by a U.N. authority and Iraqi self-rule. He declared that Spanish foreign policy will now have three central points. One is to be a revival of the European connection, strengthening of the European Union and the European social model. The second is Spain's special relationship to Latin America, where the president of Argentina has already expressed his delight at the Socialist victory. The third is the United Nations as a framework for relations between the developed and impoverished worlds. (Presumably, Spain's U.N. ambassador, who was on Fox TV on Sunday evening pronouncing the election a triumph for terrorism, will be moving on. I rather like the old gentleman: He reminds me in dress and manner of an oblivious actor successfully playing the part of an official of the Franco regime, who hasn't been told Franco has died.)
The obstacles in the Socialists' path are many. The presumed responsibility of the Islamists for the attack may increase tensions, which are already considerable, between the Spanish population and the large numbers of Muslims living legally and illegally in Spain. Zapatero's break with the "coalition of the willing" is sure to excite Bush's retaliation, direct and indirect, open and covert. Nevertheless, Zapatero has had the courage to proclaim the break. At his press conference, he remarked that Blair and Bush were wrong about Iraq and he invited them to engage in self-criticism. His courage and determination align him with France and Germany and leave Berlusconi, already in serious difficulty on many fronts, exposed to still more domestic criticism.
George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and their servants in the American media have shown a curious view of democracy, never ceasing to praise the "courage" of foreign leaders who obey not their own electorates but the White House. Perhaps this display of Spanish independence will contribute to the education of the American public, which has been told to believe that other nations are to be taken seriously only when they are appendages of Bush's policies. In his campaign, Zapatero openly expressed the belief that the world would be better off with a President Kerry in office. Clearly, U.S. interference in the affairs of other nations has now generated the sort of reciprocity that Americans will have to learn to live with.
Back to Spain. William Faulkner remarked that in his native South the past wasn't over: "In fact, it isn't even past." Spain, too, is a society with an enormous amount of historical memory. The Popular Party is not a gang of fascists. However, its hypernationalist ideology, its authoritarianism, and its self-righteous lying were nonetheless unpleasant reminders of the past. People were reminded that Aznar's grandfather had a very successful career under Franco. Zapatero's was an officer in the Republican army, executed after being taken prisoner. When the crowds gathered in Madrid on Friday, there were two main chants. One was "Spain, united, will never be defeated." The other was, "The people, united, will never be defeated." The two Spains of 1936 seem still to be there.
Zapatero has said that he wants to be prime minister for all, and in a gracious concession speech, Rajoy promised to work with him in the national interest. Perhaps it has taken the impact of terror to open this as a possibility. But the election has already changed Spain and the dynamic in Europe, and given Americans reason to reflect on their possibilities.
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About the writer
Norman Birnbaum is professor emeritus at the Georgetown University Law Center. His most recent book, "After Progress, American Social Reform and European Socialism in The Twentieth Century," is an Oxford University Press paperback. He has just returned from Spain.
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In the same way as 9/11 has changed the US, 11-M (March 11th) will change Europe (and its relation with the US.) Our class must pay very close attention to this event and its consequences.
First, there are signs that it may contribute to bring people closer on an emotional basis. "Nobody thinks that it's Spain that has been attacked," a Parisian friend told me over the phone.
Several European head of government took part in the gigantic march held in Madrid's street to denounce terrorism. Romano Prodi, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Silvio Berlusconi, José Manuel Durão Barroso were there, as were prominent members from several governments, Joschka Fischer among others. Denis MacShane, British Secretary of State for European Affairs declared to El País: "It's the first time I have seen all Europe united, left and right, in an expression of total solidarity in front of the third historic totalitarism after Communism and Fascism."
In front of the attack, many Europeans turn to Europe and 11-M might contribute to the emergence of a more tightly woven European identity. If ETA was to be recognized as the perpetrator, it might be seen as a horrendous local Spanish affair. But an attack by Al Qaeda is seen as an attack against Europe. Germany has already called for an urgent reassessment of European security in front of what is seen as a "terrorist threat against Europe."
Second, this attack will affect the US-EU relationships. On one hand, Europeans should become more sensitive to Washington's call to fight terrorism world wide. On the other, it is significant that Spanish voters dismissed the government that brought Spanish soldiers into Iraq. After Schroeder's victory in Germany last year on the basis of his opposition to the war, it is the second government elected by Europeans opposed to Bush's policy.
Finally Bin Laden has just proven that he holds the capacity to affect the course of elections in major democratic countries. It has happened in Spain. It could happen in the United States.
"Given what is known from the strikes that continue to be mounted in other parts of the world, it seems likely that al Qaeda and its affiliates still command the resources and manpower necessary for conducting a major attack in the United States," wrote John Arquilla (who will come and visit us on April 20th) in an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle on February 1st.
Will Al Qaeda do it? Asked Arquilla and his answer was: "The outcome of the November election hinges on the answer."
San Francisco Chronicle – Will Osama rock the vote?
March 11, 2004
Union, but Not Unanimity, as Europe's East Joins West
By JOHN DARNTON
This article in the New York Times deals with an issue that we have discussed in our last class: the enormous amount of "homework" that the Eastern countries have had to do in order to be accepted in the EU, and how this has considerably reduced their enthusiasm. It is also a useful reading to try to understand what kind of stories can be "sold" to a large American newspaper on this subject.
PARIS — When the European Union expands eastward this spring, it will end the 65-year divide caused by the 20th century's hot and cold wars and shift the union from a plush club of 15 like-minded nations into a street bazaar of countries differing in wealth, stature and outlook.
What is today a tight configuration huddled around France and Germany that seeks to offset American power will on May 1 become an amalgam of 25 highly diverse states, including eight strongly pro-American former Soviet satellites.
Therein lies a paradox. The new European Union, stretching from the rocky shores of Ireland to Poland's forest border with Ukraine, will be in a better position than ever to serve as a counterweight to the United States. Yet the incoming members look more to Washington than to Berlin and Paris.
"In historical terms it's an extraordinary moment," noted Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford specialist in European studies. "It's been said that Europe has had a name for 2,500 years but is still in the design stage.
"France and Germany have led European integration for 40 years, and now that's clearly over. We have to wrestle with the question of who is going to set the agenda for this huge, sprawling entity of 25 states and 455 million people."
Scarred by their postwar existence in the shadow of the Soviet Union, most of the new members bring a different mentality and different habits. They are apt to be suspicious of distant bureaucracy in Brussels, as they were of Moscow, but eager to receive European Union handouts.
They tend to be idealistic, wanting to spread freedom and oppose totalitarianism, but also cynical about politicians and accustomed to corruption in everyday life.
"When we say Europe in Eastern Europe," said Andrei Plesu, a former Romanian foreign minister, "we usually think about something in the past, something we lost and have to regain.
"It's something in an old, faded photograph, the world between the two World Wars, a nostalgia, a longing. In the West, Europe is a project. In the East, it's a memory."
For both groups it is a bit of a chore.
In Eastern Europe, the once paradisiacal vision of "rejoining Europe" has lost its sheen, whittled down by years of slightly humiliating negotiations to join the union and new fears of being swamped by the powerful West.
In Western Europe, support for the enlargement is tempered by concerns that the Eastern countries will drain away wealth and jobs, complicating problems of economic stagnation and tensions over illegal immigration. The door is being opened reluctantly, with a shoulder-shrugging sense of noblesse oblige.
"We're not in a very good mood right now," said Olivier Duhamel, a professor at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. "We're worried about unemployment, immigration and the French identity, and when you put all that together, you fear enlargement. The only people talking about a bigger Europe these days are those talking against it."
In the formerly Communist East, the sense of anticlimax is almost palpable. "Entering the E.U. was always a dream," said Maciej Karpinski, a film producer with Polish Television, "but now that it's here it just doesn't feel substantial."
Few people in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other new member countries would go so far as to try to slam the door closed. Many still see the advantages — especially the young, who will now be able to travel to the West more easily — no passport required, just a quick flash of a national ID card — and to join student exchange programs.
But those of working age are particularly bitter that almost all of the 15 current Western members are imposing restrictions to keep out Eastern workers for several years. Others worry that Western products will push their own off the shelves or raise prices or push small-scale local farmers into oblivion.
As a result, May 1 — a day for workers observed under Communism with mandatory parades and lackluster banner-waving — is not likely to see a spontaneous outpouring of celebration. Even some dramatic official plans have fizzled, like one in Warsaw that would have wrapped the skyscraper called the Palace of Culture, infamous as Stalin's gift to postwar Poland, in gold.
Europeans have waked up to the fears and palpable differences that arise when borders come down, as seen in the unification of East and West Germany, where after more than a decade, disparities in wealth and spirit persist.
Up to now the belief in Europe was that as in Germany, most economic transformation would flow largely in one direction, from west to east. The unstated assumption was that the 380 million Westerners would be at the helm and that the 75 million Easterners would be lucky enough to be on board.
But now West Europeans worry that too many Easterners may sink the boat. They envision poor immigrants coming the other way, flooding their cities and burdening their bountiful welfare systems.
At the same time, the West is apprehensive about the combative mentality displayed by battle-hardened anti-Communist dissidents in many East European elites, and both sides worry about the political schizophrenia of "old Europe" and "new Europe" that emerged over the war in Iraq.
Poland, with a history of rebellion and its strong pro-American feelings, made plain at a failed summit conference in December that it does not expect to be treated as a second-class state.
"We can't put up with an E.U. in which France and Germany have the final say," said Adam Michnik, the former Polish dissident who now runs Gazeta Wyborcza, the major daily. "And we don't want an anti-American E.U."
That position springs, he and many others insist, not from blind lockstep obedience to Washington, but rather from a distinct East European sensibility.
Petr Pithart, president of the Senate in the Czech Republic, described it this way: "Why do we care about solidarity between Europe and the United States? It's the experience of two totalitarian regimes — the Nazis and the Communists. We're conscious of the fragility of democracy. That sense doesn't exist in Western Europe."
In Western Europe, said Jiri Pehe, director of New York University's Prague center, "it's anti-intellectual to think in a simplistic way about good and evil. Here, we say we know what's good and evil — it is simple. We've lived under it. We have a less foggy view of the basics."
It is of course unclear how long Eastern Europeans will cling to their cold war vision of the United States as the gravitational center of the West.
As long as they do, the scales of loyalty are likely to tip toward the Atlantic alliance so fundamental to British governments of the last 50 years. Yet most believe that those differences will eventually melt away, much as they have as Western Europe knits itself ever closer together.
"Geography will triumph over history," declared Tony Judt, a Europe specialist at New York University. "It will eventually matter more to the Eastern Europeans to be in the favor of Brussels, because day to day they will need Brussels."
Dennis MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe, observed: "The great fallacy is that as Europe gets bigger, somehow it gets more disintegrated. The evidence is that every new previous enlargement has been followed by the need for more sharing of sovereignty and someone to set the rules in Brussels."
Over time, too, the union's voluminous codification of laws and standards, some 80,000 pages long, may wear down Eastern Europe's rough edges, fostering political stability and reducing ingrained corruption.
An unknown factor here is the United States foreign policy. Officially and historically, Washington is on record as favoring a strong and united Europe, but what if the Continent becomes a monolithic competitor in economics and foreign policy?
Already there are divisions over the delicate question of whether the union should admit Turkey, a country of 70 million. Washington is pressing for admission on the ground that Turkey is a NATO member and a secular democracy that needs to find stability in the arms of Europe.
Europeans are deeply split over the question. Some say it would be impossible to conceive of a governing structure that could accommodate, say, Turkey and Germany, countries with comparable size of population but hugely different levels of development.
Others say opening the door to millions of Islamic immigrants — in addition to the millions of Muslims that Europe is already struggling to absorb — is asking for trouble because it will set off religious and ethnic feuding and provide fodder for far-right movements.
For some the question boils down to an often fruitless attempt to fix Europe's natural boundaries. For others it becomes an effort to define what it means to be a European.
Quickly, such conversations turn to intangibles, to talk of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and definitions offered centuries earlier by Dante and Voltaire. Some talk of a feeling of belonging that overcomes them in a Central European coffeehouse or of alienation when they visit the United States.
"It's paradoxical," Mr. Pehe said. "Here I'm a Czech. But when I go to the U.S., I'm looked at as a European, and then I feel I'm a European. It's one of those concepts that you see better from the outside."
French scientists and researchers have launched what appears to be a very serious protest movement. More than 2,000 just quit their jobs, and this affects about 50% of some of the most important research centers. A petition has received more than 60,000 signatures. Protesters want more money for research in order to avoid the brain drain. The government needs to cut expenses to stick by its eurozone commitments.
The movement might reach many intelectual workers in the arts, among teachers, nurses, doctors etc.
THis might be a serious issue when we go there and could be an interesting topic for those who want to write on technology, research and innovation.
A few stories have been published in English (see Google.News), but you should look into the French media sites.
BBC - French Scientists Halt Research
Le Monde - Plus de 2 000 chercheurs votent leur démission
Entre gouvernement et scientifiques, le conflit cache des oppositions sur les réformes structurelles
LE MONDE | 08.03.04 | 13h32
Les chercheurs se disent prêts à faire bouger les institutions, quand Matignon et l'Elysée semblent vouloir d'abord court-circuiter les grands centres tels que le CNRS, critiqué dans un rapport récent
"Sar-kozy -à-la-recherche. Sar-kozy-à-la-recherche". Absurde ? Certainement. Personne ne peut croire un instant à une telle éventualité. Mais le caractère volontairement provocateur de ce slogan de potache en dit long sur l'état d'esprit des quelque 62 000 signataires de la pétition du collectif Sauvons la recherche. Leur souci : être représentés et défendus par un "vrai" politique.
Faute de l'avoir été par "Luc Ferry qui n'existe plus" et par "Claudie Haigneré qui n'est ni une spécialiste de la recherche ni une politique", les chercheurs ont eu la surprise, vendredi 5 mars, de voir leur dossier repris par Matignon cinq jours avant que les directeurs d'unité et de laboratoire ne décident publiquement de démissionner. Le premier ministre a en effet reçu le professeur, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, président de l'Académie des sciences, et son vice-président, Edouard Brézin, pour discuter - ce qui a été apprécié du collectif - de la composition du comité chargé d'organiser des états généraux de la recherche et de l'enseignement supérieur que les chercheurs appellent depuis des semaines de leurs vœux.
Puis, Jean-Pierre Raffarin a sorti un lapin de son chapeau. Alors que son gouvernement a mis depuis des mois la recherche au régime sec et au silence, il s'est soudain engagé à ouvrir pour une période de trois ans (2005-2007) une ligne de crédit d'un milliard d'euros par an qui abonderait une future agence nationale de la science. L'annonce a d'abord surpris le collectif, puis l'a laissé de glace. "C'est une autre formulation, ont commenté ses représentants, d'une promesse ancienne -et répétée- faite par Jacques Chirac" de consacrer, en 2010, 3 % du PIB à la recherche.
Or, rappelle le porte-parole du collectif, le biologiste Alain Trautmann, "on a vu ce qu'il en était : une diminution de plus de 10 % des crédits de laboratoire en 2003". "Cette annonce n'est qu'une farce", avance un autre. "On nous répond par des miracles, constate Didier Roux, physico-chimiste à Bordeaux, alors que nos exigences sont beaucoup plus modestes : 550 postes qui coûteraient environ 20 millions d'euros". Pas de quoi amadouer les signataires du collectif qui n'oublient pas que le gouvernement refuse depuis des mois de négocier avec ses élites scientifiques. Pas de quoi non plus les rallier à la cause gouvernementale quand ils constatent que les fonds proposés concernent une agence des sciences encore à créer et pas du tout les organismes de recherche.
Ces derniers seraient-ils trop ingérables parce que "trop soviétiques"? Endogame, figé et à bout de souffle comme l'analyse le rapport sur le CNRS de la mission Guillaume publié par Les Echos dans son édition du 8 mars. Tout n'est pas faux. Les chercheurs en conviennent mais refusent la caricature et se disent prêts "à faire bouger les institutions" quand Matignon et l'Elysée semblent vouloir d'abord court-circuiter les grands centres et les grands instituts pour reprendre la main.
NI DE DROITE NI DE GAUCHE
"Bien sûr, concède un chercheur, le gouvernement actuel n'est pas coupable de tous les maux de la recherche. Bien sûr, il n'est que l'héritier maladroit de vingt ou trente ans de mauvais management de ce secteur."Mais, ajoute-t-il, les pouvoirs publics n'ont à ce jour offert comme seule porte de sortie qu'"un étranglement brutal des budgets de la recherche" assorti d'"une demande simultanée de fortes réformes". Impossible à gérer, répondent les grands noms de la science inquiets de cette ligne dure à l'heure où les Etats-Unis et le Japon investissent massivement dans leur recherche publique.
"Il serait donc idiot aujourd'hui, plaide Didier Roux, de gâcher cette chance historique de débattre et de faire s'exprimer les gens de la recherche et de l'université sur la vision qu'ils ont de l'avenir." C'est un "moment inespéré, disent-ils, pour engager des réformes" et construire une loi d'orientation globale. La recherche, répètent les chercheurs, n'est ni de droite ni de gauche. Ce ne doit pas être non plus le triomphe d'une ligne dure, voire thatchérienne, de libéraux irréductibles sur une mollesse supposée complaisante d'une gauche a priori acquise. La recherche, "c'est d'abord la France de demain".
Or, aujourd'hui, "on met la charrue avant les bœufs", constate Jacques Boulesteix, astrophysicien à Marseille, car ce n'est pas seulement "un problème de crédits". La première des priorités, "ce sont les jeunes chercheurs auxquels nous devons transmettre notre capital et notre savoir". Certes, on peut toujours mettre de l'argent pour continuer à "faire marcher le système" comme avant et "vieillir ensemble", a regretté, samedi 6 mars, sur LCI, le biologiste Axel Kahn, directeur de l'Institut Cochin de biologie moléculaire et l'un des premiers signataires du collectif. Mais, pour lui, la vision comptable qui consiste à substituer à la pensée des "mots magiques" comme "immobilisme" ou "statut de fonctionnaire" n'est certainement pas de nature à résoudre les problèmes et à ouvrir les débats.
Jean-François Augereau
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Le soutien des chercheurs étrangers
Des chercheurs étrangers, parmi lesquels le Prix Nobel de médecine 1991, des membres de la Royal Society (Royaume-Uni) ou de la National Academy of Science (Etats-Unis) apportent leur soutien à leurs collègues français en mettant en garde contre le risque d'un déclin "irréversible" de la science française. Dans un texte circulant sur Internet et publié dimanche 7 mars par le Journal du dimanche, ces scientifiques de renom se disent "extrêmement préoccupés par la situation actuelle de la science en France". Les financements des laboratoires français "ont décliné, tandis que le soutien financier de la recherche fondamentale augmentait rapidement aux Etats-Unis, au Japon et plus récemment en Chine", écrivent-ils. "Parce que des augmentations budgétaires similaires n'ont pas eu lieu en France, nos collègues ont perdu leur capacité à faire face à la concurrence internationale". Evoquant les réductions de budgets et de postes, les chercheurs étrangers affirment que cela a introduit, "en plus des difficultés financières", la peur que les jeunes scientifiques "choisissent soit une autre carrière, soit un autre pays".
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 09.03.04
Plus de 2 000 chercheurs votent leur démission
LEMONDE.FR | 09.03.04 | 09h16 • MIS A JOUR LE 09.03.04 | 16h31
"La démission n'est ni une fin en soi, ni un arrêt du mouvement, c'est un passage obligé", a lancé mardi le porte-parole du collectif Sauvons la recherche. La veille, le premier ministre, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, estimant qu'"une démission n'est jamais un succès", a affirmé ne pas souhaiter "que la renommée scientifique internationale de la France soit ainsi fragilisée". Les chercheurs en appellent au chef de l'Etat.
Plus de 2 000 chercheurs (976 directeurs d'unité et 1 110 chefs d'équipe), réunis mardi 9 mars en assemblée générale à l'Hôtel de ville de Paris, ont voté massivement pour la démission de leurs responsabilités administratives, a annoncé le porte-parole du collectif Sauvons la recherche, à l'issue d'un vote à bulletin secret. Ils ont ensuite rejoint plusieurs milliers de chercheurs, qui étaient rassemblés sur la place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville pour manifester leur soutien à leurs patrons démissionnaires, afin de marcher jusqu'au ministère de la recherche, où ils doivent remettre symboliquement leur démission.
Pour trois des plus grands organismes de recherche - CNRS, Inserm (recherche médicale) et INRA (recherche agronomique) - 50 % des directeurs d'unité ont démissionné, a annoncé M. Trautmann.
Le collectif en a appelé au président Jacques Chirac et a annoncé une "nouvelle date-butoir", le 19 mars, afin d'obtenir des moyens accrus pour la recherche publique. "Si, à la nouvelle date-butoir du 19 mars, le gouvernement et le président de la République n'ont pas répondu de façon plus satisfaisante (à nos revendications), nous organiserons une grande manifestation des chercheurs à laquelle nous appelons tous les citoyens", à deux jours du premier tour des régionales, a déclaré le porte-parole du collectif. "Nous attendons un fort soutien de l'opinion publique", a-t-il ajouté.
ÉTATS GÉNÉRAUX
En outre, les chercheurs réunis à Paris ont lancé officiellement leurs propres états généraux de la recherche. "C'est un chantier pour nous très important pour faire aboutir nos recommandations", a souligné M. Trautmann. Les détails de l'organisation de ces états généraux, l'un des points forts des revendications des chercheurs, devaient être donnés en fin d'après-midi au cours d'une conférence de presse à l'Académie des sciences. Le gouvernement avait annoncé l'organisation d'états généraux, mais n'a pu trouver un accord avec les chercheurs sur les modalités de leur organisation.
Dans une interview parue mardi dans Libération, le premier ministre, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, avait pour sa part déclaré : "Nous ne sommes pas dans un marchandage à la petite semaine mais face à la construction de l'avenir du pays". Prenant acte à l'avance de la décision des chefs de laboratoire, M. Raffarin avait estimé qu'"une démission n'est jamais un succès" : "J'aurais forcément une réaction de tristesse parce que je ne souhaite pas que la renommée scientifique internationale de la France soit ainsi fragilisée." "Quand on met 3 milliards d'euros sur la table pour la recherche [d'ici à 2007], on met beaucoup plus que ce que nous faisons pour beaucoup d'autres catégories professionnelles", insiste-t-il.
Mais le chiffre de 3 milliards d'euros, annoncé samedi par Matignon, n'a pas convaincu les chercheurs. "Si ces 3 milliards se concrétisent, on sera très contents, avait réitéré, lundi, le porte-parole du collectif Sauvons la recherche. Mais pour l'instant, il ne s'agit que d'une reformulation de la promesse faite par Jacques Chirac de consacrer 3 % du PIB à la recherche. Ce qu'il aurait fallu (...), ce sont des réponses concrètes et non pas faire une autre promesse."
Selon un sondage CSA pour La Croix, le mouvement est approuvé par plus de quatre Français sur cinq (82 %). 47 % déclarent "soutenir" le mouvement et 35 % avoir "de la sympathie", seuls 12 % exprimant de l'"indifférence" et 5 % se déclarant "opposés" ou "hostiles".
Dans l'immédiat, la décision des chefs de labo aura surtout une portée symbolique. Mais très rapidement, elle pourrait entraîner une paralysie de l'appareil de recherche : les directeurs démissionnaires ne commanderont plus de produits ou de matériel pour les laboratoires, ou ne signeront plus d'ordres de mission pour le déplacement des chercheurs.
Lemonde.fr avec AFP et Reuters
The piece is very short and includes some important information of Galileo, and I think it will be helpful to people who are pursuing defense stories as well as others, as Galileo is not only an EU issue but is also connected to the EU-US relations.
It is from European Voice. By David Cronin and Dana Spinant
JAVIER Solana, the EU’s foreign policy supremo, would be given the power to switch off the Galileo satellite system if it is misused in a way that endangers the security of the European Union, under a plan due to be discussed by member states’ diplomats in the coming weeks.
According to the blueprint, seen by European Voice, the high representative for foreign affairs would issue instructions “to take any measure necessary to safeguard the security” of the EU. The concession holder of the system “shall immediately execute any instructions addressed to him”.
Solana “would be responsible for matters where the operation of the system affects the security of the Union or the member states”, “in particular as a result of an international crisis, a threat to the proper operation or actual misuse of the system”.
The plan states that all aspects of Galileo “relating to the security of the Union or of the member states are handled by the Council”. Management “of all aspects relating to the system’s safety” would be given to a supervisory authority, which has representatives from member states and the European Commission.
However, the high representative would have the power to intervene in “exceptional cases, where the urgency of the situation is such that it requires immediate action”.
A diplomat involved in the drafting of the paper said that was a proof member states “genuinely trust” Solana.
“But at the same time,” he added, “somebody must be in charge of it [Galileo], somebody that can take decisions quickly.
“It is not a responsibility you can give to the presidency – in the future maybe a collective presidency – or to the Commission.
“Like it or not, it must be Solana.”
A network of 30 satellites, Galileo is principally a civilian navigation system, designed for such tasks as locating distressed mountaineers or ships in danger of capsizing. However, defence experts have pointed out the €3.2 billion system could be used by military planners to manage troops and munitions more effectively.
In a recent study, the Paris-based European Union Institute for Strategic Studies said that “even if Galileo remains a civilian project, security issues will persist”. Because the system will have global coverage and will offer much of its services to private firms, it could have unintended users and uses, “with implications for the EU and its allies”.
The US had harboured reservations about Galileo for some time, viewing the project as a rival to its Global Positioning System (GPS).
But a deal was struck between the Commission and Washington on the project last week (25 February), under which Galileo would use the same ‘free signal’ as the GPS.
The Americans have insisted this signal would be better to avoid potential interference with the GPS military signal.
Romano Prodi, the Commission president, has been one of the strongest advocates of Galileo, which he regards as essential to strengthen the Union’s status as an economic superpower.
The system, designed by the Commission and the European Space Agency, received a major boost in September last when China agreed to contribute €203 million towards its cost.
The French governement is facing a strange blackmail by a group calle "AZF". It threatens with putting bombs under railways in the coiming weeks, and wants some money in exchange for not doint it.
Stratfor gives a thorough account of the issue, and notes that it is not done in the style of traditional Islamist terrorists. AZF describes itself as "a pressure group with a terrorist character created in a secular brotherhood."
Stratfor.com - France and the AZF Threat: More Questions Than Answers
France and the AZF Threat: More Questions Than Answers
Summary
Very little is known about a group calling itself AZF that has threatened to detonate bombs along French railways. Although the case smacks of a classic extortion bid, several curious aspects belie an easy explanation. What is known is that Paris bungled an attempt to pay the ransom, and with the story now public it will be more difficult to pay away the problem -- meaning the risk of actual explosions along French railways in coming weeks could be substantial. The political dangers to French conservatives also are quite real.
Analysis
A previously unknown group calling itself AZF has threatened to detonate 10 bombs at various dates over the next several weeks unless the government coughs up a ransom of $4 million, plus an additional 1 million euros, the French government confirmed March 3. Eight of the bombs are said to be planted along French railways with two others placed in areas where security is low.
Paris admitted to the plot following a March 3 report in the Toulouse daily La Depeche du Midi that broke a self-imposed national news blackout on the case requested by the French government. One source told Stratfor that French media had been barraged with at least 100 faxes from the group, but that the French government had mounted an unprecedented effort to keep a lid on the story while it negotiated with AZF. The lid is now off, and negotiations apparently have stopped.
There are more questions than answers about just who AZF is and what they want -- besides cash (and that could be all they want).
Early speculation was that Islamist radicals or Chechen rebels might be behind the campaign. France has been on high alert for months over concerns that Islamist cells and Chechen rebels might attack France using sophisticated bombs or ricin.
Stratfor sources close to French intelligence, however, say Islamist extremists have been ruled out as suspects, and they are skeptical about the possibility that Chechen rebels could be behind the plot. The method of operation fits neither group.
Chechens and Islamists tend to lean toward using suicide or car bombings, rather than timed explosives. And neither group is known for warning of attacks in advance or communicating directly with targets. Also, neither group undertakes operations for fund- raising purposes (extortion); they have other more sophisticated and less risky funding methods and sources.
In contrast, various facts in the case make it seem much more like a classic extortion bid. It fits the general pattern -- warn the target, demonstrate capability and then set up for a payment.
One source, who has been working on the case and rejected the Islamist option, says the operational mode makes it look like some form of extortion, possibly by an organized crime group or radical leftists on a fund-raising campaign. Yet there are several curious aspects to the case that complicate such an explanation.
One is the mixing of standard extortion techniques with the claim that the group has some sort of political axe to grind. In one letter to the government, AZF described itself as "a pressure group with a terrorist character created in a secular brotherhood." Just what they are pressuring for has not been made clear, and the description could be a cover.
Another curiosity relates to the relative sophistication that the group has demonstrated. A tip in one of AZF's communications led French police Feb. 21 (via global positioning satellite
coordinates) to a time bomb buried under the tracks near Limoges in central France. The bomb was meant to demonstrate the group's determination and capability --and apparently did. The bomb was equipped with what has been described as a "sophisticated"
detonator that was not primed to explode. A source close to the investigation notes that the Limoges bomb would have been impossible to find with either explosives-trained dogs or a metal detector due to a protective wrapping designed to make it undetectable.
The French Interior Ministry later described the explosive as "complex, efficient and in working order." Under a controlled explosion, the bomb broke a rail, meaning detonations -- if done at the right time or left undiscovered -- could derail a train.
The government considers the threat to be very serious, and all police and counterterrorism forces are on special alert.
The bomb's alleged sophistication, the use of GPS coordinates and the ability of the group to hold Paris in its grip for several weeks demonstrate that those behind AZF are not amateurs. A source involved in the investigation agrees with the assessment that whoever AZF is, they are organized and their plans are well thought out. However, compared to the level of sophistication and the extent of the plot, the ransom -- a little more than $5 million -- is paltry, especially for something like an organized crime syndicate. Insurgents in Latin America have been known to get that much in exchange for a single corporate executive.
The name itself is a curiosity. AZF is the name of a chemical plant owned by French oil major Total that exploded in Toulouse in September 2001. Thirty people died in the blast, which investigators concluded was accidental. Current investigators have not yet made any direct connection between that blast and the current threat, but there were rumors at the time of the Toulouse blast that a ransom might have been involved, adding another layer of mystery to the case.
The French investigation is divided into two parts, a source says. One group, mainly top police officers, is investigating the organized crime angle, while another (counterterrorism and
intelligence) is focusing on other options. Among those options
are: people on the government's "black list," i.e., people angry at the government and/or seeking revenge (this could be personal); leftists, anarchists or anti-globalization militants (although they could lack experience with detonators); hostile religious sects or groups; militants (although mainstream terrorist groups like Islamists, Corsicans, Basques or far-right militants are considered unlikely by the authorities).
Missed Drops and Complications
Although little is known about AZF, press reports have made one thing clear: Paris bungled an attempt to pay the ransom, and with the story now public it will be more difficult for the government to pay away the problem.
AZF first surfaced in December with a letter to French President Jacques Chirac in which it criticized the government, the media and the French school system, and threatened unspecified attacks.
The group sent several follow-on letters to Chirac and the Interior Ministry over the next two months, including the letter that led authorities to the Limoges bomb. There has been at least one communication by telephone, with a woman speaking for AZF, while someone else was heard near her while she was calling, a source indicates.
Le Monde reported March 5 that French officials have been in touch with the organization through coded newspaper advertisements. The latest of these was published March 3 in the left-wing daily Liberation and read: "My big teddy bear: Didn't see your blue scarf. Get in touch. Suzy." The teddy bear is AZF, and Suzy is the French authorities. According to Le Monde, this is a contraction of the name of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, meant to needle the tough-on-crime official. The message refers to a missed attempt to pay the demanded ransom.
Le Monde reported March 3 that the government twice attempted a "drop" of the ransom, first atop the Montparnasse Tower in Paris and -- after AZF changed its mind -- in a wooded area near Montargis in central France. A police helicopter dispatched March
1 to make the payment could not find the drop spot, marked by a blue tarp, in the darkness.
Two days later, the story broke and things have become much more complicated for the government. Paying the ransom will be more difficult, if not impossible, especially with front-page headlines such as "Who's blackmailing the state?" (Le Figaro) or "Blackmail on the tracks" (Liberation).
Tough-talking Sarkozy, Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will have a difficult time "negotiating with terrorists," especially after running in the most recent elections on a platform of being tough on crime. An inability to deal with the situation decisively could create real problems for the conservatives as they face important regional elections March
21 and 28 -- just about the time various bombs could be going off underneath French trains.
This does not leave Paris with many options. AZF reportedly warned that it would sever contact with the government for 15 days and start exploding bombs if the story went public. If the group stands by that threat -- and if it really has planted 10 other bombs and is ready to use them -- the threat to the French rail system could be substantial over the coming weeks. A source tells Stratfor that AZF claims there are eight bombs planted in a 200-kilometer-wide (124-mile) circle around Paris. France lies at the center of the European rail network, which is a vital piece of European commerce and the primary means of travel for millions of Europeans. Any explosions along French rail lines could have implications across Europe.
The government's strategy now appears to be running on two tracks. On one, it looks to be hoping to re-establish contact with AZF and continue negotiations. An aide to Sarkozy told French radio RTL on March 5: "Perhaps contact will be renewed. I hope so, but today we have no more contact."
At the same time, the government is expanding its interdiction measures. On March 4, thousands of railway workers were dispatched to inspect nearly 20,000 miles of tracks for bombs.
Nothing was found. Also, top anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere has been charged with investigating the case. He joins a vast group of police and intelligence personnel trying to find answers to a multitude of questions.
These series of articles address Prime Minister' Blair's recent speech, in which he defended pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein.
He said, "This is not a time to err on the side of caution." Apparently, they prefer to "err" on the side of intelligence. He also mentions the cases of Afghanistan and Kosovo, and why "action" was appropriate then. Keep in mind, there was some form of international consensus in these attacks.
I can't imagine France and Germany are going to swallow this. Blair is saying, in a new world order, we are going to have to accept what is in essence the Bush Doctrine of attack by any means necessary.
At a time when unilateralists are saying that the EU should have no recognition as an international body, such as a seat on the UN, Blair's speech strikes me as undermining the EU.
If We Ignore Threats, We are in Mortal Danger, The Guardian
'If we ignore threats, we are in mortal danger'
PM sets out new credo and tries to draw line under war row
Sarah Hall, political correspondent
Saturday March 6, 2004
The Guardian
Tony Blair gave his most detailed defence for going to war so far yesterday, saying that Britain was in "mortal danger" of underestimating the threat of global terrorism as he urged his critics to draw a line under the issue.
In what amounted to a personal testimony of his reasons for taking the country into conflict, the prime minister said the September 11 terrorist attacks had been a "revelation" that had convinced him of the need to tackle rogue states and "religious fanatics" prepared to "bring about Armageddon".
Speaking in his Sedgefield constituency, he suggested that international law should be reformed in light of a security threat that was "of a different nature from anything the world has faced before".
For the first time he conceded that Saddam Hussein might not have acted if the allies had not taken military action, but he stressed that, against the backdrop of global terrorism and the proliferation of WMD, he could not have "erred on the side of caution".
In combative mood, he said: "It is monstrously premature to think the threat has past."
Using Churchillian language, he added: "This war is not ended. It may only be at the beginning of the end of the first phase."
Mr Blair was given a standing ovation after delivering his speech to 150 regional businesspeople. But the speech was aimed at a far wider audience: the growing body of the public questioning his justification for going to war.
As he is dogged by renewed questions about the legality of going to war and calls for him to publish the attorney general's advice, the speech was an acknowledgment that the issue is preventing him drawing attention to the domestic agenda, which he hopes to return to, with a general election possibly only 15 months away.
Describing the decision to go to war as the most divisive he had ever had to make, Mr Blair admitted that the issue could not "just be swept away".
But he suggested that the reasons for attacking Iraq needed to be debated, not to curb attacks on his integrity but to remind critics - preoccupied with the "elaborate smokescreen" of rows about the war - of the gravity of the security risk.
While giving a passionate account of his reasoning, he adopted a far more conciliatory tone towards those opposed to the war than he has used before, telling his audience: "I have never disagreed with those who disagreed with the decision ...
"There was a core of sensible people who faced with this decision would have gone the other way for sensible reasons. The argument is one I understand totally".
He suggested such people were misguided, however, in not appreciating the extent of the threat.
"We are in mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the world in which we live ... The threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before."
Mr Blair went on to argue that even before September 11 the traditional justification for military action had changed, as support grew for the the notion of intervening - as in Kosovo - on humanitarian grounds.
September 11 crystallised this thinking. "September 11 was for me a revelation ... What galvanised me was that it was a declaration of war by religious fanatics who were prepared to wage war without limit."
He referred to the growing amount of intelligence he received on terrorism and WMD, and stressed that, as prime minister, he did not "have the luxury" of not coming to a decision.
Admitting that Saddam Hussein might not have acted, he said: "Do we want to take the risk? That is judgment. And my judgment then and now is that the risk of this new global terrorism and its interaction with states or organisations or individuals proliferating WMD is one I simply am not prepared to run.
"This is not a time to err on the side of caution."
In a move backed by the Tory leader, Michael Howard, he also repeated his call for reform of the United Nations, to make its security council fit for the 21st century, and suggested a shake-up of international law so that action could be taken against tyrannical states.
"It may well be that under international law as presently constituted a regime can systematically brutalise and oppress its people and there is nothing anyone can do ... This may be the law, but should it be?"
The Tory leader said it was "right that we have a serious debate about whether international law needs to be reviewed. This raises three important questions - Is reform necessary? What form should it take? Can it be delivered?"
But Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said: "If the UK is to embrace a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, that will be a major departure from the foreign policy principles of successive governments since the creation of the UN."
His leader, Charles Kennedy, accused the prime minister of being "astonishingly defensive" and of deliberately mixing up the issues of global terrorism and Iraq in an attempt to construct a justification for the war.
But the veteran Labour MP Tam Dalyell, an arch critic of the war, denounced the speech as "passionate, self-justifying drivel".
Many young Europeans are not clear on how to charactize what it means to be European, according to this International Herald Tribune article, except to say that it is everything that the US is not. The lack of self-identity has to do with the long history and various cultures that make up the European Union, blurring a clear identity, which will become even more unclear as 10 more countries join the union.
I think this article is very insightful for non-Europeans in general, but especially for us, since it delves into the minds of Europeans in their 20s and 30s and shows how they view themselves and the difficulties and complexities involved. It's as if they need America to define who they are, which signifies how strong of an influence the US has had globally and supports the notion of Imperialism.
International Herald Tribune
For young Europeans, identity questions
BY Sarah Lyall
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
For young Europeans, identity questions
Sarah Lyall/IHT
Thursday, March 4, 2004
PRAGUE As one of the new generation of European businessmen who fly around the Continent as readily as others might take the bus across town, Petr Eisler feels at home in Europe, mostly. It is only now and then, like when he arrives at the immigration desk at London's Heathrow Airport, that he is suddenly flung back into his old role as an outsider at the European party.
"They're always asking me how long I plan to stay, and do I have enough money with me," said Eisler, 39, who founded his software company in the Czech Republic more than a decade ago, speaks fluent English and recently opened an office in London. Once, he was traveling with a former industry minister of the Czech Republic and was startled to hear the same questions being asked of him, too - a sign, at least, that such Western inhospitality is nothing personal.
As the European Union prepares to open its doors to 10 new countries in May, people in their 20s and 30s interviewed here and elsewhere in Europe say that they feel part of the Continent yet separate from it. The feeling has partly to do with the way European countries have historically perceived each other, and partly to do with puzzlement about what Europe - not the physical place, but the philosophical concept - really is.
To the extent that there is an entity called Europe, with a distinguishable identity, culture and world view, many young Europeans say they are not so sure how to characterize it, except perhaps in describing what it is not. With America now the only real world power left in the post-Soviet landscape, there is a growing sense that Europe, in so far as it exists as an idea, can best be defined as the anti-America.
This appears to be true among the younger generation in Prague, part of the former communist Europe that has lately allied itself with the United States, even as Western Europe shies away from it.
"As with all identities, the easiest way to create an identity is to create it as against something else," said Adam Pulchart, 26, who is studying for a master's degree in European studies at Charles University in Prague.
"The rudimentary European identity I have is formed against the United States, against the image of America as the new imperialist superpower that regards everything that happens in the world in the context of its own national interest."
To some Czechs, American patriotism, particularly in the Bush era, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Soviet rhetoric of old.
"I remember all of this from the Russians, the same treatment of history," said Tereza Spencerova, who writes for Mlady Svet, a weekly magazine. Spencerova said she recently heard a joke about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a hapless student who asked an uncomfortable foreign policy question and later mysteriously disappeared. She said she had heard the same joke 15 years ago, but with a Soviet official in place of Rumsfeld.
"Once Bush started the war against terrorism, he started to use strong language that was the same as what the Russians used, like 'Who's not for us is against us,'" Spencerova said. "Europeans get nervous when someone comes and says that his truth and his world view are the only acceptable ones."
If Europe is not America, then what is it? Is there such a thing as a recognizable European identity?
It depends on whom you ask.
"Unfortunately, the answer is no," said Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the 37-year-old founder of the low-cost airline EasyJet. Born in Greece, Haji-Ioannou has homes in London, Monaco, New York and Athens, and is almost always on the road. He says he feels Greek in England, English in Greece and European in America.
"I wouldn't expect that everyone should suddenly feel European," he said. "Is someone from Alaska the same as someone from Florida? I think not."
Jan Vavra, the director and co-owner of a public relations firm in Prague, agreed. "For me, integration is good when it comes to commercial contracts and common legislation, but I don't believe there will be a new European man - there are too many differences in language and tradition from country to country," Vavra said in his office in a quiet corner of Prague.
"We can cooperate and be friends; we can make businesses and art together; and we can study in different countries. But that doesn't mean we will lose our nationality."
The more one scratches the surface, the more one realizes that many stereotypes still apply, at least in people's minds. To their European neighbors, the French are regarded as supercilious, the Germans as hyper-organized, the British as repressed and the Italians as chronically late.
"The global thinking is the same, but there are small, specific differences," said Zuzana Pitrova, 28, an executive at the Czech edition of Metro, a free newspaper with editions in 16 countries.
Pitrova said she was horrified when her boss, a Swede based in London, remained in his chair with his feet propped up on the table at their first meeting. "I'm a Czech woman, and I expect that a man will at least stand up when I walk into a room," she said.
Pitrova's European acquaintances do not consider her one of them, exactly. Her husband is American, and when they run into British friends, she said, "They look at me like, 'Oh, an Eastern-bloc chick who got married to an American so she could move to America.'" (For the record, the couple plans to move to Tokyo in the autumn.)
She said that with colleagues, too, her nationality can be a handicap. "They don't consider me European," she said. "They don't think my skills are as good as theirs, being from the Czech Republic."
The more Europeans come together, it seems, the more their differences are emphasized, even under an umbrella of similarities.
David Cerny, a 36-year-old sculptor in Prague, said "exaggerating national distinctions is part of the fun" of the new Europe.
Last summer, Cerny - who learned English from Beatles records and says he feels equally at home across the Continent - described the Czech population in an interview with a local newspaper as "an unmixed, uninteresting, slightly dumplingish, untanned mass" and lampooned "this constant stroking oneself on the belly stuffed with pork, sauerkraut and dumplings."
He applies the same broad view to other countries, too, particularly Germany. "It's like someone from New York talking about Texas," Cerny said. "Except that Texas never attacked New York and killed a couple of million people."
The tendency of national pride to slide into militant nationalism and even xenophobia is the dark side of European integration.
As the countries of Europe move closer together, their differences become exaggerated, especially to those who are suspicious of outsiders and worry about permeable borders, the influx of newcomers and a loss of national identity. Anticipating May 1, most West European countries have passed laws restricting the entry of workers from the new EU member countries, a cause of dismay to the poorer eastern countries.
In the Czech Republic, the post-Communist era has been marked by an increase in racial violence, particularly against members of the Roma minority, who have long been persecuted in central Europe.
Isolated during the Soviet era, Prague is more international than ever.
Americans by the tens of thousands moved here in the 1990s. Charles University is awash in students from across Europe who spend a semester or two under the auspices of the Erasmus and the Socrates programs, EU-sponsored exchanges.
But the country as a whole has a reputation for not welcoming outsiders.
"We're afraid of foreigners," Spencerova said. "A lot of people think that five minutes after we join the EU, our villages will be full of foreigners, and our traditions and language and culture will be destroyed. This fear is real. You can feel it in street corners, in newspapers, in political discussions."
What do the new Europeans have in common? Language, to a certain extent. When they travel, they tend to speak English, which has emerged as Europe's most readily accessible common language.
"I come from a generation where everyone pretty much speaks English, or at least tries to," said Gabriela Tomsikova, 29, a Czech who works in the Prague office of a Dutch electronics company.
"It's growing bigger and bigger. Even the French are speaking English now."
There are also shared political and cultural traditions. The United States is a country created from the bottom up; European countries were created from the top down. "There's a greater sense of history here," said Lucie Konigova, 28, a research fellow in the center for European analysis at the Institute of Foreign Relations in Prague. "We don't think in terms of individual rights as much, but in terms of social and community rights."
Cecile Antoine, 25, a Belgian who lives in Paris, said she felt that "Europe has a common thread that joins everyone together," at least for the younger generation, which has been raised on that notion.
"I feel like a European, though my roots are of course Belgian," said Antoine, who says she is just as happy in Paris as back home. Years of being part of the EU have instilled in her a sense that she is "part of a greater European community."
"All the countries from the Union have something in common, and I don't feel very different from a French person," she said.
There are signs that those who are even younger - teenagers who never knew the cold war - may be even more impervious to old-world national distinctions.
"My son is 15, and his way of thinking and seeing the world is very different from my point of view," said Spencerova, the Czech journalist. "It's 14 years from the revolution and he's just learned a new way of living which is completely different from the way that we were brought up. This new generation won't have a problem with definitions, with the difference between being Czech or German or something else."
Those in countries who are about to join the Union seem hopeful that long-established borders will fall away.
"The EU is looked at with a mixture of hope and trepidation," said Zuzanna Ziomecka, 27, who returned to Warsaw three years ago after living in the United States. "There's the thought that the EU might set standards we are having trouble setting ourselves, and might offer travel."
Not only will crossing Europe be easier for Poles - "I won't have to stand in long lines at the airport," Ziomecka said - but it will open Poland up to a new group of visitors.
"We'll be getting more people coming to Poland to see what a crazy place it is," she added, and "how much good can come from chaos."
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune
Seven out of 10 Turks support joining the Europpean Union and the country's politicians say there's never been a "broader political consensus toward EU membership." The thought in Turkey is that joining the EU would "cement Turkey's secularism and raise incomes, which now stand at about one-quarter the average level of the Union," according to the International Herald Tribune article. But doing so won't be easy as they need all 25 EU members' votes. And France may be shakey while the other "heavyweights" like Germany, Britan, Italy and Spain appear to be in favor of at least negotiations.
I think this is interesting because as Turkey and its 70 million and growing Muslim population look to boost its economy and status as a secular state, it may solicit the US's support in gaining entry to the EU. And if the EU decides against letting Turkey negotiate its entry at the December summit, the rejection could have some interesting political implications. As Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said in an interview, "all the Muslim world will once more think that, yes, there is a double standard, that there will always be a clash of civilizations."
"In Turkey, a pro-EU consensus" by Thomas Fuller
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
In Turkey, a pro-EU consensus
Thomas Fuller/IHT IHT
Saturday, March 6, 2004
7 out of 10 favor joining the Union
ANKARA At a time of relative gloom and uncertainty for the European Union, some of its most enthusiastic supporters live here in Asia.
In Western Europe, a creeping note of worry has accompanied the imminent expansion of the Union to 25 members. But here in Turkey, politicians say there has never been broader political consensus on the drive toward EU membership.
Joining is seen as a way to cement Turkey's secularism and raise incomes, which now stand at about one-quarter the average level of the Union.
In opinion polls, nearly 70 percent of Turks say they want to join the EU, a number whose corollary is the government's methodical passage of reform packages required for EU membership.
The government begins every weekly cabinet meeting with an hourlong discussion on the implementation of EU-related laws, according to Murat Sungar, secretary general of a special government department that coordinates Turkey's drive for membership.
Since 2001, Turkey has rewritten more than one-fifth of its constitution. It abolished the death penalty except for times of war, repealed laws that barred the Kurdish minority from assembling or publishing in their language, and passed a law that prevents the press from being forced to reveal sources, among many other changes.
Reforms scheduled for April will remove the military, seen in Turkey as secularism's guardian, from civilian posts such as the national educational council. Such a change would until recently have been considered taboo.
Remarkably, even among supporters of the sole opposition party in Parliament, the left-leaning Republican People's Party, 85 percent want Turkey to join the EU, according to Kemal Dervis, the deputy head of the party.
The momentum is leading up to the climactic day of Turkey's aspirations: a December summit meeting in Brussels where European leaders will decide whether to allow the country to begin formal negotiations for entry.
A "yes" decision will require unanimous approval by the EU's 25 countries and would be followed by about a decade of detailed negotiations.
EU leaders must contemplate a future where its second-biggest member is a predominantly Muslim nation of 70 million people - and growing fast.
If Europe dashes Turkey's hopes, then the reform process here and the relative harmony between a governing Muslim party and the traditionally secular and powerful military establishment could end.
When asked about the prospect of failure, Turkey's leaders say there will be great disappointment and a belief that Europe treats Turkey differently because of its Muslim nature.
"All the Muslim world will once more think that, yes, there is a double standard, that there will always be a clash of civilizations," Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said in an interview.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, said in an interview with Europe-based journalists that Turks "would really have a heartache" if given a negative response.
Turkish politicians believe that the current political constellation in Europe favors a "yes" decision.
But they are not leaving it to chance. The government recently convened its ambassadors posted in EU countries to discuss lobbying efforts. Turkey may also call on the United States, a longtime and overt supporter of membership, to trumpet the cause.
EU leaders have been making positive noises recently. "Turkey is on the right path," Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said during a visit in February. "Turkey can always count on Germany for support."
Visiting Ankara on Wednesday, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, praised Turkey for its "positive approach" on the reunification of Cyprus. "We look forward to a positive decision," he said, referring to the EU summit talks in December.
In the past, Turks and others suspected that what European leaders said publicly to encourage Turkey was different what they actually felt.
Today, the enthusiasm seems more anchored in actual support, EU politicians say.
Turkey's longstanding enemy, Greece, has become a cheerleader for Turkish membership.
Ties started to thaw between the two through a pair of remarkable and cooperative foreign ministers and the "seismic diplomacy" behind each country's assistance to the other after deadly earthquakes in 1999.
The reasons for Greece's support are complex. Yannos Papantoniou, the Greek defense minister, says it is better to have Turkey in the club than outside. Still, he notes that Greece still has concerns about human rights and the depth of democratic reform in Turkey.
"We simply believe that if and when it joins the European Union it will be obliged to observe these rules and values," he said. "This will by itself resolve most of our problems."
Still, Papantoniou said he believed the recent expressions of support around Europe for Turkish membership were genuine.
"I'm not quite sure about the end of this game, whether the Europeans really believe that at some point Turkey will in fact become a member," Papantoniou said in an interview. "But I think they are sincere that they want to help Turkey enter into the road leading up to eventual membership." Greece is using the prospect of membership as a lever to solve a territorial dispute with Turkey in the Aegean Sea and as a way to bring about the reunification of Cyprus.
Both those issues are prerequisites to Greek support in December, Papantoniou said.
Ultimately the decision on Turkish admittance would be taken by a future generation of politicians, he added.
The negotiation process involves absorption by Turkey of the EU's 80,000 pages of laws.
Commentators who oppose Turkey's admission have argued that it would draw massive subsidies from the EU, that it is simply too big to swallow and that as an Asian country it has no place in a European Union. But Halefoglu is confident: "If we get the big fish the others will follow." There is an emerging consensus, here and in Brussels, among diplomats and politicians, that Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain are among the EU heavyweights likely to favor offering negotiations. The position of France, where support for EU enlargement has been cooler, is less certain.
With a need for unanimity, a "yes" is far from certain. The collapse of the EU's constitutional talks in December was mainly caused by the steadfast opposition of Poland and Spain to the draft document, a demonstration of how a small minority can block a big decision.
The admission of Turkey - a huge, existential question for the EU - is also likely to be more widely debated in public as December approaches.
Ultimately Turkey will be judged by what is known in EU jargon as the Copenhagen criteria, a short and relatively basic set of principles established by the EU in 1993.
There are political criteria: "stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities." And economic criteria: "the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union." A country must also be able to "take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union." Sungar, the secretary general of Turkey's EU coordination office, says one problem for the government is that the political criteria "cannot be calculated" and are therefore open to interpretation.
The European Commission, the EU's executive, is responsible for judging whether the criteria have been fulfilled. The commission will issue a report in October that will form the basis for talks at the December summit meeting. International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune
Galileo is key to the constitution of an independent European Defense. The EU commission presents the agreement with the US as favorable (see Federico's entry). The situation might be more complex though.
This is the conclusion drawn by Strafor.com a site specialized in intelligence analisis with close ties to official military and intelligence institutions:
"The crux of the agreement is that both GPS and Galileo will share the Binary Offset Carrier (BOC) 1.1 signal -- wholly separate from the U.S. M-Code -- and have agreements in place to optimize the performance of the shared signal in the future. This is almost exactly what NATO had proposed nearly two years ago and means that Galileo will be a European commercial competitor, but GPS will remain the primary satellite navigation system used by NATO -- with Galileo likely acting as a backup system.
"This is another nail in the coffin of an independent European defense. Previous efforts to create a European Common Defense Force separate from NATO have stalled. This is due as much to an inability to formulate a common foreign policy as to the lack of capable and willing military forces. Despite these setbacks, many Europeans have held out hope that limited military independence from the U.S.-led NATO umbrella was possible.
"The preservation of the U.S. M-Code as the military navigation frequency ensures that all European militaries -- whether they like it or not -- are inextricably linked to the U.S. Global Positioning System for the foreseeable future."
This is a very important step forward for the European defense policy. Keep in mind that without an independent satellite system (like Galileo) the European armies are electronically "blind" and therefore guided by the US.
Date: March 1st, 2004
Source: Cordis Rtd-News.
After three years of talks, the EU and the US have finally reached agreement on the frequency to be used by Galileo, Europe's satellite navigation system, clearing the way for the operational phase of the project.
A deal on the signal structure to be used by Galileo proved problematic because of US fears that the European system could interfere with its planned M-code military signal. The agreement, reached on 25 February, will see the adoption of a common baseline signal structure for both the EU and the US open services. The future US GPS will use a BOC 1,1 signal, whereas the Galileo open service will use a fully compatible optimised version of the same signal that guarantees a high level of performance.
'This is another very important step for the Galileo project, which recognises both sides as equal partners and creates the optimal conditions for the development of the European system, fully independent and compatible [...] with the American GPS,' said Loyola de Palacio, European Commission Vice President responsible for transport and energy.
Elaborating on the EU-US agreement, she explained: 'This agreement will allow all users to use, in a complementary way, both systems with the same receiver: it creates indeed the world standard of radio navigation by satellite. I'm happy to see that we agreed not to freeze the performance of signal modulations: on the contrary, it establishes clear rules for both parties to jointly or individually continuously improve the performance of their respective systems, for the benefit of all users worldwide.'
So that both systems can be improved in the future, the agreement also allows for a degree of optimisation of the baseline signal structures, either jointly or individually, in order to further improve performance.
A few outstanding issues remain, predominantly related to legal issues and procedural aspects, which still need to be resolved, but these are not expected to delay the signing of a formal agreement, anticipated to take place in the coming weeks.
For further information on Galileo, please consult the following web addresses:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/galileo/index.htm
http://www.esa.int/export/esaNA/GGGMX650NDC_index_0.html
Category: General policy
Data Source Provider: European Commission
Document Reference: Based on IP/04/264
Programme or Service Acronym: FRAMEWORK 6C; FP6-INTEGRATING; FP6-AEROSPACE
Subject Index : Aerospace Technology; Coordination, Cooperation
RCN: 21669
CORDIS RTD-NEWS/© European Communities
For people who are pursuing stories concerning immigration. My favourite part of the story is at the end of it, it presents a list of what measures/restrictions different EU member states will deal with the migrant workers. Hope it will be useful.
Again it's from European Voice. You need to register to read the story. Originally it was by Martin Banks of The Economist.
MOVES to curb the ability of workers from new member states to take advantage of their EU citizenship and seek jobs in another country of the Union were this week branded “unfair and unjust”. The restrictions, which come in response to fears of a huge influx of workers to the present EU states after 1 May, have been staunchly attacked by accession states’ politicians.
The European Commission announced it would check whether bans introduced by member states were in line with EU law.
Although initially several EU states pledged to open their labour market to new countries’ workers, all of them made a U-turn in recent days, following popular concerns and media pressure.
On Monday (23 February), the UK announced it would impose restrictions, under which people from accession states will have to register for jobs. Migrants without work will be banned from most benefits for at least two years but those with jobs will be able to get some state help. Workers will be able to claim benefits, such as jobseeker’s allowance, only if they have worked continuously in Britain for at least a year.
The UK announcement was followed shortly by Ireland’s – the country stated it plans to limit access to its benefits system.
Ireland’s Social Affairs Minister Mary Coughlan said the move had been forced by the action of all the other member states.
Commission President Romano Prodi expressed his concern at the restrictions that were being announced. The most important question, according to Commission officials, is if arrangements that deny workers from eastern Europe benefits while granting them to others are discriminatory. Only citizens from Malta and Cyprus are exempt from the new rules.
Slovakia’s Foreign Minister Eduard Kukan led a chorus of criticism of the restrictions, describing them as “unfair and unjust”. “When negotiations took place in 2001, many EU members insisted they would not introduce restrictions and that our citizens could work in these countries after May,” he said.
A spokesman for the Hungarian foreign ministry described them as a “backward step”. Margot Wallström, who is the acting employment and social affairs commissioner, has called on member states to “come clean” about what their exact plans are.
“There needs to be more transparency on this issue and we are asking member states to give us the information,” a spokesman said. Although all EU citizens in theory have the right to live, work and claim benefit in any member country, existing members are allowed to limit employment rights for residents of accession states for up to seven years, under the terms of a harshly negotiated deal. Member states, however, are going to apply varied restrictions for different periods of time:
Germany and Austria are set to keep restrictions for the full seven years. Only people with work permits will be allowed to seek employment;
Belgium and Finland will only allow those with work permits the right to jobs, for two years;
In France, work permits will be needed for two years. Immigrants who obtain a work permit will have the same access to social benefits as French citizens;
Greece plans to apply restrictions for two years. The new government after the 7 March elections is set to announce if restrictions will be prolonged;
Ireland will announce changes to its social security system to “prevent abuse” by newcomers;
Italy hasn’t announced its decision yet;
Luxembourg will apply restrictions for two years;
The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden initially pledged to let newcomers work freely in their countries but made U-turn recently. The Hague announced quotas of 22,000 workers in the first year, but is likely to revise the figure down. Sweden will apply benefits restrictions and Denmark refuses the right to benefits but will give residence and work permits to immigrants if they find a job within six months;
Portugal: will apply restrictions of up to two years. It offers 6,500 work permits yearly to applicants of all nationalities, and;
Spain will close its labour market for two years. Bilateral agreements with Poland are possible.
martinbanks@economist.com
Interestingly, although there are so many disputes on the trade of various products between the US and EU, the two giant economies are hoping to establish a free trade zone. Of course, it won't happen soon.
The story is from a website based in Belgium, European Voice. You have to register to read the top five news stories unfortunately. Originally the story was by Dana Spinant of The Economist. Enjoy!
Speaking exclusively to European Voice, Doug Bereuter, chairman of the Europe sub-committee in the US Congress, said that such a development “is conceivable and desirable”.
However, he added, “I had predicted, a decade ago, that by 2004 we would have such a free trade area: it was way too optimistic”.
Bereuter is the second politician to openly call for an EU-US free trade pact – Spanish premier José María Aznar had put forward the same idea while visiting Washington last month.
But Bereuter insists that the world’s top two economic blocs should first concentrate on reviving the Doha Round of trade liberalization talks and reforming the World Trade Organization (WTO) system.
The congressman launched a scathing attack on the EU’s farm subsidies, warning that if it wants to save the Doha Round, the Union must dismantle the “devastating subsidies it gives to its farmers”. He is adamant the onus is on the EU to unblock the talks.
“If we expect them [developing countries] to open their markets for our services or hi-tech products, they say they are right to say ‘not until you open your agricultural markets’.
“We don’t mind how much they [EU states] pay per cow, double than the average of the money Africans get; that’s their business.
“But they should delink it from production.”
Bereuter thinks that working together on reforming the WTO and the “obsolete structures” of the United Nations would help improve relations between the two sides of the Atlantic, damaged by the bitter bickering surrounding the war in Iraq.
He warned that “attitudinal gaps between Europe and the US” have led many Europeans to have negative feelings “about America, the American government and Americans”.
He blames this on “differences over foreign policy, over the treatment of multilateral institutions”, but also on the press, education and on failures “in American public diplomacy”.
In addition, he claimed Europe suffers from a “Gulliver complex” and has a naturaltendency to try to hold back the American superpower.
Referring to one of the first clashes between the EU and the Bush administration, the rejection by Washington of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Bereuter said: “Kyoto was unacceptable to all developed countries; however, we catch most of the blame” for having spurned it.
“Our problem is that we did not put an alternative on table.”
The congressman, who was in Brussels to chair a plenary session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly last week, said he has seen a big change in Europe’s relations with the US since February 2003, when he last visited the Belgian capital.
“It was during the Turkey-Article 4 debate in NATO,” he recalls, referring to the row sparked when Belgium, France and Germany rejected a NATO plan pledging defence for Turkey in the event of Iraq aggression in retaliation to the attacks America planned to launch from Turkey.
“That was one of the low points in NATO’s history. But since, we all took steps to correct it. I’ve never seen so many French, Belgians and Germans in my office as last year.”
One year on, NATO has begun helping out the coalition forces in Iraq, he pointed out. “[NATO will act] in the Polish sector in the beginning, but its role can grow gradually bigger. Perhaps it could next take over the British sector in the south.”
Although “it would be desirable” for the Alliance to take over the control of military operations in Iraq, as it did in Afghanistan, Bereuter said NATO lacks “the manpower and resources” to do it.
But one of his European counterparts on NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly said it would be “inconceivable for Americans, for a while, that their troops in Iraq are commanded from Brussels and not from Washington – even if an American general would be in charge”.
danaspinant@economist.com
This isn't a directly U.S. related story, but I've seen this mugshot on every single news paper I've visited in the last week. We'll probably see a lot of public protesting while we're in Brussels and it's good to know about how this trial is affecting the public's view of the criminal justice system in Belgium.
After an eight-year-trial delay, Marc Dutroux will finally face charges of kidnapping six young girls and murdering four of them in Belgium. The delay is due to police blunders and investigations into a supposed larger pedophile ring.
The public is very sensitive and critical of the criminal justice system because of the blunders. For example the police allowed Dutroux to escape custody in 1998 and failed to find two of the victims that were in the house they were searching.
The initial arrest of Dutroux in 1996 triggered the White March, Belgium's largest public protest, grieving the loss of the young victims.
There are a two BBC links for the straight news--one about the context of what this trial means and one telling the stories of one of the victims. The last link gives an opinion from a magazine called Expatica for Belgiums living abroad.
Belgium is ready for Dutroux Trial
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3520819.stm
Belgian kidnap victim tells story
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2795545.stm
Blind Justice or Blind Eye
Expatica
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=24&story_id=3597
Belgium is ready for Dutroux Trialhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3520819.stm
Belgium ready for Dutroux trial
Dutroux's trial has been delayed for eight years
Belgian police are mounting a huge security operation as one of the country's most notorious men finally goes on trial in the town of Arlon.
Alleged child-killer Marc Dutroux is accused of kidnapping and abusing six girls aged from eight to 19 in the 1990s and of murdering four of them.
The trial has been delayed for eight years as police investigated claims of a wider paedophile ring.
Perceived police incompetence triggered huge demonstrations in Belgium.
It should be a normal trial, but everybody knows this won't be the case.
Justice Minister Laurette Onkelinx
Justice on trial with Dutroux
Three hundred police officers will guard Arlon's Palace of Justice on the first day of a trial expected to last three months and cost $5.8 million.
They will hope to avoid the humiliation of 1998 when Dutroux succeeded in escaping for three hours after overpowering an officer who was guarding him.
Conspiracy theory
Dutroux will stand trial with his estranged wife, Michelle Martin, 44, businessman Michel Nihoul, 62, and Michel Lelievre, 32, a drug addict alleged to have helped Dutroux kidnap several young girls.
Thousands of Belgians took to the streets in protest
"It should be a normal trial, but everybody knows this won't be the case. You cannot compare it to any other," Justice Minister Laurette Onkelinx told the Associated Press.
All four defendants were arrested in August 1996 by police investigating the abductions of two girls, Sabine Dardenne (then aged 12) and Laetitia Delhez (14).
Both girls were discovered alive two days later in the cellar of a property belonging to Dutroux in the southern town of Charleroi.
Investigators then unearthed the bodies of four other girls who had been missing for more than a year, from the gardens of other Dutroux properties.
They also dug up the body of Bernard Weinstein, an accomplice whom Dutroux has admitted murdering.
Thousands march
Dutroux has accused the Belgian police and justice system of refusing to investigate leads he provided, which he says would prove that he was just part of a wider paedophile conspiracy.
But Belgian officials say that the long delay bringing the case to court partly results from the need to investigate these alleged networks, which they say do not exist.
The government - shaken by the immense scale of public anger at perceived police incompetence - promised changes to the constitution to reduce political interference in the judicial process.
Belgium kidnap victim tells story
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2795545.stm
One of the victims of the notorious Belgian suspected paedophile Marc Dutroux has for the first time told the horrific story of her kidnapping ordeal.
Sabine Dardenne, then aged 12, was snatched on 28 May 1996, and spent the next 80 days confined to a cellar, where it is alleged she was raped and psychologically abused until her kidnapper was apprehended by police.
Dutroux is yet to stand trial for the rape and murder of four girls, and the rape of two others, including Ms Dardenne, found alive together at one of his properties.
Now 18, Ms Dardenne told several Belgian newspapers she still rereads the letters and journal she wrote during her captivity - "in order not to forget, and to prepare to go through his trial... He must pay."
Chained up
She said she was snatched by Dutroux and an accomplice, Michel Lelievre, while cycling to school, bundled into a van, and lifted inside a house inside a metal trunk.
"He chained me to the bed by my neck," she told Belgian newspapers Le Soir, La Derniere Heure and Vers L'Avenir.
"I stayed there two or three days."
Ms Dardenne said Dutroux later moved her down to the cellar, where he had built a secret compartment equipped with "a mattress and bare light bulb."
"He passed down cans after me - cold tins of meatballs in tomato sauce, and bread that turned green after two or three days."
Although she said she sometimes heard voices outside, she only ever saw Dutroux. He allegedly justified his acts by saying he was protecting her from a worse fate.
Saviour
"According to him, he was saving my life. He was the kind one, he was protecting me against someone who wished me harm and had demanded money from my parents.
"In this way, he was my friend, my saviour."
Delays in bringing Dutroux to trial brought thousands out onto the streets
But when she disobeyed him, Dutroux would threaten to "hand me over to some gang or other he knew... [who] would torture me and kill me after making me suffer."
The teenager said one of his cruellest tricks was to lead her to believe that her parents knew of her whereabouts but had simply abandoned her.
"He said I could write letters. I wrote to my parents. I told them about my day, as if I were on holiday.
"I wished them all the happiness I could. According to him, my parents were mean. I still loved them even so. I just wanted to go home."
Secret symbols
She said she believed Dutroux posted these letters. However, Dutroux would read them and use the information gleaned to pretend he had spoken to her parents and siblings on the phone, reporting back on her pet dog and saying the family had taken out the paddling pool for summer, she said.
Police investigators discovered about 30 such letters under a carpet upon her release.
On a calendar she used to mark the passing of time, she used symbols to denote events: circles for her mother and nurse's days off; crosses on days she saw Dutroux.
Stars denoted "other scenes", her lawyer told Le Soir, alluding to days when she was raped.
Ms Dardenne was later joined by another abductee, 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez.
Days later police freed the pair.
Dutroux, his wife Michele and Mr Lelievre are finally to face trial after years of delay as the police tried to determine the extent of a wider paedophile ring described by Dutroux.
Blind Justice or a Blind Eye?
Expatica
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=24&story_id=3597
For many Belgians the justice system is a source of shame and embarrassment
A survey published this week by a leading Belgian newspaper found that almost 60 percent of people living in this country have no faith in the criminal justice system.
The study, commissioned by ‘La Libre Belgique’, showed that on average 57 percent of Belgians do not trust the country’s courts and judges. The figure for Brussels region was even higher at 67 percent while in French speaking Wallonia it rose to 70 percent.
In most European countries such findings would be greeted with shock and dismay. Here, however, the most common reaction is likely to be a weary ‘is that all?’
Belgium’s criminal justice system is quite clearly a shambles. Last week saw the end of a 12-year trial into the murder of leading Socialist politician André Cools. Six men were eventually convicted of carrying out the crime. But as this site and much of the Belgian media reported in detail, the trial is likely be remembered as much for its failures as for its final conclusion. After 12 years of inquiries that produced well over 80,000 pages of evidence, investigators were still unable to determine the role of one of the key suspects in the case.
Did Walloon socialist politician Alain Van Der Biest — a former Cools protegé turned political embarrassment — have a hand in the crime? He seemed to have a motive, although he always strenuously denied any connection with the killing. One thing is certain: Van Der Biest himself will never shed any light on the question. He committed suicide two years ago.
But you’d have thought that after such a long and detailed enquiry into such a high-profile affair, Belgium’s top judges could have come up with something a bit more concrete than their final conclusion. Effectively they have said they simply don’t know whether Van Der Biest was involved or not.
If the Cools trial were just a one off case, then perhaps Belgium’s judges and investigating magistrates could be forgiven for having an unlucky break. But it wasn’t — and that’s the whole point. For many Belgians the confusion and bungling that marked much of the Cools case seem par for the course when it comes to solving serious crimes here.
The Marc Dutroux affair revealed monumental levels of police bungling
In the early 1980s for example a gang who became known as the Brabant Killers murdered 28 people in a series of apparently motiveless attacks. The police have been investigating the murders for the best part of 20 years but no one has yet been bought to book for the crimes.
And later this year, in principle on March 1, Belgium’s most notorious suspected child killer should finally stand trail — almost eight years after being captured.
Marc Dutroux was arrested in 1996 and charged with the abduction murder of several young girls including Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, whose faces had featured on a country-wide missing persons poster campaign for months previously. His capture revealed a series of monumental blunders on the part of the police. Officers had questioned Dutroux on several occasions without connecting him to a series of child abductions, despite the fact that he already had an earlier conviction for raping five girls.
Curtains on Cools trial
But the most glaring failure came when policemen searched the house where the convicted paedophile was holding Julie and Melissa prisoner — and failed to find the two girls.
The Belgian public reacted with shock and outrage to the case. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in a protest that became known as the ‘White March’. The Prime Minister of the day, Jean-Luc Dehaene, promised sweeping changes to the justice system — and then nothing happened.
Well, that’s not entirely true. After finally capturing the country’s most wanted man the police very nearly lost him again in 1998 when he briefly escaped from custody.
But, that short dramatic interlude aside, the Dutroux case has essentially foundered in a legal and administrative quagmire since 1996. Trial dates have been pushed back again and again amid more Cools-style investigative bungling, rowing between prosecution and defence lawyers and allegations of top-level cover ups and corruption — never proved, of course.
Justice in Belgium is not so much blind as totally headless
The authorities have now promised a March 1 trail date, but most Belgians seem to be at the point where they will only believe things are moving when Dutroux actually walks into the witness box.
The impression all of these cases give is that justice in Belgium is not so much blind as totally headless.
And until the country puts into practice at all levels some truly fundamental changes to the way it handles criminal investigations, gloomy opinion surveys like the one published this week are set to remain all too common.
Starting Monday, the EU will impose trade sanctions on US imported goods. That means an extra 5% tarriff on goods ranging from honey to nuclear reactors. And that is to continue increasing 1% a month.
This landmark sanction is an attempt to retaliate against U.S. corporate tax breaks (Foreign Sale Corporation- FSC--ruled illegal by the WTO).
This is a huge move that some EU officials are celebrating and others are calling the beginning of a hostile relationship between the EU and US. I see the move as justified, as many U.S. corps are able to get the leg up with tax breaks and dominate the market, but I foresee the consequences snowballing negatively.
Here are a few different viewpoints.
'Sad day' as EU imposes sanctions on US goods
Financial Times
By Tobias Buck in Brussels
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1077690772765&p=1012571727108
Europe slaps sanctions on US over export tax breaks
EU Business
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040227224025.yw5ij37j
Sanctions give Europe Prime Opportunity
Scotsman.com
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=240252004
US firms to be hit by multimillion-euro sanctions
EU Observer
http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=9&aid=14634
'Sad day' as EU imposes sanctions on US goods
By Tobias Buck in Brussels
For the first time in the history of transatlantic trade relations, the European Union will on Monday impose trade sanctions on US goods, in an attempt to force Washington lawmakers to repeal controversial corporate tax breaks.
EU customs officials will levy an additional 5 per cent tariff on a wide range of American products. The duty on imports of natural honey, for example, will rise from 17.3 per cent to 22.3 per cent. Roller skates will be subject to a 7.7 per cent duty up from 2.7 per cent.
The punitive tariffs will also apply to textiles, agricultural products, steel and glass, books and newspapers, sugar and toys - even nuclear reactors. And they will rise, by 1 percentage point each month, until they affect US exports worth $666m a year.
The aim is to force the US Congress to change the foreign sales corporation provision (FSC), which grants tax breaks to US exporters and was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organisation in 2002.
But to John Disharoon, vice president of the trade committee at the American chamber of commerce to the EU, Monday is simply "a sad day for trade relations between the US and Europe". He says: "Nobody wants to see sanctions. It adds to the negative climate."
European companies share some of Mr Disharoon's concerns. But according to one trade expert, there is "no sense of disaster" among European trade officials, business lobbies and observers. The European Commission is keen to play down the significance of the trade sanctions. It insists that Brussels has shown patience and diplomacy in the run-up to March 1, and that Washington as well as US companies have had ample warning and enough time to prepare for the sanctions.
"We've been extremely patient, but there is no way now we can avoid these sanctions, which hopefully will concentrate a few minds on the urgency of this legislation," Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner, told reporters in Washington on Friday following two days of meetings with US lawmakers. He added: "The day the necessary legislation is there, I will remove the sanctions." Officials close to Mr Lamy have argued for months that there would be no backlash from US lawmakers.
Monique Julien, a trade expert at Unice, a business federation that claims to represent some 16m European companies, says: "If you look at the record on the European side there has always been an attempt at conciliation. Sanctions were repeatedly postponed but at the end of the day, it is a question of [upholding] the credibility of the WTO dispute settlement system."
But even Europeans admit that - at some point - the Commission and its counterpart in Washington might have to rethink the way they approach trade disputes. Like many trade experts, Ms Julien is worried about the "multiplication" of recent EU-US trade spats - of which the dispute over FSC is only the most visible example.
In the past two months the EU has moved closer to trade sanctions in a string of cases, many of which are linked to US anti-dumping legislation and practices. In a dispute over the so-called Byrd amendment, which allows US companies to keep the anti-dumping proceeds raised from foreign competitors, sanctions could come this summer.
Nick Clegg, a British Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament and trade expert, warns that "everything is being shuffled off to the WTO, and if that trend continues it begins straining the credibility of the institution".
Although he applauds Mr Lamy's approach in the FSC case, Mr Clegg believes that at some point it could become necessary for the EU and the US to settle their disputes through direct negotiations. "If we continue along the same trajectory, there needs to be some kind of political decision to clear the decks in a comprehensive way.
"I think more and more businesses, especially big companies with transatlantic links, are asking: is this really the best way to handle the biggest trade relationship in the world?" Additional reporting from Edward Alden in Washington
Europe slaps sanctions on US over export tax breaks
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040227224025.yw5ij37j
EU Business
European trade chief Pascal Lamy said time has finally run out and Europe will launch sanctions Monday to pressure the United States to scrap illegal export tax breaks.
But for the first time, Lamy said he would consider allowing a transition period for removing the subsidies, ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization.
"We have been very patient but there is no way now that we can avoid this action, which hopefully will concentrate a few minds on the urgency of this legislation," the European trade commissioner said.
The European sanctions, to be ratcheted up each month to increase pressure on the United States to overturn the law, would be lifted when Congress passes legislation to repeal the subsidies, he said.
Tariffs, already approved by the WTO, begin at five percent on a range of goods from American meat to nuclear reactor parts. The duties will rise by one percentage point a month.
In 2004, the extra duties would be worth a total 315 million dollars, according to the Europeans.
The WTO has ruled that the so-called foreign sales corporation (FSC) law flouts global trade rules by allowing US firms, operating through subsidiaries in offshore tax havens, to benefit from reduced export taxes.
WTO arbitrators have agreed with the EU that just over four billion dollars (3.4 billion euros) would constitute "appropriate countermeasures" based on the trade impact of the US policy.
Lamy said he had no desire to take sides on the various proposals for US legislation to replace the FSC law; he only wanted to check the final proposal before it becomes law.
The House of Representative and Senate are drawing up rival proposals for legislation, which would need to be hammered out in a compromise text before signature by President George W. Bush.
Two of the main proposals contain a three-year transition period to phase out the tax break, however.
"The WTO ruling says that the only WTO-compliant transition period is zero. That is what the WTO ruling says," Lamy said.
"This being said, we have a margin of appreciation and if my judgment at that time is that I can use a bit or part of this margin of appreciation, I will do it (while) keeping my goal ... which is getting this thing repealed."
The trade boss said he would have to consult with the European industries affected by the US tax break, however, "to see whether or not they can live with such and such option."
Lamy noted that he had received a letter from European business chiefs suggesting they could live with a transition period.
The European business group UNICE sent a letter to Lamy on February 13 noting that the Congress was considering a three-year transition period for removing the tax break.
"For our part, we are ready to consider, while reluctantly, a reasonable transition period, as short as possible, for repeal of the current legislation," it said.
"It would therefore be appreciated if such flexibility could be explored, provided that the final outcome would be WTO-compatible and not affecting negatively European interests."
Sanctions give Europe prime opportunity
Scotsman.com
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=240252004
OFF a dirt road in a quiet section of Tripoli, a trailer camp flies two flags. One is the green flag of Libya. The other is a red banner bearing a single word: "Halliburton".
The British general manager, Richie Jones, squirms a bit when a journalist shows up. He explains that United States sanctions bar him from expanding his business. He can’t import anything with a US part, he can’t use US technology. He isn’t even supposed to communicate with Americans or anyone who pays US taxes.
"I don’t know if we’re breaking the sanctions by talking to you," Mr Jones says in a conspiratorial tone. "If you sent me an e-mail it would be illegal for me to open it."
He manages the Libyan branch of Halliburton Germany GmbH, a subsidiary of the oil services giant once run by the US vice president Dick Cheney, and his hands are tied. The US sanctions, imposed in 1986 to punish Libya for supporting terrorism, bar Americans from most Libyan business. While sanctions have cost Libya at least $30 billion (£16 billion) in lost revenues, they have also taken a toll on US business.
European and Asian companies are cashing in, building a $5 billion (£2.67) project to pump and pipe Libyan natural gas to European power plants. They will soon vie for work on a $2 billion (£1.07 billion) upgrade for a major oil refinery.
"We’re preparing for a very active and promising decade," says Tarek Hassan-Beck, planning director for the government-owned National Oil Corp. But unless the sanctions end, the Americans will be sitting it out.
US firms to be hit by multimillion-euro sanctions
EU Observer
http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=9&aid=14634
The EU will impose sanctions worth hundreds of millions of euro on US businesses from next Monday.
The move is retaliatory, counteracting tax breaks for US companies which the WTO has ruled illegal.
"I think the picture is now clear: countermeasures will come into force by Monday", Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said after talks with his US counterparts Thursday.
A 5% levy will be placed on all US exports to the EU, with that figure rising each month that the US tax break stays in place.
"Our countermeasures will start in a relatively modest way but the system has been devised so that it increases every month, the notion being that this will focus minds on the necessity to comply, which is the real name of the game", Mr Lamy said.
The figure is expected to rise by over 30 million euro a month.
With the US in an election year, any pressure from the sanctions will be made all the greater, with voters calling for politicians to protect US jobs and interests.
The Foreign Sale Corporation (FSC) - as the tax break is known - creates a loophole allowing US companies to benefit from decreased export tax.
The EU, backed by the WTO, says the FSC gives US companies an unfair market advantage.
Coupled with the strong euro, the FSC has led to very cheap US imports.
Similarly, the strong euro may also mean that the US companies hit by the sanctions will not feel the pinch quite as much as they otherwise would, with their products still being competitively priced.
The WTO has ruled that the EU may impose sanctions of up to 3.4 billion euro.
It is up to the US Congress to repeal the law.
This article written by a German and published in OpenDemocracy, an "online global magazine of politics and culture" based in the UK offers a critical view of the French ban on hijab, but succeeds in giving a balanced, and helpful account of how it was passed, what it means in the history of France and why there is something wrong about it. Very helpful.
openDemocracy - The French republic: making Muslims into citizens?
The French republic: making Muslims into citizens?
Johannes Willms
26 - 2 - 2004
France’s education system has long worked to transform peasants, migrants and believers into national, secular citizens. Will the process fail with the headscarves worn by the country’s young Muslim women?
Since the 1789 revolution the French state has used its school system to make French citizens out of people from the country’s many different regions: Corsica, the Basque areas, Provence, Brittany, Gascony, Savoie (Italian), Alsace-Lorraine. In the late 19th century, the process intensified under the influence of a centralist state. The memorable title of Eugen Weber’s fascinating book evokes its profoundly transformative impact: Peasants into Frenchmen (1976).
The wars, colonial struggles and economic cycles of the 20th century brought new generations of children into French schools: east European Jews, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Senegalese, Algerians. All, whatever their origin and first language, rote-learned the stories of nos ancêtres, les gallois (“our ancestors, the French”).
There are successful examples of “assimilation by education” in many fields of French national life – from soccer to cinema, literature to politics. The most prominent current example is the minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy – the son of an aristocratic Hungarian refugee who fled his homeland in 1944.
So it is both ironic and appropriate that the ambitious, charismatic Sarkozy – “the government’s Zinedine Zidane”, according to an ally – has been in the frontline of the latest stage in this long national project: the French parliament’s controversial new law enforcing a ban on the display of explicit religious symbols in educational institutions.
The law decrees that “in schools, junior high schools and high schools, signs and dress that conspicuously show the religious affiliation of students are forbidden.” It is neutrally phrased and in principle applies equally to Catholic crucifixes or Jewish kippah; moreover, it is intended to confirm and consistently apply existing practice, rather than to establish a new legal order. In this sense it is a continuation of a historical project rather than a fresh departure.
For all that, the controversy that the measure has provoked in France reflects the sense among both proponents and opponents that it had a tangible, specific target: the Islamic headscarves of young women, members of the 3.26 million-strong Muslim population of France.
Realms of history
The law confirming a prohibition on the wearing of religious apparel in state schools was passed by the French parliament on 10 February 2004 with an overwhelming, cross-partisan majority – 494-36, with 31 abstentions. The senate, the upper house of parliament, is now considering the law for final approval.
It must be stressed that the law applies only to state-run schools, not to private schools run by religious institutions which are obliged only to teach elements of the national curriculum. Thus, French Muslim people who want their daughters to wear the headscarf still have a choice. In the northern city of Lille, for example, a Muslim private school has operated since September 2003, and like similar Catholic, Protestant or Jewish schools is entitled to state subsidies.
Yet despite the political majority in support of the law, and the continuing space for religious education in France, the law provoked an eruption of intense protest among Muslims and sections of the French left – accompanied by a mixture of bafflement and outrage outside the country.
If these reactions had no effect, the explanation lies in a mixture of history and political opportunism. The continuing desire of the French centre-right not to lose voters to the radical, emphatically xenophobic right – mainly organised in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National – is one calculation behind the timing of the law. But the deeper current the law reflects is the preservation of the uncompromising secularism of the Fifth Republic (1958 onwards) in the face of the visible diversification of the “global nation” on French soil.
In essence, the French political establishment is resisting a multicultural solution – one that would accept this form of society as a fact (even if its utility as the best way to integrate minorities is as yet unproven) and base public policy on tolerance of diversity.
The French elite insists rather in the principle that national identity is exclusively shaped by culture and can therefore be acquired in a learning and assimilation process. This universalistic – and, in an older reading, liberal – approach can be understood as the dominant trend in a historical development rich in political convulsions.
In this perspective, modern France is the inheritor of a state, a nation and a secular understanding forged in centuries of painful argument, and present across the many available “realms of memory” (in Pierre Nora’s famous concept). This argument began with the succession of Charlemagne as ruler of a unified Frankish kingdom in 771 and found its climax, but by no means its finale, in the revolution of 1789. It continues today. The “headscarf law” is French history.
A project unfulfilled
But if the processes of state-isation, nation-isation, and secular-isation have been underway for centuries, why are they still incomplete? Three immediate possible explanations suggest themselves.
First, alongside the secular, republican ethos central to France’s official self-perception is a country shaped by deeply conservative, Catholic values. It is true that Napoleon’s Concordat with Pope Pius VII (1801) effectively suborned the Catholic Church and obliged it to exert political control over its flock; and that a century later, the Third Republic (1871-1941) concluded two decades of intense social argument by decreeing the unconditional separation of church and state in 1905.
Even this rigorous laicité, however, did not eradicate other mentalities with a significant presence in French society; a fact illustrated by the huge, and successful, demonstrations in the early 1980s against government plans to abolish subsidies for the country’s – and mostly Catholic – private schools. This social current views widespread and often militant displays of Islamic allegiance as a hostile challenge.
A second explanation is that immigrants to France from the majority Muslim societies of the southern rim of the Mediterranean are particularly resistant to cultural assimilation by “Frenchness”. Their insistence on maintaining a series of religiously-motivated social practices and prohibitions – regarding pork meat in school canteens, gender-specific use of swimming pools – impacts on the majority population as dogmatic and exclusivist. It is answered by the latter’s exclusion, tinged often with racism and leading to the marginalisation of these immigrants and their descendants in alienated urban or suburban ghettos.
A third element in the incompleteness of the secularist project may be that the sheer number of Muslims in France has grown so rapidly in a relatively short period of time; inevitably, the cultural assimilation process had to fail because it had not been devised for such profusion. In particular, the family reunions permitted during Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency (1974-81) enabled many thousands of male immigrant workers from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), whom France needed for its then booming economy, to bring their next of kin to France.
This trend, and the higher birthrate of Muslim immigrants, has made the Muslim minority in France the highest in the European Union at 3.26 million (5.5% of the population of mainland France), against 4.3% in the Netherlands, 3% in Germany, and 2.6% in Britain.
The social cost of secularism
In the face of these challenges, official France adamantly insists on the principle of equality between citizens, underpinned by a policy of cultural assimilation. By the same token, it rejects “affirmative action” – significantly labelled discrimination positive in France – as a means to accelerate the integration of minorities. Members of ethnic or religious minorities living in the country are not even registered in official statistics as long as they are French citizens.
The insistence on a secularist state policy can be interpreted partly as a cost-neutral exercise. Its proponents can also invoke the argument that if the slightest concession to Muslim demands would immediately risk arousing the desires of other religious groups, thus compromising both the secular principle and France’s cultural identity.
Many Muslims also see this as a danger; as many as 40% of French Muslims, and even larger numbers of women and younger people among them, may support the ban. Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), welcomed the law, arguing that it would successfully defend France’s secular institutions from the intrusion of Muslim fundamentalism.
But can these institutions, and the principles that underlie them, endure if the state refuses to acknowledge significant dimensions of its social landscape – unemployment and crime statistics that would be even more frightening if measured according to religious denomination? A pregnant remark of the architect of French socialism, Jean Jaurès, echoes across the decades: “A republic which is not social cannot be secular”.
This article was translated from German by Julian Kramer
More in openDemocracy’s Europe & Islam debate:
Navid Kermani, “Roots of terror” (February 2002)
Gilles Kepel, “The trail of political Islam” (July 2002)
Usman Sheikh, “Lessons from Bosnia” (November 2002)
Tariq Modood, “Muslims and European multiculturalism” (May 2003)
Abdal-Hakim Murad, “European Islam: the return of Hagar”, (July 2003)
Late Tuesday night, the US government announced to suspend importation of all processed meat and poultry from France, saying that some plants that process delicacies like foie gras didn't meet the US standars for food safety, as reported in San Francisco Chronicle story.
The EU, on the other side, banned the import of poultry and eggs from the United States on the same day after the bird flu cases in Texas.
As pointed out in the story, there's some political reason behind the food import fight. It could help better understand the relations between France (or EU countries as a whole) and the United State.
The story is from AFP. Sorry there's no direct link to the article. You need to get on the website of AFP then click the title.
PARIS (AFP) France and the United States were locked in a food fight as Washington slapped a suspension on imports of French cold cuts and foie gras after finding fault with French health safety measures.
The ban was announced here late Tuesday, the same day as the European Union said it was halting imports of poultry and eggs from the United States after an outbreak of highly contagious bird-flu in Texas.
A US Department of Agriculture official denied suggestions that the US action was retaliatory and a spokeswoman for the EU commission in Brussels said the timing of the two announcements appeared to be coincidental.
But some EU observers privately suspect that diplomatic factors may indeed have been involved. "Yes, there is very likely a political aspect," said a European diplomat who asked not to be named.
France challenged the US decision, describing it as "unjustified" but vowing to stay in contact with US authorities in order to get the suspension lifted as quickly as possible.
French meat producers affected by the ban were stunned and outraged by the US move and vowed to seek the intervention of the World Trade Organization or to take reprisals against US exports to France.
French government officials rejected the findings of a visiting team of US veterinary inspectors, who found what the agriculture ministry here called "non-confomities" with US practice in French health protection measures.
But Agriculture Minister Herve Gaymard maintained that there are "100 times more deaths from food poisoning in the United States than in Europe."
He told journalists here that a high-level French delegation had gone to Washington on Monday to confer with US public health officials.
"But the Americans had already made their decision, mass had been said," he added.
The US move followed a visit to France by a team from the US Department of Agriculture from January 15 to February 5 that included inspections of 11 companies authorized to export food products to the United States and the veterinary services that supervise them.
"In this case we found repeated problems with those plants that are certified to export," Agriculture Department spokesman Steven Cohen said.
The plants manufacture beef, chicken, pork and duck-based products, he said, without naming the factories.
Cohen also insisted that no link existed with the EU suspension of live poultry and egg imports from the United States.
"This is a process that began, concerns that were documented, beginning in 1992," Cohen said.
French producers of cold cuts and foie gras reacted with fury to the US suspension.
"The Americans don't respect the rules of the game," said Vincent Truelle, co-director of a professional committee of foie gras producers.
"They had already done us great harm by applying, since 1999, 100 percent customs duties on certain French products -- such as foie gras -- because of the measures taken against (US) hormone-treated beef by the European Union.
"Today, they are wiping out years of work by French producers to conquer the US market.
"It's not for health reasons that the Americans are closing their borders to our products ... The real reasons lie elsewhere."
Added Robert Volut, head of the federation of cold cut producers: "We are considering filing a case at the World Trade Organization or taking reprisal measures against US products imported by France."
Sales to the United States account for a only a small percentage of annual earnings by French meat exporters. But the US market, free of constraints, presents an outlet of great potential, exporters say.
France produced 18,000 tonnes of foie gras last year, of which just 20 tonnes of the prepared product -- compared with 50 tonnes before 1999 -- was exported to the United States. Another 100 tonnes of raw meat parts and products made from foie gras was also shipped.
The leading importer of French foie gras is Spain, with 300 tonnes, followed by Switzerland, Belgium and Japan.
Nearly 90 percent of French foie gras production is consumed in France.
You are not alone: most Europeans don't know their institutions very well. They don't see enough of their Euro-deputies and tend to be confused by the role of the Commission, and the Parliament. Only a third intends to vote in the coming election. The good side of this is that there seems to be a "European public opinion." The general feelings seem to be shared by most countries. This includes the 10 incoming members.
You should get a sense of what this all means in terms of the strength of European institutions, and in terms of identities.
You can read the story in French, and/or check for similar stories published by other media. The first link will lead you to the institutions that did the survey.
Eurobarometer - Website for the Public Opinion Analysis sector of the European Commission
Le Monde - A la veille des lections europennes, institutions et eurodputs restent trs mal connus
A la veille des lections europennes, institutions et eurodputs restent trs mal connus
LE MONDE | 25.02.04 | 14h09 MIS A JOUR LE 25.02.04 | 18h25
Une enqute rvle notamment que les Europens ont une ide fausse des rles du Parlement et du conseil des ministres. Moins d'un tiers des citoyens ont l'intention d'aller voter en juin.
Bruxelles de notre bureau europen
A quatre mois des lections europennes, moins d'un tiers des citoyens de l'Union (31 %) dclarent avoir la ferme intention de voter. Ce rsultat inquitant a t rendu public, lundi 23 fvrier, par la Commission de Bruxelles, d'aprs l'Eurobaromtre semestriel sur l'tat de l'opinion publique, ralis du 1er octobre au 7 novembre 2003 auprs d'un chantillon reprsentatif de 16 082 personnes.
Le manque d'enthousiasme des personnes sondes se traduit par un nouveau recul de leur confiance dans les institutions europennes (41 %, contre 44 % au printemps 2003, et 46 % au printemps 2002). Un manque de confiance qui s'applique aussi aux institutions nationales (seules 31 % des personnes interroges disent avoir confiance en leur gouvernement national, au lieu de 39 % au printemps 2002).
Cet tat d'esprit se nourrit manifestement d'un grand pessimisme sur la situation conomique : 46 % des Europens prdisent que la conjoncture va se dgrader en 2004, tandis que 16 % restent optimistes. Seuls les pronostics de 1992 taient plus noirs, avec 48 % de pessimistes.
Dans les dix pays qui rejoindront l'Union europenne au 1er mai, 35 % seulement des citoyens se dclarent srs d'aller voter. Il faut dire qu' l'Est aussi le pessimisme domine : 33 % de personnes pensent que leurs conditions de vie vont empirer cette anne et autant misent sur la stagnation, selon un sondage effectu du 11 octobre au 9 novembre auprs de 12 165 personnes des dix pays candidats, plus la Bulgarie, la Roumanie et la Turquie.
LUS NON IDENTIFIS
Curieusement, le Parlement europen est l'institution europenne la plus reconnue : 91 % des personnes interroges l'Ouest en ont entendu parler et 78 % pensent qu'il joue un rle important dans la vie de l'Union europenne. 70 % donnent le premier rle la Commission et 58 % au conseil des ministres.
Cette hirarchie, identique l'Est, montre que les Europens ont une vision errone du fonctionnement de leurs institutions. "La surreprsentation du Parlement europen est sans doute lie son nom", suggre Bruno Jeanbart, directeur adjoint du dpartement opinion de CSA, qui a particip l'enqute pour la France : "Les gens calquent ce qu'ils savent de leur Parlement national sur le Parlement europen, alors qu' Bruxelles le lgislatif a deux ttes", explique-t-il. Il prcise que, en France, "la trs faible connaissance des institutions est lie au fait que les hommes politiques ne font pas l'effort de parler de l'Europe".
Bien que le Parlement soit l'institution la plus plbiscite, l'opinion publique ne connat pas ses eurodputs : 44 % des personnes interroges dclarent n'avoir "ni vu, ni entendu, ni eu de contacts avec un membre du Parlement depuis les dernires lections europennes". Seuls le Danemark (17 %) et la Finlande (26 %) font exception ce constat d'ignorance. En France, "cette mconnaissance s'explique par le mode de scrutin", indique M. Jeanbart : "Les lecteurs connaissent, la rigueur, les ttes de listes nationales, mais elles sont presque toutes parties." Seuls sont rests Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Charles Pasqua, Jean Saint-Josse, Arlette Laguiller et Alain Krivine. M. Jeanbart ajoute que le nouveau dcoupage, en trs grandes circonscriptions, "ne permettra pas plus l'identification des eurodputs".
Les mdias ne facilitent pas cette connaissance : seules 38 % des personnes interroges disent qu'elles ont vu des membres du Parlement europen la tlvision. Ce pourcentage augmente toutefois au Danemark (77 %) et en Finlande (61 %). Or 42 % des personnes interroges disent qu'elles aimeraient voir leurs eurodputs sur le petit cran.
Rafale Rivais
ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 26.02.04
The economic battle between US and EU agriculture is heating up as the two blocs halt imports of each others meat products. Europe bans American poultry, the US bans French meats. This is the current playing field for US/European hostility as the U.S. anti-dumping law was ruled to be illegal by the WTO roughly four years ago, which allowed the EU to move forward with trade sanctions against the US.
With disputes over steel tariffs and the weak dollar, there is growing animosity over trade. This builds on Sophia's earlier entry and could grow to a broarder view of trade relations.
BBC - US Stops imports of French meat
US stops import of French meats
The US has suspended imports of French meat products on safety grounds, it has been announced.
Items such as sausages, hams and foie gras are affected, France's Agriculture Ministry has reported.
The US has introduced the ban after a team of American farm officials visited the 11 French firms allowed to export such products to the States, it said.
The French ministry added that while the US noted "non-conformities" in its health safety system, it did not.
Below standards
"France agrees neither with the statements made by the US authorities, nor the conclusions they thought they needed to draw from them," it said.
However, it admitted that the French Farm Minister Herve Gaymard had taken a last-minute trip to Washington on Monday to present the steps taken by French firms to comply with specific US standards.
This however failed to prevent the ban.
The visit to France by the US Department of Agriculture team took place between 15 January and 5 February.
In addition to inspecting the 11 French firms licensed to import foie gras and other processed meat products to the US it toured the veterinary services that supervise the companies.
Other events
Mr Gaymond said he wanted to see the export of French meat products to the US restart "as soon as possible".
The US ban on French meats comes just hours after the European Union introduced a Europe-wide total ban on poultry and egg imports from the US after a bird flu outbreak in Texas.
It also comes on the same day that the World Trade Organisation gave the EU the go-ahead to introduce trade sanctions against America, because of the US's failure to repeal an historic anti-dumping law
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/3518983.stm
Published: 2004/02/24 21:47:11 GMT
© BBC MMIV
New 'Al Qaeda' tape airs
AP, Reuters
Two tapes bearing the voice of Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman Al Zawahiri, were broadcast on the Arabic satellite channel Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera today, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.
In one of the tapes, aired on Al Arabiya, a voice supposedly to be that of Zawahiri condemns France for its move to ban the wearing of the hijab in schools and lumps France's decision with the larger Western campaign against Islam.
"The decision of the French president to issue a law to prevent Muslim girls from covering their heads in schools is another example of the Crusader envy that the Westerners have against Muslims," the voice said on the tape, which was broadcast on Al Arabiya, a pan-Arab satellite channel. "This envy boils in their hearts and overflows in their chests and they pass it on to the generations."
http://www.iht.com/articles/131017.html
France, which was widely praised by Muslims and other anti-war factions for being against the Iraq war, is now the subject of protests in the Islamic world because of the new law. The article mentions that the outcry is hardly uniform, however.
The tape also goes on to condemn one Egypt's foremost religious leader, Muhammed Sayyed Tantawi, grand sheik of Al Azhar, for issuing an edict in support of France's entitlement to pass such a law. Tantawi also asked Muslim women living in France to comply with the law.
I will be interested to see how France publicly to this tape and its criticisms.
New 'Al Qaeda' tape airs
AP, Reuters
Two tapes bearing the voice of Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman Al Zawahiri, were broadcast on the Arabic satellite channel Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera today, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.
In one of the tapes, aired on Al Arabiya, a voice supposedly to be that of Zawahiri condemns France for its move to ban the wearing of the hijab in schools and lumps France's decision with the larger Western campaign against Islam.
"The decision of the French president to issue a law to prevent Muslim girls from covering their heads in schools is another example of the Crusader envy that the Westerners have against Muslims," the voice said on the tape, which was broadcast on Al Arabiya, a pan-Arab satellite channel. "This envy boils in their hearts and overflows in their chests and they pass it on to the generations."
http://www.iht.com/articles/131017.html
France, which was widely praised by Muslims and other anti-war factions for being against the Iraq war, is now the subject of protests in the Islamic world because of the new law. The article mentions that the outcry is hardly uniform, however.
The tape also goes on to condemn one Egypt's foremost religious leader, Muhammed Sayyed Tantawi, grand sheik of Al Azhar, for issuing an edict in support of France's entitlement to pass such a law. Tantawi also asked Muslim women living in France to comply with the law.
I will be interested to see how France publicly to this tape and its criticisms.
One European Green Party? This article is an interesting peek into how the Green party is not only gaining ground and significance throughout Europe, but also the party's potential for serving as a unifying force between several European nations with varying interests while still maintaining the national identities of each of its participating nations. Is it possible for one political party with vested interests in the environment and social justice issues to bring together the European Union and find common ground? If nothing else, it is certainly innovative...and the collective monetary resources of the 32 formerly independent parties can’t hurt!
BBC News, Greens Launch Europe-Wide Party, By Frances Kennedy
The Roma (commonly referred to as “gypsies”) represent a significant and often despised immigrant group throughout Europe. It is the threat of their expansion and growth into Western Europe that is precipitating tight new immigration legislation such as the regulations introduced in Britain yesterday by David Blunkett. But are the Roma really as hell-bent on seizing jobs and sucking up space as they are often portrayed? This profile of a Czech Roma and his family challenges that notion, showing that many Roma reject the idea of immigrating to Western Europe, for fear of encountering language barriers and further prejudice.
The Guardian, 'I Don't Even Speak Perfect Czech, How would I manage English?' by Luke Harding
The Washington Post's "Germany and France Driving EU, to Distraction of Other Members" is a good review of the ties and tensions that exist between France and Germany and gives them some historic perspective.
From the UK, The Daily Telegrap in an article titled "Blair must not blow his European triumph" presents the meeting as a great victory for Blair (France and Germany have failed in their politics towards Iraq, and in reforming their economy) but is worried by what they view as a temptation to "get into bed with two countries whose recent record has been so retrogarade," and that are trying "to build a defence capability to rival NATO's."
The Portuguese Diario de Noticias, in a story titled "Uma Europa a vᲩas velocidades" considers that the existence of a so-called Directory is now a fact. It concedes that the three men who recently met in Germany may very well has the good of Europe as a goal, but it underlines the loss of credibility suffered by France and Germany for their no compliance of the stability pact.
In what appears to be an editorial from The International Herald Tribune "Europe's Big Three," the European version of the New York Times favors the summit for several reasons among which, "the main reason why the trilateral meeting makes sense is that unless Britain, France and Germany see eye to eye, little gets done in the EU."
La Vanguardia from Barcelona in Spain tries to keep a balance between those who see the meeting as a "mistake" as in the story "El tripartito" and those who consider as in "Un directorio europeo?" that anything that can contribute to moving forward is good. Many stories one can find in the Spanish press point out the fact that Blair, Chirac and Schr? are politically weak at this point.
The Washington Post - Germany and France Driving EU, to Distraction of Other Members
Two Say Close Relationship Does Not Harm Europe's Interests
By John Burgess
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page A25
GENSHAGEN, Germany -- Every six weeks or so, the leaders of Germany and France drop everything and get together for a meal.
This month, the place was this tidy village 10 miles south of Berlin. French President Jacques Chirac arrived by helicopter, then rode through the streets in a black Mercedes, waving to the locals. Ahead, up the cobblestone drive of a mansion that houses a French-German cooperation institute, his counterpart Gerhard Schroeder was waiting. Beaming, the two men embraced, bantered for a moment by the car, then disappeared inside amid a clutch of aides for lunch and private talk.
From the start of European integration a half-century ago, French-German cooperation has been the driving engine. Today the tie is so close, at both the personal and national levels, that elsewhere in Europe some people see too much of a good thing. In their view, France and Germany are sometimes crafting the new Europe on the principle that what's good for them is good for everyone.
In the past year, the two countries have stood firm against the United States in the Iraq war, ignoring sentiment in other European capitals. In efforts to restart their stalled economies, they have violated the fundamental pact of the five-year-old euro common currency. Now they are helping hold up the drafting of the first European Union constitution by insisting on a voting system weighted in their favor.
"The two cooks come from the kitchen and say they have already prepared the dinner . . . You can either eat it or not eat it, but this is what the dinner is," said Jan Truszczynski, who represents Poland, an incoming European Union member, in negotiations. Too often, he said, that's the unpleasant taste the two leave behind.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, another critic, recently summed up the constitutional deadlock: "There's one issue being debated -- who's going to be the boss in the Europe of the future?" he told Washington Post reporters and editors last month.
In Berlin and Paris, officials concede that such tensions exist, but they say that whatever others may say, Europe's interests remain at the heart of the cooperation. Hans Martin Bury, Schroeder's coordinator for relations with Europe, depicts agreement between France and Germany, countries that have vastly different cultures and a history of animosity, as a natural starting point for any decision to be made in the 15-country EU as a whole.
"If we can't get together, there won't be a consensus in Europe," he said in an interview in his Berlin office. "We bring different interests and traditions together. Our interest is not to dominate Europe but to create new solutions."
The partnership is overseeing a future that includes admission of 10 new member countries on May 1, strengthened rule of law, human rights and environmental protection and a progressive pooling of money and decision-making. The union sometimes functions as a counterbalance to U.S. influence in the world, though in foreign policy the two big partners don't always prevail. During the Iraq war, Britain, Spain and Italy led a faction siding with Washington.
The union is creating closer ties between all members, but nowhere are they closer than between Germany and France. Their cabinets hold joint meetings twice a year. Ministers meet to work on "road maps" on issues of mutual interest. French officials are stationed in ministries in Berlin, and Germans serve with their counterpart agencies in Paris. In a few countries, the governments have joint diplomatic offices and cultural institutes.
The heads of German states and French regional governments met in October to approve the exchange of more students and teachers and generally enhance people-to-people links; about 150,000 people already take part in youth exchange programs each year. Plans call for a 50 percent rise in the number of students studying the other country's language. Historians from both sides are meeting in an effort to draft a common textbook for use in French and German high schools.
As the war generation dies out, ordinary people on the both sides of the long-disputed border are acquiring warmer feelings toward each other. In a November 2002 survey of people aged 15-30, 88 percent of Germans described relations as rather good or very good; 94 percent of French respondents did.
French and German officials contend that each day that things go so smoothly is a miracle, in view of the rivalries and wars between the two peoples stretching back to the Middle Ages.
Preventing yet another armed conflict between France and Germany was the vision underlying the EU's founding in 1951 as a six-country common market for coal and steel. In subsequent years, President Charles de Gaulle acted as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's patron in readmitting Germany to respectability in the postwar period.
National needs have often helped smooth over personal differences between German and French leaders in the past, as is happening today. Chirac is a highly cultured man who attended France's elite schools and leads a right-of-center government. Schroeder has blue-collar roots and governs from the left. But by all outward signs, there is a personal rapport, and officials on both sides say it is real.
Relations between the two leaders were not always smooth. At an EU summit in Nice in December 2000, France and Germany clashed over a new framework for governance of an expanded EU. But a month later the two met for dinner at a restaurant in the French village of Blaesheim, on territory that had changed hands four times in 130 years. They decided to meet every six weeks or so, just to keep up. The lunch in Genshagen on Feb. 9 was the 17th such get-together.
The first big sign of parallel thinking came in 2002, when France and Germany reached a deal on restructuring EU farm programs, the largest single drain on the EU's $120 billion annual budget.
As the Iraq war approached, the two leaders again stood together, in opposition. Their reasons were different. Chirac sought to assert France's independence in the world, political analysts say, while Schroeder found he could save a failing reelection campaign by playing to antiwar sentiments among German voters. But the positions were the same: no support at the United Nations, no troops.
In the meantime, both countries' economies were stagnating as part of the global slowdown that followed the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Both governments tried to stimulate their economies through deficit spending, at levels supposedly outlawed by a pact that laid down rules for countries using the euro.
In theory, they became liable for fines equivalent to billions of dollars. In November, finance ministers from the euro countries voted 8 to 4 to forgive the transgression. Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm, a dissenter, complained that other ministers "had been intimidated by these two big countries."
France and Germany have also stood firm in the unsuccessful negotiations on the EU's first constitution. They and other countries say that to pass, a measure must have the backing of a majority of countries that represent at least 60 percent of the expanded EU's population of nearly 500 million people. That would make it hard for smaller countries to gang up against the big ones.
People in other countries sometimes see hints of coercion in statements from Germany, the biggest net contributor to the EU budget, that without agreement on the constitution it will be hard to settle on budgets.
The new style of business has also drawn criticism at home. In Germany, a debate broke out last year on whether the country was squandering trust and friendships built at great effort since 1945. "There is less willingness by people to think that France and Germany act in the interests of Europe," said Christoph Bertram, chairman of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "The Germans have lost something very important."
In France, said Jean-Luc Parodi, an analyst at the IFOP polling institute, the political elite is committed to the German ties. But among ordinary citizens, feelings can differ. Some "see a little risk in giving too much importance to this alliance and not enough to the total European alliance."
Officials in the two countries promise to try harder to consult, but some say that at times there's just no pleasing the critics. At the constitutional convention, said a senior French official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, delegates from other countries frequently asked: " 'What will France and Germany do?' They were waiting for the initiative from France and Germany . . . In other cases, they said, 'be careful, we don't want you to impose your views.' "
Bury said that Germany and France work hard to include other nations in consultations. British Prime Minister Tony Blair periodically attends three-way summits with Chirac and Schroeder, most recently Wednesday in Berlin. In addition, Germany and France are developing European military policy with Belgium and Luxembourg, and strengthening ties with Poland.
But in their public words and body language, Chirac and Schroeder seem to try to show there is no relationship like theirs. At news conferences, they talk about holding identical views. At times, each publicly grants the other a sort of political power of attorney -- the right to speak for both.
In Genshagen, dressed in similar gray suits, they stepped into a ballroom to deliver that message again to reporters.
Schroeder said: "The close, friendly French-German cooperation that has brought very, very pleasant personal experiences is truly fit to make progress for both countries, to make progress for Europe and to let the weight that we have together be clearly known in international discussions."
Chirac chimed in: "On the European topics that we have discussed our positions are absolutely identical. We have the same views." He went on to say that later in the day Schroeder would present those views on behalf of both men to Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the EU.
But one French reporter managed to zero in on discord. France wants to lower the EU-regulated value-added tax that restaurants collect; Germany is opposed. Chirac replied that France understands Germany's position, and Germany understands France's. Smiling, he added that on this issue France will not budge.
The Daily Telegraph - Blair must not blow his European triumph
(Filed: 19/02/2004)
Never did Britain appear more at the heart of Europe than at yesterday's trilateral summit in Berlin. Tony Blair is being courted by France and Germany because they realise that on their own they cannot remain the driving force in a union shortly to expand to 25 members. In addition, they are having second thoughts about having alienated the United States, and a large part of Europe, by their opposition to last year's invasion of Iraq. They hope that Britain can provide the impetus for new moves towards integration, and at the same time act as a bridge to Washington.
For his part, the Prime Minister seeks to convince a sceptical domestic electorate that his "passionate" commitment to both the transatlantic relationship and the union is paying off. Events of the past year - the invasion of Iraq, the imminence of enlargement - have handed him a diplomatic coup.
The kudos of Berlin, however, raises more questions than it answers. Will not France and Germany seek to exploit Mr Blair's delight at being at the heart of Europe for their own ends, the first to build a defence capability to rival Nato's, the second to advance a federal agenda? Do we want to get into bed with two countries whose recent record has been so retrograde, initially over reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, then in breaching the guidelines of the stability and growth pact?
What of our relationships with other European allies, notably Italy, Poland and Spain, which fear that the Berlin triumvirate is an embryonic directory designed to present European summits with faits accomplis, thus excluding them from decision-making? And can a country which remains outside the euro zone really claim to belong to the core?
The seismic shifts which are taking place offer Britain an opportunity to reassert Europe's vocation as a union of nation states rather than a would-be federation. France and Germany, the old motors of integration, have alienated many of their partners by their behaviour over Iraq and the stability pact.
The Commission has rarely been weaker. Differences over voting rights have prevented adoption of a European constitution. The new entrants are looking for liberal economic policies which will allow them to make the most of membership. As a champion of transatlantic unity and free trade, Britain has the potential to be the continent's pace-maker.
The problem is Mr Blair's ambivalence. He is a close ally of Washington, yet has accepted the union's acquiring an autonomous defence capability outside Nato. Despite domestic opposition, he still dreams of taking Britain into the euro zone. His attitude towards the new European constitution remains confusing: he talks of red lines that cannot be crossed, yet appears ready to accept a document which would radically alter the union's status.
This may be the hour of Britain within European councils, but it is far from certain that he is the man to match it.
Diario de Noticias - Uma Europa a vᲩas velocidades
O chanceler alem㯠tentou ontem minimizar a import⮣ia da cimeira tripartida de Berlim, onde participaram, al魠do pro Gerhard Schroeder, o Presidente franc곬 Jacques Chirac, e o primeiro-ministro ingl곬 Tony Blair. O que alguns pas europeus temiam - recorde-se a carta de seis lres de outros tantos pas (Portugal, Espanha, Itᬩa, Holanda, Pol e Est) ao primeiro-ministro irland곬 que este semestre preside ࠕni㯠Europeia, em defesa do Pacto de Estabilidade e Crescimento e do princo da igualdade para todos - acabou por acontecer: a cria磯 de um direct europeu.
Schroeder afirmou que a iniciativa n㯠visava o domo de ningu魠e muito menos da Europa. O chanceler alem㯠sublinhou que os tr고pretendiam apenas resolver os problemas comuns e aumentar a eficᣩa da UE. A afirma磯 頶erdadeira, jᠱue os tr고procuram fugir aos problemas internos dos seus pas e, por isso, querem assumir a imagem de estadistas que resolvem os problemas da UE. A quest㯠頱ue os outros pas olham com desconfian硠para Fran硠e Alemanha, que foram durante anos o motor da Europa, sobretudo na concretiza磯 de projectos como a Uni㯠Econa e MonetᲩa e o pro euro. O facto de n㯠cumprirem as regras do PEC sem serem alvo de qualquer san磯 retirou-lhes credibilidade. Agora precisam do Reino Unido para voltarem a poder reunir consensos e ditar regras na Constitui磯 europeia. Tony Blair, debilitado internamente pela morte de David Kelly e pela inexistꮣia de armas de destrui磯 maci硠no Iraque, tamb魠procura apoios que hᠵm ano eram impensᶥis.
Uma locomotiva anglo-franco-alem㠧era grandes apreens?aos restantes 12 pas da UE, a que se juntam os 10 do alargamento, marcado para Maio. Os condenados a viajar nas carruagens de tr᳠jᠮ㯠tꭠd?s de que vai passar a existir uma Europa a vᲩas velocidades. Slta saber quem vai ficar nas carruagens de tr᳠e se se vai perder o princo de um comissᲩo por paou as presidꮣias rotativas da UE.
El tripartito
FRANCIA VUELVE a poner en peligro la construccie Europa
MIQUEL ROCA I JUNYENT - 24/02/2004
El tlo se presta a engahoy, no sen Catalunya, sino en toda Espaa mencie ?tripartito? se atribuye en exclusiva al Gobierno de Catalunya. En esta ocasino obstante, se estᠨaciendo referencia a la pretensie Chirac, Schr? y Blair de constituir, de hecho, un poder tripartito para conducir la nueva etapa polca de la Uniuropea. Cansados de intentar alcanzar un consenso que no llegan a conseguir con los dem᳠estados miembros, singularmente con Espa los pas recientemente incorporados procedentes de la Europa del Este, pretenden gobernar Europa prescindiendo de ellos.
?Es un ejercicio de prepotencia? No, simplemente es ignorar que la UE o se construye desde el consenso o va a refugiarse en una triste y limitada realidad como mercado econo, sin proyecciolca ni capacidad de influencia en la escena internacional. Francia vuelve de nuevo a poner en peligro la construcciolca de Europa. Lo hizo con Mendes France en 1953, cuando lo que se pretendera la comunidad europea de defensa, y lo vuelve a hacer ahora, antes que aceptar que Europa pueda constituirse sin hegemonfrancesa.
Y lo pretende hacer de la mano de Alemania, pieza clave de la Europa de futuro, pero que no puede olvidar que su nombre inspira a muchos pas del Este el mismo recelo que despierta el vecino ruso. Unos y otros, germanos y rusos, se han pasado los dos ?os siglos de nuestra historia ocupando sucesiva y alternativamente el escenario del centro de Europa, dejando tras de sn reguero de vimas y agresiones.
Y, por si fuera poco, la compase culmina con la presencia de Gran Bretaque ha ido siempre a remolque en la construcciuropea y que, hoy por hoy, todavno ha aceptado el euro como moneda com?ste tripartito stiene de com?n el de Catalunya, que tambi鮠atribuye la culpa de todos los males a Aznar. Pero, igual que aquen Europa deberdecirse qu頳e propone, cse quiere avanzar, en qu頤irecciNo basta con definir el adversario, adem᳠debe saberse proponer cuᬠserᠥl futuro que espera a los europeos.
En todo caso, en este momento el tripartito europeo huele a retroceso, a volver muy atrᳮ La ampliaciueda en entredicho y la construcciolca de la Uniuropea en vmuerta. Lo que franceses, alemanes y britᮩcos se proponen no es suna respuesta a la oposicie otros pas, es sacar provecho de 鳴a para retroceder a muchos aatr᳠y volver a construir la Europa de los potentes, recelosos del protagonismo de los nuevos. A los euroesc鰴icos se suma ahora una nueva categor los de ?Europa spero nunca a costa de nosotros?. ?Ad vas, Europa?
?Un directorio europeo?
QUE CHIRAC, SCHRքER y Blair concierten un proyecto para revitalizar la economno debe rechazarse sin m᳠por supuesto hegemonismo
CARLOS NADAL - 22/02/2004
La reunie Chirac, Schr? y Blair celebrada en Berlel pasado mi鲣oles la han tomado a mal los gobiernos de EspaItalia, Portugal, Holanda, Polonia y Estonia. Sobre todo el de Aznar, quien, al parecer, puso el asunto sobre la mesa en la reunieciente de la internacional del Partido Popular Europeo con el resultado del redactado de una carta que estos seis pas enviaron al presidente semestral de la Uniuropea, el primer ministro irland鳬 Bertie Ahern. Una misiva en la cual se expresaba el temor a que Alemania, Gran Breta Francia pretendan constituirse en algo asomo un directorio dispuesto a marcar las pautas que seguir por la UE, en veras y despu鳠de que se amplcon diez estados m᳠a partir del 1 de mayo de este a
El recelo de los gobiernos espay polaco a todo tipo de iniciativa de los pas de mayor peso demogrᦩco, territorial y econo de la UE en el sentido de querer imponer los criterios a ellos m᳠favorables y en detrimento de los miembros medianos o pequeha ocasionado ya m᳠de una diferencia comunitaria. Ocurri rade que los ministros de Economresolvieran no aplicar a Francia y Alemania las penalizaciones que merec por no cumplir el pacto de contenciel d馩cit y, anteriormente, cuando la guerra de Iraq crea escisirave entre los gobiernos de la UE que se alinearon con Estados Unidos y los que, encabezados por Alemania y Francia, mostraron su disconformidad con la iniciativa norteamericana. Tambi鮠entonces Espa Polonia encabezaron agrupaciones de estados proamericanos. Concretamente, Espaon un documento firmado por ocho gobiernos. Estos desentendimientos crearon el ambiente enrarecido que condujo a la reunie Bruselas en que el proyecto de Constituciuropea elaborada por una Convenciajo la presidencia de Val鲹 Giscard d'Estaing quedrinconado en espera de una mejor oportunidad.
La susceptibilidad espa se apoya en el rechazo de que haya en la UE distintos grados de autoridad y capacidad de decidir. Pero al mismo tiempo responde a la hipersensibilidad de la soberannacional, el temor a que Espae vea arrastrada a cumplir decisiones polcas que perjudiquen sus intereses, no sen el seno de la Comunidad Europea, sino tambi鮠en polca exterior. Esto ?o se puso claramente de manifiesto respecto a Iraq. Es decir, al distanciamiento de la polca francesa y alemana en beneficio de un acercamiento preferencial a Estados Unidos como principal gestor de la polca en el escenario mundial.
Pero entre tanto se han producido cambios en el contexto europeo. El m᳠notable ha sido el acercamiento progresivo de Gran Breta Francia y Alemania. El deseo del ?premier? britᮩco Blair de reequilibrar su postura acentuadamente proamericana mediante la aproximaciontinental a Francia y Alemania. Como si entendiera la necesidad de borrar el efecto de la reuniripartita con Bush y Aznar en las Azores.
Este paso progresivo del eje ParBerlal triᮧulo ParBerlLondres establece relaciones especiales entre los tres pas miembros de la UE que suman el mayor peso demogrᦩco y econo. Y, sin duda, militar, sobre todo por la aportaciritᮩca, que en este terreno tiene una superioridad indiscutible. Precisamente la que le convirti el ? aliado de peso en la guerra y ocupacie Iraq. No en vano es en las cuestiones militares donde se comenzforjar este entendimiento tripartito europeo, mediante instrumentos de una defensa com?rimer paso en la direccie establecer ?convergencias aceleradas?.
Y ahora esta nueva realidad se ha consolidado en la reunin Berldel pasado mi鲣oles, de la cual ha surgido un acuerdo muy amplio para que la UE d頵n paso adelante en su potencialidad industrial, tecnola, de investigacide creacie infraestructuras, de actualizaci ampliacie la educacide ajuste de la polca social y sanitaria. Un conjunto de iniciativas que tienen su vertiente polca, por ejemplo, con el proyecto de crear una especie de superministro europeo encargado de poner en prᣴica estos objetivos. Los reunidos en Berllo han considerado como la figura de un vicepresidente de la Comisiuropea con amplios poderes.
Las denuncias de que los acuerdos tomados en Berlson la manifestacie una voluntad hegema inaceptable no parecen en principio la respuesta m᳠adecuada. Es comprensible que levanten recelos. Pero Chirac, Schr? y Blair han procurado desvanecerlos, advirtiendo de que no se trata de imposiciones, sino de propuestas que plantear, sobre todo, cara a la cumbre comunitaria que ha de celebrarse el 25 y el 26 de marzo.
Si es verdad que puede sospecharse la creacie una especie de triunvirato, de la aplicaciel principio de la ?convergencia acelerada?, tambi鮠lo es que se trata de un proyecto que m᳠bien estᠥncaminado a evitar las ?geometr variables? en la participacin la UE. Porque, habida cuenta de las circunstancias actuales, lo ocurrido en Berlm᳠parece responder al temor de un desfase econo general de la UE respecto a las grandes y poderosas unidades macroeconas como Estados Unidos y Jap al avance hacia el primer plano de potencias en crecimiento acelerado como China e India que a la voluntad de predominio triangular en el seno de la UE. Es la conciencia de que Alemania y Francia estᮠa punto de quedarse peligrosamente atr᳠y de que Gran Bretapese a encontrarse en condiciones algo mejores, tampoco da la medida del gran desafecono y por tanto polco que estᠰlanteado o planteᮤose a escala global.
Los gobiernos de Par Berly Londres han comprendido la urgencia de conjuntar esfuerzos si no quieren quedarse atrᳮ Y esto, lamente, han de resolverlo teniendo muy en cuenta el marco comunitario en el que estᮠinscritos de manera irreversible. Que algunas potencias medias o pequehagan interpretaciones peyorativas de las propuestas elaboradas en la reunie Berlen vez de disponerse a estudiarlas y comprenderlas como una iniciativa con la que es conveniente colaborar no les ayudarᮠEs natural que los estados miembros procuren no salir perjudicados por las decisiones comunitarias, pero un puntilloso nacionalismo por sistema cada vez serᠭenos rentable en una UE que sva a ser verdaderamente viable si acrecienta la interdependencia.
Ni Chirac ni Schr? ni Blair estᮠen sus mejores d polcamente. Lo cual les empuja a apoyarse mutuamente en lo que puede ser una empresa com?paz de devolverles el cr餩to popular del que no van sobrados. Si esta merma les lleva de verdad a ser creativos con una perspectiva europea, no parece razonable acusarles de hegemonismo sin esperar a estudiar sus propuestas y hacer las aportaciones crcas o participativas que se estimen oportunas y legmas.
No es Berlusconi la persona m᳠indicada para despacharse sobre el asunto afirmando que Europa no necesita ning?rectorio que cree confusiY parece exagerado que la ministra espa Ana Palacio diga que ?nadie deberestar autorizado a secuestrar el inter鳠general de Europa?. De momento mejor serdarle un margen de confianza a Blair cuando dice: ?No tenemos por qu頰resentar excusas a nadie. Estamos buscando cdeberos hacer para hacer funcionar a Europa de una manera m᳠eficiente en inter鳠de nuestros pueblos?.
Europe's Big Three
The International Herald Tribune
The meeting of the leaders of Britain, France and Germany on Wednesday was guaranteed to get other Europeans grumbling anxiously about a "big three" directorate. The fears are understandable, especially with the approach of the expansion of the EU, and it was right for six nervous European prime ministers to issue a joint statement effectively reminding Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr? that they have no monopoly on EU policy-making.
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That said, there is nothing wrong in a separate get-together of the three, especially after the bitter disputes over Iraq. In fact, it is critical for the heads of Europe's three biggest economies to be talking. What is important is that Blair, Chirac and Schr? come up with concrete ideas in advance of the next EU summit meeting on March 25 about getting Europe over some of the toughest times in its history and delivering real benefits to the people of Europe. And it is equally important that they present their decisions in a way that does not rouse new anxieties, in Europe or the United States, and avoids any talk of a "two-speed Europe" or patronizing lectures to new members.
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The conventional wisdom about the big three is that the French-German "motor" is no longer powerful enough to drive European integration and needs the added horsepower of Britain. So Blair's trip to Berlin should be good news for all Europeans, all the more so since Britain, a trusted friend of many new entrants and Europe's leading Atlanticist, will temper French-German tendencies to go it alone. It should also be welcomed by Washington, which will be less suspicious of French and German intentions for Europe if America's British ally is in on their talks.
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In the end, though, the main reason why the trilateral meeting makes sense is that unless Britain, France and Germany see eye to eye, little gets done in the EU. When they do pull together, they can often achieve more, and more quickly, than the cumbersome bureaucratic beast of Brussels in full battle armor. Recent examples of trilateral success include the mission to Tehran last year that persuaded Iran to allow inspection of its nuclear program, and burgeoning defense cooperation, notably the agreement last week by Germany to join the Franco-British plan for rapid reaction forces.
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Such cooperation, of course, can easily strain the nerves of those left out; hence the warning letter from Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Estonia. But fears of a trilateral directorate are exaggerated; Britain, France and Germany have very differing national agendas, and the three men are hardly bosom buddies, however chummy they may try to appear over their beer and w?
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The greater fear is that their separate ambitions will deflect them from the responsibility they bear for all Europe. The EU on the eve of enlargement is a fragile thing, as demonstrated by the debacle in December over the Union's draft constitution. A compromise proposed by Blair, Chirac and Schr? - or even just an agreement to compromise - could go along way toward solving the constitution wrangle; bulldozing by the big three, on the other hand, could do enormous damage to Europe's big house.
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The most promising thing about the Berlin meeting is that social and economic reform is high on the agenda. The EU has worked so far, most of the time, because it is an economic union; and globalization's success stories worldwide show that economic progress is the best recipe for stability. Settling on the best ways to tackle unemployment, social security and health care, and to improve the business environment, would not only help Europe through its current rough patch, but also give Europeans some evidence that the EU is not such a bad thing.
With friends like these
By Christopher Caldwell
Financial Times; Feb 14, 2004
This is a very comprehensive analysis of the Right and Left governments in the main European countries, and their position towards the US. There are also - not surprisingly, if you know European history - friends of America on the Left, and rivals of the Bush Administration on the Right. Be aware that the author is a columnist for the FT but also for The Weekly Standard, the influential magazine of the US Neoconservatives.
When Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, went to Berlin about a year ago to assess what he calls the "psychological situation" of young Germans, he got a rude surprise. At a roundtable set up by the German Marshall Fund, an American foundation that promotes transatlantic ties, Kissinger met a dozen young leaders - including Bundestag members from the conservative Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union - both a traditional source of support for Washington.
Kissinger was told that anti-American sentiments, the balder the better, could draw big applause at political-party rallies. Mostly this happened at Green Party rallies, but Social Democrats, and even some Christian Democrats, now also stood and cheered when the United States was anathematised.
"It was not a hostile meeting," Kissinger recalled in an interview, insisting that his surprise not be taken as anger. "It's a new generation that is trying to find its own identity. It's not burdened by the war, not obsessed with economic recovery. That means that they are not automatically pro-American."
In its diplomacy, as in its military strategy, the United States is discovering that it has a very shaky idea of who its real friends are. In the old days, it was very clear where the instinctive pro- Americans, or "Atlanticists" were to be found. They made up most of the Christian Democratic parties everywhere, and an influential right-wing rump of the Socialist parties in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain. And some of today's pro-Americans are still on the right: Germany's CDU still backs America, as do the British Tories, although not unanimously, and particularly not when Labour is in power. Beyond them, though, today's Atlanticists are an unfamiliar mix of New Labour (in its British and Dutch variants), continental human-rights activists (particularly in France), Eastern European ex-dissidents and post-cold war parties of the right (in Spain and Italy). It would be surprising if America's future foreign policy did not take some account of which Europeans like it, and which don't.
Dennis MacShane, Britain's Labour minister for Europe, tells me that I shouldn't overstate the shift in support. There were, he says, always important exceptions to the rule that America's friends in Europe were on the right. De Gaulle called the United States the biggest threat to world peace as early as 1965, while in Britain, Labour's support has been broader than the American right tends to remember.
"The roots of European social democracy are anti-communist," says MacShane. "European social democracy has far more in common with American values, including the war on terrorism, than with any other ideology." The European left should never feel embarrassed about siding with the US, provided the US is a progressive force, MacShane thinks. In the 1980s, they should have remarked (but mostly they didn't) that Ronald Reagan was, by many measures, tougher on South Africa than Europeans were.
Today, he thinks they should be quicker (but they're pretty slow) to embrace the sympathetic parts of George W. Bush's agenda. "I look at Bush, who has rejoined Unesco, talked about legalising eight or nine million immigrants from Mexico, and massively increased help for HIV/Aids," MacShane says. "This is not what we would call a hardline, right-wing agenda."
But MacShane's "we" doesn't embrace all or even most of his own party, and it sells poorly in continental Europe.
In France, Senator Jean Francois-Poncet was a pillar of Atlanticism during his term as Valery Giscard d'Estaing's foreign minister in the 1970s. He isn't one any more. He says now the Euro-American battle over the Iraq war exposed differences that cannot be ignored, and Europe marches to a different drum. "What you have to face," he told me calmly, "is that the Franco-German position had the overwhelming support of public opinion all over Europe."
Johannes Rau, Germany's president and a social democratic Atlanticist, made the same point at the height of European agitation against the war when he said: "In some ways, Europe has never been more united."
And this anti-American unity is being voiced in the traditional sancta of pro-Americanism. At a conference last summer in Berlin - sponsored by Atlantik-Brucke (Atlantic Bridge) and the American Council on Germany, two groups whose raison d'etre is bilateral comity - the rapporteur Daniel Casse, a former aide to the first President Bush, said morosely: "What I heard was that America had to be 'checked', 'tamed', 'steered', 'counterbalanced' and 'Europeanised'."
Bundesbank president Ernst Welteke sounded wistful as he recalled that "'chewing gum' and 'chocolate' were the first American words I could speak". These were the good old, Good American, days. Now, he said, "a rift is slowly developing, and has been since the end of the cold war". Amity was no longer a glue. All that could be hoped for was that interests would remain common. Winding up his remarks, he reached for the John D. Rockefeller adage that: "Friendships founded on business work better than businesses founded on friendship." One could say the same of China or Russia. Or, nowadays, Libya.
There are still "classic" pro-Americans in Europe, even in France, who think that Europe and the US, because of shared values and civilisation, will always wind up in the same geostrategic boat. Claude Goasguen, who represents Paris's wealthy 16th arrondissement, likes to remind visitors to his office in the National Assembly that he is a Breton who hails from Finistere, France's westernmost point, "turned towards the Atlantic". Goasguen is as nationalist as any French politician, but he thinks it bad for France to "wind up in a 'minority camp' in the West".
Alain Madelin, who stood on the Liberal Democrat ticket for the French presidency two years ago, is with him and with the Americans. On a sunny morning in his office in the seventh arrondissement, he says that he is unhappy that France has, in the past 12 months, become the "Mecca" of European anti-Americanism. "I'm not pro-American for the joy of being pro-American. When the United States was backing Pakistan, I opposed them. But I'm with the Americans strategically. Still, we have to realise that this is the end of the generation that lived the war. They don't have the same feeling for America, deep down."
For Madelin, those who would understand the current international predicament must realise that we live in an age of individual networkers. "The 20th century was the century of unlimited confidence in states," he says. "The 21st is rediscovering confidence in people." Madelin has made contact with like-minded political thinkers in Europe. In Venice recently, he discussed French-American links with the US under secretary of state, John Bolton, a high priest in the neo-conservative temple. Pierre Lellouche, who was the only French assembly member besides Madelin to vocally support the war, has kept up contacts in the United States, and, during the run-up to war, organised meetings for a handful of sympathetic Paris intellectuals every Tuesday night in Paris.
But such networking among individuals is as nothing compared to the anti-American, anti-war forces which control dozens of anti- globalisation and leftist websites and, in several European capitals, could put close to a million people onto the streets. And it is little compared with the rhetoric that President Jacques Chirac and foreign minister Dominique de Villepin can muster - to great applause - when they excoriate America. Many conservative parliamentarians describe a window of potential sympathy for the US that is even wider, saying wistfully that the stance of the French right towards the United States would be different if Alain Juppe - prime minister at the beginning of Chirac's first seven-year term - had been president. (The eventual chances of that, of course, moved from slim to none with Juppe's conviction in late January on corruption charges.)
Others speak of conservatives in the government who are much more pro-American than they let on in public. Interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy, for instance, who is emerging as a future rival to Chirac after spending much of January on high-profile diplomatic visits to Egypt and China, has siblings in the US.
Even if there were many pro-Americans who dared not speak their name, it probably wouldn't matter. After half-a-century of being set by the right, no matter who was in power, French foreign policy has seen its centre of gravity shift leftwards in the last half- decade. In recent French debates, there has been little difference between left and right. According to Senator Francois-Poncet, the two sides differed little in the past year's contretemps with the US, except in one respect. "The left," he said, "played a role in insisting that Chirac must follow his logic all the way to the end."
The old links and ties which sustained the right across the Atlantic have gone, in part because the necessity to stick together in face of the Soviet threat from the East, and the socialist challenge from within, have also gone. Atlanticism no longer finds its deepest roots in Christian democracy.
Europeans often look for an explanation of this estrangement in something George W. Bush "did". But perhaps the explanation rests in Christian Democracy - or in Christianity. The idea of Christianity as a conservative force has been an illusion for a long time. First, it is not a force. The weakening of piety (probably) and church affiliation (certainly) since the second world war have led the German CDU to transform itself from wooing Christians through church groups into wooing consumers through television. And the Italian Democrazia Cristiana could not manage even that transition, shattering into several tendencies after the "Clean Hands" corruption investigations of the early 1990s.
Also, the Christian churches are not particularly conservative. According to Franco Venturini, of the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, Italy's Eurocommunists found it necessary, by the end of the cold war, to back Nato. But "in the Christian Democrats you had the opposite phenomenon because they were basically Catholic and Catholics are basically pacifist". The result was surprising: "By the time of the Kosovo war," says Venturini, "the former communists behind Massimo D'Alema were more pro-American than the former Christian Democrats."
This increasing pacifism among Christians may explain the large number of rainbow-coloured flags reading "Pace" ("Peace") that one saw throughout Italy during protests over the US/UK Iraq invasion - and still see, a little tattered and grubby now, in many Italian streets. Most Italians believe that the chief constraint on the Berlusconi government's ability to adopt a stance of full-throated Atlanticism has been the anti-war position of the Pope.
The issue now is: can the United States, and particularly the neo- conservatives who believe in the use of force to defend Western values, connect with like-minded people in Europe to create a new international alliance? Here is the first problem: in the United States, the neo-conservatives are on the right. In Europe, their natural home is, or has recently been, on the left.
In France, for example, the intellectuals most often associated with support for the war in Iraq were the filmmaker Romain Goupil, the philosopher Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Medecins sans Frontieres, and the novelist Pascal Bruckner.
Sitting outside a pub near Les Halles, Bruckner tells me he's all for a "European neo-conservatism". In his mind, this would mean a European army that would take aim at the weak links in the world's totalitarian chain. He thinks it would have an advantage over its American variant, because Europeans - partly by virtue of the French and British colonial administrative traditions - have been more rooted in other cultures than the US has, and may have formed a better sense of how to respect local cultures, recognise the local power-elites and administer transition governments. Early on in the Iraq invasion, Bruckner was struck by how much more successful British troops had been in controlling Basra and the south of Iraq, compared to the Americans who were running the rest of it.
This brand of "neo-conservatism" is not an emulation of America's; it may even reflect a distrust of it. Europe's problem, as Bruckner sees it, is not that it has drifted too far to the left - for the left-right concept is one that he considers "totally discredited". Nor is Europe's problem simply anti-Americanism.
"Anti-Americanism can only be very ambivalent," he says, "where American culture sets the tone. The French are voting for America - in the market place - all the time." Rather, Bruckner says, "our great problem as Europeans is that we want to exit from history. Sometime after 1989, we developed the belief that barbarism could be refuted intellectually." Here, he makes clear, he is speaking primarily of France and Germany, not the UK.
Italy is both the same and different. There, as mentioned, Christianity has drifted into the orbit of the left, taking some formerly conservative Christian Democrats along with it. As in most continental countries, a large majority of Italians opposed the war. But Italy also has, in Silvio Berlusconi, a leader who revolutionised his country's media - and through them, his countrymen's politics - by importing American television.
Parliamentary deputy Enrico Letta is a member of the Margherita Party, a branch of Christian Democracy that, when the collapse in Italian parties came, sided against Berlusconi. As Letta explains it, the big change came in the 1980s, and it was Berlusconi the media wheeler-dealer - as opposed to Berlusconi the politician - who brought it. As he took over one Italian television network after another, Berlusconi Americanised the country. US television changed Italians' priorities, drawing them away from politics and towards consumerism.
"Berlusconi brought a model of television from the US," Letta says. "Not just a business model but a programming philosophy." Just as Tony Blair had to move his party's base from the mill to the university before he could take over his country, Berlusconi had to move his country's culture into the television age before he could reap the political benefits. Berlusconi knows what his countrymen think, because it is he who made them think it. In concrete terms, says Letta, the result is an American-style party system, in which weak parties compete for control of a strong government - the opposite of the old Italian system. Berlusconi's Forza Italia is just such a weak party. The majority of those supporting the government, in this view, are Republicans (in the American sense). "We, in turn," Letta admits of the opposition, "have become more and more similar to American Democrats."
This implosion of Italy's party system may be laying the groundwork for a more durable pro-Americanism than the old Christian Democrats could offer - and, not for the first time, it could be pioneering a new trend in Europe. After all, Italy has been the only one of the EU's six founder nations to offer the US its steady support for the past two years. Personality explains part of it. Something in US president George W. Bush, and the America he represents, is very attractive to Berlusconi. According to the Corriere's Venturini, "Berlusconi thinks: 'They will understand me... That is the country of the self-made man. Here in Italy, people will tell me I used to play piano on cruise ships. In America, they don't care. They even like that. In Italy, they tell me I'm not a real politician. In America, they distrust real politicians.'"
Different metaphors are possible: Giancarlo Loquenzi, a Senate aide, prefers to compare Berlusconi to the New York mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. Bush - unlike Schroder and Chirac - never criticised Berlusconi's election in 2001, and Berlusconi's camp includes such US admirers as defence minister Antonio Martino, who imbibed a good deal of American philosophy through his participation in the free- market Mont Pelerin Society.
In Britain, Mark Leonard, director of the Blairite Foreign Policy Centre, says there is a new strain of Atlanticism which is "revolutionary rather than status-quo". This new strain attracts a certain number of Conservatives - Leonard names the Times columnist, Michael Gove, and the MP Michael Portillo - who believe in "a neo-conservative idea of democracy".
But he also recognises that the Atlanticist project has a great appeal to part of the left. "This is a left that thinks the American tiger can be ridden to promote human rights," he says, "which is fine, except for two problems. The first is American nationalism - we're not Americans. The second is an impatient belief on the left that to deal with big problems, we are going to have to develop a more multilateral way." While Leonard thinks that certain Europeans are too obsessed with multilateralism - those who would not have attacked Serbia in 1999 without a UN mandate, for instance - he thinks the US is far too inclined to go it alone.
Israel is central to the ideological divide over Atlanticism. Much attention has been given on both sides of the Atlantic to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in many European countries, especially France. Less focus has been given to pro-Israeli movements and initiatives. Claude Goasguen says: "There are about a hundred pro- Israel people in the National Assembly, and it's among them that Atlanticists can be recruited."
Berlusconi's refusal, in the six months of Italy's EU presidency, to meet with Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat, despite an EU directive to the contrary, can be understood as placing him on the pro-American side of the Atlanticist divide. In general, though, support for Israel is haemorrhaging away in the political classes of Western Europe. In Germany, that support came primarily from political leaders - Helmut Kohl, Johannes Rau - whose generation is dying off, and whose immediate successors are evidently much less inclined to nail their colours to the Israeli mast.
By contrast, former leftists are moving to the Zionist cause as they swing to the centre, and so is one major party of the right - a party which would have been the last one would have thought could take such a position. Gianfranco Fini's post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale party, heir to Mussolini's fascists, was once viscerally hostile to the Jewish state - but Fini made an official visit to Israel last autumn.
As European integration comes to revolve increasingly around foreign-policy questions - from defence, to the Turkish candidacy for membership - hard and unavoidable decisions present themselves. Politicians on both right and left feel that Atlanticism has become a zero-sum game: they cannot take a firm stand in favour of the United States (through bilateral agreements, for instance) without endangering the European project.
It's a state of play, paradoxically, that favours the emergence of traditionally Eurosceptic Britain as a model for smaller European states. Particularly in Italy, politicians note with interest (or jealousy) Britain's ability to balance two roles - an occidental/Atlantic/Nato one and a European one. Italian Senate aide Giancarlo Loquenzi says he hopes his own country can replicate Britain's "not-so-ritual vision" within Europe.
As Italy took a hard line to protect its position on milk quotas during recent EU Common Agricultural Policy negotiations, Margaret Thatcher's name was frequently invoked.
For Giuliano Ferrara, the charismatic former communist who now edits the Berlusconi-friendly daily, Il Foglio, the Blair government represents the triumph of the political ideas of "a certain right" in Europe. "Blair acknowledges that we now live in a shareholder society." says Ferrara. "He has been consistent in foreign affairs with both Clinton and Bush." But others, inside Italy and out, doubt that the country has the means to emulate Britain's diplomatic bigamy. Enrico Letta considers the idea that a traditionally pro-EU Italy can replicate Britain's freedom of action within Europe to be delusional. France's Senator Francois- Poncet thinks Blair's stance is a dangerous one to imitate in the first place: "The British think they are in a better position by being largely subservient to the Americans," he remarks. "I would say that they wildly overstate their influence."
The point, however, is that Britain is more important in Europe because it is now becoming evident that dealing with America and dealing with the EU are not separate issues. As Gianni Bonvicini of Italy's Institute for International Affairs put it, "There is an increasing feeling that the Europe relationship can't be monopolistic. It can't mean giving up other relationships."
And Britain is the only EU-member country, at present, that is managing both relationships satisfactorily. Even French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin seems to recognise the indispensability of British military capabilities to European construction, particularly after those capabilities have been enhanced by 10 months of battlefield exposure to American technology and logistics. "There will be no Europe without a European defence," de Villepin wrote recently, "and there will be no European defence without the United Kingdom." That is why, for the Anglo-Franco-German summit recently announced for February 18, Britain appears to hold all the trumps.
Transatlantic ties are now shifting to different bases, but the bases still exist. Henry Kissinger is correct to say that the new generation of Europeans is not automatically pro-American. But neither need it be automatically anti-American. And others tend to miss the present Europe-wide unease about the European project. In the wake of December's Brussels summit, this unease has reached its highest level since the Maastricht agreement. The gloom arises, in part, from the failure at Brussels to find a constitutional voting formula acceptable to both the large countries (particularly Germany and France) and the medium-sized ones (particularly Poland and Spain.) But it also rests on the inability over the past year to find a common European voice on foreign policy, and specifically on the US.
In January, in a thoughtful Brussels post-mortem, the Le Monde writer, Thomas Ferenczi, speculated that "one of the most visible causes of the exhaustion of the European project is the retreat of those political forces that defended it, come hell or high water, for the past half-century." By this, he meant the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the former transformed into Chirac-followers and free-marketeers, the latter losing significant numbers of voters, in France, to a more charismatic extreme left. These are the two parties, Ferenczi says, with a natural link to the total history of Europe - one through religion, the other through the Enlightenment.
But they are also the parties with a natural link to the foreign policy Europe has pursued through the longest period of peace in its history. For that reason, it may be hard to strike at the roots of the European relationship with America without striking at the roots of the project of European construction. Politicians increasingly see this link. Dennis MacShane, who is so impatient with European attempts to paint George W. Bush as a radical rightist, says: "What I recognise as a hardline agenda is anti- Europeanism from the British right. Like anti-Americanism from the Continental left, it's a politics that leads nowhere." This is a two-way street. If Washington sees the same link as MacShane, it will resist the temptation to damage the EU. And indeed, in the past year, the US has moved steadily away from defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's evocation of an "Old Europe" and from a White House aide's urging that the Bush administration work towards the "'disaggregation' of Europe."
In most of his speeches since his visit to Warsaw last year, Bush has stuck to the line that one need not choose between the US and Europe. On one hand, the US has shown - for instance, through its threats, believable or not, to deny Iraq contracts to those unwilling to aid the coalition last spring - that it will not sit idly around if European countries seek to poison its bilateral relationships with other European allies. On the other, the US has dropped any larger project of undermining Europe's project of self- government, seeing that it risks creating a pretext for anti- Americanism that politicians across the political spectrum can endorse.
It is with such considerations in mind that Devon Cross, an American philanthropist whose career has included service on the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, showed up in London in January. Cross hopes to start an NGO that will link American policy-makers and strategists with European journalists and publics - and, she hopes, promote a better understanding of how American foreign- policy thinking works and what the American government is trying to do. While she is a longtime friend of Donald Rumsfeld, and might be called a neo-conservative in the US, Cross says she will make it a priority to bring to London the widest possible variety of foreign- policy voices, from Bush Republicans (she has invited the under secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to participate) to Clinton Democrats (such as the former CIA director James Woolsey) to the human-rights activists of the Democratic left (who cluster around the Freedom House Foundation and American organised labour). This varied coalition is what Americans naturally think of when they think of the political constituency for their foreign policy. But it is not what Europeans think of.
And that is just the point, according to Cross. Her view - that America is losing the battle for the world's hearts and minds by neglecting "public diplomacy", of the sort that its government, foundations and labour unions carried out throughout the cold war - is held quite widely in the US.
Cross's London operation is the first fruit of such thinking, but it is hard work starting up an organisation that aspires to do the work of such lavishly funded, celebrity-studded cold war organisations as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Chelsea house where she had hoped to locate her operation fell through, but at least now the organisation has acquired a name: The Policy Forum. Which is an improvement from the time Cross first had the idea to start such an organisation, at the nadir of trans-Atlantic relations in the days following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "Back then," said Cross on her first day in London, "I had thought of calling it Operation Just Show Up."
Christopher Caldwell is an FT columnist and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Following more cases of the birdflu in Texas, the European Commission has banned imports of poultry and eggs from the U.S., at least until March 23 when EU farm ministers will review the policy. Safety is the number one concern, not economics, says David Byrne the EU health commissioner.
The EU gets a substantial amount--nearly 25%--of its eggs from the U.S. (that's a 20 million euro business)
This story would be helpful for anyone looking at the US/EU economic relationship through export/import. We could do a follow up on how it's affected economy or local poultry/egg markets.
We could also get a piece of the story here. Without the EU demand, what will happen to local U.S. poultry/egg markets?
EU bans US poultry imports after Texas bird flu outbreak
EU Businesshttp://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040224113607.bhcq0rjf
EU bans US poultry imports after Texas bird flu outbreak
EU Business
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040224113607.bhcq0rjf
The European Commission announced Tuesday an immediate ban of EU imports of poultry and eggs from the United States after an outbreak of bird flu in Texas.
European Union health commissioner David Byrne said the import suspension, hitting trade worth over 20 million euros (25 million dollars) annually, will be reviewed by EU farm ministers next month.
He acknowledged the economic impact of the decision, but said: "Safety is what comes first... Trade considerations are important, but they are secondary to the protection of public health."
The EU executive was informed late Monday of the Texas outbreak -- the fourth US state to be hit with the virus following outbreaks in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The health commissioner, who briefed EU farm ministers about his decision Tuesday, said the Texas outbreak was more serious than the other US cases because the strain of virus concerned is more contagious.
Byrne said the ban will remain in place until March 23 when it will be reviewed by a meeting of EU farm ministers in Brussels. EU veterinary experts will meet next week to confirm the commission ban, as required by EU rules.
The EU imports primarily day-old chicks and eggs for consumption and live eggs for farmers from the United States, Byrne said.
EU imports of US poultry and eggs are substantial: some 13,000 tonnes of eggs are imported annually, representing 25 percent of such imports with a value of 20 million euros. The EU also imports some 800,000 chicks every year, with a value of 2.5 million euros, of which 450,000 are from the United States.
The Texas outbreak was detected among a flock of chickens on a farm in the county of Gonzales, which was quarantined, the Texas Animal Health Commission said in a statement.
But US authorities stressed the virus was not the same deadly strain that has swept across 10 Asian countries this winter, and does not appear to be linked to the other US outbreaks.
Bob Hillman, Texas state veterinarian, said that the flu strain, H5N2, "poses no health threat to humans and causes relatively low mortality in chickens."
"At present, there does not appear to be any connection between the cases on the east coast and the infected flock in Texas," Hillman said.
Talk about a battle over immigration! Legal workers from the 10 EU member states set to join in May will receive full rights and benefits, but the "traditional" EU countries are placing some tough short term conditions.
Here is a good summary of the British dynamics leading to David Blunkett's decision to place restrictions on Eastern European immigrant workers. It includes some interesting stats on the economic benefits of EU enlargement.
This other extended Guardian piece highlights some of the debates (and last minute panic, according to the newspaper) that took place before the home minister said immigrants must, for one, register their jobs with the UK.
What these articles make clear is the xeonophobic views of some, and the balancing act governments have to make with regard to policies on Eastern European immigration. It seems practical to place conditions on guest workers, even if they are EU citizens, all goverments do, but those conditions should be fair and driven not by nationalist or xenophobic sentiments, but by sound policy decisions. But then again, if the EU is one fluid "body" why the restrictions on any citizens?
Benefits clampdown for new EU citizens
Michael White and Alan Travis
Tuesday February 24, 2004
The Guardian
David Blunkett last night bowed to pressure in the controversy over East European immigration when he unveiled tougher-than-expected restrictions on jobseekers coming to Britain after 10 new member states join the European Union on May 1.
In a move that won the applause of the CBI and the TUC - but set Britain apart from most EU states - Mr Blunkett insisted he is "balancing" the labour needs of a dynamic economy with measures to prevent "benefit tourism" and potential strains on public services.
But the home secretary failed to stem criticism with his announcement that he will restrict access to benefits for up to two years and require workers from so-called "accession" countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states to register their UK jobs.
On left and right, the government was accused of a last-minute panic. In response, ministers insist they will deport fraudsters and that - after 20 illegal Chinese workers died in Morecambe Bay - they are determined to stop migrants sliding into "the exploitation of the sub-economy".
Mr Blunkett's decision, taken in consultation with Tony Blair and cabinet colleagues last week, will mean that jobseekers from eight EU newcomers from the old Soviet bloc will have full rights to enter Britain from May 1 along with tourists and other visitors. But they will be required to join a workers registration scheme once they have found a job and will have to provide evidence that they are being paid at least the minimum wage.
New migrant workers will not be eligible for the full range of UK benefits - housing benefit, income support or council housing - until they have been in continuous employment for at least 12 months. Those who fail to find jobs will not be able to claim benefit for two years.
If officially sponsored predictions that no more than 13,000 a year will arrive from among the 75m new EU citizens prove wrong, officials stand by to follow France, Germany and most EU states in blocking new entrants, as EU "transition" rules permit, for up to seven years.
Emphasising the advantages of an open door policy, Mr Blunkett reminded MPs that the government welcomes legal migration.
"At the same time we have balanced this by taking tougher measures to clamp down on illegal working, abuse of the asylum system and clandestine entry," he said.
Yesterday's formula is less than the fully-fledged work permit regime which Downing Street, fearful of the xenophobic tabloids, had been urging. It is believed that Mr Blunkett's plea to the cabinet that if new workers were not encouraged to come legally they would come illegally anyway, clinched the argument.
The Conservatives backed work permits, as they warned of a flood of cheap labour and benefit tourists heading to wards Dover, some accompanied by children who could not be left "destitute" in the streets.
Mr Blunkett told his Tory shadow, David Davis, that work permits would be costly and bureaucratic, compared with what aides called his own "light touch" approach.
But he has been forced to embrace tougher restraints than initially predicted after last week's discussions at No 10. No paper registration certificate was then expected and benefit restrictions for those who fail to find work were thought to be likely to last 18 months, not two years.
· The Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, last night hinted at restrictions on benefit, after Ireland became, in effect, the only EU state with a wholly open door policy to migrants after Mr Blunkett's announcement. "We must protect ourselves from what could be an abuse of the system. That was always our position," he said.
The Bush Administration is urging NATO to expand its prescence in Iraq and Afghanistan to ease some of the military burden off of the U.S. The International Herald Tribune article says the administration's goal is for NATO to make a "headline-grabbing commitment" by the end of June and a few months before the presidential election. The administration has struggled to reduce its military prescence and vulnerability in the two countries, the article said.
I think this story touches a broad range of topics from national identity to defense to perception. While Europe tries to unite and build up its military defense, the U.S. request to expand NATO into Iraq and Afghanistan would cause a significant drain on European forces but at the same time make Bush look good for the elections. Its also interesting that France's president Jacques Chirac is trying to mend his political differences with the Bush administration after clashing over the Iraq war.
Nato role expanding at urging of the U. S.
Elaine Sciolino, International Herald Tribune
NATO role expanding at urging of the U.S.
Elaine Sciolino/NYT NYT
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Bush wants alliance, now in Afghanistan, to add Iraqi mission
BRUSSELS NATO is back.
The much-maligned cold war military alliance lost its mission when its primordial enemy, the Soviet Union, collapsed, and was ridiculed by the Bush administration and rendered impotent by its own division over the American-led war on Iraq.
Only 16 months ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lectured NATO defense ministers in Warsaw that if NATO did not transform itself, "it will not have much to offer the world in the 21st century." Now, the Bush administration is struggling to reduce its military presence and vulnerability in Afghanistan in Iraq. And it is turning to NATO to expand its mandate in Afghanistan and play a substantive role in Iraq. "I believe in NATO," President George W. Bush told Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new NATO secretary general, when the two met in the Oval Office last month, senior NATO officials said. "I believe NATO is transforming itself and adjusting to meet the true threats of the 21st century." When de Hoop Scheffer pledged to work hard to get NATO to do more in Afghanistan, Bush replied, "I'm with you." And when the conversation turned to Iraq, Bush said, "The more of a NATO role the better."
De Hoop Scheffer, the Bush administration's choice to lead NATO, came home and pitched the new line. At a speech in Brussels on Tuesday, he said that the alliance was willing to deploy in Iraq. "Under the right conditions we could do it," de Hoop Scheffer told the German Marshall Fund's Trans-Atlantic Center. If a sovereign Iraqi government with United Nations backing were to ask for NATO's help, it would be difficult to "abrogate our responsibilities." Until NATO took command of the force that policies Kabul and the area around it, NATO was in the midst of an identity crisis, uncertain of its role, its future and what constituted a military threat in the post 9/11 era. Its role in stabilizing Afghanistan represents NATO's first "out of area" mission beyond Europe; Iraq would be the second. The United States wants NATO to deliver on an ambitious plan to extend its peacekeeping presence outside Kabul and create links with the American-led offensive military operation in the south, which is struggling to rout the remnants of Taliban rule. It also wants NATO to take command of the vulnerable 9,500-strong multinational brigade in central Iraq, which is now run by Poland, and possibly the larger British-led operation in the south. The goal is for NATO to make a headline-grabbing commitment to both missions at the NATO summit meeting in Istanbul, just days before the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis at the end of June and five months before the U.S. presidential election. The problem in expanding NATO into Iraq is that it already has failed to persuade countries to do enough in Afghanistan. In the four months since the UN authorized NATO to expand its peacekeeping mission of about 6,000 outside the Afghan capital, Kabul, the alliance has managed to send only a few hundred troops under German command to the relatively safe northern city of Kunduz. It took months of high-level arm-twisting of NATO members last year to get them to pledge to send desperately needed helicopters to Afghanistan.
George Robertson, the former secretary general, was forced to lobby hard for the helicopters at the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels and at every farewell meeting in December, finally getting commitments of three Black Hawk helicopters from Turkey and three or four from the Netherlands. "Lord Robertson had to use everything he had to bludgeon the foreign and defense ministers into committing helicopters," said Robert Bell, a former White House and senior NATO official who is now a private defense consultant in Brussels. "NATO can't operate that way." General James Jones, NATO's top commander in Europe, told a Senate committee last month that Afghanistan was a "defining moment" for the alliance as it adopted a broader global agenda, but then complained that NATO members were not providing enough troops for the country's reconstruction. "The alliance has agreed, the donor countries have been identified, and yet we find ourselves mired in the administrative details of who's going to pay for it, who's going to transport it, how's it going to be maintained," he said. On Wednesday, Jones presented NATO members with a wish list of what it need to enable NATO to deploy in five provincial cities, senior NATO officials said.
De Hoop Scheffer also has acknowledged his failure so far to persuade NATO nations to send more troops to Afghanistan, saying on Tuesday that force protection was a continuing problem. No member of parliament in any NATO country would approve the new request for troops if there was not an answer to the question, "Who will come to the assistance" of the troops "in extreme circumstances," he said. Asked whether the alliance could contemplate moving into Iraq when there was so much to do in Afghanistan, de Hoop Scheffer launched into a long answer about how the mission was possible, and then said that he could not be expected as secretary general "to bang my head on the table and say, 'This has to work.'" On the positive side, France, whose opposition to the war in Iraq damaged its relationship with Washington, sees NATO as a vehicle for projecting its own military and political power and repairing its American ties. In recent weeks, the United States quietly has welcomed two French one-star generals onto the staff of the NATO Response Force, a creation of Rumsfeld's set up to move rapidly in case of crisis. Jones pushed hard for the administration to grant the French request that the two generals be placed, but the issue was so divisive that Bush himself had to made the final decision, according to NATO officials. France has not been part of NATO's military command structure since President Charles de Gaulle, on a campaign to assert France's military autonomy, withdrew from it in the 1960s. But now, with about 2,000 troops in the first rotation of the 6,000-troop Response Force, France is the force's largest troop contributor. France and three other NATO countries - Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg - have also dropped plans announced at a summit meeting in Brussels last April to build a separate European Union military headquarters in Belgium that the United States vehemently opposed as duplicative of NATO and counter to American interests. Instead, last Friday, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy envoy, unveiled a much more modest - but face-saving - plan to ambassadors of member countries.
A golden opportunity for Bush to patch up differences with both President Jacques Chirac of France and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder will come with the 60th anniversary of D-Day on June 6. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has recommended that Bush accept Chirac's offer to dine at the Élysée Palace the night before and visit the Normandy beaches together, but Bush had not yet accepted, senior administration and French officials said. Senior American and French officials have said privately in recent weeks that Bush has no choice but to accept, given the historic importance of the event. They also noted that a photo of Bush standing side by side in Normandy with Chirac and Schröder could help deflect charges by Democrats that he has squandered good relations with two of America's most important allies.
There's an excellent cover article in the Feb7-13 Economist. It goes into a nice explanation (with history) on how the weaker dollar actually benefits the U.S. We started to touch on this in the first few classes. It says that many economists expect the dollar to drop even more, and illuminates how a few--Japan & China--are trying to intervene.
If anyone wants to borrow this from me, please let me know. (I'll type out a few paragraphs)
"Competitive Sport in Boca Raton"
Europeans think the dollar is in danger of becoming too weak; Americans disagree, Who is right?"
The Economist
February 7-13
"Competitive Sport in Boca Raton"
Europeans think the dollar is in danger of becoming too weak; Americans disagree, Who is right?"
The Economist
February 7-13
Second paragraph
"The euro has risen by 50% against the dollar since its trough in July 2001. European officials are frustrated by America's lack of concern for the dollar's slide and the disproportionate burden this is imposing on the euro. In the run-up to the Boca Raton meeting, some European policy makers were alling for a joint statement to stabilise the dollar. But this seems likely to have fallen on deaf ears. As John Connally, a former treasury secretary, told the rest of the world in 1971: "The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem."
It basically talks about the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project which is planning to build a nuclear fusion actor. The six members of the ITER are Japan, US, China, Russia, the European Union and South Korea. The two candidate sites for the fusion reactor are Cadarache, France and Rokkasho, Japan.
Even though the members have reached some compromise, as reported by The Japan Times, due to the adamant attitude of France and Japan who both want the reactor to be built in their countries, the talk on the site-choosing this Saturday in Vienna will not be breezy easy.
The topic is kind of related to my area of interest. Clear/renewable energy has been a huge topic in Europe, compared to the lukewarm reaction it receives in the US (think about Kyoto Protocol and so on). I'll keep an eye on the progress of the talk among the members of ITER, and see if there's possible new stories to explore.
This story is by Tim Radford, published on The Guardian.
Europe's scientists hope to mimic the power of the sun and create limitless energy on Earth with the help of a £6bn experiment in the south of France.
Ministers in Brussels gave the go-ahead yesterday for Iter, the world's biggest and most ambitious fusion reactor, at Cadarache near Aix-en-Provence. It will be 10 years in the making and, in its 20-year operating life, researchers will experiment with a kind of slow hydrogen bomb in the hope of extracting vast amounts of clean energy from tiny amounts of heavy water.
Iter will replace Jet, the current joint European fusion research project, based at Culham, Oxfordshire.
Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith, head of the UK fusion programme, said yesterday: "The Iter project will allow a major step towards an inexhaustible source of environmentally friendly power."
Petroleum and coal deliver chemical energy liberated by the breaking of chemical bonds in the form of fire. Nuclear fission of enriched uranium exploits the energy released by the breakdown of a unstable heavy atom to a lighter one. But the "ash" from a fission reaction is radioactive and it stays too hot to handle for thousands of years.
The great prize has always been fusion power: the fusion of two hydrogen atoms to make one of helium, releasing huge quantities of heat. Every second, the sun converts 600m tonnes of hydrogen into helium and illuminates and warms this planet from 90m miles away.
To do the same on Earth, engineers and physicists have to collect deuterium and tritium - isotopes of hydrogen - and heat them to more than 100m C, many times hotter than the heart of the sun. At these temperatures the heavy hydrogen would become a plasma, a ball of subatomic particles which would fuse to become helium and a shower of neutrons and a supply of heat. One kilogram of heavy hydrogen would supply the heat now generated by 10m kg of fossil fuel. There would be no greenhouse gases, no soot, and no long-lived radioactive waste. The oceans contain all the heavy hydrogen such reactors would need.
Fusion power would, in theory, be safe, because the challenge is not to stop a fusion reaction, but to keep it going. But that is the catch. If plasma at 100m C so much as touched anything, it would go out like a light. The trick is to keep tiny pellets of fuel suspended in a kind of magnetic "bottle" in a sealed chamber. Then engineers would have to pump blasts of laser fire at the pellets, compressing them to 20 times the density of lead, at which point they would start to behave like tiny stars, releasing a thermonuclear blast of neutrons to heat up a containment wall many metres away.
Fusion's most ardent enthusiasts believe that a viable power plant is 30 years away. Iter is just another stage in the research.
Although the Cadarache site has Brussels' backing, the decision has yet to be confirmed by the other partners in the project. These include Canada, the US, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China. There is one other candidate site - at Rokkashomura in Japan - and the final decision could be made in Washington next month.
There are numerous editorials and columns in the European press about the unofficial meeting between Shroder, Chirac and Blair. This Guardian link provides a sidebar full of stories and commentary, so do check it out.
It seems that Europeans are saying on the one hand, this is an ill-fated menage a trois or not so alarming, while others are bristling nonetheless and calling the meeting a threat to EU unity. As one Financial Times columnist noted though, the so called directoires will not agree enough ... so those who support them should worry that they won't be able to lay down the law too much.
I think I agree. There are fundamental differences between these partners. Where two agree on Iraq, one will disagree, and where another pair agree on EU immigration policies, a third dissents. Interestingly, an Independent editorial notes that, at the end of the day, their national interests will supercede a common EU position.
The Guardian, Press Roundup of "Big Three" Summit
'Those not invited will begin to howl'
The 'big three' are determined to lead the union
Thursday February 19, 2004
The Guardian
Julian Lindley-French
Wall Street Journal Europe, February 18
"Britain, France and Germany [met yesterday] in the latest attempt to kick-start a new power hub for Europe, a 'trirectoire'. The fact that the meeting is taking place at all represents a failure of Franco-German attempts to lead Europe and a tacit recognition that such 'leadership' is unrealistic these days without the British ... Even the suggestion of a British-French-German power hub hints to the US of an alternative to the special relationship ... [But] it will be a long time before the British forsake the reflected glory of the special relationship. First, because other Europeans are at best ambivalent about Britain in Europe. Second, because the loss of the special relationship would end once and for all Britain's view of itself in the world."
Grard Dupuy
Libration, France, February 18
"The meeting in Berlin reflects the stand the three leaders have taken on Europe - starting with their common refusal to see their influence diluted by the arrival of new members. The summit also corresponds to [the French president] Jacques Chirac's idea of having pioneering coalitions within Europe, linked by a common affinity (for example, the military).
"The three men who had a rendezvous in Berlin may not see themselves as the natural leaders of Europe, as some accuse them of doing. But the circumstances of their meeting back up that interpretation."
Angelo M Petroni
Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy, February 17
"The true, dual novelty here is, on the one hand, the inclusion of Britain in the renewed alliance, and on the other, the fact that the Franco-German claim to superiority is being staked at a time when the EU is getting set to face a constitutional moment unprecedented in its entire history ...
"The fact that France and Germany have decided to proceed down this path ... shows just how fragile their Europeanism really is, and how their national interests prevail over the ideology of a united Europe ... The price for satisfying these national interests is going to be very high for Europe."
Der Tagesspiegel
Editorial, Germany, February 18
"Berlin cannot escape the eternal problem of European politics. If you wait for consensus among the 15 member states, you will be waiting forever ... But if Germany begins an initiative with fewer EU partners, those who are not invited will begin to howl ... The widening of the Franco-German partnership to include Britain should be valuable not just to the struggle over European economic reforms, but it should also dispel mistrust over the 'Schrder-Chirac duo'."
Independent
Editorial, February 18
"For all the honeyed words in Berlin, this is a marriage of convenience. France and Germany need Britain if they want to achieve anything on foreign policy, and Britain needs both, especially after Iraq. For now, they are at one in demanding such things as a cap on EU spending. But it will surely not be long before national interest rears its head once again."
El Pas
Editorial, Spain, February 18
"The Spanish prime minister, Jos Mara Aznar, has gone back to behaving like a battering ram striking at the heart of Europe ... The motive [this time] is the stability and growth pact ... and its purpose is to underline his disagreement with the meeting in Berlin signalling to France and Germany, that their failure to stick to the deficit agreement did not incur sanctions, unlike Portugal ...
"It is not clear whether Mr Aznar is pursuing these kind of initiatives to spread division within the EU and to pay them back for not taking him into account. But it does not help with the construction of Europe nor does it increase Spain's influence in it."
Take a look at the new decision (well...in fact, no detail yet) of the UK. It looks like within the government there's also a lot of debate on whether or not to accept migrant workers from the new EU member states.
This is from The Guardian.
David Blunkett is to announce new measures on limiting migration from the new EU states after a day-long mini-summit in Downing Street on the issue.
The home secretary will brief MPs on the details in the Commons on Monday, with No 10 confirming nothing tonight other than that a "package of measures" had been agreed to prevent so-called benefit tourism.
The topic had become a hot political potato in the past fortnight, after the Conservatives challenged the prime minister on the fact that only the UK and Ireland had no restriction on the movement of workers after the 10, mostly poor former communist east European nations joined the EU in May.
Today's talks in Downing Street - conducted without any publicity from No 10 and during the parliamentary recess as MPs are away from Westminster - are a sign of the seriousness with which Mr Blair took the emerging issue.
They were attended by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the home secretary and the work and pensions secretary, Andrew Smith.
The Tories had accused the government's policy of being in confusion just weeks before the EU expands with the entry of 10 new countries.
In prime ministers' questions over the past fortnight, Mr Blair indicated that the UK was looking at tighter controls to limit migration from the eastern European countries.
Mr Blunkett dismissed suggestions that would mean taking measures aimed at discouraging people from the new member states from coming to Britain to work, saying the government was in favour of "managed migration".
Tonight a No 10 spokesman said it would be inappropriate to announce the deal they had reached while MPs are way during the parliamentary recess.
"A package of measures was agreed. With regard to the timing of the announcement it was agreed that this should be made in the first instance to parliament.
"The details will therefore be announced on Monday by the home secretary."
The shadow home secretary, David Davis, earlier attacked what he called Mr Blair's lack of foresight.
"The enlargement of the EU has been planned for years, yet the government has decided to hold a crisis summit only nine weeks before the accession date," he said.
"They are rightly worried about benefit tourism, but that is only half the problem.
"With average wage levels in eastern Europe less than half the minimum wage, many of the 75 million citizens will wish to come to Britain irrespective of benefits.
"These crisis talks should also consider the impact on public services and whether local authorities will end up footing the bill."
Mr Davis said the government's immigration policy had been incompetent from the start and was a crisis "purely of their own making".
"Emergency meetings in Downing Street only nine weeks before the accession date shows what mess they are in," he added.
Mark Oaten, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "Blair's victory over David Blunkett surely signals the final victory for populism over principle.
"How can the prime minister call himself a true European when with these measures he has effectively created a two-tier Europe."
Earlier, John Denham, the Labour chairman of the commons home affairs select committee, said he hoped the government would take "measured steps" to prevent abuse of the benefits system.
"The danger we have got is that you don't need huge numbers of people being seen to exploit the system to create a great deal of trouble," he told BBC Radio 4's World At One programme.
He said ministers were being forced to act as a result of the restrictions imposed in other EU member states.
"If everybody in Europe had open borders from the beginning and everybody was running their work and benefits system in the same way, then any problem would be so spread around Europe it would be so small that no one would worry," he said.
"The more that other countries have decided to tighten up in one way or another, the more it was inevitable that Britain would have to do so."
This Times story goes into the shiny new threat to the diamond market. London based De Beers, the world’s largest diamond business, has finally admitted there could be a potential threat from the U.S. Late last fall Boston-based Apollo Diamond filed a patent for a nearly flawless — at least to the naked eye — synthetic diamond.
I’m fascinated by this interplay of business on the global market. Add on to it that the port of Antwerp — second largest Belgium city and major port — is where 8 out of 10 mined diamonds are handled. If the synthetic diamond takes off, this could have a great economic effect.
I think there are a lot of factors into play about identity here also — the tradition of diamonds, what could happen to the African diamond mines and miners, (where De Beers has about a $4 billion stockpile), and how a manufactured little U.S. gem could usurp all of it. This is something I’d like to pursue for my story.
De Beers plans war on synthetic gems
By John O’Donnell
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9065-995202,00.html
February 08, 2004
De Beers plans war on synthetic gems
By John O’Donnell
Oppenheimer aims to open diamond stores worldwide and launch a marketing blitz
TWICE a week an armour- plated van picks up an anonymous consignment from Heathrow airport’s cargo terminal. Its driver makes his way to the fringe of Hatton Garden, London’s jewellery district, to an imposing grey building where tall black gates open, admitting the truck to an underground complex.
It is here, in the offices of De Beers, that jewellers sort through the delivery of African gems, and where Nicky Oppenheimer, patriarch of the dynasty that controls the world’s biggest diamond mines, manages his empire.
Diamonds and their emotional value have not altered in the century since Oppenheimer’s grandfather Ernest, a German emigrant, left his homeland for South Africa and eventually won control of De Beers.
Today the family still owns 40% and has a further stake of less than 5% through a separate company. Anglo-American, the mining group, has owned 45% of the firm since it was taken private two years ago. “It hasn’t changed much,” said Oppenheimer. “Whether to mark success in the East or love in the western world, a diamond has always been the ultimate gift.”
Although the product is unaltered, the marketplace has changed. Last week De Beers announced a 7% rise in annual sales to £3 billion. But the company, once a cartel that controlled 80% of diamond supply, has seen its power dwindle in the face of competition from Australia and Canada.
Today Oppenheimer is chairman of a business that controls just over half of the world supply and one that is threatened by synthetic diamonds so sophisticated that it is impossible for the naked eye to distinguish them.
In the company’s South African home, De Beers faces the forced sale of 15% of its mining business to black workers. The sensitivities of “conflict diamonds” — sold to raise money for war — pursue the company. The British government is investigating De Beers’s alleged links with parties that bought diamonds in war-torn Congo. And Oppenheimer, who travels to work by helicopter, is unable to visit America because of an indictment, following claims that his company fixed industrial diamond prices.
Despite this, the 58-year-old king of diamonds is optimistic. “What you have seen in the 10 years to 2000 is diamonds losing out to other luxury goods,” said the Oxford- educated baron. “Now they are regaining ground.”
He credits this revival partly to an industry advertising push initiated by De Beers that aims to treble total marketing expenditure to more than $1.5 billion.
De Beers has pressured its site holders — those who buy its diamonds — to increase their contribution to the marketing budget following the introduction of its so-called “supplier of choice”, which cut the number of dealers to which the company sells. And it is recruiting retailers such as Tiffany to cover further marketing spend.
The company’s move to improve its product’s branding has been helped by a venture with the French company LVMH to open diamond stores worldwide, including a flagship site on London’s Bond Street.
Oppenheimer pledged further investment. “If you look at the new De Beers store in London, it is a step change in what jewellery stores look like. Traditionally, the bravest thing you could do was to go in the door of a jewellery store — that has to change. People have to market jewellery in a modern way.”
The brand offensive will also target one of the biggest problems faced by the industry. “Synthetic diamonds are a threat we have been aware of for some time,” said Oppenheimer. “It is much closer now than it has been before.”
De Beers’ marketing drive hopes to beat competition from the synthetic rocks with a simple message: real men give real diamonds. “Diamonds are created by nature over millions of years of volcanic activity,” said Oppenheimer. “They come from the bowels of the earth — not a laboratory.”
The company is restructuring its South African mining business ahead of the forced sale of the 15% stake. This division contributes about a quarter of the company’s diamond haul. “It has always been our attitude and something my grandfather said, ‘We operate to make money but also to make a real contribution to the country where we operate’.”
Oppenheimer defended his company’s handling of the controversial diamond buying by De Beers clients in the Congo. In a UN report being followed up by the Department of Trade and Industry, De Beers was criticised for links with a group of diamond traders who bought gems in the war-torn country. The sellers used the proceeds to fund conflict. De Beers said that after the report it had warned its buyers to stop the trade.
“We are co-operating with the DTI,” said Oppenheimer. “I am certain that De Beers’s name will be cleared. When you produce something like diamonds you have to be extremely careful that your product is untainted. That’s a matter of concern for us every day.”
With the rising demand for diamonds, he has cause for optimism. Prices are going up following the depletion of gem stockpiles. De Beers sold many of its diamonds after it was taken private to pay off debt raised to buy the company. It believes that high demand and stock shortages will lead to annual price rises of about 5%.
Taking advantage of this favourable outlook will most likely be the responsibility of his 31-year-old son Jonathan. Oppenheimer said he “certainly hoped” his son would take his place on his retirement, which he has already started planning.
With diamonds more popular than ever, it appears that human vanity — as Oppenheimer’s grandfather explained the emotional appeal of gems — is as strong today as it was a century ago. “A really beautiful diamond doesn’t do you any good,” said Oppenheimer. “But it fills a niche in the human psyche. It’s a symbol of something emotional and it has a very exciting future.”
Francis mentioned at last meeting that France is facing a higher education crisis that might cause technology immitation rather than innovation, while everybody in the world knows today that the economic development (and the political/military power) is based on knowledge and technology.
This is a press release from RAPID, the Press and Communication Service of the European Commission.
I found the article on Lexis-Nexis, but can't paste the link here, as it wouldn't allow direct connection.
The European Commission today presented the first NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology) projects retained for funding for 2004. These ten projects cover issues such as bio-terrorism, obesity, atom optics and the environment. NEST is a new research activity under the EU 6th Research Framework Programme (FP6 2003-2006), designed to respond to new scientific opportunities and challenges, and promote interdisciplinary high risk research. NEST will launch more focused calls on emerging topics that will be identified through consultation with the research community. With a budget of C215 million over four years and almost 300 proposals submitted in last October's second round of calls, NEST's potential is great for further unconventional, frontier research.
"NEST is leading the way in making the most of our scientific and technological potential," says Research Commissioner, Philippe Busquin. "Through visionary projects the European Union can build on the ideas and innovations of bright and iconoclastic researchers. The new NEST projects demonstrate how the initiative is open to new ideas within a wide range of scientific fields. It also gives the perfect opportunity for up and coming researchers to expand their horizons, with the focus being on the unexpected rather than solely on existing successes and consolidated scientific dogma. Yesterday's science fiction is today's science."
Interest and competition flying high
The Commission will allocate C215 million to NEST over four years. There has been a high level of interest from researchers, with around 170 outline proposals submitted at the first deadline in April 2003, and 265 submitted at the second, in October 2003.
Going the distance
The geographical distribution of the partner countries for proposals retained is very diverse, covering 19 countries, including all EU Member states, except Ireland and Luxembourg, and including Norway, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Cyprus. Candidate and Accession countries will receive about 9% of the total EU contribution.
Building on NEST's opportunities
The first projects demonstrate NEST's openness to a wide range of scientific fields and address both new opportunities for science and technology (ADVENTURE projects) as well as new problems and challenges (INSIGHT projects). NEST projects aim to develop new systems to immunize the human body against bio-chemical agents, to create novel coatings for materials using micro-organisms, to detect diseases from the human breath, and to develop new atomic scale manipulation and imaging methods.
These NEST projects will also strive to boost the capacity of electron microscopes, to manipulate atoms with lasers, to create new bio-materials from ionized gases for medical and surgical applications, to detect and study toxic chemicals such as Perfluorinated Hydrocarbons (PFCs), to produce new chemicals and clean fuels, and to develop policies to tackle the obesity epidemics.
Topics on the horizon
The Commission has now published the NEST calls for proposals for 2004. These include not only calls open to any kind of proposals, but also calls on three specific topics (deadline 14 April 2004):
Synthetic biology: engineering new sub-cellular modules and organisms from scratch, to develop the knowledge and European skill base for a true engineering discipline in biology, as well as to improving understanding of fundamental biological processes.
What it means to be human: highly interdisciplinary research focusing on the unique characteristics of human cognitive faculties, and their evolutionary origins.
Tackling complexity in science: the focus is on complex problems and "generalized" methods for simplifying and solving them.
For further information:
http://www.cordis.lu/fp6/nest.htm
ANNEX
First NEST projects
Biodefence
The objective of this project is to develop a completely new mechanism of rapid immunization against bio-terrorist weapons, using transformed GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) organisms. This includes genetically engineering Lactobacilli, micro-organisms which live in the human gastrointestinal tract, to create antibodies. After ingestion, the micro-organisms will colonize the intestinal mucosa and secrete antibodies enabling rapid protection against bio-terrorism agents or emerging diseases.
EA-Biofilms
The project aims to exploit "electro active" (EA) micro-organisms that are able to form thin films and "plug themselves in" to conducting surfaces thus directly extracting electrical power from them. If successful, such micro-organisms could provide a new and revolutionary way to catalyze and control chemical reactions in diverse applications such as bio-remediation, bio-sensors, and corrosion prevention.
The Optical Nose
An on-line, non-invasive and total-profiling instrument for trace gas sensing applications in medical sciences. More than three thousand volatile organic compounds found in human breath may be markers of diseases. This project aims to develop and apply a novel type of laser-based analytical instrument, for rapid, non-invasive screening of human breath to identify specific markers related to various diseases.
INA Imaging with neutral atoms
The objective is to improve the resolution of helium atom microscopy by a factor of 50, from 1 micron to 0.02 micron. This would create a novel imaging method with unique characteristics and a wide application range (bio-physical, bio-medical, electronics, and other applications), and give European researchers a leading position in the technology of atom optics.
CHIRALTEM the next generation of electron microscopes
Using new experimental results, the aim is to develop a novel method for accurate measurement of chiral dichroism (the absorption of circular polarized photons). If successful it will provide a new analytical technique for transmission electron microscopy, allowing accurate measurement of magnetic properties below the surface and in multilayer materials at nanometer resolutions.
ATOM3D how to manipulate atoms with lasers
Advanced techniques for optical manipulation using novel 3D light field synthesis. The aim is to develop novel optical manipulation techniques, for "optical tweezers", whereby the momentum carried by the photons of an intense laser beam can be used to manipulate microscopic objects, ranging from atoms to particles in the micron size range. It opens the way for trapping and localizing tiny biological samples such as viruses and DNA, and has promising applications in fundamental science (optics, atomic physics) and technology, including micro-fluidics.
BIOPLASMA
Bio-compatible and bio-active surfaces are crucial in many areas of biotechnology and in medical applications such as bone implants. BIOPLASMA aims to develop novel techniques using low temperature plasmas (ionized gases) to bind bio-molecules in order to create low cost bio-active coatings.
PERFORCE
Perfluorinated Hydrocarbons (PFCs), presumably resulting from industrial activity, are increasingly present in the environment. The resulting health threat of such potentially toxic chemicals is a matter of growing concern but has not yet been measured. This project aims to establish means to assess both the prevalence and possible health impact of PFCs on human life throughout the EU.
ELCAT
By combining the size-selectivity of nanoporous membranes with the catalytic properties of noble metals, the objective is to realize an as-yet elusive vision: the production of chemicals from CO2 and H2 under "mild" reaction conditions. This could have enormous industrial and environmental implications ranging from the use of solar energy to produce fuels from CO2 and H2O, and the reduction of greenhouse gases, to chemical syntheses and processing.
PORGROW lean and mean research
Obesity has recently been recognized as a problem of epidemic proportions, but it is extremely difficult to address, given the range of factors at stake. The project aims to generate a novel form of systematic socio-technical intelligence based on the mapping of the problem according to different criteria, to assist policy-makers and help design a new cross-national methodology to develop more effective, forward-looking strategies.
LOAD-DATE: February 12, 2004
"I am convinced that only a transformation in the way we understand the concept of politics in relation with the idea of “power” will allow us to begin to escape the aporias affecting the notion of a “European policy,” and to give a realistic content to the notion of a “European mediation,” which combines such opposite demands as increasing Europe’s specific role in world affairs, and deconstructing the myths of European closure and exclusive identity (“Fortress Europe,” to quote its most aggressive formulation). How then both to individualize and de-substantialize Europe? Is that really possible?"
Étienne Balibar - Europe: Vanishing Mediator? Download file
"The reason anti-Europeans can't imagine a future for Europe is that they can't imagine its present. They are trapped in the contradictions of EU member nations' misunderstanding of themselves. And this false picture of Europe's present is blocking its future development.
"I think I can demonstrate that the Euroskeptics have it exactly backward. The solution to the EU's problems is not more national realism. Rather, it is more Europe, more of the reality we are already experiencing-a cosmopolitan Europe. National categories of thought have created this impasse. National irrealism is Europe's problem."
Ulrich Beck - Understanding the Real Europe Download file
A number of people have expressed interest in Immigrants in Europe. This opinion Eurozine piece (great site recommendation from Francis) says that there is in increase in the illegal trafficking of people because of the very laws set to stop it. Sasseen argues that regulations (at the borders) and Europe's political and economic participation contribute to dehumanizing individuals (and sometimes their deaths) that try to come into the countries for work. He also offers good history. The story is a bit old, but maybe could use an update from one of us?
Saskia Sassen
Is this the Way to Go?
Handling Immigration in a Global Era
http://www.eurozine.com/article/2002-09-17-sassen-en.html
Saskia Sassen
Is this the Way to Go?
Handling Immigration in a Global Era
As Europe's borders become more and more fortified against immigrants, illegal human trafficking becomes ever more common. By criminalizing immigration, Europe does not only ignore a moral problem: It hits hardest on those desperate enough to escape their homecountries and contributes to the enormous profits that smugglers make in the process. Saskia Sassen asks what price Europe is paying for these shortsighted and unsustainable policies.
Over the last decade it is estimated that more than 2,500 would-be immigrants died trying to get into Europe. That is many dead, but not many immigrants for a continent of over 350 million people. Whom is it we are determined to keep out to the point that they risk their lives to get in: an equally determined but tiny minority of men, women and children from mostly poor countries who will come no matter what in search of work or refuge. They are not criminals. Yet the result of our determination is that we are feeding a criminal trade. There has been a sharp growth in illegal trafficking of people as receiving countries have clamped down on entries and semi-militarized more and more borders.
These developments raise two issues. One concerns the old trade-off between policies that criminalize what may not intrinsically be a criminal act in the name of controlling a somewhat untenable situation; this in turn raises the incentives for genuinely criminal actors to promote the forbidden activity. A familiar instance of this trade-off concerns marihuana control policy. Does the criminalizing of marihuana in the US -and the UK- really work better as a policy to control its use than the controlled legality of marihuana in the Netherlands which leaves very little room for profit making by drugdealers and hence no incentive to expand its use?
The second policy issue raised by these developments is that the deaths of these hundreds of people attempting to enter Europe affect us all, not only those directly concerned. The fact that these people lack the proper documents for entry is easily represented in policy and media circles as exempting us from any responsibility as societies for these deaths. The lack of proper documents somehow seems to make these deaths less human and reduce whatever might be our responsibility contributing to these deaths.
I want to argue that the direction we are taking in our immigration policies towards greater police and military control and growing disregard for international human rights codes as well as our own civil liberties laws is promoting illegal trafficking and weakening our rule of law and thereby our democracies. These policies are adding to an already growing mix of what I would describe as negative incentives, or incentives with negative outcomes for significant sectors of our societies. Illegal trafficking and the deaths of men, women and children who are not criminals, and who die on our "soil" eventually touches the fabric of our societies and distorts or weakens the rule of law. In the long run it will affect us all. Yes, the central victims are the men and women who are trafficked and especially those who die. But we would be foolish to think that we can allow these abuses and deaths to happen in the name of maintaining control, and remain untouched. The growth in illegal trafficking and the sharpening of extreme anti-immigrant politics willing to sacrifice some civil liberties in the name of control are indications of this broader negative effect.
Interconnected Forms of Violence
Part of the challenge is to recognize the interconnectedness of forms of violence that we do not always recognize as being connected or for that matter, as being forms of violence. The sharp growth of government debt, poverty, unemployment, closing of traditional economic sectors in the global south, partly due to neoliberal economic globalization has created whole new migrations as well as fed an exploding illegal trade in people. We now have growing evidence that IMF policy has sharpened these conditions even as it has brought great prosperity to about 20 per cent of residents in many countries in the global south(1).
Our governments, by supporting IMF policies, are partly contributing to those conditions that are going to stimulate emigration and illegal trafficking in people. Further, as the rich economies become richer partly because of these same IMF policies, they also become more desirable destinations. This in turn creates a source for hard currency for the governments of the sending countries in a context where they face mounting debt and declines in national revenues as neoliberal globalization weakens and often destroys many of the national economic sectors in these countries. Thus these governments are not interested particularly in regulating emigration either. Finally, as these same policies have also raised inequality and unemployment inside the rich economies, the disadvantaged have become radicalized, often taking on extreme right wing politics.
The tragedy is that those most affected negatively, those to whom violence has been done both in the global south and in the rich economies, the victims of it all, now confront each other as enemies inside our countries. Anti-immigrant sentiment probably runs highest among those who have been hurt from the same policies that have hurt the poor and the middle classes (though not the upper 20 per cent) from where the immigrants and would-be immigrants come. And as the rich countries raise their walls to keep immigrants and refugees out, they feed the illegal trade in people and raise the profits to be made as despair rises in the global south and fear in the global north. This is not sound policy. This is a vicious policy cycle.
The same infrastructure, both technical and institutional that has enabled global flows of capital and goods, services and the new transnational managerial and professional class, also enables migrations and illegal trafficking. And they facilitate the flow of remittances back to sending countries, a major incentive for not doing anything on the part of these governments. These various entanglements raise the complexity of the challenge of how to regulate immigration. But these entanglements and this type of complexity are going in the wrong direction. We need to reverse this dynamic.
When globalization policies go wrong they really go very wrong for countries in the global south. Thereby these policies sharpen the incentives for both emigration and trafficking for emigrants, traffickers and governments in the global south, given growing government indebtedness and lack of opportunity for workers and would be entrepreneurs in much of the global south.
Emigrants enter the macro-level of development strategies for sending countries through their remittances. In many countries these represent a major source of foreign exchange reserves for the government. While the flows of remittances may be minor compared to the massive daily capital flows in various financial markets, they are often very significant for developing or struggling economies.
In 1998 - the last year for which comprehensive data is available - global remittances sent by immigrants to their home countries reached over US$ 70 billion. To understand the significance of this figure, it should be related to the GDP and foreign currency reserves in the specific countries involved, rather than compared to the global flow of capital. For instance, in the Philippines, a key sender of migrants generally and of women for the entertainment industry in several countries, remittances were the third largest source of foreign exchange over the last several years. In Bangladesh, another country with significant numbers of its workers in the Middle East, Japan, and several European countries, remittances represent about a third of foreign exchange. Exporting workers and remittances are means for governments of coping with unemployment and foreign debt(2).
This would also seem to be the case given the growing interdependencies brought on by globalization which also enable illegal trafficking. Cross-border business travel, global tourism, the Internet, and other conditions integral to globalization enable multiple global flows not foreseen by the framers and developers of economic globalization. This creates a difficult trade-off in a context where September 11 has further sharpened the will to control immigration and resident immigrants. Increased illegal trafficking and the reduction in civil liberties will not facilitate the need to learn how to accommodate more immigration to respond to the future demographic turn. Let me focus next with some detail on one specific flow which brings many of these issues together.
Illegal Trafficking
Trafficking in workers for both licit and illegal work (e.g. unauthorized sex work) illuminates a number of intersections between the negative conditions in the global south and some of the tensions in the immigration regime(3). Trafficking is a violation of several distinct types of rights: human, civil, political. Trafficking in people appears to be mainly related to the sex market, to labor markets, to illegal migration. Much legislative work has been done to address trafficking: international treaties and charters, UN resolutions, and various bodies and commissions. Trafficking has become sufficiently recognized as an issue that it was also addressed in the G8 meeting in Birmingham in May 1998 (IOM 1998). The heads of the eight major industrialized countries stressed the importance of cooperation against international organized crime and trafficking in persons. The US President issued a set of directives to his administration in order to strengthen and increase efforts against trafficking in women and girls. This in turn generated the legislation initiative by Senator Paul Wellstone; bill S.600 was introduced in the senate in 1999. NGO's are also playing an increasingly important role. For instance, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has centers and representatives in Australia, Bangladesh, Europe, Latin America, North America, Africa and Asia Pacific. The Women's Rights Advocacy Program has established the Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons to combat the global trade in persons. This type of trafficking shows us one of the meanings of interdependence in the current global system. There are two distinct issues here: one is that globalization has produced new conditions and dynamics, especially the growing demand for these types of workers by the expanding high income professional workforce associated largely, though not exclusively, with globalization(4). The second issue is that globalization has enabled older trafficking networks and practices which used to be national or regional to become global.
Here I want to focus on some of the data on the trafficking of women, especially for the sex industries and the growing weight of this trafficking as a profit making option for the traffickers, especially it would seem from the global south. This, then adds to the role of emigrants' remittances generally, whether from lawful, unauthorized or trafficked immigrants in the account balance of many of the impoverished governments of sending countries. Profits and revenues are, clearly, a disincentive to attack this trade. Insofar as the countries of the global north are one of the key destinations, they do not escape the consequences of this illegal trade either.
Trafficking in migrants is a profitable business. According to a UN report, criminal organizations in the 1990s generated an estimated US$ 3.5 billion per year in profits from trafficking migrants (excluding most of the women trafficked for the sex industry). The entry of organized crime is a recent development in the case of migrant trafficking; in the past it was mostly petty criminals who engaged in this type of trafficking. The Central Intelligence Agency of the US(1999) reports that organized crime groups are creating intercontinental strategic alliances through networks of co-ethnics throughout several countries; this facilitates transport, local contact and distribution, provision of false documents, etc. The Global Survival Network (1997) reported on these practices after a two year investigation using the establishment of a dummy company to enter the illegal trade. Such networks also facilitate the organized circulation of trafficked women among third countries -not only from sending to receiving countries. Traffickers may move women from Burma, Laos, Vietnam and China to Thailand, while Thai women may have been moved to Japan and the US.
Although there is no exhaustive data, the available information suggests that trafficking in women, including minors, for the sex industry is highly profitable for those running the trade. The United Nations estimates that 4 million women were trafficked in 1998, producing a profit of US$7 billion for criminal groups. These funds include remittances from prostitutes' earnings and payments to organizers and facilitators in these countries. In Japan, where the so-called entertainment industry is legal, profits are about 4.2 trillion yen per year over the last few years; there is growing evidence that illegally trafficked women are a growing share of sex-workers. In Poland, police estimate that for each Polish woman delivered, the trafficker receives about US$700. In Australia, the Federal Police estimate that the cash flow from 200 prostitutes is up to $900,000 a week. Ukrainian and Russian women, in high demand in the sex market, earn the criminal gangs involved about US$500 to US$1000 per woman delivered. These women can be expected to service on average 15 clients a day, and each can be expected to make about $US 215,000 per month for the gang.
It is estimated that in recent years several million women and girls are trafficked within and out of Asia and the former Soviet Union, two major trafficking areas. Increases in trafficking in both these areas can be linked to women being pushed into poverty or sold to brokers due to the poverty of their households or parents. High unemployment in the former Soviet republics has been one factor promoting growth of criminal gangs as well as growth of trafficking in women. Unemployment rates among women in Armenia, Russia, Bulgaria and Croatia reached 70 per cent and in Ukraine 80 per cent with the implementation of market policies. There is some research indicating that economic need is the bottom line for entry into prostitution(5).
Some of the features of immigration policy and enforcement may well contribute to make women who are victims of trafficking even more vulnerable and to give them little recourse to the law. If they are undocumented, which they are likely to be, they will not be treated as victims of abuse but as violators of the law insofar as they have violated entry, residence and work laws. The attempt to address undocumented immigration and trafficking through greater border controls over entry, raises the likelihood that women will use traffickers to cross the border, and some of these may turn out to belong to criminal organizations linked to the sex industry.
Further, in many countries prostitution is forbidden for foreign women, which enhances the role of criminal gangs in prostitution. It also diminishes one of the survival options of foreign women who may have limited access to jobs generally. Prostitution is tolerated for foreign women in many countries while regular labor market jobs are less so-this is the case for instance in the Netherlands and in Switzerland. According to IOM data, the number of migrant women prostitutes in many EU countries is far higher than that for nationals: 75 per cent in Germany, 80 per cent in the case of Milan in Italy, etc.
While some women know that they are being trafficked for prostitution, for many the conditions of their recruitment and the extent of abuse and bondage only become evident after they arrive in the receiving country. The conditions of confinement are often extreme, akin to slavery, and so are the conditions of abuse, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, and physical punishments. They are severely underpaid, and wages are often withheld. They are prevented from using protection methods against AIDS, and typically have no right to medical treatment. If they seek police help they may be taken into detention because they are in violation of immigration laws; if they have been provided with false documents there are criminal charges(6).
As tourism has grown sharply over the last decade and become a major development strategy for cities, regions and whole countries, the entertainment sector has seen a parallel growth and recognition as a key development strategy. In many places, the sex trade is part of the entertainment industry and has similarly grown. At some point it becomes clear that the sex trade itself can become a development strategy in areas with high unemployment and poverty and governments desperate for revenue and foreign exchange reserves. When local manufacturing and agriculture can no longer function as sources of employment, of profits and of government revenue, what was once a marginal source of earnings, profits and revenues, now becomes a far more important one. The increased importance of these sectors in development generates growing tie-ins. For instance, when the IMF and the World Bank see tourism as a solution to some of the growth challenges in many poor countries and provide loans for its development or expansion, they may well be contributing to develop a broader institutional setting for the expansion of the entertainment industry and indirectly of the sex trade.
This tie-in with development strategies signals that trafficking in women may well see further expansion. It is a worrisome possibility especially in the context of growing numbers of women with few if any employment options. And such growing numbers are to be expected given high unemployment and poverty, the shrinking of a world of work opportunities that were embedded in the more traditional sectors of these economies, and the growing debt burden of governments rendering them incapable of providing social services and support to the poor. Under these conditions, women in the sex industry also can become a source of government revenue. These tie-ins are structural, not a function of conspiracies. Their weight in an economy will be raised by the absence or limitations of other sources for securing a livelihood, profits and revenues for respectively workers, enterprises and governments.
The Coming Demographic Crisis in the North
Even as the rich countries try harder and harder to keep would-be immigrants and refugees out, they face a growing demographic deficit and rapidly aging populations. According to a major study (Austrian Institute of Demography 2001), at the end of the current century and under current fertility and immigration patterns, population size in Western Europe will have shrunk by 75 milllion and almost 50 percent of the population will be over 60 years old -a first in its history(7). Europe, perhaps more so than the US given its relatively larger intake of immigrants, faces some difficult decisions. Where will they get the new young workers needed to support the growing elderly population and to do jobs considered unattractive by the native born, particularly in a context of rising educational attainment. The numbers of these jobs are not declining, even if the incidence of some of them is; one sector that is likely to add jobs is home and institutional care for the growing numbers of old people. Export of older people and of economic activities is one option being considered now. But there is a limit to how many old people and low wage jobs an economy can export and a society can tolerate. Immigration is expected to be part of the solution.
In the US, the evidence suggests a slightly different pattern. By century's end the forecasted fall for the US is 34 million people, though this represents a point in the upward slope which will not be completed until after the end of this century. The evidence is fairly clear that a significant component of population growth in the US over the last two decades as well as labor force growth is accounted for by immigrants, both second generation and foreign born. In both cases, immigrants account for a larger component of growth than their share in respectively the general population and the total labor force.
Yet the way the countries in the global north are proceeding is not preparing them to handle this future scenario. They are building walls to keep would-be immigrants out. At a time of growing refugee flows, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees faces an even greater shortage of funds than usual. Given an effective demand for immigrant workers, and indeed families for demographic purposes, both of these policy preferences are likely to have negative repercussions for Europe. They construct the immigrant and the refugee as a negative and undesirable subject, thereby encumbering integration. Further, given firms and households interested in hiring immigrants or determined to do so, for whatever reasons, restrictive policies and racialized representations of the immigrant and the refugee, can be expected to feed the already growing illegal trafficking of people.
Conclusion: The Need for a More Enlightened Immigration Policy
The large and looming issue confronting societies under the rule of law is whether policies that brutalize people - no matter what their nationality - and promote criminalized profit-making through the trade in people, are desirable and indeed sustainable if we are to keep up our systems based on the rule of law for which our forebears fought so hard and spilled so much blood.
Allowing this sort of brutalization and criminality is a very high price to pay for maintaining border control, and sooner or later it begins to tear at the fabric of the lawful state and of civil society.
The risks to our societies and to us - citizens - fully documented, are well illustrated by what is happening today in the US. The events of September 11 and the subsequent restrictions on the civil liberties of particular immigration groups in the US is tearing at, and some would say weakening the rule of law as it affects all US residents. The government in the US is granting itself more and more authority to deal directly, in an extrajudicial way, with matters that used to run through judiciaries or that would not be considered a matter for the government to get involved with. In so doing, the US government is violating basic rights not only of those it has profiled as possibly dangerous but also of its citizens, all citizens, not just those who might be suspect.
Are there ways of regulating the flow of people into our societies that could strengthen, rather than weaken, its civic fabric? The repeated incidents of would-be immigrants dying at the hands of illegal traffickers surely do not. They risk producing indifference when it happens over and over again. And they risk promoting acceptance of these deaths among ourselves and our children, all in the name of maintaining control over entry.
We are not only paying a price for those who die on our soil; we are also paying a price for those who are smuggled into our countries alive. The price we pay for allowing the abuse that is human smuggling is much higher than the "price" we pay for accommodating these people who just want a chance to work-and work they do. Indeed, much research suggests that we actually gain from the presence of these immigrants. For instance, 17 per cent of entrepreneurs in London belong to ethnic communities, a far higher share than their population share.
Continuing to use policies that make possible the brutalization of would-be migrants and the profit-making of criminal smugglers is a cancer deep inside our states and societies. It is the price we pay for criminalizing undocumented immigrants and, more generally, for resorting to policing and militarization as the way of regulating immigration. The US illustrates this to some extent. In the name of effective control, the new US 1996 Immigration Act strengthened policing by reducing judiciary review of immigration police actions. A crucial issue here is the object of the expanded policing: It is not known criminals or firms suspected of violating environmental regulations or drug dealers. It is a population sector, not even select individuals, but a fairly broad spectrum of men, women and children.
There are consequences to this tension between, on the one hand, the strenghtening of police approaches to immigrant regulation and, on the other, the strengthening of civil and human rights and the civic empowerment associated with a stronger sense of civil society. Sooner or later this policing will get caught in the expanding web of civil and human rights. And these rights will include those of citizens. Policing, when unchecked by civil review, can easily violate such rights and interfere with the functioning of civil society.
If my son decided to go write the great American novel by spending time with farm workers or in garment sweatshops, and there were an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) raid he could well be part of the suspects-because I know he would not be carrying his US passport with him. Or worse, if he were among the farmworkers in California running away from the INS police and pushed towards jumping in one of the water levies, as has happened a number of times over the last few years, he might have been one of those who drowned. The most dramatic account of these incidents has it that the turbulent waters seemed less threatening than the INS police with their guns and shouting, and that, indeed, these farmworkers may have been pressured in terror into the waters and drowned. After the new 1996 law, many of these INS actions can escape review and accountability in front of a judge if the persecuted were merely suspected of being undocumented. Sooner or later abusive or excess policing and the weakening of judicial review of such police actions will interfere with the aspiration towards the rule of law that is such a deep part of our inheritance and our lived reality. Sooner or later, this type of police action will touch us, the documented. We need to find another way of regulating entry: now we are strengthening modes of regulation that carry a high cost not only in immigrant deaths but also to the rule of law.
This is an iteresting overview of some of the reasons why European public broadcasting is in crisis. What is seriously lacking though is any mention of what it means, or, let's be fair, what it meant.
I see this piece as a good example of the difficulties of understanding and explaining "differences," and I would like to discuss it in class tomorrow. Think about it.
The New York Times - State-Aided Broadcasting Faces Scrutiny Across Europe
February 16, 2004
State-Aided Broadcasting Faces Scrutiny Across Europe
By ERIC PFANNER
International Herald Tribune
Like the country homes where its costume dramas are set, public broadcasting has long seemed like a fixture of the media landscape in Europe, featuring programming that is regarded by many as part of their cultural identity.
But lately, public broadcasters have been thrust into the harsh glare of their own klieg lights. At the BBC and at a French public television network, France 2, top executives have resigned after journalists were cited for mistakes in reporting. In Italy, the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has moved to increase its oversight of the public broadcaster RAI, raising concerns about independence of news and other programming.
The new concerns come at a particularly bad time for broadcasters, as regulators and competitors are gearing up for a closer look at their mission, and at the fees or taxes that sustain them.
Some viewers and private-sector competitors are complaining ever more loudly about the nearly 20 billion euros ($25.5 billion) in public financing that public television and radio receive across Europe.
"Public service broadcasting is in a struggle to remain relevant," an executive at one large European public broadcaster said, insisting on anonymity. "It will live or die based on its credibility."
Some experts say the struggle for relevance plays a part in news reporting lapses at the BBC and at France 2. Last week, as the furor over a report critical of the BBC's reporting on the British government's case for war in Iraq was easing, France 2's news director was forced to resign, and a popular anchor was suspended.
They had wrongly reported on the nightly newscast that the former prime minister, Alain Juppé, planned to resign from various political posts after being convicted on corruption charges. At the same time, Mr. Juppé was actually announcing on the rival TF1 channel, which is privately owned, that he planned to stay on.
As conspiracy theories swirled, some journalists at France 2 said there were signs of a plot by the right-leaning government of President Jacques Chirac to discredit public broadcasting - never particularly popular with conservatives - by giving France 2 a bum steer on the Juppé news. But others said the mistake probably had more to do with France 2's desperate struggle to stay competitive with TF1 despite trailing badly in ratings and resources.
The difficulty of striking a balance between quality and commercial success is an increasingly common lament among many public broadcasters in Europe.
"We're supposed to have quality programming that is up to par with Arte," a publicly financed, French-German venture that shows highbrow cultural programs, said Alban Mikoczy, a high-ranking editor at France 2.
Political interference has been more obvious in Italy, where the RAI public broadcasting system is governed by a board dominated by political appointees loyal to the prime minister. Analysts cite numerous instances in which Mr. Berlusconi has used his influence to prevent programming critical of him or his government from being aired.
Now, some executives at the BBC, long regarded as the gold standard of independence among publicly financed broadcasters, are worried that it could come under increased political pressure, after an outside report sided firmly against a BBC reporter's claims that the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had intentionally "sexed up" reports on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The government is reviewing candidates for chairman of the BBC's board, after Gavyn Davies, the previous chairman, and Greg Dyke, the director general and day-to-day manager, resigned after the inquiry. Both had stood firm after the government objected to its reporting.
The BBC's setback came at an inopportune time. With a review of the broadcaster's charter due in 2006, British regulators have begun work on a broad examination of public service broadcasting; a report is to be published in April. The Times of London reported on Sunday that the government is considering a range of proposals for the BBC, including breaking it up into separate units for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile, the BBC has delayed work on its own recommendations for the charter review, pending the appointment of a new leader.
Given the politically charged backdrop, the BBC is preparing to parry assaults on the license fee, which provides it with about £2.5 billion ($4.7 billion) a year, the majority of its revenue. Anyone in Britain with a television must pay £112 a year.
The financing and structure of public broadcasting varies widely across Europe. Some broadcasters are financed almost entirely by license fees or taxes; others, like Britain's government-chartered Channel 4, rely entirely on commercial money. Still others, particularly in southern Europe, are a hybrid, accepting financing from both sources. Germany provides the biggest amount of public financing - 6.6 billion euros ($8.4 billion) last year for the broadcasters ARD and ZDF, which also obtain some of their money from commercial means.
To some private investors who are vying with public networks for viewers, that is unfair competition.
Last year, after he assumed control of ProSiebenSat1, Germany's second-biggest commercial TV business after Bertelsmann's RTL, the American media entrepreneur Haim Saban criticized the German system in a newspaper interview.
"There's something I don't understand," Mr. Saban said. "How can public broadcasters that receive millions and millions of euros in fee revenues have the right to broadcast commercials and siphon 400 million euros to 500 million euros in advertising revenue from private broadcasters?"
But with more than 40 percent market share, public television remains popular in Germany, and proposals to overhaul the system radically have not gotten far, though there have been efforts to tinker around the edges.
In France, however, the specter of privatization has been dangled at France 2 and at Radio France, the public radio system, where journalists went back to work over the weekend after a five-week strike over pay. After all, the government sold off TF1 in 1987 - and it leads France 2 by a wide margin in the ratings race.
As in Britain, French regulators are preparing this summer to study consumer attitudes toward public service broadcasting. European Union regulators are also taking an interest. Brussels, which has taken a tough stance against government aid in other industries, has steered clear of public financing for the media because of the political and cultural sensitivities; lobbyists for public broadcasters worry privately, however, that the recent developments will embolden regulators to listen more carefully to those who would like to see such financing abolished.
Until recently, the BBC was seen by many analysts as a model of how a public broadcaster could adapt to a more competitive commercial setting. It maintains a vast production operation, employing tens of thousands of Britons and providing a counterweight to the American programming juggernaut. And the previous leadership moved to expand in areas such as children's broadcasting, digital archive services and the Internet.
While the BBC has drawn criticism for what some Britons say is a dumbing-down of the broadcaster's once-highbrow programming, others welcome the move away from what they see as a snobbish tradition of noblesse oblige, rooted in a discredited class system.
But critics of the BBC also questioned whether the broadcaster's new marketplace focus might have led it to push the envelope too far in its reporting of Blair's case for war.
Regardless of the outcome of the license fee review, commercial pressures on public broadcasters will only grow in coming years as governments manage the transition from analog to digital broadcasting. Millions of Europeans already subscribe to digital satellite services, and digital terrestrial technology is eventually intended to render analog broadcasting obsolete.
That will mean a proliferation of viewer choice, making life even more challenging for public broadcasters - even if they do not compound the damage with their own journalistic mistakes and political miscalculations.
Kevin O'Brien in Berlin, Eric Sylvers in Milan and Elisabeth Franck-Dumas in Paris contributed reporting for this article.
This is a site that deserves some attention. It is a cultural webzine made out of several European cultural sites. The level of the articles seems pretty high, and you will find great articles on some key issues like diversity and identity.
The very fact that you have participants from different countries and the use of different languages in a same virtual space gives interesting clues on some of the trasnformations of Europe
Eurozine - Changing Europe: Enlargement, Identity, Diversity
Europeans seem to enjoy the many shades of "gray" which might be a very important attitude in this world. This story shows that a new form of commitment between people which is a little bit more than a fee union and less than an actual marriage is quite popular. Read it.
My main point here is that we often learn much more about different places, countries, and culture by looking at the way people live and feel rather than by only sticking to politics and business. Fiction is not bad either.
The New York Times - In Europe, Lovers Now Propose: Marry Me, a Little
February 15, 2004
In Europe, Lovers Now Propose: Marry Me, a Little
By SARAH LYALL
ARSEILLE, France — Nathalie Ramirez and Djillali Antar have been together for eight years. But like many modern couples whose relationships are shaped by practicality and logistics as much as romance, they are not sure what they want in the future. Marriage, so far, has always seemed like a goal too much.
So two years ago, they presented themselves to a court in Aix-en-Provence and signed a pacte civil de solidarité, or PACS, as they are popularly known, giving them many of the same legal rights as married people but not, Ms. Ramirez explained with some relief, committing them to be together forever.
Today they are happily, if somewhat ambivalently, "PACS'ed" in an arrangement that Ms. Ramirez, 28, and Mr. Antar, 31, say does not feel like conventional marriage, but a light approximation of it. They do not wear wedding bands. They still refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. When they visit her parents, Mr. Antar does not spend the night. He has not even told his parents, who are originally from Algeria, that he got PACS'ed.
"They wouldn't understand," he said. "For them, it is marriage or nothing."
Even as President Bush is proposing to spend $1.5 billion to promote marriage in the United States, European countries are moving in the opposite direction. They are granting new status to couples looking for some legal rights in the broad gray area between living together casually and "till death do us part."
What European laws have in common, said Kathleen Kiernan, a professor of social policy and demography at the London School of Economics, is that they take a pragmatic approach to their populations' changing attitudes about the role — and even the relevance — of marriage in contemporary life.
"In some ways, there has been an acceptance of cohabiting relationships in Europe," Professor Kiernan said. "There isn't a move in European countries to promote marriage — although care has also been taken not to undermine the position of marriage in formulating legislation. Europe has moved toward the idea of committed partnership and committed parenthood, and civil status is a secondary issue."
Gay groups have led the way to registered partnership laws in many European countries; nearly all governments in Western Europe have or are proposing such laws for gays. But today France and some Scandinavian countries also have similar plans for heterosexuals, and at least one other country is considering them.
The result, for the time being at least, is a legal patchwork in which rights and benefits bestowed in one country are not always recognized elsewhere.
For French heterosexuals with religious or political objections to marriage, as well as those suffering from modern angst over what kind of commitment they are prepared to make, the government-issued pacts offer the perfect halfway house.
Speaking in their small apartment here, Ms. Ramirez laughed sheepishly, trying to explain the many things they considered when they decided to get PACS'ed instead of married. Their respective parents, who come from different countries, have not yet met each other, she said. There are the geographical complications of combining her career as a journalist with his job as a secondary school administrator — not to mention her fear of a long-term commitment, and the issue of having children, which they both agree they would undertake only if they were first married.
The civil solidarity pact that they signed confers some stability and legal rights. It means, for instance, that Mr. Antar can remain in his civil service job in Marseille, living with Ms. Ramirez, secure that he will not be transferred to another area. It means that the couple share property rights and, after three years as official partners, will get the same tax breaks as married people.
But it also allows either member to dissolve the relationship, with little legal complication, on three months' notice, a source of some comfort to this skittish couple.
"At first, when we PACS'ed, we thought we would be de-PACS'ed after three years, but we changed our minds," said Ms. Ramirez.
The Scandinavian countries, where being unmarried is increasingly the norm, have long allowed such couples to register as domestic partners, mostly as a way to protect any children they have together.
Unmarried couples in Norway who live together with children make up the fastest-growing household census category, having increased to nearly 100,000 people from nearly 61,000 20 years ago, according to the national statistics office. The Norwegian Parliament is considering a proposal to increase significantly the rights of people who are living together, known by a Norwegian word that translates as cohabitants.
Under the proposal, people who have been living together for five years or more, or who have children together, would have inheritance rights like married people. Surviving partners would also be allowed to keep the house the couple lived in and its contents, regardless of what their partner's will says.
Even in Italy, where marriage is so deeply rooted as a foundation of society that it is codified in the Constitution, a proposed law would for the first time grant some legal recognition to unmarried couples.
Among other things, the proposed Italian law would allow the surviving member of a couple in which one of the partners has died the right to remain in the house they shared for a period roughly equal to the length of the relationship.
"No one wants to go against marriage," Alessandra Mussolini, a member of the Italian Parliament and one of the bill's sponsors, said in an interview with The New York Times last November. "I'm married, and I think that is an institution that needs to be respected. But there should not be discrimination against children from unmarried parents, and there still is."
For its part, however, Italy seems loath to grant comparable rights to gay couples; indeed, one of the biggest objections to the bill is that it might somehow open the door to legally recognized gay couples.
At the same time, several other European countries have taken the opposite approach, recognizing gay relationships but refusing to grant special rights to unmarried heterosexuals, on the grounds that they have marriage as an option.
A government proposal still being considered in Britain, for instance, would allow gay couples to register in civil partnerships that would give them inheritance and pension benefits, and next-of-kin rights in hospitals. But when the government announced its plan last summer, gay groups protested, saying that it discriminated against heterosexuals.
In Germany, too, the law on unmarried couples favors gays. Under the country's registered partnership program, gay couples are, among other things, allowed to choose one surname as a shared "partnership name;" they also have increased financial rights in issues like inheritance, housing and maintenance.
About 6,000 couples have registered under the plan so far, said Volker Beck, a member of the German Parliament from the Green Party and a supporter of the law.
The civil solidarity pacts in France, in fact, began as a way for gays to formalize their partnerships, but were broadened, when religious and conservative groups objected, to include heterosexuals. By the end of 2002, according to the French Justice Department, about 133,890 people had signed such pacts.
"The government is opening up to different lifestyles — although I'm not persuaded that being gay is that different from being straight," said Gilles Segrestain, the president of Gaipar, an organization for gays from different nationalities in Paris.
"I think one of the reasons why gay relationships often appeared as being short-lived is because there was no institution, no framework," he said in an interview. "And now when two gay men or lesbians say, `we're PACS'ed,' it's like a straight couple saying, `we're married.' "
Well, not always. For many, it is more like marriage training.
"It's an intermediate way between no commitment and a wedding," said Caroline Vinot, 34, a Frenchwoman who lives in Prague and recently had a baby with her Czech boyfriend. The two are now considering signing a PACS together.
"I think there will probably be one day when it will be convenient for both of us to have this situation be legalized and all the financial and property aspects to be organized between us," she said.
There is still the allure of a traditional wedding, but Ms. Vinot is not sure how ready she is. "I probably would be very excited, with the big cake and the big party and the white dress," she said. "But I'm too scared to get married."
Christian Science Monitor, Poland tightens eastern border as new outpost of EU
EU officials are nervous. They fear illegal immigrants from the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia will easily cross Poland's 800-mile border to enter Western Europe. The Monitor article underscores various challenges and changes taking place as Poland prepares for its new membership. For example, the EU is pumping millions into border security and Poland is introducing new visa policies. This story gives a good idea of the inside views as the country undergoes another major evolutiion in its turbulent history.
In essence, Poland is ditching its old best friends for a new playmate at the risk of local economies collapsing and the disruption of cross-border family relationships. I've seen few articles about the negative impacts of integration. Usually reports will focus on the benefits Poland will receive. Additionally, the border challenges add to an already tense relationship between western and eastern European member states over immigration, employment and identity issues.
Poland tightens eastern border as new outpost of EU
Poland and seven other Central European countries will join the European Union in May - and are under pressure to stem illegal immigration from their eastern neighbors
By Deborah Steinborn | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
TERESPOL, POLAND - The dense forests of this border area make a perfect cover for illegal migrants coming from the east.
Poland is bracing itself. It will soon become an outpost of the expanding European Union.
Last summer, a native American unit of the US Customs Service helped train Polish border guards to spot the telltale signs of crossings along the "green border" - broken twigs and branches, overturned rocks.
"Everyone wants to get in, legally or not," says Wojciech Woloch, an officer with the Polish Border Guard at Terespol. "A lot of people now see Poland as a stepping stone to other places in the EU. Patrolling is a lot tougher than it used to be, but I think we're ready with the equipment and increased staff."
Fortress Europe
Under pressure from current EU members to seal their eastern borders, Poland and seven other Central European countries that will join the union this May are cracking down to stem the flow of illegal migrants from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia as well as from regions further afield.
They're rolling out high-tech border controls and strict visa requirements for neighboring lands. Otherwise, the EU says, drug, weapons and human smugglers from Central Asia and elsewhere will find an easy back door into Western Europe.
Over the past two years, the native American Shadow Wolves unit has also trained border guards in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia in an effort to help these new EU members.
Yet as a result of the increased border vigilance, the EU newcomers are shutting out border regions that share close family and trade ties. What's more, the effort could end up encouraging would-be migrants to take an illegal route to the EU.
"I used to drive to Poland every week to make money for my family, and it was no problem," says Stanislav K. "Now I couldn't even get a visa at the embassy. There's no work for us in Belarus, so what are we to do?"
Just before Christmas, he and two friends - natives of Brest, a city across the Bug River from Terespol - raised nearly $500 from families, friends, and their own savings, and paid a smuggler to help them get across. Now the trio is working in Poland, helping to renovate a Warsaw estate.
"We realize that even with visas, the flow from the east will be difficult to stop," says Jan Wegrzyn, a director in the Polish Interior Ministry.
"Whatever visa requirement or detection device we introduce, foreigners will always find a way around it ... nevertheless, we have to meet the standards of the EU."
EU officials stress that higher standards are necessary before candidate countries can join Schengen, a security system that has lifted internal border controls throughout most of the EU. While travel within the union is mostly passport-free under the Schengen agreement, movement into the EU is strictly controlled. For new member states, tight restrictions for local cross-border trade are also mandated.
For all countries about to join, that's meant a rush to revamp equipment, retrain personnel, and introduce new rules - while struggling to maintain relations with their non-EU neighbors next door.
At Terespol, the largest passenger crossing between Poland and Belarus, border guards self-consciously display brand-new night-vision goggles, mobile heat-sensor units, machines that scan the contents of vehicles, and cameras that can detect a person hiding in a dark place or at night.
Indeed, the EU is pouring hundreds of millions of euros into bringing its new eastern frontier up to snuff, from Slovenia down south to Estonia in the north. It will spend $184 million over the next three years on Hungary alone, helping that country to tighten its borders with four countries that have been left out of the union, at least for now.
Poland, with an almost 800-mile-long eastern border lined with forests, lakes and mountains, is among the EU's greatest security concerns as May nears.
"Are we nervous? Of course we are," says an EU official, who declined to be named.
"Just look at a map," says the official. "There are hundreds of miles of unmanned territory in Poland alone, areas with dense woods to hide in. For smugglers of any kind, this is paradise. And countries to the east - Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Moldova - they have a bad reputation for illegal migration already, even before the EU expands."
Polish authorities estimate that more than a hundred thousand undocumented migrants from the two bordering former Soviet republics of Belarus and Ukraine and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad already live in Poland. Many work at undocumented menial jobs on construction sites in homes and gardens.
In search of a living
"They talk about the drug and the sex businesses being imported from Ukraine, but I just want to make an honest living," says Irina, a young Ukrainian nurse with cropped blond hair.
Irina has cleaned houses and cared for sick Ukrainians in Warsaw for the past three years. She hasn't gone home to see her daughter since August. "I don't know whether I'd get back in again, and I can't afford the risk. In Ukraine, I earned maybe $10 a week if I was lucky, and it wasn't enough to feed my family. Here I can earn four times that amount."
In Poland, all visitors from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have had to show visas at the border since Oct. 1.
Even basic tourist visas cost 30 euros ($38) or more and are valid for just three months a year.
A smuggling ring snared
The EU's efforts to crack down on illegal migration at the soon-to-be new borders have seen some results.
In mid-November, Hungarian and Austrian border guards broke two human smuggling rings that had helped an estimated 10,000 people from southeastern Europe migrate illegally into Hungary, then on to Austria, over the past six years.
In Poland, new passport readers detected several hundred faked documents at eastern border crossings in the past 10 months.
But the measures have isolated the EU candidates' ex-Soviet neighbors. That's been particularly problematic for Poland and Hungary, which have large ethnic minorities in those neighboring countries as well as long-standing economic ties.
"All my cousins, my niece, and my nephews all live in Poland," says Helena, a seamstress from rural Belarus. She's been to the Polish Embassy five times in recent months to apply for a visa, but hasn't gotten one yet. "With these new rules, I can only get a visa for a short time, just once in a year, and I have to show I can afford the stay. I feel like this is a new wall for us, one we cannot get through."
Concerned about relations with their non-EU neighbors, Polish government officials have argued at the EU for more lenient visa requirements for local cross-border traffic. In September, the European Commission proposed a new "local visa" for residents of border areas in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus who need to travel short distances into the EU.
Flexible visas?
The new visa, if approved, would be issued for people who have relatives or property on the other side; it would also help facilitate short- distance commercial travel between countries such as Poland and Ukraine.
However, the proposal is controversial among current EU member states, all of which still need to approve the plan. Meanwhile, some analysts say a dangerous division between EU and non-EU is developing nonetheless.
"People on the other side of those borders don't see what's going on at the policy level, or what the concerns [of the EU] are," says Heather Grabbe, a researcher at the Centre for European Reform in London.
"What they care about is whether or not their daily lives have changed as a result of the EU expansion," she says. "And they have. This new border is a big deal for Russia, for Ukraine, for Belarus. It's already disrupted trade and daily cross-border traffic, and it's kept them from seeing their relatives."
Experts at Poland's Institute of Eastern Studies say the country's cross-border trade with Belarus, Ukraine, and Kaliningrad also risks collapsing under the new visa regime. Though the Polish government doesn't track this type of trade, it estimates it totaled 700 million euros in 2002.
Migrants, meanwhile, say they'll take the illegal route into "Fortress Europe" if need be. Already smugglers have set up shop in border towns like Brest to tempt locals eager to get back to the other side. The smugglers are "easy to find," says Helena.
"You just go to the market and ask around, and they appear," she says. "They ask as much as 600 euros ($760) to get just a few kilometers over [the border] in a "fool-proof" way, and about 300 euros ($380) for forged passports," she says.
"I never would have thought of doing something like that before, but if I had the money now, I'd try."
The Guardian, EU rich and poor split over budget increase
EU president Romano Prodi is having a tough time convincing some member states that the union needs a spending boost of $270bn to fund its enlargement. It seems the 'rich countries' resent financing the union whose 10 new members are the 'poor countries.' The Guardian article previews a long battle to come on this issue.
The necons don't need an alleged plot to thwart EU cohesion - member states are well on their way towards dividing themselves if the drama behind this debate isn't exaggerated. And with financial problems in their own countries, plus the debate over identities, I wonder how such an expanded patchwork of nations will come together under an EU umbrella.
It seems though that the 'rich nations' need to take financial responsibility if they also want to take the helm, which they've indicated through their trilateral meetings. That's the price.
EU rich and poor split over budget increase
Ian Black in Brussels
Wednesday February 11, 2004
Europe's richest nations last night reacted with fury to proposals that would increase Brussels' budget to €143bn, a 25% increase on current spending.
In the first round of what will be a bitter battle, Germany and the UK rounded on plans for the hike, presented by the European commission.
EC president Romano Prodi insisted the increase was vital to finance the union's historic enlargement. He said the money was needed to boost economic competitiveness, create jobs, tackle immigration and finance the union's historic enlargement.
But the chancellor Gordon Brown and finance ministers from other leading nations, including Germany and Sweden, said the EU's budget could not soar when individual countries were trying to tighten their belts.
The argument flared after Mr Prodi defended the proposed increase to €143bn by 2013, an increase of €20bn.
According to one calculation, total spending could reach a trillion euros by the end of the next seven-year budget period. "The gap between ambitious high-level political commitments and the failure to implement must not be allowed to widen further," Mr Prodi warned.
The EU executive insisted any smaller rise would mean cuts in key areas and that the higher ceiling is needed to finance the accession of 10 new and mostly poor countries in May as well as Romania and Bulgaria two years later.
The plan was welcomed by Pat Cox, the Irish president of the European parliament. "We cannot run an ambitious Europe of tomorrow on an empty fuel tank," he said
The commission ignored warnings from the "gang of six" net contributors - Germany, Britain, France, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands -who are demanding that the budgets be capped to 1% of EU national income. Mr Prodi retorted in Strasbourg last night: "That puts numbers before the political project. It is like building a house by starting with the roof."
Yesterday's exchanges were the first shots in what promises to be a marathon struggle pitting rich against poor members, old against new and minimalists against integrationists
The showdown is not likely before next year - during the UK presidency of the EU.
The Guardian, UK to join rapid reaction force
The wheels are in motion to create small "battle groups" of German, French and British soldiers for deployment to world "hotspots" by 2007. The troops would only be sent to areas where the U.S. has "no direct interest." The plan appears heavily symbolic in the wake of EU failure to create a larger and broader defense apparatus. The Guardian piece touches on the reasons why: EU members are not spending enough to modernize their armies and they won't combine resources in order to save money.
It's clear that the EU wants to be a political and military counterweight to the US, but it won't realistically be able to compete with US funding of its armed forces, even if member states share equipment. It seems the EU will have to make a tough choice: stick closely to Nato or build its own forces at the risk of jeopardizing the Alliance and being a weak military power in the region. Can the EU be a strong institution without a joint armed forces to back its political reach? More food for an identity crisis thought.
UK to join rapid reaction force
New EU battle groups for deployment to 'failing states'
Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday February 11, 2004
The Guardian
Britain, France and Germany, are to set up a joint military force in a ground-breaking initiative expected to be approved by senior EU officials today.
Under the ambitious plan, the three countries will create battle groups of well-trained troops ready to be deployed at a moment's notice to prevent fighting or restore peace around the world.
The battle groups, each of 1,500 troops, will be capable of being deployed within 15 days. They will be active initially for 30 days, but, with a turnaround of troops, could stay at a location for up to 220 days.
Their missions are to be "appropiate for, but not limited to, use in failed or failing states (of which most are in Africa)", according to the draft proposal.
The force will operate under the mandate of chapter seven of the UN charter, which covers peacemaking and peacekeeping operations sanctioned by the UN security council. The plan is the outcome of the British-French summit, held in November, when Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, the French president, agreed it was time the EU "pulled its weight", and bolstered its influence, by intervening early on and with force in conflicts.
British defence sources say the plan will be subject to approval by the EU's military committee and also by the union's political and security committee. It is expected to be discussed by Mr Blair, Mr Chirac, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, at their trilateral summit in Berlin next week.
The aim is for the the joint battle groups, capable of air, land and amphibious missions, to be ready by 2007. It is likely the troops would be used only in limited, regional, crises in which the United States had no direct interest.
The move reflects frustration at the inability of the EU to realise its original aim of setting up a rapid reaction force of 60,000 troops, and the failure of European countries to modernise their armed forces and save money by sharing equipment - failures which have been having a serious impact on Nato, as most EU members are also members of the US-led military alliance.
Nato's new secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, told an international security conference in Munich last weekend that the alliance could soon find itself unable to deploy troops to hotspots around the world unless it tackled serious shortcomings in its armed forces.
"If this shortfall is left unaddressed we will soon reach a point where our political reach goes beyond our military grasp," Mr Scheffer said.
He was referring in particular to Afghanistan. Despite the severe budgetary problems facing his department, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, has offered British troops as leaders in an expanded Nato peacekeeping mission in northern Afghanistan.
Mr Scheffer also said Nato should not rule out a role in Iraq. "If a legitimate Iraqi government asks for our assistance, and if we have the support of the UN, Nato should not abdicate from its responsibilities."
However, Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, expressed what he called "deep scepticism" about the US proposal for Nato to play a role in Iraq, warning that such missions could threaten the cohesion of Nato. "The risk of failure and the potentially very serious, possibly fatal consequences for the alliance, absolutely must be taken into consideration," he told the Munich conference.
Just to follow up on the class discussion, I think this op/ed in The New York Times shows a common contrast in criticism of the Bush Administration compared with the Spiegel article. In this column, the writer's tone and language are much calmer yet critical of his own administration. I think this approach is much more practical from U.S. newspapers.
"Lost in Credibility Gulch"
By Bob Herbert of The New York Times
Lost in Credibility Gulch
By BOB HERBERT
he question: What can we believe?
The president is genial enough, but it might be time for a bipartisan truth squad to follow him around, sorting out the facts from his musings, speculations, fantasies and mis-rememberings.
Iraq has shown us the trouble that can lurk in the gaps between reality and whatever it is that George W. Bush believes or says. Tim Russert, during his hourlong interview with Mr. Bush on NBC's "Meet the Press," displayed a quote from the president's address to the nation last March 17:
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
More than 500 American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war that was launched on that faulty data. And the war goes on.
"I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons," Mr. Bush told Mr. Russert.
Here at home, the president has been as wrong about jobs as he was about weapons of mass destruction. More than two million jobs have vanished on Mr. Bush's watch and the recent uptick in job creation has, by all accounts, been meager.
The tax cuts signed into law by Mr. Bush in May 2003 were euphemistically dubbed the Jobs and Growth Act. Workers are still waiting for the jobs. Despite a surge in the economy, we've actually been going backward with regard to employment. There are 700,000 fewer jobs now than when the recovery from the recession began back in November 2001.
If I were advising the president, I'd suggest he form his own truth squad to vet his policies and public statements and advise him on ways to maintain a high level of credibility. That might have helped him avoid the fiasco over the cost of his recent "reform" of Medicare.
The bill, which established a prescription drug benefit, was supposed to cost no more than $400 billion over the next decade. The White House had a hard time rounding up support from conservatives who thought even that was too much. Less than two months after the bill was signed, the administration disclosed that it would actually cost an estimated $534 billion, one-third more than the original estimate.
Last week the president unveiled a $2.4 trillion budget that hardly anyone, on the left or the right, believes is credible. Among other things, it includes an increase in military spending of 7 percent, or $26.5 billion, to $401.7 billion. But it does not include the cost of continued military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan!
Those estimated costs — scores of billions of dollars — will not be made public until after the November elections.
Samuel Butler said, "I care about truth not for truth's sake but for my own."
Mr. Bush presented himself in 2000 as an honest, straight-shooting Texan, an aw-shucks kind of guy whose word, unlike that of the sitting president ("I did not have sexual relations . . ."), could always be trusted.
The credibility that he enjoyed during that campaign, and which reached a peak in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, has steadily eroded since then. He said he was a compassionate conservative, but he has hammered programs designed to assist the poorest and most vulnerable among us. His administration has taken a blowtorch to the environment. And his fiscal policies are so outlandish that liberals, moderates and conservatives are asking if he's taken leave of his senses.
During the run-up to war, the public heard ominous references to mushroom clouds and was encouraged to believe there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.
It's time to put an end to the fantasies and the deceit, which have landed us in a quagmire overseas and the equivalent of fiscal quicksand at home.
It's not too much to ask that the president of the United States speak the clear truth about his policies and their implications. Mr. Bush would do himself and his country a favor by establishing a closer relationship with reality and a more intense commitment to the truth.
Those Americans who have put their trust in the president deserve nothing less.
This "Agenda for a Growing Europe", often referred to as the "Sapir report" is a recent assessment of the EU situation today and its need for growth. Establkished on the initiative of the president of the European Commission, it assesses strengths and weaknesses and suggests an agenda to "make the EU economic system deliver." Very useful.
Just a mention because all of us should have read that in The New York Times, and two questions:
How do you value, and define the differences, if you find any, between this article coming from a prestigious German newspaper, and the stories you have read in the Times, The Washington Post, or your favorite daily?
Do you see it as a valid example of how the Europeans view the United States?
Please answer by posting comments.
The New York Times - The Debate over Responsibility for the War
The Debate over Responsibility for the War
By DER SPIEGEL
George W. Bush is on the defensive. His CIA director confirms the absence of weapons stockpiles in Iraq and the national budget is moving toward a record deficit. With the election nine months away, the opposing Democratic camp is bursting with confidence.
The President is no friend of the press. George W. Bush, notorious for linguistic gaffes and muddled logic, doesn't like spontaneous questions, and he gives fewer press conferences than most of his predecessors. Whenever he does appear before the White House press corps, the dramatics have already been worked out to the smallest detail, even though Bush likes to give the impression of camaraderie by using journalists' first names ("Your turn, John").
This made the request that US broadcast network NBC received last week all the more unusual. The President, according to the request, wanted to appear on the Sunday program "Meet the Press." Of all people, George W. Bush had chosen Tim Russert, the intellectual grand inquisitor who moderates the weekend's best political talk show, to deliver a message to his fellow Americans: I am still here, and I am still in control. The public relations offensive is necessary. In recent weeks, the man in charge at the White House has lost a great deal of his reputation and support.
His last victory, the capture of Saddam Hussein, was quickly forgotten. The carefully staged State of the Union address on Capitol Hill proved to be a propaganda flop, and even fellow Republicans criticized the Bush budget proposal for 2005 presented last Monday as an irresponsible "fantasy budget." It gets even worse: According to a Gallup poll conducted last week, the sitting president had fallen behind John F. Kerry, the current favorite of the Democratic Party, by a margin of 46 to 53 percent. And the election is only nine months away.
John Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts, celebrated his biggest victory to date in last Tuesday's primary elections. He is emerging as a competitor who, thanks to his heroic record as a Vietnam veteran, could truly pose a threat to George W. Bush. And it was precisely in this unfortunate week that the troublesome issue of the war in Iraq landed on Bush' desk once again.
It was not just anyone, but CIA Director George Tenet, a confidant of the president, who addressed the public last Thursday at Washington's Georgetown University and bluntly exposed the propagandistic trickery with which commander-in-chief George W. Bush led the American nation into the Iraq war.
The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), chief coordinator of all US intelligence services, took matters into his own hands when it became clear that his people - and, most of all, Tenet himself - were about to be blamed for the US' costly military adventure.
The hunt had been triggered by David Kay. The former head of the Iraq Survey Group quit his job out of frustration, because his 1,400 specialists had been unable to find any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Kay told a group of surprised senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq had probably not had such weapons for years.
"It looks as though we were all wrong, and that is most disturbing," complained the man who, as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq after 1991, was apparently far more effective in bringing about disarmament than Washington would like to admit. According to Kay, however, George W. Bush did not knowingly mislead the American people; instead, the intelligence services "misused" him.
The beleaguered Tenet fought back. He dutifully absolved his president of responsibility, claiming that the war was justified and, furthermore, that no one had coerced the CIA into doctoring its analyses to support a military campaign which, according to revelations by the administration's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, had been planned ever since Bush came into office in January 2001.
"Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful - or thoughtful - discussion of intelligence these days," the DCI complained, passing the buck on to someone else. "Our analysts were certainly of different opinions on many important aspects of this weapons program, and we believe that this debate was clearly expressed." They "never claimed that there was acute danger."
One person, in particular, is now feeling exposed: Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was first considered a voice of reason until, in late 2002, he transformed himself into the spokesman of the hawks. In a dramatic appearance on February 5, 2003, the retired general attempted to force the UN Security Council to approve military action just six weeks before the attack on Iraq. Powell had spent days at CIA headquarters collecting top-secret information to "report what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
"Any statement that I issue today is based upon sources, solid sources. These are not simply claims," Powell assured the council, and then proceeded to serve up one lie after the next. He told the Security Council that the "deadly weapons programs" were a "real and present danger" and that the United States had "first-hand descriptions of mobile biological weapons laboratories."
In contrast, Kay now says: "We found information that led to entirely different conclusions." Like the UN inspectors before him, he too concludes that defectors "said what we wanted them to say." The mobile laboratories were apparently used for a highly mundane purpose: to deliver hydrogen for weather balloons.
"Saddam Hussein has never accounted for 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents," Powell said. Today Kay says: "There is no indication that these warheads were ever filled."
By now, almost every one of Powell's claims based on CIA information has been refuted. No wonder that Powell, to the dismay of the White House, has now come to the conclusion that his decision on the war might have been different today: "The absence of weapons of mass destruction changes the political calculation."
But if the calculation was wrong, then only one person is responsible - not Tenet, not Powell, but George W. Bush.
It is this debate over responsibility for the war that now hangs around the President's neck like a millstone. Last week in Charleston, South Carolina, he too conceded that the often-cited weapons had not been found. However, he stubbornly stuck to his justification for the preventive attack: "Based on what I knew then and based on what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq."
Now he feels compelled to appoint a commission to determine the true reasons why the CIA supplied false information on Saddam's weapons arsenal. Bush, who can appoint the members of this body himself, asked former Democratic Senator Chuck Robb, once a conservative judge, to serve as its chairman. However, the commission will not present its findings until 2005, after the presidential election. Of course, the President is hoping to be cleared of any blame, just as Tony Blair has managed to stage his own acquittal.
These days, Bush is becoming increasingly driven by events he no longer controls. Shiite leader Ali al-Sistani apparently has more influence over the timing and course of the power transfer in Iraq than the superpower. Moreover, the occupying army continues to be powerless against devastating attacks.
Following the capture of Saddam, the United States had hoped that the attacks in Iraq would begin to subside. However, this has not proven to be the case. Last week, two suicide bombers wiped out a portion of the Kurdish elite, killing 110 people in the attacks in Arbil. Furthermore, American soldiers are killed on a daily basis - painful reminders of a military adventure that was thoughtlessly initiated by the Bush administration.
An opinion poll conducted by the Associated Press reveals just how much Bush' popularity has suffered: His job approval rating has dropped to 47 percent, which is even lower than it was prior to September 11, 2001. Contrary to expectations, Bush will not be able to simply coast toward reelection as a patriotic wartime president.
Until now, however, he has been able to rely on his luck. When his approval ratings suddenly dropped last fall, Saddam was discovered in a hole in the ground and then the economy began showing signs of recovery. Could Bush' luck return?
A healthy recovery at the right time would certainly increase his chances for reelection. This is exactly the way things seemed to be going when the economic figures for the third quarter of 2003 were released: The economy had grown by more than eight percent, a rate of growth that hadn't even occurred in the golden nineties. According to the prevailing wisdom, these conditions should have led to 150,000 new jobs in December. But then came the shocking news: only 1000 new jobs had been created. It seems that growth and employment have become disconnected.
As the months pass, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the economy will serve as a strong argument for reelection. Absent a miracle, Bush will go down in history as the first president since Herbert Hoover who has seen more jobs lost than created during his time in office. And Hoover had to lead America through the Great Depression after 1929.
Unemployment is currently at 5.6 percent. Since 2001, the year Bush moved into the White House, more than 2.3 million additional Americans have become unemployed. This number would be even higher if many of the unemployed hadn't simply given up looking for work.
Economists believe that the reason for this "jobless recovery" is that many companies continued to behave as if there were a recession. They laid off employees and increased productivity during the crisis. Now, instead of hiring new employees as demand grows, they prefer to continue with layoffs. This is good for the bottom line - and devastating for the employment market.
And then there is the issue of the federal budget. This year's deficit is expected to reach a record 521 billion dollars. The national debt is currently 3.9 billion dollars - a sum equal to the gross national products of Germany and France combined.
Deficits of this magnitude can do serious damage to even the strongest economies over time. They stand in the way of important future investment, fuel inflation, and ultimately lead to higher interest rates, which in turn has disastrous consequences for growth and employment.
The deficit is also dangerous for the President because it undermines his credibility. He has just presented a budget that contradicts his economic theory. Not too long ago, Bush said: "We can continue with tax cuts without having to worry about debt." The Bush administration believes that the tax cuts totaling 1.3 billion dollars over a ten-year period are its crown jewel.
Apprehension is spreading, even among loyal Republicans. They see the deficit as a symptom of unbridled spending. In fact, government expenditures during the past two years have increased by an average of 8.2 percent in those areas in which the administration felt it had spending latitude. Similar spending habits could not even be attributed to Ronald Reagan. "Truly shocking," noted an indignant Wall Street Journal, usually a Bush-friendly paper.
On top of all this, the President is promising improvements. He wants to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009. In the new budget the administration submitted last Monday, many government programs were frozen, at least temporarily. Exceptions? The Pentagon budget (up 7 percent) and the budget for national security expenditures (up 9.7 percent).
This is exactly what Bush' opponents are using to attack the President during the current Democratic primaries: The fact that this country has also lost its economic balance. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who is behind frontrunner John Kerry and could become his vice-president, talks about a two-class America. John Kerry himself, with his stentorian voice, denounces the amount of influence lobbyists have over the White House.
Nevertheless, the presidential candidates' proposed reforms are exceedingly moderate. Edwards and Kerry agree that higher taxes should only be imposed on those with incomes over 200,000 dollars
Neither of the two candidates has proposed cutbacks in spending for national security, a move that would be unpopular at this point. Even if a Democrat becomes president, the United States will not be immune against a high national debt.
Frontrunner John Kerry doesn't spend much time talking about economic policy during his campaign appearances. Foreign policy is his passion. "We are here today to introduce the end of the Bush presidency," Kerry announces in a booming voice when he approaches the podium in New Hampshire or Missouri.
It's been forgotten that the current favorite was behind his fellow Democratic candidates just a few weeks ago, that Kerry, the son of a diplomat who served as legal advisor to the US envoy to West Berlin in the 1950s, lacked just about everything: a message, a campaign song, enthusiasm and a belief in himself. But then his fellow senator, Ted Kennedy, offered Kerry the services of his capable office manager, Mary Cahill. Now, as Kerry's campaign manager, she is doing everything in her power to "tell the story of John Kerry the right way."
The new, softened image is working, with Kerry adding state after state to his list of victories. On last week's first "Super Tuesday," he won the primaries in five states across the entire country. "In American history, anyone who has won so many early contests has always ended up being his party's nominee," writes the New York Times.
Kerry is the man of the hour. Missouri and Arizona, North Dakota, Delaware and New Mexico are a microcosm of the ethic and social diversity of America. The fact that he was able to prevail in such different states makes Kerry the only candidate with national appeal.
America's Democrats are already becoming caught up in a frenzy of confidence. They are united by a will, fed by deep resentment against President Bush, not to face four more years of neoconservative dominance in America and not to become involved in any more experiments with preventive war.
Upstanding Republicans must be furious about the fact that John Kerry, a scion of the wealthy East Coast aristocracy, and John Edwards, a nouveau riche upstart, are traveling around the country and accusing the Bush administration of creating tax laws that favor the rich. Their views, programs and political carriers have turned Kerry and Edwards into prime targets for the Bush camp.
The Republican campaign is also moving full speed ahead. Weaknesses in the biographies of the competition are being researched, and potential voters are being recruited door-to-door, by telephone, and by e-mail. The objective is to register at least three million new Republican voters.
The President's schedule routinely includes galas, dinners and receptions at which guests are given the opportunity to drop off checks for the campaign, a method that has already brought the Bush campaign about 135 million dollars. That number is expected to increase to 200 million by this summer - the largest amount of money ever spent by a single candidate in an American election campaign.
But does George W. Bush also plan to change his tactics? According to a rumor that has been making the rounds in Washington for some time, most of the orchestrators of the Iraq war - from Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - would not be part of a second Bush administration.
It may be that Americans are gradually becoming fed up with war, unilateral action and grandiloquent