Euromedia

Turkey: a bridge to the future, a bridge to the past

The European Union is faced with a difficult decision. If it doesn't allow Turkey to join the EU, it could be viewed as further proof of the "clash" between the Muslim world and the west. If it does allow Turkey to join, it faces a potential wave of immigrants that people aren't ready for or fully accepting. And, with open borders and Turkey's neighbors, obvious security concerns.

Europeans praise themselves for their ability to overcome the past, by creating things like a European Defense Agency 90 years after World War I and only 15 years after the fall of Communism. But to turn its attention away from overcoming centuries of exclusion and battles against the Muslim world and the Turks would be to ignore a much more pressing issue.

International Herald Tribune -Is EU ready for Turkey? Muslim world is waiting

Roger Cohen: Is EU ready for Turkey? Muslim world is waiting

Roger Cohen International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Globalist
 
ISTANBUL

Where Europe ends, and with it presumably the European Union, has long been a vexed question. Just how vexed will be demonstrated over the next seven months as the EU grapples with a critical decision: whether to begin negotiations leading to Turkish membership.

The EU has just admitted 10 new members without being sure how it will run itself as a 25-member club. So the notion of opening the way for Turkey appears far-fetched. This is a country of close to 70 million people, the vast majority of them Muslims, bordering Iraq, Syria and Iran. Few Europeans associate such dangerous borders with their continent.

But Turkey amounts to a special case. Its links with the EU go back to 1963, when it entered into economic agreements. Ever since, the prospect of possible membership has been dangled with growing specificity before this diverse and determinedly secular state. Now the EU Commission is completing a report on Turkey that will form the basis for a decision by European leaders in December.

The looming verdict will provoke sharp divisions. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, recently expressed strong support for Turkish membership, saying it would bring a "new dimension" to the EU. The German government also appears favorable. But Alain Juppé of France, the leader of President Jacques Chirac's UMP party, said last month that his party opposed opening negotiations with Turkey. Chirac himself has been more evasive, saying Turkey has a "European vocation." Make of that Delphic phrase what you will.

Scrutiny of the EU's next move is intense in the United States, in the Islamic world and in Turkey itself. The American view is straightforward. Europe says it wants good relations with Muslims. That being the case, it cannot slam the door on Turkey.

"If the Muslim world is not an enemy, they have to go through with this," said one American official.

The American idea, of course, is that Turkey's natural role is as a bridge between the West and the Islamic world at a time when suspicion and anger are growing over Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To open talks leading to EU membership would sweep away suspicions of religious and cultural prejudice that have grown as Turkey has waited on the sidelines for four decades. It would show that a Muslim country that is also a secular democracy has its place at the same European table as France, Britain and Germany.

Support for EU membership is strong in Turkey. Saban Disli, the vice-chairman of the governing Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that negotiations should begin in the first half of next year with a view to bringing Turkey into the EU by 2008, or 2010 at the latest.

"If Turkey is left out, close to 1.5 billion Muslims around the world will feel as bad as I will feel," he said. "The clash between Islam and the West will be sharpened."

Erdogan, who leads a party with Islamic roots that some now refer to as "Muslim Democrats" (an echo of Europe's right-of-center Christian Democrats), has worked hard to persuade European leaders that Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is now ready. Just last week, special state security courts sometimes used to try Kurds were abolished, one of a series of amendments to the Constitution.

In general, the army has lost its once dominant behind-the-scenes role; the often trampled rights of Turkey's minority Kurdish population have been bolstered. Erdogan has also pushed hard to reunite the divided island of Cyprus through support for a United Nations peace plan that was rejected last month by Greek Cypriots.

In all this, he has shown himself responsive to European and American prodding. Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, wrote to the Turkish government in February, urging it to do more for judicial transparency. This month, he called Turkey a "very, very secular democracy" (after causing ire earlier by mistakenly labeling it an "Islamic republic").

But resistance to Turkey in Europe remains strong. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and overseer of efforts to draft a new EU constitution, declared in 2002 that Turkey's entry would mean "the end of Europe." Such views are widely shared, if seldom expressed so directly.

Turkey resides somewhere deep and ambivalent in the European psyche. It was against the westward pushing forces of the Ottoman empire and Islam that Europe long fought. The Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna, the centuries-long battle to put an end to Turkey-in-Europe - these events were marking.

The mingled minarets and church steeples of Bosnia are only the most obvious imprint of the Turkish presence.

Today, that presence is felt most immediately in the large number of Turkish immigrants in the EU, particularly in Germany. The specter of hordes of young Turks moving west troubles many people. Europe remains uncertain about how to integrate its growing Muslim population. The notion of the EU as some sort of Christian club has not been entirely lost. In such a club, of course, Turkey does not fit.

So, many Turks are skeptical. "Turkey is a big thing to swallow," said Lerzan Ozkale, a university professor. "I think the EU prefers us cooperating on the outside." Up to now, it is true, the EU has done well by tantalizing Turkey without admitting it.

But that game now looks exhausted. Turkey is impatient; a world of tensions between Islam and the West is watching. The country has much to offer the EU: its understanding of the Islamic world, its vitality, its large army, its geographic bridge.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green politician, spoke this month of the EU as a land of "miracles." The first two were Franco-German reconciliation and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The third, he suggested, could be Europe's rapprochement with the Muslim world through Turkish membership. He had a point. To close the EU to Turkey would be to look backward at a time when a troubling future must be confronted.

Europe vs. the Corner Store

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)

Cultural integration?

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.

Tolerance, fears collide in Netherlands

This clanging port city on the Rotte River is a study in European immigration. One-third of Rotterdam's population of 600,000 are minimally educated immigrants with little command of the Dutch language. If trends continue, according to a city government study, the non-native community will grow about 58 percent by 2017 - a dramatic demographic shift in a nation where half a century ago there were few foreigners.

I'm looking at immigration for my story, browsing at some different country cases. This one really affected me. It says so much about the collision of new fears about terrorism and buried xenophobic feelings in some European countries. I know personally, some distant relatives in Holland are worried that they will be deported to Afghanistan because the government is now relatively stable. That is the case in the US too. The illegal immigrants caught up in the special registration webs often are sent back to countries when it may not be safe for them. In the case of the Palestinians, there is no state to be sent back to. What strange times we live in ...

Tolerance, Fear Collide in Neatherlands, Los Angeles Times

Europeans share values, but not a common identity

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.

The French Connection: boon or bane for Kerry?

These are only two of the many recent articles where Senator John Kerry is accused of being too French and of his cousin trying to distance Kerry from his Gallic relations and tendencies, presumably for his benefit.

But the undercurrents of such accusations tend to suggest that rift between the U.S. and France, at least with the Bush administration in the White House, isn't showing any signs of mending.

On the other hand, as the article mentions, the editor of Le Monde approvingly told a New York audience that Kerry "looks French."

International Herald Tribune - Globalist: If Kerry 'looks French,' look for an ugly fight

Chicago Tribune - Sen. Kerry's French connection

Globalist: If Kerry 'looks French,' look for an ugly fight

Roger Cohen IHT
Saturday, April 3, 2004

PARIS It is not going to be a pretty American election. Already the Bush administration has embarked on a campaign to portray John Kerry as a flip-flopping, tax-raising, European-educated wimp. The presumptive Democratic candidate has responded by describing the president as a job-destroying, budget-busting, alliance-breaking unilateralist.

But perhaps the surest indication that the looming political season will be ugly has come from repeated Republican suggestions that Kerry “looks French.”

Not only that: the senator is said to betray a dubious fondness for things French, even the language. A recent comment from Commerce Secretary Don Evans that the Massachusetts Democrat is “of a different political stripe and looks French” was only the latest of several jibes, mainly from conservative talk-show hosts and columnists, that have included allusions to “Monsieur Kerry” and “Jean Chéri.”

For some months now, the Republican House majority leader, Tom DeLay, has been opening speeches to supporters with an occasional routine. He says hi, then adds: “Or, as John Kerry might say, 'Bonjour.'”

The remark “always brings the house down,” said DeLay's spokesman, Stuart Roy, who added that its purpose was to highlight “Mr. Kerry's lack of support for the war on terror and the way he seems to be in agreement with the arguments of the French.” What is going on here? Ever since the Iraq war divided the Atlantic Alliance and the French government emerged as its most vociferous opponent, France has become a dirty word in some Republican circles. The France-bashing has had its lighter side - French fries disappearing from menus - but it has been no laughing matter. The criticism has carried the serious suggestion that France is not to be trusted. So if Kerry “looks French," the inference is clear enough.

Impugning the patriotism of a Vietnam war hero may seem an outlandish political tactic. But the Republicans have focused on other aspects of Kerry's life. He attended a Swiss boarding school and speaks good French; his maternal grandparents had a house in a village in Brittany, Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, where he spent several vacations; he has a French first cousin, the ecologist politician Brice Lalonde. The Republican National Committee recently circulated this last fact. Asked why, Christine Iverson, a committee spokeswoman, said the French family was not a big issue because Kerry would “be judged on his support for tax increases, not on his fondness for brie and Evian.” As for Lalonde, now the mayor of Saint-Briac, he is reluctant to be drawn into his cousin's campaign.

Many others in France have been less reticent. The broad French hope that Kerry will replace Bush in the White House is no secret. The Democratic candidate has been getting very good press; Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of Le Monde, recently told a New York audience that Kerry “even looks French.” This time, the tone was one of approval.

Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist, sees several reasons for the French embrace of Kerry. A conviction that Americans will not re-elect a president widely seen in France as arrogant, simplistic and dangerous. A belief that Kerry will embrace old allies like France. Neglect and incomprehension of the large swathe of American society that finds Bush attractive. A subliminal association of John Forbes Kerry with another JFK, one beloved in France.

“There is a nostalgia for the Kennedy years and a hatred of Mr. Bush that I have never known for another American president,” Bacharan said. “So the French have just blocked out the America of religious faith and straight talk that likes Bush.” Much, it seems, is being blocked out in the talk of Kerry's French side. It is true that some of his promised policies seem attractive to many Europeans. He favors diplomatic engagement - in the past with Vietnam, today with Iran. He has castigated the Bush administration for its “intoxication with the pre-eminence of American power.” He has said he understands the need to “cooperate and compromise with our allies and friends.” He has vowed “to replace unilateral action with collective security.”

But Kerry also voted in favor of the war in Iraq - a fact not much aired in France - and urged the new Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to refrain from withdrawing Spain's troops from Iraq.

The fact is that Kerry understands the reality of post-9/11 America, one often only dimly perceived in Europe. The attack, like Pearl Harbor, changed the country, pushed national security back to the center of the political agenda for the first time since the end of the cold war, and almost certainly made any candidate not strong on defense and tackling terrorism unelectable.

As a result, the differences on foreign policy between Bush and Kerry, while distinct, may be less radical than they appear. The president is not as isolated or as isolationist as he is sometimes portrayed, and Kerry is not as beholden to his multilateralist convictions as the French might wish. “Multilateralist when you can, unilateralist when you must” is how Richard Holbrooke, an adviser to Kerry, describes the candidate.

Still, in an election as tight as this one, the Republicans will do all they can to associate Kerry with what they see as the French penchant for conciliatory weakness and slow-moving international institutions.

The French theme in the campaign is likely to endure, much to the displeasure of Nathalie Loiseau, a French Embassy spokeswoman in Washington. “I regret that anyone would consider that portraying someone as French is negative,” she said. “This is a country of immigrants, after all.” Indeed: Kerry's paternal grandfather Frederick Kerry (born Fritz Kohn) arrived in America from Europe in 1905.

As for the Kerry campaign, it is adopting a certain hauteur in the French affair. “There are more important things to talk about, like affordable health care,” said Stephanie Cutter, a Kerry spokeswoman. “Mr. Kerry is an American citizen.”

Chicago Tribune
Sen. Kerry's French connection
Not wanting to hurt his election chances, relatives in Brittany downplay affiliations

By Jocelyn Gecker
Associated Press
Published April 5, 2004

ST.-BRIAC-SUR-MER, France -- John Kerry's relatives in France bristle at jabs from across the Atlantic that the presidential contender has a French connection.

They say Kerry has no link to France other than the home his grandparents bought here.

"John Kerry is incredibly American," says Brice Lalonde, Kerry's cousin and mayor of this seaside Brittany village. "He has absolutely nothing French about him."

For another cousin, Christopher Curtis: "This is an American story. John is an all-American guy with the benefit of having spent some time overseas."

With the race for the White House turning nasty--and France-U.S. ties not quite mended from the Iraq war--Kerry's Gallic clan, when questioned, talks up his American-ness. Some are keeping a low profile, saying too much talk about France could be political arsenic.

As Lalonde puts it: "I'm afraid to hurt him."

But that hasn't stopped the Frenchman from pasting Kerry bumper stickers on his car--hardly a common sight in this 16th Century village.

St. Briac, near the port city of St. Malo, is a place of rugged seascapes and narrow, cobbled lanes that inspired Renoir and other Impressionists. It was here that the senator from Massachusetts spent boyhood summers and has said he traced his first inspiration to become a politician.

But nowhere on Kerry's Web site does he mention his summers in France or the family estate, known as Les Essarts, a sprawling property on a bluff over the sea.

"Monsieur Bush is angry with France," says Ian Forbes, an 85-year-old Kerry uncle who lives at Les Essarts. "We don't want to accentuate the connection between Johnny and France."

Kerry's maternal grandparents, James Grant Forbes and Margaret Winthrop--a descendant of Massachusetts' first governor, John Winthrop--bought the estate in the 1920s. They had 11 children, including the mothers of Kerry, Lalonde and Curtis, a British-American who lives in Paris. The home served as a summer hub for their cosmopolitan clan.

In his youth, Kerry joined the family gatherings while his father, a U.S. diplomat, was posted in Europe. Young Kerry also attended a Swiss boarding school and brought a touch of America to this corner of northwestern France.

"He introduced us to games like capture the flag. We still play something called kick the can," said Lalonde, who at 58 is two years Kerry's junior.

Politics also run in the family here. Lalonde was environment minister under then-President Francois Mitterrand. Like his American cousin, Lalonde ran for president. But that was 1981 and he received less than 4 percent of the French vote.

Kerry's campaign and his days in France have been widely reported here. A recent story in Liberation newspaper was headlined, "John Kerry, too Frenchy for the Republicans." It catalogued insults by allies of President Bush and the tendency of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to start speeches with: "Good afternoon, or as John Kerry might say, `Bonjour.'"

For Lalonde, Kerry's long, angular face "resembles Abraham Lincoln, without the beard."

The French media like to compare John Forbes Kerry, who speaks fluent French, to John F. Kennedy.

A Spanish philosopher on secularism

This is an interesting Op-ed on "secularism" (laicism) from Fernando Savater a Spanish philosopher and writer. He develops "five theses" that deserve a close reading from those working on this issue.

An imperfect summary of the most relevant points could be:

Minarets Rise in Germany

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."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writers Petra Falkenberg in Berlin and Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris and special correspondent Bruce Wallace in London contributed to this report.

EU considers regulations on corporate book cookers

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.

11-M will change Europe (and its relation with the US)

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?

Europe, the anti-America?

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

Headscarves: France and Britain, two different models

Other than being a good description of the “war of the headscarves” that is currently troubling France, the article is a very complete and compelling theorization of different European approaches to ethnic diversity, in comparison to the American model, too.
In brief, the author defines a French model of multiculturalism (based on a particularly conscious integration), a British model (consisting in "not worrying" and leaving ethnic minorities alone by the state to practice their faith and culture), and the American affirmative-action style.
I think it would be very important -- for both European and non-European citizens -- to start thinking about what might be the dominant, winning model for the new Europe, and about its relation with the U.S.
I am sure the article will be a crucial foundation for our reporting in France.

"The war of headscarves", The Economist
www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2404691

Muslim activist sues Pope

An Italian convert to Islam who fought to have crosses removed from schools is now suing the Pope for comments he made in his 1994 book, allegedly calling Christianity superior to other religions, in violation of the Italian constitution.

I find this fascinating. I don't know much about the previous lawsuit, but it seems this devout Muslim is fighting so that the secular Constitution is upheld in a land that is richly Catholic. How do Italians view him?

I posted a short news blurb. Maybe some of our Italian speakers can tell us what the Italian press thinks.

Muslim activist sues Pope

A Muslim activist sued the Pope, a top cardinal and other church officials, claiming their comments about the superiority of Christianity violated the Italian constitution. In a civil suit filed in Aquila, central Italy, activist Adel Smith said he was seeking a court condemnation of the comments. Smith, president of the Muslim Union of Italy, has made headlines for his court battle to have a crucifix taken down from his son's classroom. In his latest legal effort, Smith said that, over the years, Pope John Paul II and other church officials had violated the Italian constitution, which proclaims that all religions are equal under the law.

A pan-Europe political party?

Thirty-two Green parties are uniting to create the first pan-European political group, according to this Christian Science Monitor article. The article considers the challenges facing such a coalition in light of increasing skepticism about a European Union identity. It also talks about the motives of creating such a party.

Pan-European parties boost the idea of a united Europe and highlight the similar political issues facing Europeans. However, what other issues outside of the environment can unite Europeans? I think it's a great experiment in EU poltiics though.

Christian Science Monitor, Greens seek pan-European political clout

Greens seek pan-European political clout

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS - Thirty years ago a handful of ecology-minded activists threw themselves into the European political fray and succeeded, over time, in turning what had been radical environmental demands into mainstream, conventional concerns.

Now the Greens are going against the grain again. Even as Europe flounders in its search for cohesion, and Europeans retreat further into their national identities, 32 Green parties have founded the first pan-European political party with a transnational election platform and continental reach.

The goal, says Monica Frassoni, cochairwoman of the European Parliament's Green members, is to create a genuinely European electorate for the first time. With parliamentary elections set for June, she says, "we see a space for European politics to become more autonomous from national politics."

They are pursuing this dream at a difficult time, for the Greens are less likely than any other group to win new seats from the 10 new European Union members joining in May. Though environmental problems are enormous in the post-Communist countries that make up the bulk of the new entrants, most of their citizens are more concerned with prosperity than with pollution.

The Greens are launching their election campaign with a psychological boost, however. In Latvia, former Environment Minister Indulis Emsis has just become the world's first Green prime minister, appointed by the president to break a political deadlock.

Nowhere else in Europe do the Greens hold such a senior post, and their support rarely rises above 10 percent in national elections. But they enjoy visibility beyond their numbers through leaders such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May 1968 uprising in Paris and now probably the best-known European Parliament member, and Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister.

Many grass-roots members appear ambivalent about whether they even want to be in government, preferring the freedom to remain true to their principles as thorns in the side of authority. The French Green party, for instance, grew bitter at being ignored as a junior partner in the last Socialist-led government.

At the conference in Rome 10 days ago where the new European party was founded, Mr. Fischer fustigated such dilettantism. "It is all well and good to be on the right side of history, but that means nothing if history follows the wrong path," he told some 1,300 delegates from 29 countries.

"Beautiful ideas are all very well, but we must fight for power; it is a challenge."

The new party is a step in that direction, Ms. Frassoni says. "We founded it because we want to win elections," she says. The question is whether European voters are ready for a continent-wide party. Recent EU opinion polls show that less than half of EU citizens now believe that their country's membership in the Union is a good thing, and turnout in European Parliament elections has fallen every time they have been held, to just 49 percent in 1999.

"Since Europe does not deliver, people have lost confidence in it," argues Frassoni. "But one of the reasons why Europe cannot get its act together and be really united is that people think in national terms.

"We have to show that Europe works, and to do that we need instruments," she adds. "A European party will be a very good instrument."

Though European socialists, conservatives, and liberals are also banding into formal continentwide parties to take advantage of new EU funding for such groups, the Greens may be best suited for such an approach, analysts say, if only because the sort of environmental issues that move their voters - such as renewable energy and genetically modified food - transcend national borders.

"As Europe becomes more politically divided, parties that appeal to narrowly defined constituencies will grow in popularity and power," suggests a recent report by Stratfor, a US political consultancy group. "Narrow-issue parties will be among the few that can overcome national politics."

The task will not be easy. European Green parties are divided among themselves on fundamental issues such as how much power national governments should cede to EU bodies: The German Greens are federally minded, while the British and Scandinavian parties are more 'Euroskeptic.' The Danish Green party refused even to sign the common electoral platform.

Green leaders insist that their new formation merely reflects the goal set by the proposed EU Constitution - of "unity and diversity." And in the European Parliament, "When you look at our voting record we are the most coherent of all the groups," says Green deputy chairman Pierre Jonckheer.

At the last European Parliament elections, the Greens won 38 of the 625 seats, and they do not expect to win many more. But to maximize their appeal, they have drawn up a "back to basics" manifesto that focuses on core Green issues, while skirting divisive questions such as defense.

Campaigning as a single party, says Frassoni, the Greens will be able to get their message across more clearly. "People close to the Greens are particularly sensitive to the fact that to regulate environmental issues or to control globalization you need a hard core of power," she argues. That power must be Europe and it must be visible."

“A republic which is not social cannot be secular”

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)

How the Europeans see their Institutions

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 europ�ennes, institutions et eurod�put�s restent tr�s mal connus

A la veille des �lections europ�ennes, institutions et eurod�put�s restent tr�s mal connus

LE MONDE | 25.02.04 | 14h09 � MIS A JOUR LE 25.02.04 | 18h25
Une enqu�te r�v�le notamment que les Europ�ens ont une id�e fausse des r�les 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 europ�en

A quatre mois des �lections europ�ennes, moins d'un tiers des citoyens de l'Union (31 %) d�clarent avoir la ferme intention de voter. Ce r�sultat inqui�tant a �t� rendu public, lundi 23 f�vrier, par la Commission de Bruxelles, d'apr�s l'Eurobarom�tre semestriel sur l'�tat de l'opinion publique, r�alis� du 1er octobre au 7 novembre 2003 aupr�s d'un �chantillon repr�sentatif de 16 082 personnes.

Le manque d'enthousiasme des personnes sond�es se traduit par un nouveau recul de leur confiance dans les institutions europ�ennes (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 interrog�es 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 Europ�ens pr�disent que la conjoncture va se d�grader 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 europ�enne au 1er mai, 35 % seulement des citoyens se d�clarent s�rs 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 ann�e et autant misent sur la stagnation, selon un sondage effectu� du 11 octobre au 9 novembre aupr�s de 12 165 personnes des dix pays candidats, plus la Bulgarie, la Roumanie et la Turquie.

�LUS NON IDENTIFI�S

Curieusement, le Parlement europ�en est l'institution europ�enne la plus reconnue : 91 % des personnes interrog�es � l'Ouest en ont entendu parler et 78 % pensent qu'il joue un r�le important dans la vie de l'Union europ�enne. 70 % donnent le premier r�le � la Commission et 58 % au conseil des ministres.

Cette hi�rarchie, identique � l'Est, montre que les Europ�ens ont une vision erron�e du fonctionnement de leurs institutions. "La surrepr�sentation du Parlement europ�en est sans doute li�e � son nom", sugg�re Bruno Jeanbart, directeur adjoint du d�partement opinion de CSA, qui a particip� � l'enqu�te pour la France : "Les gens calquent ce qu'ils savent de leur Parlement national sur le Parlement europ�en, alors qu'� Bruxelles le l�gislatif a deux t�tes", explique-t-il. Il pr�cise que, en France, "la tr�s faible connaissance des institutions est li�e 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 pl�biscit�e, l'opinion publique ne conna�t pas ses eurod�put�s : 44 % des personnes interrog�es d�clarent n'avoir "ni vu, ni entendu, ni eu de contacts avec un membre du Parlement depuis les derni�res �lections europ�ennes". Seuls le Danemark (17 %) et la Finlande (26 %) font exception � ce constat d'ignorance. En France, "cette m�connaissance s'explique par le mode de scrutin", indique M. Jeanbart : "Les �lecteurs connaissent, � la rigueur, les t�tes de listes nationales, mais elles sont presque toutes parties." Seuls sont rest�s Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Charles Pasqua, Jean Saint-Josse, Arlette Laguiller et Alain Krivine. M. Jeanbart ajoute que le nouveau d�coupage, en tr�s grandes circonscriptions, "ne permettra pas plus l'identification des eurod�put�s".

Les m�dias ne facilitent pas cette connaissance : seules 38 % des personnes interrog�es disent qu'elles ont vu des membres du Parlement europ�en � la t�l�vision. Ce pourcentage augmente toutefois au Danemark (77 %) et en Finlande (61 %). Or 42 % des personnes interrog�es disent qu'elles aimeraient voir leurs eurod�put�s sur le petit �cran.

Rafa�le Rivais

� ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 26.02.04

Migration - is it really an economic question

I’ve included two articles from the Guardian. The first is a list of figures and quotes that, taken together, suggest the worry over immigration from new member countries is motivated, more, by racism (it includes and interesting quote about gypsies) and xenophobia, and less, by the valid economic concerns of current member countries. The most interesting figure: “According to one study the economic gain of EU expansion to the existing 15 countries will be about £6bn and approximately £15bn to the newcomers.”
One statistic I do not see here is the UK estimate of the drain a projected influx would have on welfare, health and education. I looked, but could not find these estimations in other sources, but I would like to know what the estimation is because this ‘drain’ seems to be the only strong argument for migration controls.
With this list I’ve included a related article from the Guardian that humanizes the Roma in the Chez Republic. I find it gives new perspective to the migration debate by relaying the views of potential immigrants (who don’t want to move) and the Czech Republic the Prime Minister, Vladimir Spidla (who says “the concern over influx is provoked ‘by silly media’”).
I find the list and the article important because they suggest that the worry over migration stems from the friction between national identities (the Czech preference for “home” is also evident) and the EU ideal.
The article even reaches (for a moment) to address the identity crisis that some individuals experience within their own country. It introduces a man who lost his Czech citizenship – “I'm not Indian. I'm not Polish. I'm nothing,’ he complained bitterly. " And I think this supports Balibar’s conception of the situation.

EU enlargement: facts and fears

Steven Morris
Monday February 23, 2004

· Ten countries will join the EU after May 1: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Cyprus
· Of the existing 15 members, Germany, Italy and Austria are likely to ban migrants from the 10 new EU states until 2011, as they are entitled to under EU rules. France is expected to take a similar line. Even traditionally liberal countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands imposed restrictions. Britain and Ireland stood alone in their willingness to open their borders to workers from the new member states
· Britain's policy was heavily criticised by tabloid newspapers. Under the headline See you in May, the Sun said "tens of thousands" of eastern European Gypsies planned to settle here. The Express claimed 1.6m Gypsies were "ready to flood in". Referring to an British government advertising campaign in Slovakia asking people not to come to the UK, the Mail asked: "Are ministers living in the real world?"
· Tory leader Michael Howard called on the government to follow the example of its EU counterparts and impose restrictions. During his visit to Burnley last week, he said racial tolerance depended on people knowing that "immigration is controlled"
· In the Commons earlier this month Tony Blair conceded there was a "potential risk" of an influx from new EU states. He said the government was examining rules governing the eligibility to benefits of new migrant workers
· The Home Office believes 5,000-13,000 people a year will enter the UK from new member states. Rightwing group Migrationwatch UK claims soon 40,000 people a year will enter the UK from eastern Europe
· According to one study the economic gain of EU expansion to the existing 15 countries will be about £6bn and approximately £15bn to the newcomers
· Supporters of the UK's open door policy, among them home secretary David Blunkett, believe an influx of new workers will boost the economy. Home Office statistics show legal migrants make up 8% of the UK's population but generate 10% of the gross domestic product.

EU enlargement: facts and fears

'I don't even speak perfect Czech. How would I manage English?'

Luke Harding in Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic
Monday February 23, 2004
The Guardian

There are no traces of the wall that once fenced off Josef Lacko's flat from those of his neighbours. Five years ago locals in the Czech industrial town of Usti nad Labem built the wall to separate their homes from the Roma housing estate across the street. The wall got knocked down.
But antipathy towards the town's 5,000-strong Roma community has proved harder to demolish. With less than three months to go until the Czech Republic joins the European Union, the jobless Mr Lacko seems exactly the kind of migrant worker who might end up in Britain and who, it has been claimed, could soon be sponging off Britain's benefits system.
Except that Mr Lacko doesn't want to go to Britain. "I have my roots here," he said yesterday, sitting in the kitchen of his council flat, a few yards away from the demolished wall, and overlooking a grassy yard where his sons were kicking a football. "I don't even speak perfect Czech. How would I manage to speak English?" he asked. He added: "I admit it would be nice to live in a country where people don't look at you in a funny way all the time. And it would be great to take my grandchildren to the zoo. Here, we are afraid the skinheads will beat us up. But I would worry about my kids. In Britain I wouldn't know what to do if one of them fell sick."
Despite the problems Roma face in finding jobs, Mr Lacko said most of them wanted to stay in Usti, a depressed but picturesque town on the banks of the Elbe, with a ruined medieval castle, three communist-era factories, and a baroque church.
The town in north-western Bohemia (population 100,000) was once a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was known as Aussig an der Elbe until 1945, when its German-speaking residents were forced out. These days, though, its modern-day citizens are reluctant to migrate anywhere, despite high levels of unemployment.
"I've got to go to France for five days with a Roma folk group," Mr Lacko said. "I don't even feel like going there."
After initially agreeing that Britain would open up its labour markets to workers from all of the 10 new countries that join the EU on May 1, Tony Blair has had second thoughts following a campaign by the tabloid press. The Daily Express has warned of a wave of "benefit tourists" flooding in from eastern Europe and today the home secretary, David Blunkett, will announce how the government intends to regulate the potential increase in migration.
In the Czech Republic the tabloid campaign has been met with rising political irritation. Earlier this month its social democrat prime minister, Vladimir Spidla, said that the British government's concern over an influx of Roma was provoked by "silly media". His deputy, Petr Mares, complained of "hysteria".
An exhaustive study by the Czech government, meanwhile, revealed that the "vast majority" of the Czech population, 82.3%, didn't want to work abroad. Of the 1.6% who were genuinely interested in leaving, most wanted to go to neighbouring Germany. Only a small minority of those - 11.1% - mentioned Britain.
"The whole scare is nonsense," Jan Jarab, the Czech government's human rights commissioner said yesterday. "Under the British system these people are not entitled to welfare benefits anyway. The problem is the Czech media have picked up what is in the Sun - that the Roma will come over in large numbers. The effect is to encourage more people to go. The media is now creating reality rather than describing it."
Not surprisingly, in the snow-covered villages around Usti, where Vietnamese traders invited in during the communist years sell garden gnomes from roadside stalls, the locals are only interested in working in Germany. The border is less than half an hour away by train; German tourists driving BMWs come here in search of cheap skiing and goulash - and, it would appear, bearded garden ornaments.
"I definitely wouldn't go to Britain," Petr Kopecky, a bricklayer from the village of Petrovice, said. "I don't want to be away from my family. But of course if there was a chance in Germany I would take it."
Mr Kopecky spent five years during the 1990s working on housing sites in Germany until his work permits were no longer renewed. Unlike Britain, Germany has refused to allow migrant workers from the new EU states in after May 1. Every other existing EU country except Britain and Ireland has followed Germany's lead.
Mr Kopecky, though, has his own doubts about the wisdom of closer European integration. In the Czech Republic's referendum last summer on whether to join the EU he voted no. "States have to defend their workers," he said. "The problem now is that if I try to get a bricklaying job a Ukrainian will do it for less."
Over at the nearby ski lift Jan Maska, who worked as a roofer in Germany during the post-unification boom, said he was baffled by the idea of moving to Britain. "It is too far away." Business at the lift was poor, but he didn't intend to leave his job selling tickets: "Moving abroad is for young people."
It is, nevertheless, hardly surprising that some of the Czech Republic's 150,000 Roma should fantasise about a better life elsewhere. Outright racism is rarer these days, but a hidden intolerance persists.
Mr Lacko's brother-in-law Josef Kulena recently got out of prison. He said he had stolen "things" from pubs because he did not have any money. Like many Roma Mr Kulena lost his Czech citizenship after the collapse of communism. "I'm not Indian. I'm not Polish. I'm nothing," he complained bitterly. "It took me five years to get it back. What kind of a country is this?"
Mr Kulena said he was "thinking about" trying to find a job in Britain but was uncertain how to go about it. "I don't have the right documents. I don't have papers. They took them away," he said.
Mr Lacko, meanwhile, said the local mayor knocked down the wall around his house following an international outcry. The wall reached two metres in height and lasted for three weeks. "It was silly, really as we could get out round the back. We pointed out that this is what the Nazis did to the Jews."
Asked where the wall was now, Mr Lacko said: "The local zoo bought it. They use it to keep in the animals."

'I don't even speak perfect Czech. How would I manage English?'

"Accession" doesn't come with full benefits

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.

Shiny U.S. threat to English diamond giant

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.”

Illegal human trafficking on the rise?

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.

Eurozine

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

Love in Europe

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."

The problem of Poland

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."

Pope speaks in defense of the Islamic veil

The proposition about the veil is raising a very controversial and complex debate that goes beyond the typical black and white devide.
Surprisingly enough, even the Catholic environment is split into different positions.
According to his recent speech in Rome (January 12, 2004,) The Pope himself criticized Jacques Chirac’s government initiative.
The following article says that Pope John Paul II condemned “the secularity that becomes laicism.” In other words, the French new rule is interpreted by the Church as a deviating form of laicism: “a principle of liberty that becomes a refusal of the freedom of every single individual.”
On the other hand, the Italian newspaper “L’Avvenire” published an interview to the authoritative Islamist Samir Khalil Samir, a Jesuit, who said that the veil is part of a phenomenon of “non-integration,” that has its roots in the current European crisis.”

www.chiesa, L'Espresso, "Il velo proibito. La Francia tra laicita' e islamismo"

A European on Mars?

Europeans might be from Venus, but they are going to Mars.

The European Space Agency is planning to send a manned mission to the Moon and then to Mars. It won't happen tomorrow (2035 maybe). It won't be the first mission of this kind, and not everybody is convinced it's a good idea. Nevertheless it could be seen as a device that might contribute to the emotional constitution of a European identity.

What do you think?

Wired - Europe catches Mars fever

Europe faces up to Islam and the veil

There have been many articles about France's proposed school ban of religious symbols like the hijab, skullcaps and crosses. This Guardian article sweeps across Europe, though, highlighting local tensions with Muslim immigrants, identity issues and subsequent political reactions.

The author writes that France and other European countries are facing the "demands of an increasingly radical Islam." This blatantly implies that the hijab is radical - a ridiculous notion in my opinion. The hijab has in modern history served as a political symbol, and many women have worn it in part as a political act; but they've done this in Egypt and Iran, not France or Belgium.

If anyone has politicized the issue of hijab in Europe now, it's the governments themselves. They have imported a debate on hijab; it's a reflection of Europe's identity crises (actually, it's paranoia) and its long-standing problem with immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East (xenophobia). Does a piece of cloth really challenge France's entire secular tradition? If so, France has some insecurity issues as well. Feel free to disagree.

Europe faces up to Islam and the veil
Muslims claim discrimination in legal battles over religious symbol

Jon Henley in Paris
Wednesday February 4, 2004
The Guardian

Spilling out of their school in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris, they are so keen to get a word in that on a bitter afternoon, they are queueing up on the pavement. Many went on the march. Most are against the law. A few are in favour, and happy to say so.

"For years we've been warning about the fundamentalists, the radical imams, the huge step backwards that they represent for women and Muslims in general in France," says Lydia, 16. "This law is really necessary. You've got no idea what pressures some girls come under."

Ratiba, 17, interrupts. "Nobody has ordered me to wear one. If I do it's because I want to. Our religion tells us to, it's part of our identity. France calls itself the cradle of human rights. Here of all places we should be able to show who and what we are." Lillia, 16, agrees. "The veil should be for us to choose. This law discriminates against us."

After weeks of heated and at times harmful debate on the street and in the national media France's national assembly yesterday began debating a bill to ban religious symbols, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses, from schools.

France is not the only western state to face the demands of an increasingly radical Islam, although its unique attachment to the principles of its secular republic means it is the only one so far to have proposed a legal ban on overt signs of religious faith.

Criticism But despite fierce criticism of the bill in the Arab world there appears to be a growing feeling among several of France's continental European neighbours that similar measures may, eventually, become necessary. A bill modelled on the planned French legislation has been tabled in Belgium's senate.

"In all Muslim countries women are fighting to free themselves from the veil and affirm their identity," says Anne-Marie Lizin, a socialist backing a ban. "It's not normal that in certain parts of Brussels there are more women in veils than in the streets of Algiers."

Belgian politicians are divided on the initiative, which has won the backing of the foreign and interior ministers. Generally the appetite for a ban seems greater in the French-speaking south of the country than the Dutch-speaking north, where relations between the authorities and the Muslim population are already strained. Race riots flared briefly in Antwerp in December 2002 after a mentally ill white Belgian shot his Islamic neighbour.

The port city remains a powderkeg: one in three voters supports the anti-immigration Vlaams Blok party, while many young Muslims appear attracted to a radical organisation called the Arab European League, whose leader has demanded that Arabic be recognised as the country's fourth official language.

Public distrust of the Muslim community has also been fuelled by the arrest, detention and conviction of a number of Islamist extremists on terror-related charges. In the traditionally tolerant Netherlands attitudes towards the 1 million-strong Muslim community remain influenced by Pim Fortuyn, the maverick politician shot dead in 2002 by an animal rights activist after calling Islam "backwards" and demanding that Muslim conservatism must not be allowed to dilute Dutch liberalism. Many Dutch politicians seem to be quietly edging towards some of Fortuyn's views.

New imams are being given compulsory lessons on freedom of speech and religion, euthanasia and non-discrimination and a debate about banning veils is also under way. Some schools already ban them.

As in France, an official report declared recently that the Dutch policy of integration had been a 30-year failure. Alarmed by rising Islamist fundamentalism, the Dutch lower house of parliament last year demanded an investigation into the activities of the Muslim population, particularly radical mosques.

In Germany the headscarf debate blew up last September when a Muslim teacher, Fereshta Ludin, won the right to wear a headscarf in class from Germany's highest court.

In 1998 Ms Ludin, originally from Afghanistan, was refused a teaching job in the conservative state of Baden-Württemberg. Germany's constitutional court ruled by five votes to three that she could wear a headscarf - although it also said German states had the right to pass laws banning headscarves.

A balance had to be found between religious freedoms - to include Germany's 3.5 million mainly Turkish Muslims - on the one hand, and neutrality in schools on the other, the judges added. Ms Ludin's victory turned out to be largely Pyrrhic: Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria rushed to introduce legislation that made wearing headscarves in schools illegal.

Bavaria's rightwing education minister, Monika Hohlmeier, claimed the head scarf was increasingly used as a political symbol. Wearing Christian crosses or Jewish symbols was acceptable, she added - an assertion that invited accusations of double standards.

While most teachers' unions and human rights groups are strongly opposed to a headscarf ban it has found favour with many on the right and the left of Germany's political spectrum.

Spain has only just begun to address how it should behave towards its growing Muslim population as it becomes, proportionally, Europe's biggest receiver of immigrants. It is unlikely to follow France's path - the conservative People's party government recently introduced obligatory teaching of religion in secular state schools. The country had its own veil debate last year when 13-year-old Fatima Elidrisi, the daughter of a Moroccan immigrant, was told by the Catholic nuns running a state-funded private school near Madrid that she was not allowed to wear a hijab.

Solved

The problem was solved by sending her to a state school, which said it saw no reason to prevent her wearing the veil, and she was welcomed by a clapping crowd of teachers and students. The conservative social affairs minister, Juan Carlos Aparicio, said the garment was "not a religious sign but a form of discrimination against women" and compared it to genital mutilation.

Italy has a Muslim minority numbering some 800,000, but many are immigrants and the country is just beginning to come to terms with the implications of becoming a multi-ethnic society.

If France's national identity is inseparably tied to secularism, then Italy's is linked to religion. That seemed at least the message to emerge from a heated row over whether crucifixes should hang in the classrooms of Italy's nominally non-confessional state schools.

It began in October when an Italian-Egyptian convert to Islam, Adel Smith, won a court judgment ordering the removal of crosses from his children's village school in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. In a country where the use of Muslim headscarves has never been an issue the decision prompted an outcry.

Crucifixes are ubiquitous in Italy. The decision ordering the withdrawal of crucifixes from the school was revoked and the case sent to be reheard by a special tribunal.

· Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn in Brussels, Luke Harding in Berlin, Giles Tremlett in Madrid and John Hooper in Rome

Belgium's voting rights debate

This Christian Science Monitor article examines resistance in Belgium to granting noncitizen immigrants the right to vote in local elections. Belgium is not alone in this. Across Europe, some fear the rise of Islamic political parties or a loss of cultural and other identities as immigrants from North Africa and Turkey are becoming involved in civic affairs. The article points out that if an EU citizen from Germany can vote in Belgium, why can't a Moroccan who's lived there for much longer.

Very interesting quotes in this article. Do read on.

In Europe, a voting-rights debate

Belgium is considering a bill that would let noncitizen immigrants cast ballots in local elections.
By Tom Vandyck | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

BRUSSELS - In a roadside gas station 25 miles west of the Belgium capital, a handful of truckers are sipping hot coffee and loudly discussing politics.

"In the big cities, the immigrants already run the city councils," one of the men says, in a statement marked by equal parts of hyperbole and resentment. "Now that they are going to give them all the right to vote, they will take over the smaller towns, too. Pretty soon, we won't be the boss in our own country anymore."

Belgian plans to let noncitizen immigrants vote in local elections are fanning the latest controversy as Europe wrestles with the issues of immigration, citizenship, and national identity.

Proponents say the change will bring Belgium into line with other parts of Europe - such as Sweden, Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands, where immigrants without European Union (EU) citizenship already have the right to cast ballots in local polls.

Some EU member states see such rights as a way to compensate for earlier failed integration policies, says Anoush Desboghessian, an analyst with the Brussels-based European Network Against Racism (ENAR). "Europe is changing," she says. "There is more and more diversity of cultures and languages. But immigrants remain excluded from society."

Policymakers in Italy, Germany, and France are also debating voting rights for noncitizen immigrants. But, as in Belgium, the issue is controversial.

"Passing this law goes against the will of the majority of the people," says Philip Dewinter, the political leader of the far- right Flemish Bloc. "This is a permanent message to foreigners that Belgium is a land of milk and honey, where they have rights but no duties. It will attract more foreigners - poor foreigners without any added value for our society."

But to Turkish-born socialist senator Fatma Pehlivan, voting rights are essential to immigrants' integration in society. "The people who will benefit from this measure are mostly first-generation immigrants - people who have come here in the '60s, and have contributed to this country's economy. To them, this is a positive signal that they are part of society, that their vote counts."

Immigrant voting rights were first discussed in Belgium in the late 1970s, when it became clear that the hundreds of thousands of Muslim guest workers from Turkey and Northern Africa, who had moved to Europe in the boom years of the '60s, would never go back. Local voting rights were seen as a way to give them a say in how their communities - most in the inner city - were governed.

With the more pressing matter of economic hardship on the table in the '80s, and the electoral rise of the anti-immigrant far right in the '90s, the idea was put on hold in Belgium, only to be revived by the current left-leaning administration of socialist and liberals.

Under the proposal, now making its way through the Belgian parliament, noncitizen immigrants from non-EU countries who have lived in Belgium legally for at least five years - and are therefore considered to be sufficiently integrated - would be permitted to cast their ballots in local elections. As a special condition, they would have to register to vote (which Belgian nationals do not have to do, since the country has compulsory voting), and sign a written declaration that they will respect the Belgian laws and constitution - a provision that was added as a safeguard against Islamic fundamentalism. A number of immigrant groups criticize the special condition as discriminatory.

"The proposal is about people like my parents, who have been in Belgium for 40 years and have always been taxpaying, law-abiding people," says Mourad Bekkour, an immigrant rights activist from Antwerp, whose family is from Morocco. "Now they would have to sign a form that says they are not terrorists. To me, that is demeaning and hurtful."

Many first-generation immigrants from Morocco and Turkey never applied for Belgian citizenship. Most came from rural backwaters in their countries of origin. Since applying for Belgian citizenship involves producing birth certificates that in many cases simply do not exist, thousands never bothered.

According to the Belgian Ministry of Domestic Affairs, as of February 2002, the number of potentially eligible non-EU voters was 123,542, among Belgium's total population of 10.3 million inhabitants.

"This is about a fairly small number of people," says Dirk Jacobs, a researcher with the Institute for Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO), at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. "In most communities nothing would change. In some cities one or, at most, two council seats would change hands."

According to Mr. Jacobs, the Belgian initiative is part of a trend to grant people who live in the EU equal political rights, regardless of nationality. "After the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, voting rights [in local and European elections] were granted to EU nationals in other EU member states. The logical conclusion of that principle is: If an Italian or a Greek can vote in Belgium or Holland the day he moves there, why not give the same right to a Moroccan or an American who has been there for much longer?"

In countries where noncitizen immigrants are already allowed to vote locally, fears of Islamic fundamentalist parties taking over city councils have so far proven unfounded.

A 1998 study by the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) in Utrecht in the Netherlands, shows that, although their electoral turnout is low, immigrants initially tend to vote for left-wing parties. After a number of years, their votes spread out, and, by and large, they vote the same way as the general population. The traditional political families - liberals, socialists and Christian-democrats - cater to these new constituencies by presenting them with moderate Muslim candidates.

In Belgium's last general elections, the party Resist, a somewhat unlikely alliance between the radical Arab- European League, led by "the Belgian Malcolm X," Dyab Abou Jahjah, and the Maoist Labour Party, failed to clear the 5 percent threshold to qualify for parliamentary representation. "Those Muslim parties have some grass-roots support, but they represent a minority of the immigrant community," says Jacobs.

Interview with the Turkish Ambassador to Germany

Issues of identity become very complicated in Europe when dealing with immigration. In the case of Germany and Turkey, you have a significant Turkish minority living in Germany (2 million people, about 2.5% of the poplulation). If Turkey becomes a part of the EU, how will that affect the German Turkish population? Will a changed legal status have an effect on people's attitudes?

In this interview, the Turkish ambassador has pretty strong words for what Turkey's exclusion from the EU would mean. They dont mention the Greece-Turkey Cyprus conflict here, but as far as I know, that's the biggest unresolved issue surrounding Turkey's membership. People would certainly argue that religion is a big factor as well.

From the weekly English edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Frankfurter Allgemeine - Turkish-German integration smooths cultural divisions

Frankfurter Allgemeine - English edition

Turkish-German integration smooths cultural divisions
Diplomat says both countries are democratic, modern societies, well-prepared to help minorities feel at home

The Turkish ambassador to Germany, Mehmet Ali Irtemcelik discusses the integration of Germany's largest immigrant group, and Turkey's possible entry into the European Union, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

There are about 2 million Turks living in Germany. How well are they integrated?
I think that the integration of Turks in the Federal Republic of Germany over the past four decades has been a respectable success. There are now some 600,000 Germans of Turkish descent and about 90,000 mixed marriages. Integration is not a condition, but a process.
What can be done to promote and advance this process?
Naturally, it's not a one-way street. Integration depends on both sides. We encourage Turks living in Germany to open up and integrate themselves into society. But they must have the feeling that they're welcome.
In Frankfurt, some 1,000 Turks have taken out German citizenship in recent years. How do you judge this trend?
We support it. These people have chosen to spend their lives in Germany and so they should integrate and become good, productive German citizens - all the while not forgetting their roots. (Citizenship) gives these people a feeling of belonging. The same would apply for Germans who decide to live permanently in Turkey.
'There are people in Germany who say that integration has become more difficult in recent years. Compared to the earlier period, communications with the mother country are a lot easier, Turkish media are present (in Germany), and travel to Turkey is cheaper.
'I don't really buy that argument. The easier contact to the home country assures that the Turks don't forget their roots - it doesn't hinder their integration.
Is religion an obstacle to integration?
I would say no. But naturally there are people - Germans as well as Turks - for whom that is an issue. But Germany is a democratic, modern society that can also deal with religious minorities.
How strong are the fundamentalist tendencies among Turks living here?
It is a very tiny minority that one must, without a doubt, take seriously. Yet it would be a mistake and extremely unfair to see the Muslims here as part of this minority or to define them as such.
What effects would Turkey's entry into the European Union have on the integration process?
The relationship of Turkey to the EU is, in my view, a decisive factor in the future of this process. And that goes not only for Turks in Germany but for the integration process of all Muslims in Germany and all of Europe. If the EU gives Turkey the cold shoulder, all Turks, all Muslims in Europe will automatically ask, 'If Turkey is not welcome, can it be possible that I am not welcome?' The future of the relationship between Turkey and the EU will be a catalyst: Either in the direction of continued, less problematic integration or - and this would be something undesirable - in the direction of alienation.
Where do most of the reservations concerning Turkey come from?
They involve prejudices, a certain fear, a lack of knowledge - and a lack of vision. While the Europeans want to be a 'global player,' an EU that shows Turkey the cold shoulder can't play a global role. Only Turkey can be, in a sense, the bridge between Europe and other Muslim countries. Seen in this way, Turkish membership in the EU is a test case. When we, as a secular, democratic and Muslim society are accepted or rejected by Europe, then that will have long-term effects not only on the millions of European Muslims but on the entire Islamic world.
What are these prejudices you mentioned?
Behind the usual 'cultural differences' label a number of prejudices are hidden. These touch on religion. In every religion there are fanatics.
And what consequences would a 'no' have for EU heads of government?
It would be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to neutralize the damage resulting from a 'no.' Consequently, the decision in December will be taken between the possibility of continuing - in the interests of both sides - the further development of the relationship between Turkey and the EU that has developed over 40 years, and the risk of a derailment - with unforeseeable consequences.

The interview was conducted
by Peter Badenhop.
Jan. 30

A wave of anti-semitism in Europe

A story on Le Monde: European political leaders and scholars have met in Berlin to discuss the resurgence of anti-semitism.
Recently the European Commission tried to hide a report that connected this new anti-semitism with the arabic immigration. It is a controversial issue which may give some ammunition to the American Neoconservatives' accusations against the European tendency to "appease" even the most intolerant brands of Islamic Fundamentalism.

A Berlin, intellectuels et politiques européens s'interrogent sur la résurgence de l'antisémitisme
LE MONDE | 31.01.04 | 13h17
Le ministre allemand des affaires étrangères, Joschka Fischer, lie le phénomène au conflit du Proche-Orient. Alain Finkielkraut le voit prospérer "sous le manteau de l'antiracisme".
Berlin de notre correspondant

Joschka Fischer tourne rarement autour du pot. En ouvrant, mercredi 28 janvier, à Berlin, la rencontre internationale sur l'antisémitisme organisée par la Fondation Heinrich-Böll, le ministre allemand des affaires étrangères s'est immédiatement lancé dans une description des enjeux liés au conflit israélo-palestinien. Le ton était donné : si l'on parle d'antisémitisme aujourd'hui, si l'on en redoute la résurgence, c'est à cause d'un conflit dont la dégradation alimente un feu destructeur de passions dangereuses.
Un rapport récent, commandé à des universitaires berlinois par le Centre européen d'observation sur le racisme et la xénophobie, n'a pas été rendu public au prétexte, accusent d'aucuns, qu'il contenait des assertions déplaisantes sur un "nouvel antisémitisme" dont les populations d'origine arabe, établies en Europe, seraient les principaux propagateurs.
"Il y a de nombreux conflits dans le monde, avec leur lot de victimes bien plus nombreuses que le conflit israélo-palestinien. Mais, pour l'Europe, ce conflit a une signification particulière,a constaté Joschka Fischer, en faisant référence à l'Holocauste. Israël est le seul Etat dont l'existence est remise perpétuellement en question. Aussi longtemps que ce sera le cas, les Israéliens seront victimes de leurs peurs anciennes et seront enclins à assurer leur survie par des moyens militaires. Ce conflit ne finira que lorsque le droit à l'existence d'Israël sera assuré." Et, surtout, devait-il ensuite préciser, lorsque "deux Etats, garantissant à chacun son espace, seront créés. Il n'y aura pas de compromis acceptable pour les Palestiniens si Israël repousse la question de l'Etat palestinien".
Avec une pointe d'ironie, Antony Lerman, essayiste britannique, membre du Forum juif pour la justice et les droits de l'homme, devait aussitôt faire remarquer qu'il ne savait plus s'il se trouvait dans une conférence sur le conflit israélo-palestinien ou sur l'antisémitisme,"ce qui montre déjà l'étendue du problème". Quant à l'antisémitisme dit "nouveau", il serait surtout une"théorie pour détourner les critiques qui s'exercent contre l'Etat d'Israël".
Cette assertion allait déclencher la réaction d'Alain Finkielkraut, philosophe et professeur à l'Ecole polytechnique. Evoquant la polémique créée autour de Tariq Ramadan - l'intellectuel musulman suisse, considéré comme l'un des porte-drapeaux de l'islam en France, avait accusé, en octobre 2003, des intellectuels "chéris des médias" de défendre Israël par réflexe communautaire -, le philosophe français décrivait une fois encore ce nouvel antisémitisme, qui, selon lui, s'exprime désormais "sous le manteau de l'antiracisme et au nom des droits de l'homme",rejeton paradoxal de l'islamisme et de l'antiglobalisation pour lequel Israël est devenu le prolongement de cet ennemi si décrié que sont les Etats-Unis.
L'idéologie, assure Alain Finkielkraut, amalgame ou nie les faits qui expliquent. Dans cette logique, poursuit-il, "le mur -en construction entre Israël et les territoires palestiniens- devient le mur de la honte ou celui de l'apartheid, et non pas un obstacle pour empêcher les attentats, tandis que les partisans de la loi sur le voile sont décrits comme des adversaires de la liberté individuelle, et non pas comme les adversaires du type de société que prônent les partisans du voile".
Les termes du débat étaient posés et les orateurs ne devaient pas s'en écarter. Inquiets, les intervenants allemands ont tenté d'évaluer la signification de cet antisémitisme - fort ancien puisqu'il reprenait la problématique de la responsabilité juive dans la révolution d'Octobre - brusquement surgi des paroles d'un député chrétien démocrate, Martin Hohmann, finalement exclu de son parti.
Evoquant les attaques du député Jürgen Möllemann lancées contre le vice-président de la communauté juive, Michel Friedman, Joschka Fischer s'est dit inquiet de cet antisémitisme mou, issu "du milieu de notre société, dans un parti comme le Parti libéral (FDP), où beaucoup se sont tus et dont les chefs ont mis si longtemps à réagir".
"Pour la première fois depuis 1945, constatait Werner Bergmann, sociologue au Centre de recherche sur l'antisémitisme de l'Université technique de Berlin, nos études montrent une montée, modérée, mais réelle, des sentiments antisémites." Cette montée touche les vieux comme les jeunes, la droite comme la gauche qui, par exemple, uniformément regrettent que les juifs touchent encore des indemnités si longtemps après la fin de la guerre.
C'est, à nouveau, la centralité de la communauté arabo-musulmane dans l'expression du nouvel antisémitisme que devait évoquer Eberhard Seidel, journaliste de Berlin et animateur de l'association Ecole sans racisme, en donnant les chiffres des agressions de ces deux dernières années, ou en recensant les sites et les lieux islamistes, de plus en plus nombreux, d'où fuse la parole antisémite. "Rapporté à l'importance de leur communauté, le nombre de radicaux islamistes en Allemagne est vingt fois plus important que le nombre des néonazis", a souligné M. Seidel.
Professeur à l'Université évangélique de Berlin, spécialiste des migrations, Ralph Ghadban évoquait, lui, le rôle du fanatisme religieux islamiste en notant que, dans les communautés musulmanes, l'expulsion, en 1948, des Palestiniens des territoires devenus aujourd'hui Israël, était souvent assimilée à l'expulsion de La Mecque des partisans du Prophète.
Alors qu'en Pologne l'antisémitisme s'exprime en dessins et en paroles classiques, l'antijudaïsme en France se noue, là aussi, autour du conflit israélo-palestinien. La journaliste Anne-Elisabeth Moutet a ainsi mis en garde contre les dangers d'une situation "où les communautés arabo-musulmanes sont bombardées, par cassettes, Internet ou émissions de télévision satellitaire, d'une propagande antisémite".

Georges Marion

• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 01.02.04

Defense and identity

EU foreign policy Chief Javier Solana compares the success of diplomatic mediation in the case of Iran and Libya with the failure of military action in Iraq. It constitutes, in his view, a good reason to promote "efficient multilateralism." He thinks that Europe should not be defended by others, and that without militarily competing with the US it should invest more in defense. During a conference held on January 31st in Barcelona he criticized the way EU heads of state adopted different positions in front of the Iraq crisis and heavily blamed the dependence on the intelligence community.

The German philosopher Jurgën Habermas and others defended the idea that Europe should not try to pretend creating an identity similar to the one that the Nation-State ideally provides. A minimum of solidarity allowing European countries to act on the world stage would be sufficient.

This story highlights the relationship between identity and defense and the ongoing search for a new answer to this very old problem.

El País - Solana compara el éxito de la mediación en Irán y Libia al fracaso de Irak

Solana compara el éxito de la mediación en Irán y Libia al fracaso de Irak Habermas, Rocard, Held y D'Amato analizan en Barcelona el modelo de seguridad europea

J. M. MARTÍ FONT - Barcelona

EL PAÍS | Internacional - 01-02-2004

"Cuando se ha intervenido con medios diplomáticos para la detección de armas de destrucción masiva, como en el caso de Irán y el de Libia, ha sido un éxito; cuando se ha hecho por medio de la fuerza militar, como en Irak, un fracaso". Esta comparación sirvió ayer al Alto Representante de la Política Exterior y la Seguridad Común europea (PESC), Javier Solana, para reivindicar el concepto de "multilateralismo eficiente" como uno de los principales pilares en que debe descansar la estrategia de seguridad de la Unión Europea. "Nuestro vecindario no debe ser defendido por otros", indicó Solana, "tampoco necesitamos competir militarmente con EE UU, pero sí que tenemos que invertir más en defensa para disponer de capacidad militar".

Solana participó ayer en Barcelona en el seminario Guerra y paz en el siglo XXI. Construyendo una Europa diversa para la seguridad global, organizado por la Fundación CIDOB, el Ayuntamiento de la capital catalana y el Fórum de las Culturas, junto al filósofo Jürgen Habermas; el ex primer ministro francés Michel Rocard; el ex primer ministro italiano Giuliano D'Amato; el profesor David Held, de la London School of Economics, y el profesor Tariq Modood, de la Universidad de Bristol (Reino Unido), entre otros.

Los servicios de inteligencia
El responsable de la política exterior de la UE criticó la actuación de los países europeos a lo largo del proceso de la guerra de Irak, cuya desunión propició el desenlace, y fue especialmente crítico con el papel determinante que los servicios de inteligencia occidentales jugaron en desencadenar conflicto. "Hemos estado en manos de la comunidad de inteligencia, una situación muy poco confortable", dijo. "Los jefes de Estado que apoyaron la guerra, incluido el propio [presidente norteamericano] George Bush, se justifican ahora diciendo que se creyeron los informes que les daban sus espías", añadió.

David Held, al igual que Solana, no descarta el uso de la fuerza, pero "sólo como la afirmación del derecho internacional". El autor de La democracia cosmopolita apuntó que "la crisis del multilateralismo es más profunda y sostenida de lo que muchos queremos creer". La globalización, aseguró, tiene también aspectos tan positivos como la extensión del concepto de derechos humanos y del Estado de derecho. Pero los acontecimientos del 11 de septiembre de 2002, en su opinión, han configurado una respuesta equivocada a los retos que plantea.

El concepto de identidad europea fue abordado tanto por Habermas como por Rocard y Modood. La complejidad de las actuales sociedades hace inútil, según todos ellos, la pretensión de crear una identidad similar europea al estilo de la que, idealmente, proporciona el Estado-nación tradicional. Se trataría, según el filósofo alemán, de establecer un mínimo de elementos solidarios "que otorguen a Europa la capacidad de actuar en la escena mundial". Según Rocard, la paradoja europea consiste en que, pese a que tiene una fuerte identidad, siempre se ha negado a dotarse de una identidad política.

Power Struggle Underscores Blair-Chirac Rift

A story from the New York Times on a new biography of British PM Tony Blair. An example of how national rivalries stand on the way of a common EU foreign policy.

January 27, 2004

By PATRICK E. TYLER

LONDON, Jan. 26 — Strong opposition by the French president, Jacques Chirac, to the war in Iraq last spring was in part motivated by a desire to undermine Prime Minister Tony Blair in a struggle for leadership of Europe, a new book asserts.
The book is based in part on reports from British intelligence in which Mr. Blair was said to have concluded and to have told close aides in confidence that Mr. Chirac was "out to get him" by opposing the American- and British-led military campaign and thus seeking to isolate Mr. Blair in Europe. Mr. Blair came to believe that "the dispute over Iraq was in fact a proxy for a much more serious contest," the account states.
The book, "Tony Blair," by Philip Stephens, will be published next month by Viking, a division of Penguin Group in the United States. Excerpts were printed Monday in The Financial Times, for which Mr. Stephens is a political columnist with access to Mr. Blair and his senior aides. The assertions excerpted from the book are not attributed, however, either to Mr. Blair or his aides.
The intelligence reports informed the prime minister that Mr. Chirac had decided that "Blair had usurped" Mr. Chirac's position "as the natural leader of Europe," the book states.
Reacting to the publication on Monday, the prime minister's official spokesman declined to address the specific assertions in the book and said instead that it was "not the government's policy to do book reviews." The spokesman said Mr. Blair and Mr. Chirac had a "very good relationship" and would be meeting in February with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany.
In Paris, Mr. Chirac's spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna, said in an e-mail message: "There will be no comment on our side."
Mr. Stephens's biography of Mr. Blair reports on the intricate nature of the triangle of power among Britain, France and Germany. It also characterizes the role of Vice President Dick Cheney as "implacably opposed" to British efforts to persuade President Bush to work through the United Nations in confronting Iraq.
Mr. Cheney scorned the notion that the United States needed international approval to remove Mr. Hussein. "Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools," Mr. Cheney told a high ranking British official in mid-2002, the book says.
When Mr. Chirac appeared to favor Mr. Schröder's opponent in German elections in 2002, Mr. Schröder traveled to London in his first postelection trip, snubbing Mr. Chirac.
"The slight was not missed by Chirac," Mr. Stephens wrote. Mr. Blair "enraged" the French leader by assaulting protectionist farm policies on the Continent at the European summit meeting in October 2002.
But Mr. Stephens reported that Mr. Blair missed the signals of Mr. Chirac's gathering anger. In December 2002, as the United Nations was giving Iraq a final opportunity to declare its illicit weapons, Mr. Blair met with one of Mr. Chirac's ministers in London and told him that the "good cop, bad cop" cooperation of the United States and Europe had succeeded at the United Nations in getting inspectors back into Iraq.
"The hawks in Washington had been obliged to compromise, and Bush had been kept in the multilateral game," Mr. Stephens wrote, adding that Mr. Blair urged the French to "more closely" coordinate with Britain as the war debate advanced.
But Mr. Chirac chose a path of strong opposition. Mr. Blair regarded the French leader's strategy as an attempt to re-cement German-French cooperation and isolate Mr. Blair, Mr. Stephens wrote.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Germany vs Poland

Charlemagne

Of wars and weighted votes

Jan 3rd 2004
From The Economist print edition

(How the history of conflicts between Germany and Poland has played an important role in the failure of the EU summit that should have approved the new Constitution)

The history and future of the German-Polish relationship

THE European Union was founded in reaction to the second world war. In many ways, its greatest triumph is that European leaders now spend their time arguing about fish quotas, not disputed frontiers. Yet occasionally memories of war bubble back to the surface. The recent deadlocked European Union summit in Brussels was just such an occasion.

That the central confrontation came between Germany and Poland was bound to stir up memories. But despite the tension, the EU could still claim to be exercising its civilising influence. This was not, after all, an argument about national survival. Rather it was a dispute between two democratic governments over voting rights, one to be settled by multilateral negotiations, not force of arms. The Germans want EU votes to reflect population size, giving them twice as much weight as the Poles. The Poles are leading the defence of the current system, which gives them almost as much clout as the Germans.

Berlin

Germany, Poland

The European Union

EU enlargement

The EU has information on the summit.

Poles usually make a point of not mentioning the war explicitly in any dealings with Germany. But they barely need to. It is implicit in their insistence that they will not be intimidated by demands from their bigger and more powerful neighbour. Asked by the BBC whether he was worried that Germany might make his country suffer for its obduracy, President Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland exploded that his country was not afraid of suffering: Polish history was about suffering.

These days, the German approach to Poland seems slightly less weighed down by memories of the war. This is new. In the tortuous negotiations over the enlargement of the EU, which took up much of the 1990s, Germany championed the Polish cause, making much of its need for an historic reconciliation with its eastern neighbour. When other countries mused that Poland might not be ready to join the first wave of new entrants, the Germans were always the first to insist that any EU expansion without Poland was not worth having.

Now that Poland's entry is secure, though, the Germans seem to feel that past debts have been settled in full. Indeed the new German refrain is that the Poles are being unreasonable and arrogant in blocking the adoption of a new constitution, even before they are officially inside the Union's pearly gates. (Poland, along with nine other countries, mostly from central and eastern Europe, will formally join the EU only in May, but all have been included in the constitutional debate as they will be full members when any new constitution comes into force.) Günter Verheugen, a European commissioner from Germany who handled the enlargement negotiations, recently fumed to the European Parliament that he now almost regrets all the efforts that he made on Poland's behalf. In the corridors of the Brussels summit one German diplomat was even heard to say, without apparent irony: “How can the Poles behave like this, after everything we have done for them?”

It is not just the Poles who are acutely aware of the weight of history. There was a distinct whiff of 1939 and all that in the reaction of British Conservatives to the way the plucky Poles had scuppered the EU constitution and “stood up to the Germans”. Perhaps the most tasteless comment in the summit's corridors came from a Swedish diplomat, who remarked: “Maybe the Poles could claim equal voting weight with Germany, by counting all the Poles that the Germans killed in the war.”

Not terribly funny, perhaps—but not entirely frivolous, either. Consider the reconciliation between France and Germany on which the EU was founded. The principle of absolute equality between aggressor and victim was clearly fundamental to the bargain. For over a decade after German reunification had boosted that country's population well beyond France's, the French continued to insist that the two should retain precisely equal voting weights. France formally abandoned this position only in 2002. “In the end you have to accommodate yourself to reality,” explains a French diplomat. “The Poles will have to do the same, eventually.”

Think national, speak Europe
The closeness of today's Franco-German relationship is often cited as a model for the future of German-Polish relations. But, whereas France and Germany have now had 50 years of working together in which to overcome old fears and hatreds, for most of that time Poland was locked away behind the Iron Curtain. The French and German leaderships like to argue that, partly as a result, Polish politicians are still fixated on old ideas of national sovereignty, while their two countries have moved on to a new sort of relationship, based on a fresh way of thinking that transcends such old categories as the “national interest” or “national security”.

To make the point that Germany is thinking of European rather than national interests in pressing for the new constitution, German diplomats are now recounting a key moment in the Brussels summit. Searching for a compromise, Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who was chairing the talks, suggested to Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, that rather than moving to a voting system linked to population, Germany could simply have more votes within the current system: perhaps three more votes, giving Germany 32 votes, against 29 each for France, Britain and Italy, and 27 each for Poland and Spain. Mr Schröder dismissed this angrily: the point, he said, was not to increase German power, but to give the EU a more rational system of government.

Maybe so. But then a population-based voting system is even more advantageous to Germany. And, as one distinguished German chancellor, Bismarck, once put it: “I have always found the word Europe in the mouth of those politicians who were demanding from other powers something that they did not dare demand in their own name.”

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