Read how the radical left in the west is systematically facilitating Islamofascist terrorism: Solidarity With Terror, from Front Page Magazine, 2004-Jul-2, by Lee Kaplan
from The Ratio Institute, 2004-Apr-28, by Nils Karlson:
Dignity and the Burden of the Welfare State
Abstract
The burden of the welfare state may be analysed from an economic as well as a more normative perspective. This paper attempts to do both things. By the use of the case of Sweden the expansion and the costs of the welfare state is described, partly in international comparison, and explained, largely in terms of unintended consequences. Special attention is given to the effects of taxes. Next, the concept of dignity is explicated and used to evaluate the Swedish welfare state. The overall conclusion is that the burden of the welfare state is high indeed, both in economic terms and from the perspective of human dignity. Consequently, if we want to promote economic efficiency, growth and dignity the size of the state should be radically decreased.Introduction
The burden of the welfare state and the high tax levels necessarily associated with it may be expressed in economic terms such as low growth rates, economic inefficiencies and high unemployment levels. This is an important venture and I shall devote a considerable part of this paper to such issues, with a special focus on taxes. However, the burden of the welfare state may also, and perhaps more appropriately, be described in terms of its consequences on human dignity.
The case to be analysed below is Sweden. It may be the most extreme example but there are definitely great similarities with other welfare states such as Germany and many other West-European countries.
The purpose of this paper then is to describe and explain the development of the Swedish welfare state, and also to evaluate it from the perspective of economic efficiency and human dignity.
In the first section the general characteristics of the Swedish case are presented, partly in international comparison. The following section provides an explanation of the development of the welfare state, largely in terms of unintended consequences. Thereafter special attention is given to the effects of taxes. Next, the concept of dignity is explicated and used to evaluate the Swedish welfare state. The paper ends with a section about possible lessons for other countries.
The Swedish Case
For many years the Swedish welfare state portrayed itself as a model to the world.1 To many this was also how it was perceived. For example already in 1936 Marquis William Childs published the book Sweden: The Middle Way (Childs 1936) which described the Swedish model as the middle of the road between capitalism and socialism. Sweden was thought to have found a way to combine economic development and growth with generous, publicly provided welfare programmes “from the cradle to the grave”. For these reasons even a well-established economist like Assar Lindbeck regarded the Swedish welfare state a triumph of modern civilization (Lindbeck 1993, p. 98).
However, the reality of the Swedish model has become quite different to what was intended and to what many people still believe to be the case. Five stylised facts may illustrate the present situation:
1 See e.g. Korpi (1991) and Meidner (1994).
- No job on net have been produced in the private sector since 1950.2
- None of the top 50 companies on the Stockholm stock exchange has been started since 1970.3
- Sweden has dropped from fourth to 14th place in 2002 among the OECD countries in terms of GDP per capita since 1970.4
- Well over one million people out of a work force of around five millions do not work in 2003 but live on various kinds of public welfare programmes such a pre-pension schemes, unemployment benefits, sick-leave programmes etc.5
- A majority of the adult population are either employed by the state or clients of the state in the sense that they have a majority of the income coming from public subsidies.6
However, the characteristics of the current situation are of course the result of a long process. A few aspects of it should emphasized.
In the mid-19th century Sweden, like many other European countries, went through a period of rapid institutional change. Within a few decades the economy was deregulated, taxes were lowered and tariffs were abolished. Moreover, modern institutions such as limited liability corporations and patent laws were introduced. In addition, the political system was changed into a two chamber parliamentary system with successively increased suffrage.
As a consequence a period of high growth and social change occurred. From 1890 to 1950 Sweden was the fastest growing country in the world (Krantz 2004). Several major industries, e.g. in mining, forestry, paper, high-current electric equipment, telecommunications, chemicals, car manufacturing etc., were founded around the turn of the century. Over the coming decades many of the leading companies in these industries developed into large international corporations. Parallel to this economic development a dynamic civil society evolved with numerous voluntary organizations and clubs. Sweden was transformed from a poor rural country into one of the wealthy modern society.
2 Davidsson and Henrekson (2002) 3 Henrekson (2002) 4 OECD (2004) 5 Actually it was 1 035 958 full-time equivalents, which in practice is many more individual. See SCB (2003) and Dagens Nyheter (2003). 6 Zetterberg (1995), p. 54-57 During this period Sweden was in fact a low-tax country, a fact that is not even well known in Sweden. In Figure 1 below the development of the Swedish tax level is presented:
Figure 1: Total taxes as a percentage of GDP, 1900-2002 Comment: By direct taxes is meant taxes paid by individuals, e.g. the income tax. By indirect taxes is meant taxes paid by corporations, e.g. value-added taxes. Social security contributions consists of taxes paid by employers as well as individuals to mandatory social security systems.
Source: Johansson (2004) and Riksskatteverket (2002)As shown, around 1900 the taxes amounted to around 8 percent of GDP and it was not until 1950 that the taxes rose to around 20 percent. By the mid-1970's it had reached the current level between 50 and 60 percent of GDP (2002: 52 percent), the highest in the world, at least among democratic countries. Note also the increasing share of indirect taxes and payments to social insurances. In Table 1 the development of the tax rates for all the OECD-countries and some other countries for which data is available are presented:
Table 1: Total taxes as percentage of GDP in different countries 1925 1933 1950 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 1998 1999 Australia 22,3 22,9 26,6 27,4 29,1 29,3 29,4 29,9 30,6 Austria 33,9 34,9 37,7 39,5 41,6 40,2 41,6 44,4 43,9 Belgium 31,1 35,7 41,6 43,1 46,3 43,1 44,8 45,9 45,7 Chec Rep. 40,1 38,3 40,4 Denmark 19,6 20,1 19,8 25,3 29,9 40,4 41,4 43,9 47,4 47,1 49,4 49,8 50,4 Finland 21,6 20,1 27,8 27,5 30,3 32,5 37,7 36,2 40,0 44,7 44,9 46,2 46,2 France 21,1 26,3 30,2 33,4 34,5 35,1 36,9 40,6 43,8 43,0 44,0 45,2 45,8 Germany 17,8 23,0 30,1 33,9 31,6 32,9 36,0 33,1 32,9 32,6 38,2 37,0 37,7 Great Britain 22,6 25,2 33,1 27,3 30,4 37 35,4 35,3 37,7 36,0 35,2 37,2 36,3 Greece 18,2 20,9 21 24 28,6 29,4 31,7 37,1 Hungary 42,4 38,7 39,2 Irland 24,9 29,9 30,2 31,5 35,1 33,6 33,1 32,2 32,3 Island 26,2 27,0 29,6 29,2 28,4 31,4 32,1 33,6 36,3 Italy 17,5 30,6 27,0 25,5 26,1 26,2 30,3 34,4 38,9 41,2 42,7 43,3 Japan 18,3 19,7 20,9 25,4 27,6 30,9 28,4 28,4 26,2 Kanada 25,9 31,2 33,1 32 33,1 36,1 35,7 37,4 38,2 South Korea 15,2 17,7 16,9 19,1 20,5 21,1 23,6 Luxembourg 27,7 28,9 39,7 40,8 45,3 40,7 41,9 41,5 41,8 Mexico 16,2 17 17,3 16,6 16,0 16,0 Netherlands 14,9 18,6 30,3 30,4 32,8 37,1 43,0 43,4 42,4 43,1 41,9 41.0 42,1 New Zeeland 24,7 27,4 31,1 33,0 33,6 38,1 37,6 35,2 35,6 Norway 20,9 25,1 32,0 29,6 34,9 39,9 42,7 43,3 41,8 41,5 43,6 41,6 Poland 39,8 37,9 35,2 Portugal 15,8 19,8 21,2 24,6 27,1 29,6 32,7 34,2 34,3 Slovakia 37,1 35,1 Spain 14,7 16,9 19,5 22,9 27,6 33,0 32,8 34,2 35,1 Sweden 16,0 18,9 21,0 28,7 35 39,8 43,4 47,1 48,3 53,7 47,6 52,0 52,2 Switzerland 19,6 22,5 27,9 28,9 30,6 30,6 33,5 35,1 34,4 Turkey 10,6 12,5 16,0 17,9 15,4 20 22,6 28,7 31,3 USA 11,0 23,4 23,9 27,5 25 27,7 26,9 27 26,1 26,7 27,6 28,9 28,9 Average 18,3 23,1 27,0 29,3 EU 15 25,8 28,9 31,1 35,8 38,6 39,2 40,1 41,3 41,6 OECD 27,8 31,2 34,1 32,1 33,8 35,0 36,1 37,0 37,3 Comment: Year 1925 and 1933 as percentage of GDI.
Source: Johansson (2004), Rodriguez (1981, Table 2.1) and Riksskatteverket (2002, Table 14.3).Again, in 1950 the Swedish taxes were lower than in most other European countries as well as the USA. Also in 1960 the Swedish tax level was below the average, but by 1965 Sweden had the highest taxes of the listed countries.7 One should also note that there is an upward trend for tax rates in all countries all through the 20th century, except perhaps for the last few years for a few countries.
The reason for this development was of course the rise of the Swedish welfare state and the consequent expansion of public expenditures. In figure 2 the development of public expenditures in Sweden as a percentage of GDP is presented:
Figure 2: Public expenditures in Sweden as a percentage of GDP during the 20th century Source: Moberg (2004)
Up until around 1960 the public expenditures of Sweden did not differ much from other comparable countries. But thereafter Sweden definitely took the lead, as shown in table 2 below:
7 It should be noted that Figure 1 and Table 1 are based on different statistical series which explains the slight differences between them.
Table 2: Government expenditure in a number of countries expressed as
percentage of GDP 1960-19951960 1980 1990 1995 Australia 21 32 35 37 Austria 36 48 49 53 Belgium 30 59 55 55 Canada 29 39 46 46 France 35 46 50 54 Germany 32 49 45 50 Ireland 28 49 41 42 Italy 30 42 53 52 Japan 18 32 32 36 Netherlands 34 55 54 51 New Zealand 27 38 41 35 Norway 30 38 54 49 Spain 19 32 42 44 Sweden 31 60 59 66 Switzerland 17 33 34 39 UK 32 43 40 43 USA 27 32 33 33 Arithmetic average 28 43 45 46 Source: Krantz (2004) and Tanzi/Schuknecht (1997), p. 397. After 1995 the public expenditure have declined somewhat in Sweden as well as in some other countries.
A Largely Unintended Development
There are many reasons behind this development. Obviously ideology is important. From 1932 up until today the social democrats have been in power except for two short periods, 1976-1982 and 1991-1994. But also during those nine years with non-socialist government, taxes and public expenditures continued to expand. In fact, the two peaks on the on the curve showing the growth of the Swedish public expenditures in Figure 2 occurred during those periods.This welfare state ideology favoured substantial interventions in markets as well as in the civil society. For example labour markets became heavily regulated in order to promote job security. Also substantial legislation favoured collective wage bargaining and democratic corporativist arrangements. Moreover, the traditional roles of families were largely taken over by the state in the form of child care, the care of the sick and elderly etc.
In this sense the development of the welfare state and the high tax levels necessarily associated with it was clearly something deliberate and wanted. However, if we want to understand how and why the welfare state has evolved it is quite clear that such explanations are insufficient, in particular since the expansion of the welfare state is an international phenomenon.
In previous work (Karlson 1993 and 2002) I have developed two general explanatory models or mechanisms, the logic of conceit and the logic of opportunism, which may explain the emergence of the welfare state as a largely unintended consequence of human action, within the tradition of spontaneous orders (or disorders) by F. A. Hayek (1973) and Adam Smith's (1981/19776) analysis of the invisible hand. What follows in this section draws heavily on that work.
The starting point for both models is a society with a small democratic state and where markets and communities are important, much like the Sweden around 1900 as mentioned above.
In the first explanation it is assumed that voters and politicians are all benevolent and involved in a project to make society better. The “good life” is to be attained through the means of politics.
The members and voluntary organizations and clubs which were created for mutual support, aid and enlightenment of members, and sometimes even non-members, in areas like basic or adult education, charity, industrial and labour relations, consumer issues, the production of local public goods, culture, care of the elderly and so on, no doubt felt that their means and resources were entirely insufficient to handle all the urgent problems. They therefore turned their eyes to the state and asked for various types of interventions by the state.
Knowledge, information and expertise, it was argued, could be centralized in the state, which through deliberate interventions should improve conditions in markets and civil society. Most importantly, markets should not be eliminated but circumvented and improved. Such interventions, as von Mises argued as early as 1927, are isolated acts, not socialist attempts to completely abolish private property and plan the whole economy. Rather, they are supposed to constitute a “third way” (Mises 1985/1927, p. 76) between socialism and capitalism.
Such views gained wide support in politics as well as in academia. For example Karl Popper (1966a/1945, pp. 158-159) argued that the state should engage in piecemeal social engineering and fight against the most urgent evils of society. In the economic sphere Popper argues that “the principle of non-intervention, of an unconstrained economic system, has to be given up ... we must demand that the policy of – unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention by the state.” (Popper 1966b/1945, p. 125) Similar ideas of course lie behind Keynesianism, that the economy should be fine-tuned through deliberate interventions by the state.
These ideas tended to focus on the immediate solutions to the asserted problems – the long-run consequences were ignored or openly disregarded. In particular, it was believed that large-scale negative consequences of such policies could be avoided. However, many of these benevolent interventions give rise to a number of unintended consequences which not only often tend to pervert the original ends and values but also legitimise further interventions, leading to additional unintended consequences, which in turn necessitate further interventions, and so on. The primary reason being that the individual actors in markets and civil society rationally adapt to the signals and incentives given by the interventions themselves. This is what the logic of conceit is all about – how an exaggerated belief in politics as a means to promote ends which may even be politically unattainable has caused an unintended growth of the state.
There are numerous policy-caused social problems of this type (Karlson 2002, p. 143-150). Rent control causes house shortages, black markets, rationing, less construction, new interventions, subsidies, regulations and in the end higher cost of living for most people. Job-security legislation causes reluctance to hire people, less innovation, fewer new firms, less employment, less flexibility on labour markets, health problems among employees, new interventions, and in the end increased insecurity to many people. Labour market policies and job-creating measures exert a upward pressure on real wages, crowding out of regular employment, new interventions, and in the end increased open unemployment. The public provision of goods and services causes lack of competition, less innovation, higher costs, new interventions, and in the end less availability of those goods and services. And so on.
Conceited politicians and voters may thus as an unintended consequence have promoted the growth of the state and higher taxes into something quite similar to the modern welfare state. Every step in itself may have been deliberate and intentional, but the end result, with a weakened role for communities and the civil society as well as undermined and less dynamic markets, is surely something that was unforeseen and probably also unwanted.
In the second model or mechanism, the logic of opportunism, it is no longer naively assumed that the political actors are value rational, benevolent and directed towards the establishment of the good society. Neither does it implicitly treat politics as a unitary actor, but regards it as a struggle or competition between different actors with conflicting interests. The basis for this logic is thus the assumption that politicians, voters, bureaucrats and other actors on the political scene – such as interest groups, labour unions and firms – primarily have their own self-interest as the ultimate motive for their actions.
With such a perspective, largely studied within public choice theory, it is evident that the political process is far from optimal and that there exist a number of systematic political failures. Two aspects should be briefly highlighted: the dominance of special-interest groups and myopic decisions.
There are many reason why narrow special interests are likely to have their way in the political process. One major cause is that different groups in society vary in their ability to articulate and aggregate their interests (Olson 1965). The demands on the state will be asymmetrical – there is a tendency for groups which represent really wide and common interests to remain unorganised, while more concentrated and strong interests, which are shared by a smaller number of actors, are more easy to articulate. The prevalent absence of strong interest groups furthering the interest of consumers, bank savers and tax payers serves to illustrate the first part of the argument, while the latter is exemplified by the overwhelming existence of special-interest groups in support of subsidies to farmers, labour market regulations and restrictions on imports from the developing countries etc.
Moreover, these concentrated and privileged groups are also likely to meet weak resistance from the voter majority to the policies they propose. The cost of these concentrated measures are often possible to diffuse over large groups of citizens. This implies that each individual voter only will experience a slight increase in his costs and thus not find it in his or her self-interest to oppose it. The political parties and politicians therefore are also likely devote a disproportionate amount of attention to policies of this kinds.
The economic consequences of this asymmetry have been discussed at length by Mancur Olson (1982) and others. The general conclusion is that growth rates will decline and the size of the state will grow.
The second general tendency of the democratic political process is the encouragement of short-sighted or myopic decisions. Partly, we have already touched upon this question above: narrow special interests are often precisely expressed in the forms of demands for legislation which is in the specific group's short-term interest while being counter to the long-term good of society at large.
For example, when tenants of rental apartments cry our for rent control, they disregard the interest of people who currently do not have a lease and future generations of potential tenants who become shut out from the rental market because of declining construction rates of new apartments and the low mobility between different-sized flat and different types of accommodation, such as private houses and condos. The same argument also applies to legislation which ensures that people can keep their jobs, stipulate minimum wages, give protective measures or subsidies to ailing industries, pay-as-you-go pension schemes, and so on – these all accord to this type of short-run benefits to specific groups.
The overall, basically unintended, consequence of these tendencies is that the political decisions will often focus on direct, expansionary and consumption-oriented measures, instead of more indirect, instrumental and investment-oriented alternatives. Over time the state will grow and the taxes get higher, resulting into something quite similar to the modern welfare state. And again, markets and the communities in civil society will be undermined.
Both the logic of conceit and the logic of opportunism may thus explain the emergence of the welfare state. In practice a synthesis is likely. Something of a historical irony may be involved in such as development. Well-meaning politicians who solely intended to promote a good society may in the end come to favour and patronize various more selfish special interests. It should also be noted that this process is largely self-enforcing. The bigger the state becomes and the more politics comes to dominate society, the greater the reasons for different actors and interests to try to use the state for their own narrow and myopic special interests. The larger and more complex the role of the state, the harder and more costly it also becomes for the voters to inform themselves about the totality of the political decisions, the programs of political parties and the activities of the politicians and bureaucrats. These will therefore gain an increasing independence from the actual wishes of the voters.
Figure 3 below illustrates the development from a society with a small state, dynamic markets and a lively civil society around the year 1900 to the present situation where the markets and civil society really have been crowded out and are appendages to the state. The size of the circles are intended to indicate the size of the three sectors respectively. This applies to Sweden as well as to many other welfare states.
Figure 3: State, markets and civil society What Taxes Do
Presently the Swedish tax share is 52 percent and the public expenditures amount to 57 percent of GDP. Most of the taxes are levied on labour, almost two-thirds. As a consequence an average Swedish worker pays 60 percent of his income in taxes, if direct and indirect taxes as well as social security contributions are summed up. In a similar manner holders of shares of companies on the Stockholm Stock Exchange pay around 60 percent in taxes if company taxes, property taxes, taxes on dividends and so on are summed up. Successful entrepreneurs sometimes pay even more. This largely explains the five stylized facts reported above.
With taxes at those levels it is not surprising that the burden of the welfare state is high. In economic terms this often expressed as the excess burden of taxes. If we limit ourselves to taxes on labour the excess burden consists primarily of a lower level of participation in the labour market. Moreover the citizens will work less efficiently and with the wrong things. In particular, the taxes drive in a wedge between buyers and sellers on the labour market which hampers the division of labour and specialisation in the economy, with lower productivity and lower long-term growth as an unavoidable consequence. Also a black economy will arise in many sectors of the economy.
This tax wedge may be measured in a number ways. It is e.g. common to express it in terms of the total marginal effect of the taxes. In table 3 below, however, it is presented in terms of how much an individual has to earn in order to pay someone 1000 SEK, or some other currency, for a certain service job:
Tabel 3: Income requirement for the purchase of services in different countries 2001 Net
Income
to
SellerMarginal
Tax,
Soc. Sec.
Benefits,
Indirect tax
Market
PriceNet
Income
Requirement
to
BuyerMarginal
Tax,
Soc. Sec.
Benefits
Income
RequirementBelgium 1.000 2.703 3.703 3.703 6.010 9.713 Denmark 1.000 1.477 2.477 2.477 4.162 6.639 Germany 1.000 2.241 3.241 3.241 3.396 6.637 Sweden 1.000 1.611 2.611 2.611 3.402 6.013 Finland 1.000 1.812 2.812 2.812 2.966 5.778 Norway 1.000 1.790 2.790 2.790 2.713 5.503 Italy 1.000 1.707 2.707 2.707 2.464 5.171 Netherlands 1.000 1.413 2.413 2.413 2.614 5.027 Austria 1.000 1.579 2.579 2.579 1.461 4.040 France 1.000 1.363 2.363 2.363 1.565 3.928 Canada 1.000 856 1.856 1.856 1.536 3.392 Australia 1.000 726 1.726 1.726 1.625 3.351 Irland 1.000 816 1.816 1.816 1.427 3.243 Great Britain 1.000 894 1.894 1.894 1.263 3.157 Portugal 1.000 977 1.977 1.977 1.065 3.042 Spain 1.000 1.165 2.165 2.165 855 3.020 New Zeeland 1.000 766 1.766 1.766 1.192 2.958 Switzerland 1.000 639 1.639 1.639 902 2.541 USA 1.000 650 1.650 1.650 881 2.531 Japan 1.000 530 1.530 1.530 561 2.091 weig. OECD aver. 1.000 1.007 2.007 2.007 1.435 3.442 weig, EU average 1.000 1.588 2.588 2.588 2.323 4.911 Comment: The yearly income of the seller and the buyer of the service are assumed to be equal to
one respectively two yearly incomes of an average industry worker in the different countries.
Source: DuRietz 2004I guess the table speaks well for itself. It is quite obvious that when the marginal effects of taxes reach the levels at the top of the table, i.e. when you have to earn six, seven or even nine times what the seller gets after the job is done in order to buy a certain service, huge inefficiencies will arise in the economy. It should also be noted that some countries are even worse off than Sweden in this regard.
Dignity
The burden of the welfare may not, however, only be measured in economic terms. In my view it also important to assess the effects of the welfare state and the high taxes necessarily associated with it from a broader, more normative perspective. In this section, the burden of the welfare state will be assessed in terms of its consequences on human dignity. First the concept of dignity must be explicated.8
Dignity is just like other important concepts such as “justice” or “democracy” genuinely contested. A number of possible interpretations exist. The view presented here, however, is in line with the mainstream traditions in classical liberalism as well as classical humanism according to which every individual has a unique value in himself and the view that the characteristics of a good society is individual liberty and the personal responsibility of every individual for his own life – in accordance with what he himself believe to be a good life – with equal respect for others' liberty. With dignity also follows that the individual deserves respect, from himself as well as from others. But dignity has primarily a value in itself. To classical liberal as well as classical humanist such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus of Rotterdam, John Locke, Adam Smith, Baruch Spinoza and Wilhelm von Humboldt9 human dignity was of prime importance, even though there certainly are great differences between their views. For example, the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola already in 1488 argued that human dignity is intimately connected with liberty, which makes the individual responsible for all his action, and thereby himself chooses his own character. Almost 400 years later the classical liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt (1993/1852, p. 10) makes the same argument in the following way:
8 A longer, more elaborate versions of this section is published in Karlson (2004). 9 See e.g. Pico della Mirandola (1996/1488), Erasmus (1964), Locke (1998/1690), Smith (1982/1759), Spinoza (2001) och Von Humboldt (1993/1852). The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes...
There is also a strong connection between this perspective and Aristotle's (1988) view of what it is that constitutes a good, happy and virtuous life. According to him the highest good is eudaimoni, which usually is translated as “human flourishing”, by which is meant acting in such a way that we fulfil our potential as rational and social human beings. Every individual is born with this potential and the method to be used to achieve it is to form one's character through good habits, practical wisdom and virtues.
Dignity, defined as taking active responsibility for one's own life project, may then look very differently to different individuals. Since we all have different experiences, interests and priorities the good life will differ between persons and we should therefore respect and tolerate different ways of living. Our concept of dignity is thus both including and universal – the freedom and responsibility are the same for everyone. Of importance is also that every individual, also the weak and unfortunate, is given the opportunity to live a dignified life.
Dignity thus takes its starting point in the liberty of the individual, understood in the sense of non-interference. Paternalism is not in general compatible with dignity, even though some exceptions exist, as I shall argue below. Closely related to individual liberty is personal responsibility. Only if you could have acted in another way are you responsible for your actions. Liberty is in fact a prerequisite for responsibility. Figure 4 below illustrates the relationship between liberty, responsibility and dignity:
Figure 4: The relationship between liberty, responsibility and dignity A first requirement for dignity is, then, that individual liberty is guaranteed. If the state can promote this it is thus positive. But if the opposite is true – e.g. if the welfare state through taxes and regulations limit the liberty of the individual – then it is negative for dignity.
The second requirement is that that the individual himself takes responsibility for his actions. Without liberty this is not possible. But responsibility is of course also to a large extent a voluntary choice. The question is then what it is that may make the individual take his responsibility. And can legislation and acts by the state promote responsibility in certain situations? Here the analysis immediately becomes more complicated.
In the tradition mentioned above there is an optimistic view of the individual's ability to learn from successes as well as mistakes. We learn to take responsibility by taking responsibility, which again requires freedom. To emphasise learning through the taking of responsibility also highlights the role of the social environment in which the individual acts. The norms, morals and feedback mechanisms characteristic of this environment are essential for our own views about responsibility. Responsibility also requires that the individual has resources of his own. Such resources, in particular knowledge and wealth, are also created in interaction with the environment in which the individual acts. Two types of environments are of prime importance: markets and the communities of civil society.
To be able to support oneself and one's kin is essential to dignity. Without an income it is very hard to actively form a life project. Productive work is thus a prerequisite for dignity. Consequently a dynamic market economy with an extensive division of labour and specialisation is of primary importance for dignity, since only such a system can create long-term prosperity and employment. Moreover, the market process itself can be described as a learning process where the individual actors constantly use their freedom and take responsibility for their decisions, the bad as well as the good ones. The market also creates the resources that are essential to dignity. We cannot choose any type of economic system and still believe that we can promote liberty, responsibility and dignity. The same is true for civil society. To a large extent it is within the communities, families and voluntary associations of the civil society that our views on personal responsibility is formed. Consequently, a vital civil society is fundamental to dignity.
Now, what does all this mean for the assessment of the welfare state? Let me start by briefly propose what the state may do to promote dignity. Both markets and the civil society need some basic institutions in order to work well. Basic liberties have to be secured and basic responsibilities be defined in relation to them. This is essential for human dignity. Of fundamental importance is a system of individual rights and liberties which protects each individual's life, freedom and property against the encroachment of others. The basic requirements of the rule of law must be fulfilled. In practice, also various types of contract laws, civil laws, tort laws, family laws etc. are important. In these areas the state has a constructive role to play.
Moreover, and perhaps more controversially, the state may also have a role in guaranteing that every individual, also the weak and unfortunate, is given the resources necessary to live a dignified life, if and only if these resources are not created in the markets or the civil society [Here, Karlson's immersion in the culture of Sweden makes it impossible for him to conclude, at least openly, that dignity is logically unattainable by these weak and unfortunate, by his own definitions (see Figure 4 above). If a person cannot take responsibility for himself, he cannot be dignified. -AMPP Ed.]. The reason is that this is a prerequisite for the respect of the unique value of every individual. It should be noted that a certain measure of paternalism here is introduced.
Also it is quite apparent that we have a somewhat difficult trade-off question to handle. Concerning children's right to education and the genuinely handicapped's right to support the state has an important role to play. But in almost all other cases and situations it is the responsibility of the individual himself to use his freedom to live in dignity. Private savings, private wealth and private insurance are always better from the perspective of dignity. The role of the state should not be to undermine the liberty of the individual or to take away her responsibility for her own life through various types subsidies, interventions or taxes, apart from the cases identified above.
My conclusion is therefore that human dignity unequivocally will decrease when the size of the state and the level of taxes reaches a certain level. Figure 5 below illustrates the general relationship between taxes and dignity:
Figure 5: The relationship between taxes and dignity The initial upward slope of the curve requires that the taxes go to the areas identified above. The following downward slope is explained by the economic inefficiencies caused by high taxes – through weakened division of labour and specialisation, increased unemployment and staggering [Karlson means "stymied" -AMPP Ed.] growth - discussed in the last section as well as by a less vital civil society.
There can be no doubt that the Swedish welfare state is far beyond the peak of the curve.10 If we want to promote dignity the size of the state should be radically decreased.
Lessons for Other Countries
The Swedish welfare state and the high tax levels necessarily associated with it likely to have been very harmful to human dignity. Most Swedes have become heavily dependent on the state and have neither means nor the ability to take responsibility for their own lives. Through various types of interventions, either by benevolent but largely incompetent politicians or by narrow and myopic special interests, the state has slowly but steadily crowded out markets as well as the communities in civil society. Consequently, the taxes have reached such levels that huge inefficiencies exist in the Swedish economy, with comparatively low growth as an unavoidable consequence.
The burden of the welfare state is great indeed.
Other countries, such as Germany, which are approaching the Swedish situation should beware. No one knows for sure when the point of no return is reached.
10 Moberg (1994) has calculated the tax level necessary to provide all the standard collective goods, basic education for all children up through 12 th grade and a basic social security net. Using the current Swedish public expenditures in these areas as estimates this amounts to around 15 percent of GDP, to be compared with the present level of 57 percent. References
Aristoteles (1988), Den nikomachiska etiken (The Nichomachian Ethics), Göteborg : Daidalos
Childs, M. (1936), Sweden: The Middle Way, London: Faber and Faber
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Original PDF version of the previous item
See also the eugenics treatment in the racism chapter of AMPP, wherein Sweden and the other western European states figure prominently.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-14, by Daniel Henninger:
A Decadent Nobel
A prize for soft moralism.So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year's Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There's been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair.
The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting." I'd say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence.
Let's be clear. This decadence isn't primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi's playboy club or French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand's adventures in Thailand. Though these are not irrelevant.
This Nobel is about political decadence.
"Decadence," an enduring word, emerged from the Latin "de-cadere," which means "to fall down." Decadence stripped bare means decay.
The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.
When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state.
Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history's most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one's armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.
The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: "The insatiable consumption and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?"
This isn't to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life's primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore's unstoppable sermons.
Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on Europe's soil in 1983. Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists. A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now beyond its reach.
Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darfur is a hard question. Where to hold captured terrorists is a hard question.
Americans heard often the past four years how much Europe "hated" us because of that most complex of hard questions, the Iraq war. Unpopular wars cause bad feelings to be sure, but past some point Europe's antipathy toward the U.S. over Iraq began to sound a lot like moralistic decadence. It is a neurotic resentment of a superpower merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill.
What we are in the process of discovering is just how much President Obama's worldview coincides with that of the continent that claims to have seen itself reflected in him and its Peace Prize.
Mr. Obama is at a crossroads in his presidency. As George W. Bush departed the White House, he said his successor would one day arrive at the need to make a decision that made clear the reality of being the American president. That moment has arrived. It is the pending troop-deployment for Afghanistan, a very hard decision.
After that, Mr. Obama will go to Oslo Dec. 10 to receive the Prize itself. That will occur in the middle of the Dec. 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, whose goal is among the explicit reasons why Mr. Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Between Afghanistan and Oslo, we're going to get some clarity about the Obama presidency.
Perhaps the most intriguing onlooker to this education is European Nicolas Sarkozy. On his good days, France's president seems aware of the political and economic decay he has inherited. So it was striking at the United Nations last month when Mr. Sarkozy said that Mr. Obama "dreams of a world without nuclear arms." Then, describing Iran's nuclear threat, he said, "At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions."
By "us" he means that the U.S. must lead. In the West, only the U.S. president can still make decisions based on hard facts rather than recede into soft moralism. The day that is no longer true, the U.S. will finally deserve a decadent Nobel.
from the Associated Press, 2009-Oct-22, by Ian MacDougall
Lutefisk and loot: Tax records open in Norway
OSLO — It's the moment nosy Norwegian neighbors have been waiting for — the release of official records showing the annual income and overall wealth of nearly every taxpayer in the Scandinavian country.
In a move that would be unthinkable elsewhere, tax authorities in Norway have issued the "skatteliste," or "tax list," for 2008 to the media under a law designed to uphold the country's tradition of transparency.
It's Norwegians' way of keeping up with the Johansens — from fishermen on the western fjords and Sami reindeer herders in the north to members of the committee that awarded President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.
To non-Scandinavians, it would seem to be a gross violation of privacy.
The tax list stirs up a media frenzy, with splashy headlines revealing oil-rich Norway's wealthiest man, woman and celebrity couple.
The data shows that former cross-country skiing great Bjoern Daehlie, who has eight Olympic gold medals, also has plenty of cash — 29.3 million kroner ($5.4 million).
Actress and director Liv Ullmann, for instance, earned $17,300 in Norway, and has a wealth of $2.5 million. Income earned or kept abroad, or otherwise in some sort of tax shelter, is not included.
Pioneering women's long-distance runner Grete Waitz, a nine-time New York City Marathon champion, earned $13,500 in Norway, and has a wealth of $90,000.
Many media outlets use the tax records to produce their own searchable online databases. In the database of national broadcaster NRK, you can type a subject's name, hit search and within moments get information on what that person made last year, what was paid in taxes and total wealth. It also compares those figures with Norway's national averages for men and women, and that person's city of residence.
Defenders of the system say it enhances transparency, deemed essential for an open democracy.
"Isn't this how a social democracy ought to work, with openness, transparency and social equality as ideals?" columnist Jan Omdahl wrote in the tabloid Dagbladet. He acknowledged, however, that many treat the list like "tax porno" — furtively checking the income of neighbors or co-workers.
Critics say the list is actually a threat to society.
"What each Norwegian earns and what you have in wealth is a private matter between the taxpayer and the government," said Jon Stordrange, director of the Norwegian Taxpayer's Association.
Besides providing criminals with a useful tool to find prime targets, he said the list generates playground taunts of my-dad-is-richer-than-your-dad.
"The children of people with low wages are being teased about it in the schools," Stordrange said Thursday. "People with low salaries are being met with comments at the grocery store, 'How can you live on these low wages?'"
The information had been available to media until 2004, when a more conservative government banned the publication of tax records. Three years later, a new, more liberal government reversed the legislation and also made it possible for media to obtain tax information digitally and disseminate it online.
Norway's 2007 law emphasized that "first and foremost, it's the press that can contribute to a critical debate" on wealth and the elaborate tax scheme that, along with the country's oil wealth, keeps Norway's extensive — and expensive — welfare system afloat.
The country of 4.8 million people had the third-highest income tax among industrialized countries in 2007, behind Denmark and New Zealand, according to the latest statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Since the latest tax data was released Wednesday, national media have scrambled to analyze it, building top-10 lists and graphic breakdowns of income differentials between sexes, age groups and residences.
So who's Norway's richest man? Tobacco mogul Johan Henrik Andresen, worth $2 billion, has surpassed last year's No. 1, industrialist Kjell Inge Roekke, according to Dagbladet. Andresen now owns the Ferd investment group, whose assets include the Elopak packaging company and ski wax maker Swix Sport. Roekke is chairman of Aker ASA, a holding company in the fishing, construction and industrial sectors.
Norway's richest woman is stock market investor Tone Bjoerseth-Andersen, whose wealth of $107 million placed her behind 24 men, the paper said.
Members of the royal family are not on the list because they don't pay taxes. Also excluded are the homeless and people whose details are kept secret for security reasons.
NRK's online edition compared the income of Norwegian celebrity couples — called "super-duels" — while newspaper Aftenposten's Web site ranked common Norwegian first names by wealth under the headline "How rich is your name?"
It found that men named Terje tend to do very well, while among women, Marit is a winner.
Most other Europeans, including residents of Britain, Italy and the Netherlands, have very different attitudes toward transparency and privacy and would be horrified at such a setup. Last week, the Spanish government for the first time released information on how much each Cabinet member is worth, but data on ordinary citizens is still private.
In neighboring Sweden, anyone can order a printed edition of the Taxation Calendar, which lists the earnings of people in mid- to upper-income brackets. The information is also available online, although Swedes whose financial information has been searched are notified by mail of who checked their details.
Christine Ingebritsen, a professor at the University of Washington, said the Norwegian tax list exemplifies a time-tested, distinctly Scandinavian custom of egalitarianism.
"This is how you make sure that you're being legitimate in the eyes of the community — you show that the wealth of a CEO isn't off the charts," she said, adding that unlike the U.S., Norway "places the wealth and health of all as a priority above the individual success stories."
Still, there are plenty of opponents of the list in Norway. A 2007 survey by research group Synovate revealed that only 32 percent of the Norwegian public wanted the tax list published, and 46 percent were against it.
Georg Apnes, director of Norway's Data Inspectorate and a member of the Conservative Party, called publishing and combing through the tax list "repulsive" and "disgusting."
"It reflects very poorly on our culture and on our society," he said on an NRK morning news program.
from the National Post of Canada, 2010-Jan-9, by David Frum:
England made him
The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was born in Nigeria. But his attempted attack on an American airliner is not really a Nigerian story.
Abdulmutallab vanished to Yemen for training before the attack. Still, it's not primarily Yemen we should be worrying about today.
American intelligence did not act on multiple warnings of danger, and Dutch screeners overlooked the explosives on Abdulmutallab's person. Yet even these near-lethal Dutch and American mistakes should not disturb us most.
The most daunting danger exposed by the underwear bombing is a danger that originates among Great Britain's radicalized Muslims.
The shy 18-year-old who arrived in London in Sept. 2005 to study engineering at University College was still very much an unformed personality: religious but also concerned with sports, sex and school, according to the Washington Post's review of some 300 of his Facebook postings.
In a column this week, The New York Times' Tom Friedman imagines the thoughts of young Abdulmutallab's father: "My family system, our village system, broke down. My own son fell under the influence of a jihadist version of Islam that I do not recognize and have reason to fear."
But the village that lost young Abdulmutallab was not some unpaved, grass-thatched Nigerian country town. It was the city of Dr. Johnson and Charles Dickens.
Abdulmutal lab joined University College's Islamic Society and was soon chosen president. The London Times reports that Abdulmutallab "is the fourth president of a London student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in three years. One is facing a retrial on charges that he was involved in the 2006 liquid bomb plot to blow up airliners. Two others have been convicted of terrorist offences since 2007."
As Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove document in their important books Londonistan and Celsius 7/ 7, Britain has incubated a Muslim terror culture. Four British Muslims detonated themselves on the London Metro system on July 7, 2005, killing 56 and wounding about 700. Two British Muslims attempted suicide bombings in Tel Aviv on May 1, 2003, killing three victims.
Polls of British Muslims reveal the most radicalized community in Europe.
About one-sixth of British Muslims look with sympathy on terrorist acts. According to British police, about 3,000 British Muslims passed through Osama bin Laden's Afghan training camps. More than 80% of British Muslims consider themselves Muslims first, British second -- by far the least patriotic score of any European Muslim community. (French Muslims were the most patriotic: 42% considered themselves French first.)
Worse, in Britain's non-Muslims often add their voices to condone and excuse Muslim violence. The ideology of Muslim victimhood is propounded by many of the most respected institutions in British life. Here, for example, is an article posted just last week in The Guardian, arguably Britain's most influential newspaper, on the attempted axe murder of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard: "Muslims ... saw in [the cartoon] a defamatory and humiliating message: Muslims are terrorists. ... Intentional humiliation is an aggressive act. ... This is the real issue between Denmark and Muslim extremists, not freedom of speech."
This was the environment that Abdulmutallab encountered in Britain. Soon, he was sponsoring talks on jihad-ism at his school, and joining with secular leftists to organize protests against the U.S.-U.K. war on terror. He found his way to Yemen, and to his new cause: mass murder in the name of God.
As a result, U.S. transportation safety officials will now apply more intense screening procedures to citizens of 14 countries, including Nigeria.
But what the Abdulmutallab story tells us is that citizenship is not a very useful indicator of dangerousness. In percentage terms, Nigerian passport holders are probably a lot less likely to be Islamic extremists or terrorist than are British passport holders.
Britain has allowed itself to incubate a danger to the whole planet -- and even now, their corrective action is too hesitant and too partial.
The British need to swiftly deport from their country non-citizen imams who preach extremism and violence. They should monitor mosques closely and maintain detailed databases on their Muslim youth populations. They must do a much better job than they did on Christmas sharing information with friends and allies. (It is troubling that Abdulmutallab obtained a U.S. tourist visa after the British had withdrawn his U.K. visa.)
Above all, we need an end to the kind of radicalism-condoning "sympathy" from British elites. The Blair and Brown governments have too often identified the most radical British Muslims as the most "authentic." Prestige, power and money have been directed to the worst in the community, while the best have been isolated and ignored.
That's no longer just a British problem; it's a threat to the whole world.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-26, by Theodore Dalrymple:
The British Disease
Gordon Brown is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile.Whenever I am in Amsterdam, I stay in a small, elegant and well-run hotel. The excellent and obliging staff are all Dutch.
Whenever I am in London, I stay at a small, elegant and well-run hotel. The excellent and obliging staff are all foreign—which is just as well, for if they were English the hotel would not be well-run for long. When the English try to run a good hotel, they combine pomposity with slovenliness.
Perhaps this would not be so serious a matter if the British economy were not a so-called service economy. It has been such ever since Margaret Thatcher solved our chronic industrial relations problem by the simple expedient of getting rid of industry. This certainly worked, and perhaps was inevitable in the circumstances, but it was necessary to find some other way of making our way in the world. This we have not done.
Incompetence and incapacity are everywhere. Despite ever-rising local taxes, town and city councils are either unable or unwilling to clear the streets of litter, with the result that Britain is by far the dirtiest country in Europe.
Although we spend four times as much on education per head as in 1950, the illiteracy rate has not gone down. I used to try to plumb the depths (or shallows) of youthful British ignorance by asking my patients a few simple questions. Fifty percent responded to the question "What is arithmetic?" by answering "What is arithmetic?" It is not that they were good at doing something that they could not name: When I asked one young man, not mentally deficient, to multiply three by four, he replied "We didn't get that far."
This is the result of 11 years of state-funded compulsory education, or rather attendance at school, at a cost of between $100,000 and $200,000. The government's response has been to raise the school-leaving age to 18, thus making total ignorance even more expensive.
This is at the bottom rung of society, but incompetence starts at the very top. It is doubtful whether any major country has had a more incompetent leader than Gordon Brown for many years. The product of a pleasure-hating Scottish Presbyterian tradition, he behaves as if taxation were a moral good in itself, regardless of the uses to which it is put; he is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile, though he has not been an apt pupil, for he now makes disconcertingly odd grimaces at inappropriate moments. He is the only leader known to me who combines dourness with frivolity.
Early in his disastrous career in government he sold the country's gold reserves at a derisory price, against all advice, driving the price lower by the manner in which he arranged the sale. A convenience-store owner couldn't, and almost certainly wouldn't, have done worse.
After 12 years of ceaseless Brownian motion, British public finances have gone from being comparatively healthy to being catastrophically bad. In order to expand vastly the public sector in which he is a true believer, Mr. Brown has raised taxes by stealth, undertaken government obligations that appear nowhere in the accounts and that will weigh on future generations, and eased credit to encourage asset inflation and give people the illusion of prosperity. For the duration of his time in government, Britain has been like a consumptive patient, with an excess of bogus well-being shortly before expiry. If the world is an opera stage, Britain has been playing Violetta or Mimi in the last act.
What, then, of the opposition? Surely it has managed to hit a few of the easy targets with which the government has so thoughtfully supplied it?
No words of mine can adequately convey the contempt in which the Conservatives are now, rightly, held by almost everyone. I do not recall meeting anyone who thinks that David Cameron, their leader, is anything other than a careerist in the mold of Tony Blair. The most that anyone allows himself to hope is that, beneath the thin veneer of opportunism, there beats a heart of oak.
But the auguries are not good: Not only was Mr. Cameron's only pre-political job in public relations, hardly a school for intellectual and moral probity, but he has subscribed to every fashionable policy nostrum from environmentalism to large, indeed profligate, government expenditure. Not truth, but the latest poll, has guided him—at a time when only truth will serve. However, he will be truly representative as prime minister. Like his country, he is quite without substance.
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician.
from City Journal online, 2009-Oct-1, by Theodore Dalrymple:
It's Only Anti-Social
In Britain, the seriousness of an offense depends on who the victim is.A single case sometimes shines a lurid light on an entire country, and the case of Fiona Pilkington does just that for contemporary Britain—both its population and its officialdom. A coroner's inquest was recently held in the case, two years after the events in question.
On October 23, 2007, Pilkington, a single mother of low intelligence, used gasoline to set fire to her car, with herself and her 18-year-old, severely handicapped daughter inside. They both died in the conflagration.
The reason that she killed herself and her daughter was that local youths had abused them for years. They taunted her and her daughter for hours on end, standing and shouting outside their home, pelting it with bottles and stones, and repeatedly intruding into the garden. Pilkington, who was inoffensive, shy, and retiring, called the police a total of 33 times, but they did absolutely nothing, though they knew what was going on. The local chief of police issued an apology at the inquiry into the affair. If he had meant it, of course, he would have immediately resigned his post.
The deep spiritual sickness of contemporary Britain is evident in the following comment on the inquiry in the liberal newspaper, The Guardian: “Although much of the abuse centred on the taunts about the children's disabilities, police failed to recognise it as a hate crime rather than simple antisocial behaviour, which would have made it a far higher priority.”
In other words, the seriousness of an offense committed in Britain now depends upon who the victim is. If a person is not of an identifiably protected group, he or she is not entitled to police intervention against abusive stone- and bottle-throwing youths. He is not entitled to protection at all.
The Guardian's article appears to accept that such behavior, so long as it targets a member of an unprotected group, is merely undesirable—“anti-social” rather than obviously criminal. The rule of law is fast evaporating in Britain; we are coming to live in a land of men, not of laws.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is Not with a Bang but a Whimper.
from the Times of London, 2009-Oct-11, by Jeremy Clarkson:
Cleverness is no more. This is a dumb Britain
Forty years ago, my dad came into my bedroom and made me get up.
I was nine and sleepy. I was snuggly and warm. I wanted to stay under the covers. But he was insistent. “There is something on television you need to see,” he said. And I remember the next bit vividly: “It's going to be important.”
So downstairs I went and there, in black and white, were some men talking, while nearby, various sheep fell out of trees. I laughed so much, my teddy bear's arm came off. And so it was that at the age of nine, I became Monty Python's first and youngest fan.
Aged 13, I was taken to the Grand in Leeds to see the Pythons perform in what they called their “first farewell tour”, and afterwards, we all went out for supper together. John Cleese, whom my father had befriended, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and me. They all signed a copy of my Big Red Book and it remains the one possession I would save should my house choose to explode.
I would spend hours listening to their records, and reliving their television programmes in my head. And eventually — my dad said it would be important — this fanaticism caused me to pass my English O-level. I was sitting there, in my study at school, listening to Snow Goose, with the dreary Merchant of Venice swimming around on the page, none of it making any sense at all.
And then I thought: “Hang on a minute, if it is possible to learn off by heart Eric Idle's travel agent sketch, then how hard can it be to memorise this twaddle?” So that's what I did. Learnt it.
I knew all the Python sketches off by heart. And the books. And the films. I still do. And I still fly off the handle when someone misquotes. It was Norwegian Jarlsberger, you imbecile. I know it's really called Jarlsberg but that's not what Cleese said. How can you not know that??!!?
Only last week, I was asked by a keen young reporter to recite my favourite Python sketch into her camera for a feature she was making. I did Novel Writing.
Novel Writing is another reason Python turned out to be important. It's the reason I'm married. My wife is a huge fan of Thomas Hardy and was deeply impressed that I knew the opening page of The Return of the Native. She never realised that I was simply reciting a Python sketch. In the same way that she never knew when I hummed Nessun Dorma that I was singing what I thought was the music from a commercial for Pirelli.
Novel Writing is at the very heart of what makes Monty Python so brilliant. The notion of Thomas Hardy writing his books, in front of a good-natured bank holiday crowd in Dorset, while cricket-style commentators and pundits assess every word he commits to paper is a juxtaposition you don't find in comedy very much any more.
To get the point you need to know that while Hardy may be seen as a literary colossus, there's no escaping the fact his novels are dirge. We see these attacks on intellectualism throughout Python. To understand the joke, you need to know that René Descartes did not say, I “drink” therefore I am. You need to know that if you cure a man of leprosy, you are taking away his trade. And that really Archimedes did not invent football.
Today my encyclopedic knowledge of everything Python is seen as a bit sad. Former fans point out that Cleese has lost it, that Jones is married to an eight-year-old and that Spamalot was a travesty. Worse. Liking Python apparently marks me out as a “public-school toff”.
There's a very good reason for this. Nowadays people wear their stupidity like a badge of honour. Knowing how to play chess will get your head kicked off. Reading a book with no pictures in it will cause there to be no friend requests on your Facebook page. Little Britain is funny because people vomit a lot. Monty Python is not because they delight in all manifestations of the terpsichorean muse.
When you go on a chat show, it is important you tell the audience straight away that you were brought up in a cardboard box and that your dad would thrash you to sleep every night. If you want to get on and to be popular you have to demonstrate that you know nothing. It's why Stephen Fry makes so many bottom jokes.
And then you have my colleague James May, who says that, occasionally on Top Gear, he would like to present a germane and thought-provoking piece on engineering. But I won't let him unless his trousers fall down at some point. I'm ashamed to say that's true.
It's also true that today no one ever gets rich by overestimating the intelligence of their audience. Today you make a show assuming the viewers know how to breathe and that's about it. It's therefore an inescapable fact that in 2009 Monty Python would not be commissioned.
The only example of intelligent sketch-show comedy in Britain today is Harry & Paul. And what's happened to that? Well, it's been shunted from BBC1 to BBC2. And you get the impression it'll be gone completely unless they stop using Jonathan Miller as a butt for their wit. Today you are not allowed to know about Jonathan Miller because if you do, you are a snob.
That's why my Monty Python appreciation society is so small and secret. Members speak every morning, each giving one another a word or phrase that has to be placed in context by six that evening. Last month I was given one word: “because”. And I got it. It's from the Four Yorkshiremen. “We were happy ... Because we were poor.”
The Pythons were laughing at that idea then. We're not laughing any more.
from the Associated Press, 2010-Jan-12, by Raphael G. Satter:
UK universities warn that they face 'meltdown'
LONDON - Oxford, Cambridge and other British universities said Tuesday that the government's plan to cut hundreds of millions of pounds (dollars) from their funding would put their world-class reputations in jeopardy.
Unlike most elite institutions in the United States, Britain's top schools rely almost exclusively on taxpayers keeping them going.
But strapped for cash, the government has slashed its higher education budget by 600 million pounds (nearly $1 billion) over the next three years—a figure British media say comes to a 12 percent reduction when combined with other cuts.
British universities have little chance of raising big funds on their own: Student fees by law are capped at about 4,000 pounds a year, and endowments generally are no more than modest.
The Russel Group, representing 20 leading research universities, said the cuts would have "a devastating effect, not only on students and staff, but also on Britain's international competitiveness, economy and ability to recover from recession."
"It has taken more than 800 years to create one of the world's greatest education systems, and it looks like it will take just six months to bring it to its knees," according to an editorial by the group's Chairman Michael Arthur and Director Wendy Platt, published in The Guardian newspaper.
In defending its decision, the government noted that higher education funding had risen by 25 percent since 1997. Higher Education Minister David Lammy said now was time "to look to the higher education sector to tighten its belt."
Struggling with massive deficits from trying to bail out crisis-hit banks, the government has promised painful cuts across the public sector. Universities would be unlikely to get much more out of the rival Conservatives should they win upcoming elections. The opposition party has promised even harsher austerity measures.
But is Oxford University—the English-speaking world's oldest university—really on the verge of a "meltdown," as described by Arthur and Platt in their editorial?
The institution, which developed rapidly in the 12th century, wouldn't say which, if any, of its programs might be axed in the event of a funding shortfall. And Cambridge University, which recently celebrated its 800th birthday, has said only that it shares the concerns raised in the editorial and would seek to minimize the impact of any cuts.
One commentator said the universities might be overstating their case—but that the concerns were real.
"The language is extremely strong," said Phil Baty, the deputy editor of the Times Higher Education Magazine. But "if that's what it takes to make the wider public sit down and take notice, then it's worth shouting from the rooftops."
He said many universities were already making sacrifices due to funding shortfalls—such as the University of Gloucestershire in southwest England, which has had to sell its new London campus. The University of Cumbria may also have to sell, or at least stop using, its campus in the northwest town of Ambleside.
Other universities have scaled back certain programs, especially in foreign languages.
Even the gothic architecture that marks many venerable universities is at risk, as the government has cut funding for maintaining historic building. "You may see some crumbling," Baty said.
___
On the Net:
Russell Group's editorial in The Guardian: http://bit.ly/756FTB
From the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2009-Oct-25:
Mrs. Merkel Wins, Germany Loses
The German Chancellor is holding back reforms.Judging from the German government program hammered out in the wee hours of Saturday morning, Angela Merkel mostly prevailed on labor, social and health care policies in her coalition talks with the Free Democratic Party. The Chancellor's success is Germany's loss.
The Christian Democrat prevented the easing of so-called job-security laws, which—as the FDP correctly argued—do more to impede the hiring of new workers than to protect them. And instead of improving on the welfare reforms introduced by a Social Democratic chancellor some six years ago, the new center-right government even extended welfare benefits. The coalition agreed, for example, to triple the amount of savings a recipient of government handouts can keep, to €750 per year of age.
Little is also left from the FDP's plans to inject more competition into the state-run health care system, which despite insurance premiums of 14.9% of gross pay will require a €4 billion taxpayer injection next year to help plug a €7.5 billion funding hole. One small success is the decision to freeze the employer contribution at 7% of gross pay. While this ensures that non-wage labor costs will not rise in lock-step with rising insurance premiums and thus compound the health care problems by fueling unemployment, it does nothing to curtail health-care costs as such.
Another mini-reform will allow state-sponsored health insurers—quasi state bureaucracies—to compete on premiums. But that competition still blocks out private insurers. Only civil servants, the self-employed and people making more than €48,150 year can opt out of the Bismarckian model and sign up with a private provider. For everyone else, the "public options" are the only option.
The Free Democrats seem to have had more success with their signature campaign call for cuts in tax rates combined with a simplification of Germany's notoriously complex tax code. But here too, Mrs. Merkel's timidity will mute the economic impact of the reforms. The FDP wanted to replace the current rates, which rise gradually from 14% to 45%, with just three brackets of 15%, 25% and 35% to cut €35 billion in taxes.
In the end, it managed to push through only €24 billion in tax relief, and these cuts will benefit predominantly lower and middle income earners. This sort of compromise is hardly unusual, but it's a costly way of "saving" money on tax cuts. By scaling back the cuts in the top marginal rates, Mrs. Merkel's government may or may not avoid charges of cutting taxes for the "rich," but it means that those top marginal rates, which are the most important to the incentives of the small business owner, won't come down the way they must.
The government also pledged to simplify the code, but the details are still left open. Instead, the coalition treaty says the tax cuts should be "preferably" implemented in 2011. That doesn't quite sound like it's written in stone. In that context, it's somewhat disconcerting that the FDP insisted on making the costs for tax advisers tax-deductible again. If the tax system will soon be so simple that—as the FDP famously promised—Germans will be able to fill out their tax forms on a beer coaster, who needs a tax accountant?
It was more reassuring to hear this new government praise the virtues of supply side policies as it defended the tax cuts in the face of the worst post-war recession and record public debt. "We must pursue a growth path, otherwise we cannot generate the needed savings," Chancellor Merkel said Saturday. It's a refreshing departure from Germany's fetish of balanced budgets.
However, the absence of any specific spending cuts as the public deficit is approaching 6% of GDP points to another unhealthy extreme. At the very least, a €100 billion deficit next year will make it politically more difficult to push through those tax cuts as promised. While the recession played its part, much of the fiscal mess is structural. The deficits are embedded in the country's social systems, which are suffering from rising costs, an aging population and higher unemployment. The shortfall for the jobless insurance and health care systems, which taxpayers will have to make up for, is expected to be about €20 billion next year.
"We don't increase taxes or levies," the Chancellor said Saturday. As the health-care problems show, though, higher premiums will be all but inevitable, meaning the Chancellor's promise will be short-lived unless her government is willing to confront some of the tough choices that it ducked this weekend. Mrs. Merkel was not re-elected to a caretaker position, but to take care of some of Germany's real economic problems. At first blush, her new government's program looks too timid to get that job done.
from the New York Times, 2009-Sep-29, p.A1, by Steven Erlanger:
Europe's Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn
PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism's slow collapse.
Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right's failures.
German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.
Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer's European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.
Some American conservatives demonize President Obama's fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe's right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.
Europe's center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.
Europe's conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d'Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany's Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.
It is not that the left is irrelevant — it often represents the only viable opposition to established governments, and so benefits, as in the United States, from the normal cycle of electoral politics.
In Portugal, the governing Socialists won re-election on Sunday, but lost an absolute parliamentary majority. In Spain, the Socialists still get credit for opposing both Franco and the Iraq war. In Germany, the broad left, including the Greens, has a structural majority in Parliament, but the Social Democrats, in postelection crisis, must contemplate allying with the hard left, Die Linke, which has roots in the old East German Communist Party.
Part of the problem is the “wall in the head” between East and West Germans. While the Christian Democrats moved smoothly eastward, the Social Democrats of the West never joined with the Communists. “The two Germanys, one Socialist, one Communist — two souls — never really merged,” said Giovanni Sartori, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. “It explains why the S.P.D., which was always the major Socialist party in Europe, cannot really coalesce.”
The situation in France is even worse for the left. Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.” While he was accused of exaggerating, given that the party is the largest in opposition and remains popular in local government, his words struck home.
The Socialist Party, with a long revolutionary tradition and weakening ties to a diminishing working class, is riven by personal rivalries. The party last won the presidency in 1988, and in 2007, Ségolène Royal lost the presidency to Mr. Sarkozy by 6.1 percent, a large margin.
With a reputation for flakiness, Ms. Royal narrowly lost the party leadership election last year to a more doctrinaire Socialist, Martine Aubry, by 102 votes out of 135,000. The ensuing allegations of fraud further chilled their relations.
While Ms. Royal would like to move the Socialists to the center and explore a more formal coalition with the Greens and the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou, Ms. Aubry fears diluting the party. She is both famous and infamous for achieving the 35-hour workweek in the last Socialist government.
The French Socialist Party “is trapped in a hopeless contradiction,” said Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliver; the result leaves space for parties to its left that can take as much as 15 percent of the vote.
The party, at its summer retreat last month at La Rochelle, a coastal resort, still talked of “comrades” and “party militants.” Its seminars included “Internationalism at Globalized Capitalism's Hour of Crisis.”
But its infighting has drawn ridicule. Mr. Sarkozy told his party this month that he sent “a big thank-you” to Ms. Royal, “who is helping me a lot,” and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a prominent European Green politician, said “everyone has cheated” in the Socialist Party and accused Ms. Royal of acting like “an outraged young girl.”
The internecine squabbling in France and elsewhere has done little to position Socialist parties to answer the question of the moment: how to preserve the welfare state amid slower growth and rising deficits. The Socialists have, in this contest, become conservatives, fighting to preserve systems that voters think need to be improved, though not abandoned.
“The Socialists can't adapt to the loss of their basic electorate, and with globalism, the welfare state can no longer exist in the same way,” Professor Sartori said.
Enrico Letta, 43, is one of the hopes of Italy's left, currently in disarray in the face of Silvio Berlusconi's nationalist populism. “We have to understand that Socialism is an answer of the last century,” Mr. Letta said. “We need to build a center-left that is pragmatic, that provides an attractive alternative, and not just an opposition.”
Mr. Letta argues that Socialist policies will have to be transmuted into a more fluid form to allow an alliance with center, liberal and green parties that won't be called “Socialist.”
Mr. Winock, the historian, said, “I think the left and Socialism in Europe still have work to do; they have a raison d'être, and they will have to rely more on environment issues.” Combined with continuing efforts to reduce income disparity, he said, “going green” may give the left more life.
Mr. Judt argues that European Socialists need a new message — how to reform capitalism, “recognizing the centrality of economic interest while displacing it from its throne as the only way of talking about politics.”
European Socialists need “to think a lot harder about what the state can and can't do in the 21st century,” he said.
Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don't think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that's bad news.”
from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2009-Oct-4, by Anne Jolis:
How the EU Got the Irish to 'Yes'
Too bad the rest of Europe's voters don't have a say.DUBLIN—Ladbrokes in downtown Dublin was paying one to 33 that Irish voters would approve Europe's Lisbon Treaty, against eight to one that they would strike it down. For non-gamblers, that means the betting chain thought the EU charter was a favorite to win—by a lot.
Two doors down, patrons of the Sackville Lounge turned away from televised horse races to reveal why. After Irish voters spurned the treaty in a referendum last year, the European Commission—the EU's unelected legislative, regulatory and executive branch whose power would be cemented under the treaty—left little to chance this time around. Here is how Brussels did it:
1. Don't let a good crisis go to waste: Playing to voter apathy backfired in Ireland last year, but in the fall of 2009 a much more powerful tool presented itself for the Commission and its Dublin backers: fear. Specifically, fear of economic isolation.
An Irish Times reporter asked Commission President José Manuel Barroso at a victory press conference on Saturday about allegations of fear mongering. Mr. Barroso was all innocence: "Scare tactics? I don't know what you mean by that."
Perhaps Mr. Barroso forgot the interview he gave to the Irish Times two weeks ago, where he seemed concerned that "some people"—still unnamed—had asked him whether Ireland would leave the EU, adding that "For investor confidence, it is important that there is certainty about the future of Ireland in the EU." So while Mr. Barroso knew Ireland could reject Lisbon without risking full EU and euro membership, he calculated that in an era of 12.6% Irish unemployment, stoking nerves over capital flight would have a big impact.
That message was clear enough to Ruairí Brennan, a 24-year-old student who explained his Yes vote to me over ale at the Sackville. "We have no money, that's what it comes down to," he said. "If we go against them, they'll go against us."
He produced a pamphlet from Ireland For Europe, a coalition of Yes-ite business and civic leaders. The leaflet states that the EU has invested more than €70 billion in Ireland. Mr. Barroso gave the Irish a well-timed reminder of such largesse last month, when he announced €14.8 million to help laid-off Irish workers. It's true that Ireland received €566 million more from EU coffers last year than it contributed, but this difference accounted for only 0.36% of Ireland's gross national income, by the Commission's own figures—hardly the lynchpin of the health and wealth of the Celtic Tiger.
The pamphlet also echoes the Yes campaign's claim that approval of the treaty will mean jobs. But Lisbon's promise that a reformed EU will be "aiming at full employment" is no guarantee that Mr. Brennan will graduate to a host of job offers. The best hope for that happy prospect is, rather, his own hard work and Ireland's own pro-growth tax policies—which Lisbon could give other EU countries the power to thwart. No question, the monetary discipline that came with Ireland's adoption of the euro will also brighten Mr. Brennan's future, but contrary to Mr. Barroso's insinuations, Mr. Brennan would not have been risking this had he voted No.
2. Activate the herd mentality: Alongside the economic threats, Irish voters were subjected to the even more vague minacity that Ireland would somehow be shunned by the rest of the bloc. After the Republic rejected the treaty last year, Brussels mandarins ignited the rumor that a two-tier Europe could be the solution. Though such isolation within the EU is impossible, the rumors stuck, cemented by Yes campaign posters telling voters to say "Yes to Europe," rather than to the 294-page document on offer.
"We wouldn't have the same authority, we'd be out on the fringes," said Hugh McGinn, a teetotaling taxi driver, when asked what arguments had most swayed his Yes vote.
Such arguments are incorrect, but one can forgive Mr. McGinn for believing them. The official "Statement for the Information of Voters," prescribed by Ireland's Oireachtas (or Parliament) and distributed to voters and posted at polling stations, opened by saying a Yes vote would "(a) affirm Ireland's commitment to the European Union" and "(b) enable Ireland to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon and to be a member of the European Union established by that Treaty."
So much for informed democracy. Ireland's "commitment" to the existing EU was not up for a vote, and without Irish ratification there would have been no reformed EU for Ireland to be, or not be, a member of.
But the contrary point was central to the peer pressure targeting Ireland: That if Ireland voted no, it would spoil reforms for the rest of Europe's 500 million citizens, as if they too had been given a say in the matter (they hadn't). This awkward position of serving as proxies for democracy for half a billion people weighed on the minds of Irish voters. At the Sackville, 19-year-old student Shane Gaynor asserted that his Yes vote was as much for Europe as for Ireland. "After all Europe has given us, it's time to give something back," he said.
Lauren Bacon, also a student and also 19, saw it differently. "We're the only country that even got a vote on this. We shouldn't throw away what other countries didn't even have."
3. Move the finish line: Perhaps the single greatest factor determining the outcome of Friday's referendum was that it was held at all. Democracy means adhering to the will of the majority of the day. Do-overs and give-backs not only mock the voting process, they convince many that going to the polls is an exercise in futility. This was the case for many, who told me they had voted against the treaty last year but hadn't bothered on Friday.
"I'm not voting, I voted No last time," said Shane Masterson, a 22-year-old builder outside the Sackville. "I wasted dear, valuable time waiting in line, and they threw it away. They're going to keep asking until they get their way, so what's the point? We chose to speak and they chose to ignore." They won't now of course—Brussels has the answer it wants.
There remains some hope for those who believe Europe deserves a better treaty. Senators in the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus has yet to sign the document, have filed an eleventh hour challenge to Lisbon in the country's Constitutional Court. Depending on how long the court takes to issue a verdict, the move could buy time for British Conservative leader David Cameron to make good on his promise, repeated on Saturday, that if his party wins general elections next year before the treaty is ratified by all EU countries, they will hold a British referendum.
If so, Mr. Cameron should take note of the tactics employed by Mr. Barroso & Co. As any Irish bookie would tell him, "democracy" in the hands of an unelected central bureaucracy is not a safe bet.
from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2009-Apr-30:
Mayday for Capitalism
Amid a gloomy economy, Europe could see a summer of rage.May Day in Berlin has been marred by "anticapitalist" violence for more than two decades now. Given the current financial crisis, tomorrow's protests could set a sad new record.
"We explicitly want social unrest and will do everything to make sure it happens," is how the organizers of the "Revolutionary May 1 Demonstration" put it to the Spiegel Online. More than 20 protests are planned in Germany's capital under such mottos as "Capitalism Is Crisis and War -- For the Social Revolution" and "Burn, Capitalism, Burn." This is not just a figure of speech -- more than 70 cars, mainly up-market models, have already been torched in Berlin since January.
The fear that rising unemployment may spark social unrest is not confined to Germany. All of Europe could see a summer of rage. There already have been wildcat strikes against foreign workers in Britain, riots in Greece and more than 150,000 workers demonstrating in Ireland. In Iceland, Latvia and Hungary, street protests helped bring down governments.
Millions have marched in France. There is a "revolutionary risk," former center-right Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin warned this month. Tomorrow's May Day will see the third nationwide protests in as many months against President Nicolas Sarkozy's handling of the economic crisis. Over the past few weeks, French workers facing layoffs have pioneered a new negotiating tactic called "bossnappings," in which managers are taken captive to extract better compensation packages.
Political extremists tend to thrive in economic misery, a troubling prospect as general elections are scheduled this year in Germany, Norway, Bulgaria and Lithuania. The NPD, a German nationalist party, is organizing its own May Day protest tomorrow under the motto of "Fight and Work For Ever." Left-wing radicals are outraged, arguing on the Web site "antifa.de" that "May 1 belongs to us, not the NPD!"
It may shock these self-declared antifascists to learn that it was Hitler who introduced the first of May as a public holiday in Germany. What started as a movement to advance workers' rights was quickly usurped by both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. A return of fascism or communism in Europe as a result of the financial crisis is unlikely. But it would be unfortunate enough if the fear of social unrest were to lead to wrong-headed policies that will only prolong this crisis.
People are understandably scared by the rapid economic collapse. But the failed policies of the past of expanding the welfare system, raising taxes and more government intervention won't create jobs.
To calm the fury, it would help to start an honest debate about the real roots of the crisis. Unfortunately, the popular myth of a failure of free markets is easier told than the more complex truth: a failure to let free markets properly work. Few in Europe are aware of the role of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in spawning the global credit mania or the central role the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the U.S. subprime mortgage debacle.
Nor is there much talk in Europe about its own policy blunders. Take Germany. According to a list compiled by the country's financial service regulator and leaked to the press this week, German banks are sitting on illiquid and toxic assets of €816 billion. Almost half of this waste is held by the state-owned Landesbanken. This has yet to spark a debate in Germany about the wisdom of government-run businesses.
In this current crisis it is easy to forget that even before the global credit squeeze Europe faced structural problems -- overstretched pay-as-you-go pension systems, low productivity, high youth and immigrant unemployment, to name only a few. The crisis has made the free-market polices that could solve these problems -- such as cutting labor costs and market deregulation -- more urgent and less popular at the same time.
At tomorrow's May Day events we can expect the usual anticapitalist rhetoric to fan the flames of discontent. Making a strong case for reforms, though, would be truly in workers' interests.
from the Daily Mail of London, 2008-Sep-20, by Peter Hitchens:
Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead
I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.
In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.
Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.
What's more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.
Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.
Now it's indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?
The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.
Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.
And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?
Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.
It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.
It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.
Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.
Now that's over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.
The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?
Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party's similar death.
They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.
He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.
But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.
The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.
IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.
He became leader because none of the supposed `big beasts' of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.
And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron's pocket.
What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.
The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the `Centre-Left' establishment.
It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.
It was made easier because the `Centre-Left' media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.
He isn't. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.
After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.
So nobody did. And he was `elected' unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.
Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.
The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.
The `Centre-Left' establishment, Britain's permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.
Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.
He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the `Centre-Left' media.
Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.
Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the `Centre-Left' media decided it was not a scandal.
The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment's caretaker, was also achieved by the `Centre-Left' media.
They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.
You'll notice that it is the same people, that `Centre-Left' combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.
The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions.
Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.
The only lasting deep change in Labour policy since the Eighties has been the party's lobotomised conversion to support for the EU and globalism in general.
Nationalisation hadn't mattered for years, the old industrial unions were as dead as the industries they helped to ruin, and the H-Bomb wasn't an issue any more.
Labour's real `Clause Four' - its bilious hatred of selective state schools - remains untouched. What's more, it has now been openly adopted by the Tories as well.
The rule nowadays is that you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the `Centre-Left' media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.
That elite speaks for the 1968 generation which fanned out in the Seventies into the civil service, education, entertainment, the law, the arts, rock music and - above all - the media.
We no longer have elections where two evenly matched parties go into a fair contest with competing ideas and it is over only when the last vote is counted.
Instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.
And the winner is always the `Centre-Left', which claims to be moderate but is in fact a swirling cauldron of wild Sixties Leftism - anti-British, anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-education and pro-crime.
But if you dare to oppose this stuff, they'll call you an extremist.
British democracy, as we used to know it, is quite dead. It just needs to have a new funeral every few years.
from City Journal, 2009-Spring, by Bruce Bawer:
Heirs to Fortuyn?
Muslim immigration and sclerotic welfare states push Europe right (sort of).When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born that would mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion that social-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalist United States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to a European academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues’ sneering over cocktails about his nation’s shame du jour—Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment, or health care. For much of the American Left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia.
This rosy view was never accurate, of course. Europe’s socialized health care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waiting lists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the Left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.
The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.
Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to sharia. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 Sunday Telegraph poll, for example, showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain, 14 percent approved of attacks on Danish embassies in retribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13 percent supported violence against those who insulted Islam, and 20 percent sympathized with the July 2005 London bombers.
Too often, such attitudes find their way into practice. Ubiquitous youth gangs, contemptuous of infidels, have made European cities increasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews, and gays. In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population. In 2005, 82 percent of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups, the majority of them Muslims.
Non-Muslims aren’t the only targets of Muslim violence. A mountain of evidence suggests that the rates of domestic abuse in these enclaves are astronomical. In Germany, reports Der Spiegel, “a disproportionately high percentage of women who flee to women’s shelters are Muslim”; in 2006, 56 percent of the women at Norwegian shelters were of foreign origin; Deborah Scroggins wrote in The Nation in 2005 that “Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, but they account for more than half the women in battered women’s shelters.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch advocate for democracy and women’s rights, would no doubt say far more than half: when she was working with women in Dutch shelters, she writes, “there were hardly any white women” in them, “only women from Morocco, from Turkey, from Afghanistan—Muslim countries—alongside some Hindu women from Surinam.” When she and filmmaker Theo van Gogh tried to highlight the mistreatment of women under Islam in the 2004 film Submission: Part I, he was killed by a young Muslim extremist.
More and more Western Europeans, recognizing the threat to their safety and way of life, have turned their backs on the establishment, which has done little or nothing to address these problems, and begun voting for parties—some relatively new, and all considered right-wing—that have dared to speak up about them. One measure of the dimensions of this shift: owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who ten years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly two-to-one margin.
The other major reason for the turn against the Left is economic. Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety net that seems increasingly not worth the price. These taxes have slowed economic growth. Timbro’s Johnny Munkhammar noted in 2005 that Sweden, for instance, which in the first half of the twentieth century had the world’s second-highest growth rate, had since fallen to number 14, owing to enormous tax hikes.
Government revenues in Western Europe go largely to support the unemployed, thus discouraging work. Over the last decade or so, the overall unemployment rate in the EU 15—that is, Western Europe—has hovered at about 2.5 to 3 points higher than in the United States. In France and Germany, it has ascended into the double digits (and that was before the global financial crisis that began in 2008). Western Europe’s rate of long-term unemployment has consistently been several times higher than America’s, denoting the presence of a sizable minority either permanently jobless or working off the books, often for family businesses, while collecting unemployment benefits.
These two factors—immigration and the economy—are intimately connected. For while some immigrant groups in Europe, such as Hindus and East Asians, enjoy relatively low unemployment rates and healthy incomes, the largest immigrant group, Muslims, has become such a burden that governments have made extensive cutbacks in public services in order to keep up with welfare payments—closing clinics and emergency rooms, reducing staff in hospitals, cutting police and military spending, eliminating course offerings at public universities, and so on. According to a report issued last year by the think tank Contribuables Associés, immigration reduces France’s economic growth by two-thirds. In 2002, economist Lars Jansson estimated that immigration cost Swedish taxpayers about $27 billion annually and that fully 74 percent of immigrant-group members in Sweden lived off the taxpayers. And in 2006, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise warned that Norway’s petroleum fund—which contains the massive profits from North Sea oil that have made the nation rich—could wind up drained to cover outlays to immigrants. (This in a country whose roads, as a report last year indicated, are in worse shape than Albania’s.)
The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.
The November 2001 general election in Denmark is the most decisive—and successful—rejection so far of a Western European left-wing establishment. Alarmed by a widely publicized study showing that their country would have a Muslim majority within 60 years if immigration rates didn’t change, Danish voters sent the Social Democrats down to defeat for the first time since 1924. The new Liberal-Conservative governing coalition, which voters returned to power in 2005, has introduced the continent’s most sweeping immigration and integration reforms, including rules designed to thwart the near-universal practice in Europe’s Muslim communities of marrying one’s children off to cousins abroad so that they, too, may immigrate to the West. As a result, the flow of new Muslim arrivals has decreased significantly, allowing the government to focus resources on the immense challenge of trying to integrate Muslims already living in Denmark. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen also defended free speech strongly during the 2006 Mohammed cartoon crisis, standing firm while Muslims around the world raged against Denmark and Western leaders begged him to back down.
The rightward shifts in Europe most widely reported in the U.S. have been those in Germany, where Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, and in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy took over the presidency in 2007. Those developments, as well as the third term that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi won in 2008, were grounded largely in public recognition of the need for economic liberalization. By French standards, Sarkozy’s campaign rhetoric was nothing less than stunning: arguing that “the revolution of 1968”—a sacred event for the left-wing French establishment—had not liberated France but “brought us into moral decline,” Sarkozy insisted that if the French wanted growth, they needed to spend less time in cafés and more on the job.
In brave little Denmark’s backyard, two more countries have moved to the right. In Norway, the Progress Party—which the political and media establishment has smeared for a generation as racist and fiscally unserious—now rivals the Labor Party, architect of the country’s welfare state, thanks to voter concerns about immigration and public services. Though the financial crisis had caused support for the Progress Party to slip a bit, recent Muslim riots and debates about hijab have sent poll numbers skyward again, and the party seems a good bet to come out on top in next September’s parliamentary elections—though it will be in trouble if, as appears likely, other right-of-center parties refuse to join a Progress Party–led coalition. And in Sweden, perhaps the ultimate symbol of social democracy, voters motivated largely by concerns over unemployment and other economic issues unseated the long-powerful Social Democratic Party in 2006. In its place they installed a center-right coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderates, who promised to help businesses and lower taxes.
But demonstrating a distinctively European species of schizophrenia, many on both the right and the left, while acknowledging the need for welfare-state reorganization, have ultimately resisted it—as if the philosophical leap required were simply too great. In Western Europe, after all, even the mainstream Right tends to be statist. “The concept of the cradle-to-grave welfare state is so deeply embedded in the Danish psyche that even the conservatives don’t dare touch it,” noted NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli in 2006. Ivo H. Daalder made the same point in a 2007 Brookings Institution report, writing that “when one talks about the right in Europe, you are talking about a very state interventionist political class that still believes that the government has a fundamental role in guiding how the economy is supposed to be run.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Europe’s new leaders have made relatively modest economic changes. True, Sarkozy has raised state employees’ retirement age (precipitating a transport strike) and ended France’s 35-hour workweek. But from the start, Social Democrats in Germany, whom Merkel’s slim margin of victory forced her to accept as coalition partners, have limited her ability to implement serious economic reforms. In April 2008, Judy Dempsey noted in the International Herald Tribune not only that the coalition had “run its course” but that Merkel herself had been “forced to move leftward,” hiking pensions and “rolling back radical labor reforms, ironically introduced by her Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, which were designed to bring older people back to work by reducing social welfare payments.” And with the onset of the economic crisis, notes German author Henryk Broder, “there is even an ongoing discussion about Enteignung [expropriation] and Verstaatlichung [nationalization], which was unthinkable a year ago.”
As for Sweden, shortly after the 2006 victory, BusinessWeek writers Stanley Reed and Ariane Sains paraphrased Reinfeldt as saying that his “idea isn’t to dismantle the cherished Swedish welfare state. . . . That would be too controversial.” Reinfeldt’s one major innovation has been a “partially successful” effort “to force people off the welfare rolls and into the labor market,” University of Lund social thinker Jonathan Friedman tells me. Reinfeldt’s economic plan has also involved increased privatization, somewhat lower taxes, and encouragement of entrepreneurship—all policies, as Friedman notes, “that were started by the previous government.”
Meanwhile, with the notable exception of Denmark, the new nonsocialist governments have left their predecessors’ disastrous immigration and integration policies almost entirely intact. Sarkozy’s defiant campaign rhetoric about Muslim rioters in the suburbs raised hopes for major change. But though he announced last July that illegal immigration would be a major focus during France’s EU presidency, he has done little even about legal immigration, most of which, in Western Europe, involves the importation of new spouses in arranged, usually forced, marriages. Sarkozy seems to believe that job creation and other economic measures will resolve France’s colossal integration challenges.
Merkel, meanwhile, shone briefly when she insisted that the Deutsche Oper proceed with a 2006 production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that Muslim leaders condemned as offensive. But the heavily hyped “national integration plan” that she introduced the following year rested on such half-measures as an increase in the number of government-sponsored German classes, an effort to encourage immigrants to play sports, and (incredibly) a program that addressed wife-beating—permitted by the Koran and extremely common in Muslim communities—by offering advice on the Internet. Merkel actually described these pathetic gestures as a “milestone”; Broder, more accurately, calls them “make-believe action,” another way to avoid conflicts in her coalition.
In Sweden, says Friedman, Reinfeldt has pursued “a variant of politics as usual” on immigration and integration. Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, insists that Swedish efforts to encourage employment “will undoubtedly prove ineffective over the long haul” because “the fundamental problem is demographics. Sweden remains Europe’s main importer of Muslim immigrants who are unwilling to assimilate and whose imams order them to detest Swedish culture. So long as the current government is unwilling to tackle this basic problem, everything else will be for naught.”
Sarkozy has undertaken one high-profile initiative, which seems disastrously ill-conceived in a uniquely Gallic way: developing closer, more formal ties between France and the Arab countries from which it receives most of its immigrants. At one point, he even spoke of a “Mediterranean Union.” Haaretz writer Michalis Firillas summed up Sarkozy’s plan tidily in January 2008: “For some, his Mediterranean Union is a containment policy. For others it is neocolonial. But there is also a sense that Sarkozy is betting on French grandeur, that aura of greatness, to bridge the disparate Mediterranean with a new and serious political body. Unfortunately, he may find that there are others with similar visions of grandeur, from Ankara to Cairo, from Jerusalem to Tangiers, who have their own Mediterranean visions.” Indeed, Sarkozy’s scheme appears to be a continuation of his left-wing predecessors’ efforts to bring the Arab world under French influence—efforts that ended up subsidizing the colonization of French suburbs by Arabs who now consider them part of the House of Islam.
Not only has Europe’s move to the right not always had concrete results; it also hasn’t been an across-the-board phenomenon. In Britain, the Tories seem poised to resume power after Labour’s long, slow decline. Yet the ideological gap between the parties has narrowed so much in recent years, and the leadership vacuum is so pronounced, that it’s difficult to imagine a Tory takeover’s having an impact remotely comparable with that of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election. On the contrary, conservative columnist Peter Hitchens recently charged that nowadays “you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.” That elite, alas—as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of sharia in parts of Britain—is bent on appeasing fundamentalist Islam.
And Spain, in a move widely seen as capitulating to Islamists, responded to the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid by voting for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist Party, which had vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately. Zapatero narrowly won reelection last year. As libertarian columnist Antonio Golmar explains, the centrist consensus established after King Juan Carlos’s introduction of democracy in the seventies has been shattered by Zapatero’s hard-left initiatives. These include the Historical Memory Law—which portrays leftist mass murderers during the Spanish civil war as heroic freedom fighters, while stigmatizing many of their innocent victims as fascists—and the introduction in all schools of “citizenship” classes that teach scorn for capitalism and representative democracy.
In response, some Spaniards have lurched rightward toward the national-Catholic, proto-fascist ideology of Franco’s time and become increasingly vocal within the conservative Partido Popular. Consequently, says Golmar, “moderates in Spain are trapped between a far-left administration and their cronies and the revival of the extreme right disguised in conservative and even libertarian clothing.” While America struggles to move beyond the antagonisms of the 1960s, then, Spain has entered an ideological battlefield reminiscent of the years preceding its civil war of the late thirties. There seems little room for those who loathe both the neo-Marxists and the neoreactionaries.
The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
For establishment politicians, journalists, and academics, these parties serve an exceedingly useful purpose: their existence makes it easy to tar any nonsocialist party with the fascist brush—labeling it racist and xenophobic, equating its leaders with the likes of Le Pen and Haider, and stigmatizing its supporters. No party in Europe has been subjected to more unfair attacks than Norway’s Progress Party, whose extraordinary electoral successes have outraged that country’s socialist elite. Like other parties on what we may call Europe’s respectable right, the Progress Party has expressly distanced itself from parties like the National Front and Vlaams Belang. Yet despite these disavowals, American media have routinely echoed the leftist establishment’s unjust calumnies.
A seminal example was a March 2002 New York Times article by Marlise Simons about Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who, according to the article’s headline, was proudly gay, and marching the dutch to the right. Though Simons acknowledged that Fortuyn criticized Islam because it offered “no equality for men and women and because . . . the imams here preach in offensive terms about gays,” she nonetheless echoed the Dutch establishment’s characterization of him as a menace to Dutch values, making sure to mention that he had been widely compared with Mussolini and Haider. A few weeks later, Fortuyn was murdered by an environmental fanatic taken in by similar claptrap.
The same kind of incendiary rhetoric that Dutch journalists used against Fortuyn can now be seen in American left-wing coverage of any nonsocialist European party or politician. Typical was Gary Younge’s 2007 piece in The Nation: in europe, it’s the old right that’s full of hate. According to Younge, “the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamofascism’ . . . but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities.” This was nonsense on a breathtaking scale: though the rise of parties like the BNP is indeed distressing, the truth remains that for every act of anti-Muslim violence in Europe, there are—to make an exceedingly conservative guess—100 acts of Muslim-on-infidel violence.
Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined.
The final question, then, is whether the Western European Left’s condescension toward America, and the American Left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama. Stir in the international financial crisis, which will almost certainly cause a socioeconomic upheaval of untold dimensions in both hemispheres, and it seems reasonable to expect that the old pattern may be broken for good. Meaning that American professors will have a far less stressful time of it at European cocktail parties—at least until sharia comes along and forbids cocktails entirely.
Bruce Bawer is the author of the upcoming Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. He blogs at brucebawer.com.
from the Washington Times, 2009-May-25, by Iason Athanasiadis:
Muslim anger ignites violent new response
Far-right-wing vigilantes burned a makeshift mosque in Athens over the weekend after Muslim immigrants in Athens attacked police with rocks and bottles over an incident in which a policeman reportedly defaced a Koran.
Although Greece has a history of political violence from radical leftists and anarchists, sectarian bloodletting represents an entirely modern phenomenon.
The latest incident began with a policeman who made an identification spot check on an immigrant from Iraq. When word spread that the policeman had ripped and stomped on the suspect's Koran, things got ugly.
Chanting "God is great" and waving leather-bound copies of Islam's holy book, about 1,000 Muslim immigrants demonstrated with a march on Parliament Friday.
When the crowd dwindled to about 300, remaining protesters began throwing rocks and bottles at police and smashing windows at a luxury hotel in central Syntagma Square, according to an account by the Associated Press.
Far-right-wing vigilantes replied over the weekend by setting fire to a Muslim prayer hall. Taken together, the incidents represent some of the worst sectarian violence witnessed in modern Greece.
A spokesman for the Greek police claimed that the policeman did not rip up a Koran, but a folded and glued sheet of paper containing unidentifiable writing in Arabic.
"The isolated and under-inquiry incident does not excuse rioting by individuals committed to damaging citizens property and seriously disturbing the citys social and economic life," said Christos Markogiannakis, the deputy interior minister. "The state will not permit such radical behavior."
Successive scandals have rocked the countrys beleaguered police force since a policeman fatally shot a teenage schoolboy in December, sparking two weeks of nationwide riots. Those riots, however, were not sectarian-based.
Unrest in Greece's community of Muslim immigrants is something new, analysts say.
"For so many years, they've been scared and defensive," said Takis Geros, a lecturer of anthropology of the Middle East at Panteion University. "To suddenly come out in broad daylight with their faces exposed and trash 75 cars indicates a massive change in attitude."
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Muslim Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia cross into Greece illegally every year from neighboring Turkey or by sea.
Social tensions have risen in recent years as the racial and religious makeup of this formerly homogeneous Greek Orthodox Christian country shifted to a multiethnic, multireligious society.
"Sometimes the humiliation is such that were made to feel by Greeks as if were not human beings," said Ejazulhaq Syed, a representative of the Pakistani community in Athens who has lived in Greece for 35 years. "But the violence [against us] had nothing to do with religion but with the bad economic situation and having too many foreigners in Greece."
Today, an estimated 1 million of Greeces 11 million people are foreign, and second-generation immigrant children are exposed to exclusionary practices by the educational system and labor market.
Attacks on foreigners by vigilante groups were on the rise before the Saturday incident, in which suspected rightists set the makeshift mosque on fire in the St. Panteleimon district of Athens, which is heavily populated by immigrants.
Five Bangladeshi nationals were reportedly injured.
Though legislation has been passed through the Greek Parliament to allow for the building of a mosque for Athens estimated 400,000 Muslim residents, construction has yet to begin.
Muslims worship in unofficial prayer spaces in rented apartments and stores.
from Commentary, 2009-May, by Mark Steyn:
Israel Today, the West Tomorrow
On Holocaust Memorial Day 2008, a group of just under 100 people—Londoners and a few visitors —took a guided tour of the old Jewish East End. They visited, among other sites of interest, the birthplace of my old chum Lionel Bart, the author of Oliver! Three generations of schoolchildren have grown up singing Bart’s lyric:
Consider yourself
At ’ome!
Consider yourself
One of the family!
Those few dozen London Jews considered themselves at ’ome. But they weren’t. Not any more. The tour was abruptly terminated when the group was pelted with stones, thrown by “youths”—or to be slightly less evasive, in the current euphemism of Fleet Street, “Asian” youths. “If you go any further, you’ll die,” they shouted, in between the flying rubble.
A New Yorker who had just moved to Britain to start a job at the Metropolitan University had her head cut open and had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel, causing her to miss the Holocaust Day “interfaith memorial service” at the East London Central Synagogue. Her friend, Eric Litwack from Canada, was also struck but did not require stitches. But if you hadn’t recently landed at Heathrow, it wasn’t that big a deal, not these days: Nobody was killed or permanently disfigured. And given the number of Jewish community events that now require security, perhaps Her Majesty’s Constabulary was right and these Londoners walking the streets of their own city would have been better advised to do so behind a police escort.
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A European Holocaust Memorial Day on which Jews are stoned sounds like a parody of the old joke that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. According to a 2005 poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 percent of Germans “are sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews”—which is a cheerfully straightforward way of putting it. Nevertheless, when it comes to “harping on,” these days it’s the Jews who are mostly on the receiving end. While we’re reprising old gags, here’s one a reader reminded me of a couple of years ago, during Israel’s famously “disproportionate” incursion into Lebanon: One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.
“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”
“Israel, of course.”
Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.
“Israel is unfashionable,” a Continental foreign minister said to me a decade back. “But maybe Israel will change, and then fashions will change.” Fashions do change. But however Israel changes, this fashion won’t. The shift of most (non-American) Western opinion against the Jewish state that began in the 1970s was, as my Continental politician had it, simply a reflection of casting: Israel was no longer the underdog but the overdog, and why would that appeal to a post-war polytechnic Euro Left unburdened by Holocaust guilt?
Fair enough. Fashions change. But the new Judenhass is not a fashion, simply a stark reality that will metastasize in the years ahead and leave Israel isolated in the international “community” in ways that will make the first decade of this century seem like the good old days.
A few months after the curtailed Holocaust Day tour, I found myself in that particular corner of Tower Hamlets for the first time in years. Specifically, on Cable Street—the scene of a famous battle in 1936, when Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, in a crude exercise of political muscle, determined to march through the heart of Jewish East London. They were turned back by a mob of local Jews, Irish Catholic dockers, and Communist agitators, all standing under the Spanish Civil War slogan: “No Pasaran.” They shall not pass.
From “No Pasaran” to “If you go any further, you’ll die” is a story not primarily of anti-Semitism but of unprecedented demographic transformation. Beyond the fashionable “anti-Zionism” of the Euro Left is a starker reality: The demographic energy not just in Lionel Bart’s East End but in almost every Western European country is “Asian.” Which is to say, Muslim. A recent government statistical survey reported that the United Kingdom’s Muslim population is increasing ten times faster than the general population. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and many other Continental cities from Scandinavia to the Côte d’Azur will reach majority Muslim status in the next few years.
Brussels has a Socialist mayor, which isn’t that surprising, but he presides over a caucus a majority of whose members are Muslim, which might yet surprise those who think we’re dealing with some slow, gradual, way-off-in-the-future process here. But so goes Christendom at the dawn of the third millennium: the ruling party of the capital city of the European Union is mostly Muslim.
There are generally two responses to this trend: The first is that it’s like a cast change in Cats or, perhaps more precisely, David Merrick’s all-black production of Hello, Dolly! Carol Channing and her pasty prancing waiters are replaced by Pearl Bailey and her ebony chorus, but otherwise the show is unchanged. Same set, same words, same arrangements: France will still be France, Germany Germany, Belgium Belgium.
The second response is that the Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction—from British banks’ abolition of children’s “piggy banks” to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.
Fifty-nine percent? What the hell’s wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—i.e., the “moderate” Arab world—79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven’t re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen.
To be sure, there are occasional arcane points of dispute: one recalls, in the wake of the July 7 bombings, the then London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s somewhat tortured attempts to explain why blowing up buses in Tel Aviv is entirely legitimate whereas blowing up buses in Bloomsbury is not. Yet these are minimal bumps on a smooth glide path: The more Europe’s Muslim population grows, the more restive and disassimilated it becomes, the more enthusiastically the establishment embraces “anti-Zionism,” as if the sinister Jewess is the last virgin left to toss in the volcano—which, given the 13-year old “chavs” and “slappers” face down in pools of their own vomit in most British shopping centers of a Friday afternoon, may indeed be the case. For today’s Jews, unlike on Cable Street in 1936, there are no Catholic dockworkers or Communist agitators to stand shoulder to shoulder. In post-Christian Europe, there aren’t a lot of the former (practicing Catholics or practicing dockers), and as for the intellectual Left, it’s more enthusiastic in its support of Hamas than many Gazans.
To which there are many Israelis who would brusquely reply: So what? Pity the poor Jew who has ever relied on European “friends.” Yet there is a difference of scale between the well-established faculty-lounge disdain for “Israeli apartheid” and a mass psychosis so universal it’s part of the air you breathe. For a glimpse of the future, consider the (for the moment) bizarre circumstances of the recent Davis Cup First Round matches in Sweden. They had been scheduled long ago to be played in the Baltiska Hallen stadium in Malmo. Who knew which team the Swedes would draw? Could have been Chile, could have been Serbia. Alas, it was Israel.
Malmo is Sweden’s most Muslim city, and citing security concerns, the local council ordered the three days of tennis to be played behind closed doors. Imagine being Amir Hadad and Andy Ram, the Israeli doubles players, or Simon Aspelin and Robert Lindstedt, the Swedes. This was supposed to be their big day. But the vast stadium is empty, except for a few sports reporters and team officials. And just outside the perimeter up to 10,000 demonstrators are chanting, “Stop the match!” and maybe, a little deeper into the throng, they’re shouting, “We want to kill all Jews worldwide” (as demonstrators in Copenhagen, just across the water, declared just a few weeks earlier). Did Aspelin and Lindstedt wonder why they couldn’t have drawn some less controversial team, like Zimbabwe or Sudan? By all accounts, it was a fine match, thrilling and graceful, with good sportsmanship on both sides. Surely, such splendid tennis could have won over the mob, and newspapers would have reported that by the end of the match the Israeli players had the crowd with them all the way. But they shook ’em off at Helsingborg.
Do you remember the “road map” summit held in Jordan just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq? It seemed a big deal at the time: The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. president, all the A-list dictators of the Arab League. Inside the swank resort, it was all very collegial, smiles and handshakes. Outside, flags fluttered—Jordan’s, America’s, Saudi Arabia’s, Egypt’s, Palestine’s. But not Israel’s. King Abdullah of Jordan had concluded it would be too provocative to advertise the Zionist Entity’s presence on Jordanian soil even at a summit supposedly boasting they were all on the same page. Malmo’s tennis match observed the same conventions: I’m sure the Swedish tennis wallahs were very gracious hosts behind the walls of the stockade, and the unmarked car to the airport was top of the line. How smoothly the furtive maneuvers of the Middle East transfer to the wider world.
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When Western governments are as reluctant as King Abdullah to fly the Star of David, those among the citizenry who choose to do so have a hard time. In Britain in January, while “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators were permitted to dress up as hook-nosed Jews drinking the blood of Arab babies, the police ordered counter-protesters to put away their Israeli flags. In Alberta, in the heart of Calgary’s Jewish neighborhood, the flag of Hizballah (supposedly a proscribed terrorist organization) was proudly waved by demonstrators, but one solitary Israeli flag was deemed a threat to the Queen’s peace and officers told the brave fellow holding it to put it away or be arrested for “inciting public disorder.” In Germany, a student in Duisburg put the Star of David in the window of an upstairs apartment on the day of a march by the Islamist group Milli Görüs, only to have the cops smash his door down and remove the flag. He’s now trying to get the police to pay for a new door. Ah, those Jews. It’s always about money, isn’t it?
Peter, the student in Duisberg, says he likes to display the Israeli flag because anti-Semitism in Europe is worse than at any other time since the Second World War. Which is true. But, if you look at it from the authorities’ point of view, it’s not about Jew-hatred; it’s a simple numbers game. If a statistically insignificant Jewish population gets upset, big deal. If the far larger Muslim population—and, in some French cities, the youth population (i.e., the demographic that riots) is already pushing 50 percent—you have a serious public-order threat on your hands. We’re beyond the anti-Semitic and into the ad hoc utilitarian: The King Abdullah approach will seem like the sensible way to avoid trouble. To modify the UN joke: Whom won’t we play? Israel, of course. Not in public.
One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, a group wearing “BOYCOTT ISRAEL” T-shirts entered a French branch of Carrefour, the world’s largest supermarket chain, and announced themselves. They then systematically advanced down every aisle examining every product, seizing all the items made in Israel and piling them into carts to take away and destroy. Judging from the video they made, the protesters were mostly Muslim immigrants and a few French leftists. But more relevant was the passivity of everyone else in the store, both staff and shoppers, all of whom stood idly by as private property was ransacked and smashed, and many of whom when invited to comment expressed support for the destruction. “South Africa started to shake once all countries started to boycott their products,” one elderly lady customer said. “So what you’re doing, I find it good.”
Others may find Germany in the ‘30s the more instructive comparison. “It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities,” the Canadian public intellectual George Jonas recently wrote. “Don’t count heads; count decibels. All entities—the United States, the Western world, the Arab street—have prevailing moods, and it’s prevailing moods that define aggregates at any given time.” Last December, in a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing power and wealth, Pakistani terrorists nevertheless found time to divert one-fifth of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If this was a territorial dispute over Kashmir, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Because Pakistani Islam has been in effect Arabized. Demographically, in Europe and elsewhere, Islam has the numbers. But ideologically, radical Islam has the decibels—in Turkey, in the Balkans, in Western Europe.
And the prevailing mood in much of the world makes Israel an easy sacrifice. Long before Muslims are a statistical majority, there will be three permanent members of the Security Council—Britain, France, Russia—for whom the accommodation of Islam is a domestic political imperative.
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On the heels of his call for the incorporation of Sharia within British law, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interview to the Muslim News praising Islam for making “a very significant contribution to getting a debate about religion into public life.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. The urge to look on the bright side of its own remorseless cultural retreat will intensify: Once Europeans have accepted a not entirely voluntary biculturalism, they will see no reason why Israel should not do the same, and they will embrace a one-state, one-man, one-vote solution for the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
The Muslim world has spent decades peddling the notion that the reason a vast oil-rich region stretching thousands of miles is politically deformed and mired in grim psychoses is all because of a tiny strip of turf barely wider than my New Hampshire township. It will make an ever more convenient scapegoat for the problems of a far vaster territory from the mountains of Morne to the Urals. There was a fair bit of this in the days after 9/11. As Richard Ingrams wrote on the following weekend in the London Observer: “Who will dare to damn Israel?”
Well, take a number and get in line. The dust had barely settled on the London Tube bombings before a reader named Derrick Green sent me a congratulatory e-mail: “I bet you Jewish supremacists think it is Christmas come early, don’t you? Incredibly, you are now going to get your own way even more than you did before, and the British people are going to be dragged into more wars for Israel.”
So it will go. British, European, and even American troops will withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bomb will go off in Madrid or Hamburg or Manchester, and there will be nothing left to blame except Israeli “disproportion.” For the remnants of European Jewry, the already discernible migration of French Jews to Quebec, Florida, and elsewhere will accelerate. There are about 150,000 Jews in London today—it’s the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category. By 2025, there will be Jews in Israel, and Jews in America, but not in many other places. Even as the legitimacy of a Jewish state is rejected, the Jewish diaspora—the Jewish presence in the wider world—will shrivel.
And then, to modify Richard Ingrams, who will dare not to damn Israel? There’ll still be a Holocaust Memorial Day, mainly for the pleasures it affords to chastise the new Nazis. As Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in 2005: “When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm—tattoo number A-25466—I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.” Jenin?
You can see why they’ll keep Holocaust Day on the calendar: In an age when politicians are indifferent or downright hostile to Israel’s “right to exist,” it’s useful to be able to say, “But some of my best photo-ops are Jewish.”
The joke about Mandatory Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land. But isn’t that Europe, too? And perhaps Russia and maybe Canada, a little ways down the line? Two cultures jostling within the same piece of real estate. Not long ago, I found myself watching the video of another “pro-Palestinian” protest in central London with the Metropolitan Police retreating up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly in the face of a mob hurling traffic cones and jeering, “Run, run, you cowards!” and “Allahu akbar!” You would think the deluded multi-culti progressives would understand: In the end, this isn’t about Gaza, this isn’t about the Middle East; it’s about them. It may be some consolation to an ever-lonelier Israel that, in one of history’s bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews.
from the Associated Press, 2008-Nov-24, by David Stringer:
UK PM taxes rich to help fund economic recovery
LONDON — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown set out plans Monday to raise an income tax rate for the first time in three decades, abandoning a pledge that had carried his Labour Party to power.
The plan: squeeze the rich to pay for measures aimed at helping families and small businesses through the financial downturn.
Treasury chief Alistair Darling said that by mid-2011 those people earning more than 150,000 pounds ($224,000) would pay a 45 percent income tax rate, up from 40 percent — the first increase since the mid-1970s.
Brown's predecessor as prime minister, Tony Blair, won office in 1997 with a promise not to raise the income tax. It was an important part of his effort to move the leftist party to the political center and have it embrace the business sector.
The pledge was repeated as Labour won successive elections in 2001 and 2005.
But Darling said Monday that Britain's top earners had seen their salaries double since 1996 and they must help balance a budget drained by a proposed a 20 billion pound ($30.2 billion) fiscal stimulus package aimed at pushing the country out of a 2009 recession.
"This higher rate of tax will only affect the top one per cent of incomes," Darling told lawmakers. Financial think tank the Institute of Fiscal Studies estimates about 400,000 people will pay the higher rate.
The Queen, Brown, senior financial executives and Britain's highly paid soccer players will be among those with higher tax bills. Brown earns 189,994 pounds ($287,000) a year.
"The fact that for the first time direct taxation on the very highly paid is to be raised is a hugely symbolic, and important practical, step," the leftist former London mayor Ken Livingstone wrote Monday on his Web site.
Reforms outlined by Darling are designed to help most low and middle income earners, a policy some read as an attempt to woo voters before an election.
Though Brown on Friday ruled out calling an election in the coming months, he must contest a national election before mid-2010, meaning Britons will have a chance to express themselves on the proposed 2011 tax hike.
The main opposition Conservative Party criticized the proposed tax increase.
"It is a precision-guided missile at the heart of a recovery," said Conservative lawmaker and economic spokesman George Osborne.
But the opposition said they would not pledge to scrap the tax increase if they won office. The Conservatives believe Brown hopes they'll commit to reversing the hike and then fight an election by casting his opponents as defenders of the rich.
from the Independent of London, 2008-Nov-28, by Ben Russell:
Cameron furious after senior Tory MP arrested
Shadow Immigration minister's premises searched over Home Office leaksA senior Conservative frontbencher was arrested yesterday in connection with leaks of information from the Home Office.
Damian Green, the shadow Immigration minister, was being questioned in a London police station last night after he was held on suspicion of "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office". He had not been charged with any offence last night.
Police searched Mr Green's Westminster and constituency offices as well as his home after he was arrested in Kent yesterday afternoon.
Senior Tory sources said the arrest was linked to a string of embarrassing revelations about the Home Office which have emerged in the press in recent months and came 10 days after the arrest of a "whistleblower".
It is understood that as many as nine counter-terrorism officers were involved in the operation, which provoked fury among the Conservative high command.
A senior Tory source said the party's leader David Cameron was "supportive and is angry about the way Damian Green has been treated" after he learnt about the arrest of his senior frontbencher.
One source described the arrest as "Stalinesque". He said: "It's quite clear that this must have been cleared at the very top of government."
Downing Street said Gordon Brown had been informed of the police operation after Mr Green's arrest.
A spokesman said: "The Prime Minister has been informed about it. It was the first he had heard about it. He did not have any knowledge until the police had acted. It's a matter for the police."
The allegations are understood to centre on four newspaper reports which have caused considerable embarrassment to ministers in recent months.
They include: the publication of a Whips' Office memo detailing Labour MPs expected to vote against plans to detain terror suspects for 42 days without charge; a report in November last year that the Home Office was aware the Security Industry Authority had granted licences to 5,000 illegal workers; a report in February that an illegal immigrant was employed as a cleaner in the Home Office; and a letter from Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to the Prime Minister warning that recession could lead to a rise in violent crime.
A Conservative Party statement said: "We can confirm that Damian Green was arrested earlier today in connection with his work as Opposition spokesman for immigration.
"As shadow immigration minister, Mr Green has, on a number of occasions, legitimately revealed information which the Home Office chose not to make public.
"Disclosure of this information was manifestly in the public interest. Mr Green denies any wrongdoing and stands by his actions."
Whitehall sources insisted last night that ministers were not aware of Mr Green's arrest until after the event. One said: "There is absolutely no party political element to this."
George Osborne last night described Mr Green's arrest as "absolutely extraordinary".
He told the BBC's Question Time programme: "It has long been the case in our democracy that Members of Parliament have received information from civil servants. I think to hide information from the public is wrong.
"It is very early days. It's an extraordinary case. I think there are going to be some very, very big questions asked of the police."
from the Times of London, 2008-Dec-14, by Matthew Campbell:
Greek riots spark fear of Europe in flames
Seldom do Greek academics attain the heroic status that was bestowed last week on Christos Kittas, an eminent professor of pathology and rector of Athens University.
More comfortable in front of a whiteboard Kittas, a wiry figure with grey hair and a silver beard, found himself on the front line in what looked like a war zone.
From his palatial office on the first floor of the university, he organised a “human chain” of colleagues to defend the historic building from being ransacked in Greece's worst street violence in decades.
“I'm terrified,” he confided on Friday as yet another column of demonstrators filed past the building, screaming abuse at police – “killers in uniform” – for having shot dead a teenager six days before.
“I haven't slept in days now,” he added, sitting beneath oil paintings of previous rectors going back to the 1830s.
Downstairs, other teachers had formed a line on the steps to prevent hardcore demonstrators from breaking into the building and using it, as they had done previously, as a base from which to hurl Molotov cocktails and stones at police.
A week of protests and rioting by students venting fury over the death of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos has thrown Greece into turmoil, causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage and focusing attention on economic, political and social woes.
“It feels as though we are in Iraq or Afghanistan,” said Kittas, peering once more through the window. “I think I can hear them,” he said nervously. “I think they've broken in.”
It turned out to be a false alarm. However, Kittas, who has become the unlikely star of TV chat shows, has every reason to be jittery: a year ago, when protesters broke into his office, they took a knife to two of the portraits. “I'm worried that this time they'll burn the place down,” he said.
The protests continued yesterday and more demonstrations are planned. Some see a foretaste of the next phase of the global financial crisis, sensing in the tear gas and chants a warning to European leaders of what may unfold elsewhere if they do not take into account the frustrations of their people.
Sympathy protests from Moscow to Madrid helped to fuel such concerns, as did Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who mentioned the Greek upheaval to justify his rejection of budget proposals that would have cushioned the wealthy from losses.
First in the line of fire, however, were Greece's ruling elite, who had been bolstered in recent years by a bonanza of European Union and the eupho-ria surrounding the hosting of the Olympics in 2004.
Last week they faced a popular uprising by thousands of citizens over a host of grievances from corruption in the government to low salaries and unemployment among the young. The rhetoric was enough to send a shiver down the spine of world leaders meeting in Brussels to discuss a multi-billion-euro bailout.
“Athens must burn, especially the banks,” a teenager called Marios in a hooded sweat-shirt and jeans told me during a protest on Friday.
Nearby, rioters had smashed the display screens of cash dispensers and shattered dozens of shop windows, carting off mobile telephones, watches, clothes and computers. A few rioters dragged a drinks refrigerator on to the street, ripped off the back and filled their arms with bottles and cans. They drank a few and used the rest as projectiles.
Down the road, policemen watched from behind riot shields but did nothing: the government has ordered them not to use force in order to avoid further bloodshed. This has fuelled anger among shopkeepers who complained that Athens, after being rebuilt amid great fanfare for the Olympics, had been left to burn.
“People have a right to demonstrate,” said Katarini Halaounis, who lost thousands of pounds worth of stock when protesters looted her jewellery shop on Monday, “but not to destroy shops and businesses that have taken a lifetime to build. The government just doesn't seem to be interested.”
A target of wrath was Costas Karamanlis, the conservative prime minister since 2004. Since narrowly winning reelection in 2007, he has been plagued by a series of embarrassing scandals in which several of his closest associates have been forced to resign.
Rumours swirled about the capital that he was suffering from severe depression, so inactive has he appeared during the sacking of Athens.
In Brussels on Friday for a European summit, Karamanlis said there would be a “sober assessment” of how the authorities had handled the protests, adding: “We should not confuse the actions of groups destroying public property with the right that people, students and workers, have to protest.”
With more protests scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday, Petros Doukas, the assistant foreign minister, suggested that new directives would soon be given to police to help restore order.
“The feeling is that from now on, this sort of thing won't be tolerated,” he said.
The trouble began with the killing of Grigoropoulos last Saturday night by a policeman who claimed to have fired warning shots when a group of youths threw a firebomb. Witnesses claimed that he had aimed at the boy.
Riots quickly spread across the country and to the islands of Crete and Corfu. The policeman was arrested and charged with murder, but this did nothing to dispel the mob's fury and most of Athens was soon smelling of soot.
On Monday night, protesters set ablaze the city's huge Christmas tree, which had only just been installed in the central square. Some of the protesters sang carols as they watched it burn.
Grigoropoulos was buried on Tuesday but the crisis intensified on Wednesday when unions rejected government pleas to call off a long-planned general strike that ended up paralysing the country.
On Thursday, the policeman's lawyer claimed a ballistics report showed Grigoropoulos was killed by an accidental ricochet. The protesters called it a cover-up.
Grigoropoulos was hardly an ideal martyr for a movement suspected of being heavily influenced by a hard-left party known as Syriza. His mother runs a jewellery shop opposite Prada in the Bond Street of Athens and his father is a bank manager.
He apparently belonged to a cluster of Athenian youths from well-to-do families who enjoy goading police on a Saturday night in the troubled district of Exarchia.
The shooting prompted parents all over the country to examine the liberties they have been permitting their children.
“My 12-year-old daughter has been getting text messages inviting her to join demonstrations,” said Constantine Michalos, president of the Greek chamber of commerce. “One of the messages said, `Don't go to school today. We need to show our power on the street.' I had to lay down the law.”
He had publicly predicted trouble as far back as September, not just because of Greece's penchant for protest – there were 902 demonstrations in Athens last year that closed the central square at a cost to the economy of some £1.3 billion.
Michalos blamed an economic downturn that has had a brutal impact on the shipping industry, the mainstay of the Greek economy. Unemployment has soared to 21% among 20-to 30-year-olds.
A fifth of the Greek population is living below the poverty line, which has been measured at €486 (£437) a month. The protests also highlighted the emergence of a so-called “€700 generation” made up of young graduates who complain of not being able to find jobs paying little more than £600 a month.
Some dismissed such complaints as being unfounded and the angry backlash against protesters appears to be gathering momentum.
“Spoilt doesn't begin to describe it,” said Renee Pappas, a Greek-American public communications consultant, describing Greek teenagers. “Nowadays we're in Europe,” she added. “If they can't find a job in Athens, there's plenty of other cities in which people can work.”
The authorities have always been indulgent of student protests. Ever since the shootings of protesters in antimilitary demonstrations in the early 1970s, Greek police have kept off the campuses, not wanting to be accused of the same “fascist” methods as the colonels.
This allowed protesters sheltering last week in the Polytechnic – a symbol of resistance because tanks drove through the gates on November 17, 1973, killing at least two dozen students – to manufacture Molotov cocktails there with impunity. None of the professors sought to interfere.
At Athens University, by contrast, Kittas argued that what some referred to as a “right of asylum” in universities was a “myth”. He resigned on Monday when police refused to evict rioting students.
The government pleaded with him to stay on, and he has since taken to organising the defence of his beloved building. “I'm a professor, though, not a police detective,” he said. “The world has gone mad. What is happening to us?”
Stratis Stratigis, former chairman of the Athens Olympics organising committee, suggested he might have an answer. “Our democracy is destroying itself because it misrepresented the right to liberty and equality,” says an e-mail circulating his friends. “It taught the citizens to regard disrespect as a right, lawlessness as liberty, impertinence as equality and anarchy as enjoyment.”
This is a quote from Socrates, the ancient philosopher who ended up being sentenced to death for voicing truths that nobody wanted to hear.
“It's funny,” said Stratigis. “Those words have a ring about them today.”
from the Washington Post, 2008-Nov-23, p.A21, by Edward Cody:
Leadership Fight Frays Socialist Party in France
PARIS, Nov. 22 -- France's once-reigning Socialist Party, the main opposition to President Nicolas Sarkozy, fell into full disarray Saturday over a backbiting leadership struggle that betrayed deep divisions about the role of a leftist party in modern France.
The dispute marked another chapter in the national decline of the organized left, leaving a largely open playing field in the near future for Sarkozy and a coalition of Gaullist-oriented parties that control the legislature as well as the presidency.
The party's unraveling at the top also seemed to portend longer-term difficulties for a movement that helped propel François Mitterrand to the presidency in 1981, underpinned a leftist majority in Parliament from 1997 to 2002 and still holds a majority of city halls and local posts. In addition to clashing personal ambitions and friction among veterans and upstarts, it centered on disagreement over what the party should stand for -- vague social democracy reaching toward the center or statist policies more in tune with traditional Socialist ideology.
After counting and recounting all night, the party announced that Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille who advocates close ties to labor unions, had won a bitterly fought election by 42 votes out of about 135,000 cast and would be the next first secretary. But her opponent in the second round of voting, former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, immediately asserted that the count was marred by fraud and demanded another ballot.
"There was fraud, there was cheating," Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and one of Royal's top lieutenants, said in a television interview. "I call for the membership to rebel."
The outgoing first secretary, François Hollande, Royal's longtime companion until last year and the father of her four children, said the party's National Council would meet Tuesday evening to rule on the dispute. Hollande, who said last week he was ashamed of the party and its inability to come together against Sarkozy, urged Aubry and Royal to keep their cool in the meantime for the good of the movement.
But the unseemly split, on the heels of a party congress last weekend marked by rancor and discord, appeared to have already undermined the party's standing in public opinion, even among its own members. The political commentator Alain Duhamel called it a "disaster," and newspaper reports were full of expressions of disappointment from the rank and file.
"Everybody knows our party is not in good health," Aubry acknowledged in a victory statement late Saturday.
An Internet commentator on the site of Le Monde newspaper, identifying himself as Jean T., called the outcome "a great victory for Sarko."
Sarkozy made no comment, but reports quoting his aides depicted him as reveling in the open battle. To some degree, the reports said, Sarkozy has taken credit for nudging it along. He has given ministries and other posts to several Socialist figures, for instance, sowing distrust in the ranks. And in pushing President Bush for a summit conference on the world financial crisis, he specified Nov. 15 as a date, guaranteeing the summit would overlap -- and eclipse -- the Socialist Party congress.
Royal, 55, sought to lead the party on the basis of her respectable showing against Sarkozy in last year's presidential election and the promise that she could be a strong candidate again in 2012. To improve chances of winning, she suggested, the party could seek alliances in the center, particularly with the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou. Unsaid, but clearly part of the suggestion, was the idea that her soft image and broad appeal on television would aid that approach.
But Aubry, 58, a former labor minister who championed France's 35-hour workweek, decried that suggestion as a betrayal of Socialist ideals. She was backed by party elders, called the "elephants" because of their longevity, and by a slice of young activists eager to see the party return to the purity of its roots.
In fact, those roots have been indistinct for more than two decades. Mitterrand won election in 1981 in alliance with the Communist Party on a distinctly leftist program. But within three years, he broke the alliance and began privatizing big state holdings. By the time he ran for reelection in 1988, he was campaigning on a conservative platform and describing himself as "the tranquil force."
The party's erstwhile allies in the Communist Party, meanwhile, have almost faded from the scene. Their presidential candidate in last year's election, Marie-George Buffet, got 1.94 percent of the vote.
from the Times of London, 2008-Dec-3, by Thomas Coghlan:
German soldiers deemed 'too fat to fight'
Kabul -- First they were accused of not wanting to fight. Then they were blamed for failing in their main mission to train the Afghan police.
Now Germany's battered military reputation has received a further humiliating blow. According to official reports the 3,500 troops in northern Afghanistan drink too much and are too fat to fight.
A German parliamentary report has revealed that in 2007 German forces in Afghanistan consumed about 1.7 million pints of beer and 90,000 bottles of wine. During the first six months of this year 896,000 pints of beer were shipped to German forces in Afghanistan. British and US bases in the country enforce a strict ban on alcohol.
The physical condition of the soldiers was already in question after a German armed forces report found that 40 per cent of its soldiers aged 18-29 were overweight, compared to 35 per cent of the civilian population of the same age.
The report, published in March, concluded that the Bundeswehr lived on beer and sausages while shunning fruit and vegetables. It said that an overdeveloped bureaucracy was also contributing to a “passive lifestyle” on the part of the soldiers.
Reinhold Robbe, the parliamentary commissioner for the German armed forces, concluded: “Plainly put, the soldiers are too fat, exercise too little and take little care of their diet.”
“Yes, it is true, the German soldiers in Kunduz are allowed to drink two cans of beer per day,” Lieutenant-Colonel Rainer Zaude, a spokesman for the forces, confirmed.
Even more damning is the allegation from a senior officer that Germany is failing in its main mission to train the Afghan police. General Hans-Christoph Ammon, the commander of the special commando unit, the KSK, described the efforts as “a miserable failure”.
The Government is also reported to have banned any reference to Krieg (war), in press statements on Afghanistan. Caveats imposed by the German Government limit the forces to operations in the relatively passive north.
Twenty-eight German soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, including two in a suicide bomb attack in Kunduz province last month.
The Germans in Afghanistan
German Tornado aircraft are limited to unarmed reconaissance
German Medevac helicopters have to be back at base by dusk
German forces limited to the northern areas of the country where there is a lower level of fighting (though the level of fighting there is now beginning to change)
US forces have been very frustrated by the caution of German rules of engagement - German troops operating alongside US forces have refused to open fire on occasion for fear of causing civilian casualties.
A trial is currently underway in the German courts following an incident in which German soldiers opened fire on a car that approached a checkpoint believing it contained a suicide bomb - several civilians died in the incident
from Reuters, 2008-Oct-16, by Erik Kirschbaum:
Global crisis sends east Germans flocking to Marx
BERLIN – Two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, communism's founding father Karl Marx is back in vogue in eastern Germany -- thanks to the global financial crisis.
His 1867 critical analysis of capitalism, "Das Kapital," has risen from the publishing graveyard to become an improbable best-seller for academic publisher Karl-Dietz-Verlag.
"Everyone thought there would never ever again be any demand for 'Das Kapital'," managing director Joern Schuetrumpf told Reuters after selling 1,500 copies so far this year, triple the number sold in all of 2007 and a 100-fold increase since 1990.
"Even bankers and managers are now reading 'Das Kapital' to try to understand what they've been doing to us. Marx is definitely 'in' right now," Schuetrumpf said.
The revival of Marx's treatise reflects a broader rejection of capitalism by many in eastern Germany, a communist country until 1989 and now racked by high unemployment and poverty.
A month of intense financial turmoil has toppled banks in the United States and forced a series of government bailouts in Germany and elsewhere, reinforcing anti-capitalist sentiment.
Chancellor Angela Merkel -- herself an easterner -- unveiled a 500 billion euro (388.5 billion pound) financial rescue package this week, a move decried as a reward for irresponsible bankers.
A recent survey found 52 percent of eastern Germans believe the free market economy is "unsuitable" and 43 percent said they wanted socialism rather than capitalism, findings confirmed in interviews with dozens of ordinary easterners.
"We read about the 'horrors of capitalism' in school. They really got that right. Karl Marx was spot on," said Thomas Pivitt, a 46-year-old IT worker from east Berlin.
"I had a pretty good life before the Wall fell," he added. "No one worried about money because money didn't really matter. You had a job even if you didn't want one. The communist idea wasn't all that bad."
CAPITALISM EVEN WORSE
Unemployment in the former communist east is 14 percent, double western levels, and wages are significantly lower. Millions of jobs were lost after reunification. Many eastern factories were bought by western competitors and shut down.
"I thought communism was shit but capitalism is even worse," said Hermann Haibel, a 76-year old retired blacksmith, who was strolling near Alexanderplatz in the heart of old East Berlin.
"The free market is brutal. The capitalist wants to squeeze out more, more, more," he said.
Free market hopes were high in the east when Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised "flourishing landscapes."
But while some areas on the outskirts of Berlin, in Leipzig and along the Baltic shore are thriving, much of the rest suffers from depopulation and high unemployment.
The opposition Left party, which traces its roots to Erich Honecker's SED party, has capitalised on the frustration and become the east's most popular party with support of 30 percent.
"I don't think capitalism is the right system for us," said Monika Weber, a 46-year-old city clerk.
"The distribution of wealth is unfair. We're seeing that now. The little people like me are going to have to pay for this financial mess with higher taxes because of greedy bankers."
Like many other east Germans, Ralf Wulff said he was delighted about the fall of the Berlin Wall and to see capitalism replace communism. But the euphoria was ephemeral.
"It took just a few weeks to realise what the free market economy was all about," said Wulff. "It's rampant materialism and exploitation. Human beings get lost. We didn't have the material comforts but communism still had a lot going for it."
But not everyone condemned capitalism. Astrid Gerber was a master tailor in East Berlin before her company was shut down.
"It was my dream job," said Gerber, 42. She was unemployed for seven years, then opened up a newsstand but gave it up after her family disintegrated due to her 90-hour work week.
"Capitalism has its advantages but so does communism," she said. "I can't say one is better than the other."
from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Nov-18:
Russia Out of Rehab
Europe puts Russia's invasion of Georgia behind it.Russia needed only a few days this August to drive Georgia's army into retreat. In the aftermath, Europe has held out only a bit longer than Tbilisi's troops.
EU leaders on Friday said they were resuming talks with Moscow toward an economic-cooperation agreement. The negotiations were put on ice 10 weeks earlier because of Russia's invasion of its tiny neighbor and refusal to abide by a French-brokered cease-fire. But by Friday's EU-Russia summit in Nice, France, Moscow's fulfillment of "a large part of its obligations" was good enough for French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Thus ends the lone sanction Europe placed on its belligerent neighbor after the August war. The talks are back on, but Georgians are still waiting for the promised pullback of Russian soldiers to their prewar positions. Numerous Russian troops remain in the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, whose self-declared independence has been recognized by only Russia and Nicaragua.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians are still unable to return to their homes both in and outside the conflict zone. EU and other Western observers remain blocked from entering the most war-torn areas, and as recently as Sunday were still reporting incidents in which they'd been fired upon near Abkhazia.
A second round of peace talks between Russia and Georgia is slated to begin today in Geneva. But with Europe in retreat, Moscow will be under no pressure to compromise with Tbilisi. This round is likely to end almost as soon as it begins, just like a first set of negotiations in October.
Europe's reversal is embarrassing on a number of levels. Russia hardly seemed bothered by the suspension in the first place -- and wasn't exactly begging Brussels to come back to the table. Worse were the rationales for resuming the talks, as offered by Mr. Sarkozy, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso. Perhaps anticipating the decision, Mr. Sarkozy noted on November 7 that the negotiations had not been suspended but "postponed" -- and that this meant he and Mr. Barroso had the authority to decide how long the postponement would last.
Mr. Barroso even scolded EU members such as Lithuania and Poland for standing in the way of consensus on the bloc's stance toward Russia. "You may not like the common EU position entirely," he said, "but it is in your own interest to have one rather than three or four different positions."
One might expect the Poles and Baltic nations to have a better idea than Mr. Barroso of how to deal with Russia. As for us, we recall a conversation in August with a U.S. diplomat about approaching Russia after the war in Georgia. Rather than trying to wallop Russia's political and business elites with some large penalty while they were in the flush of victory, the diplomat suggested, it would be better to produce a steady stream of measures over time, "so that they realize this isn't going to pass."
What Russia no doubt realizes after last week is that Europe has the will to do absolutely nothing, and that its invasion will in fact "pass" without consequence.
from Newsweek, 2008-Nov-1, by Denis MacShane:
What If McCain Wins?
If John McCain becomes the next U.S. president, it will send europe into a fit of despair not seen on the old continent in decades. After all, Barack Obama is Europe's candidate, so much so that French President Nicolas Sarkozy—so happy to spend a vacation day with George W. Bush—turned Obama's fleeting summer stopover in Paris into an orchestrated photo op, to milk maximum publicity from the Democratic candidate. In Britain, Conservative M.P.s seem to have forgotten that McCain had been the keynote foreign speaker at the Conservative Party conference just last year and now openly wear Obama buttons as they gossip in the House of Commons corridors and tearoom. German Christian Democrats from Angela Merkel's party swelled the 200,000-strong crowd who listened to Obama in Berlin in July. For the European left, Obama is the savior, McCain irrelevant. The intelligentsia and the political weeklies in every European capital seem to have long ago agreed to write off McCain and splash Obama's face on every front cover. If he loses, narrowly or otherwise, there will be a sense that America has lost its senses.
Ever since McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, Europe has looked down its collective nose at the thought of a McCain presidency. Little matter that Europe is awash with populist politicians of its own. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi or the late Jorg Haider in Austria proved that crude sloganeering and appeals to the gut rather than the intellect were as common in Europe, despite the self-regarding belief of Europeans that their political life is conducted on a higher plane than in America. McCain has been seen as the quintessential American from Mars who appeared to Europeans from Venus as a politician who never saw a geopolitical problem that could not be solved by throwing troops at it.
By contrast, instead of taking steps on its own to shape a united European Union that is willing to invest in security, extend the euro to Britain and lower the protectionist barriers that distort the single market, Europe has invested all of its hopes for a happy tomorrow in Obama. But in the excitement of waiting for the end of the Bush-Cheney years, which Europe blamed for all the woes of the world, few have examined the small print of his ideology. He has made clear that America would never take orders from the United Nations, yet the Europeans said they wanted more multilateral global decision making. He has said Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, while Europeans have long ago awarded half of Jerusalem to the Palestinians as capital of their putative state. Obama has said America might have to bomb Pakistan in order to chase out Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda from their hiding holes on the northwest frontier. To win U.S. labor support Obama has questioned free trade, the neoprotectionism that if enacted would cripple European exports. And while Obama had the good fortune not to be a member of Congress when the votes on Iraq in 2003 had taken place, he seems enthusiastic nonetheless about increasing troop presence in Afghanistan despite increasing European pessimism that any victory is possible.
So for a handful of politicians and professional policymakers there might be a sense of relief if McCain wins. A Republican, to be sure, and one with an odd vice president. But America and the world survived Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle. And McCain is anti-Bush across a range of policies. He has patrolled Europe's security conferences over the years. For many worried about Vladimir Putin's divide-and-rule authoritarianism—including leaders in East Europe, the Nordic countries and tougher politicians like Britain's clearsighted foreign secretary, David Miliband—a Washington that had few illusions about Russia's Soviet-style aggressive posturing would be welcome.
The fairy tale of Obamania has caused Europe temporarily to suspend all of its centuries-old cynicisms about the politics of Camelot and Sir Galahads single-handedly saving the world from evil. But with a Republican president holding sway, there could still be a kind of relief that it would mean politics as usual. The calls would be made. "John, cher ami," Sarkozy would say. "Mein lieber Freund," Angela Merkel would trill. "Come and visit your roots in Scotland," Gordon Brown would urge. In the wider European population, however, there would be a stunned refusal to accept the result.
Once again, it would seem that America had let down Europe, because despite the existence of the EU, Europeans still do not believe deep down that they can stand on their own feet without America. And with no leadership on offer to take on Europe's disappointment, to provide hope to Europe's pessimism, the continent would become more sullen, more inward-looking, more nationalistic and less and less able to be the united partner that the United States needs to defend democracy and promote freedom around the world.
MacShane is a Labour M.P. and Britain's former minister for Europe.
from Macleans, 2006-Oct-20, Mark Steyn:
The future belongs to Islam
The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.
Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.
This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.
Let's start with demography, because everything does:
If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries. And they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.
For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number:
The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.
Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.
Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk -- in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have "big" families these days, it's the anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.
As I say, this isn't a projection: it's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, "Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself." By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.
Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.
Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.
You might formulate it like this:
Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.
By "will," I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it's riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don't think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents -- in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.
Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.
We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.
For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different world view.
Which brings us to the third factor -- the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two. To Americans, it doesn't always seem obvious that there's any connection between the "war on terror" and the so-called "pocketbook issues" of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal "deficit" isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the Eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History -- written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism -- is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans -- or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans -- may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies -- they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.
In Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.
Here's another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.
And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons.
But beyond that the very phrase "Indian territory" presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today's "Indian territory" was relatively ordered a generation or two back -- West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swaths of the map have spiralled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favour the latter.
The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced -- but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation-states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation-states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.
We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: "the long war." Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower. The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way. That's what makes doing anything about it even more problematic -- because different countries' reactions to their own particular domestic circumstances are likely to play out in destabilizing ways on the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions -- no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country's relationship with a cramped neighbour -- China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place -- like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.
Let's start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It's a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.
At first it doesn't sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you're in a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is "presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labour force." For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented ambitious med school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you live in certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Monday morning. That's when the maternity ward is open -- first day of the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in to attend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. And at 5.30 p.m. she flies out. So, if you've been careless enough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday, you'll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to give birth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to time your breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?
The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn't expecting any more. Doubtless most of us can recall reading similar stories over the years from remote rural districts in America, Canada, Australia. After all, why would a village of a few hundred people have a great medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000, and there are still no obstetricians: birthing is a dying business.
So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios: whatever Japanese feelings on immigration, a country with great infrastructure won't empty out for long, any more than a state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays empty for long. At some point, someone else will move in to Japan's plant.
And the alternative? In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.
And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you'd grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It's like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England's early 19th century population surge but with England's Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional -- and indeed, if most of the available manpower's Muslim, it's actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.
Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:
Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.
Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.
That's where civilizational confidence comes in: if "Dutchness" or "Frenchness" seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter's strength of will.
Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.
If America's "allies" failed to grasp the significance of 9/11, it's because Europe's home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty's Government used to call an "acceptable level of violence." But in the same three decades as Ulster's "Troubles," the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.
On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory "of courses": of course, not all Muslims are terrorists -- though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of them share their basic objectives(the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America)to function wittingly or otherwise as the "good cop" end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists' demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality -- because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that's not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He's jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.
You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on in France, apparently. Something to do with -- what's the word? -- "youths." When I pointed out the media's strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting "youths," I received a ton of emails arguing there's no Islamist component, they're not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they're secular and Westernized and into drugs and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economic concerns, it's the lack of jobs, it's conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, "You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad."
Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything's about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: "youths." What's the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man's game.
In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six -- what's that word again? -- "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be -- quelle surprise! -- of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."
No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr. Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the -- here it comes again -- "youths." In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.
Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those "youths" to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn't think so:
There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign -- Saudis and Egyptians. Since 9/11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens -- British subjects, citoyens de la République française. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses "only" on the Nazis'(alleged)Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis' ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.
How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.
In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?
"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."
Reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing from America Alone © 2006 by Mark Steyn
from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jun-16, by Natan Sharansky:
Democracies Can't Compromise on Core Values
As the American president embarked on his farewell tour of Europe last week, Der Spiegel, echoing the sentiments of a number of leading newspapers on the Continent, pronounced "Europe happy to see the back of Bush." Virtually everyone seems to believe that George W. Bush's tenure has undermined trans-Atlantic ties.
There is also a palpable sense in Europe that America will move closer to Europe in the years ahead, especially if Barack Obama wins the presidential election.
But while Mr. Bush is widely seen by Europeans as a religious cowboy with a Manichean view on the world, Europe's growing rift with America predates the current occupant of the White House. When a French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, declared that his country "cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyper power," President Clinton was in the seventh year of his presidency and Mr. Bush was still governor of Texas.
The trans-Atlantic rift is not the function of one president, but the product of deep ideological forces that for generations have worked to shape the divergent views of Americans and Europeans. Foremost among these are different attitudes toward identity in general, and the relationship between identity and democracy in particular.
To Europeans, identity and democracy are locked in a zero-sum struggle. Strong identities, especially religious or national identities, are seen as a threat to democratic life. This is what Dominique Moisi, a special adviser at the French Institute of International Relations, meant when he said in 2006 that "the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening. We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare."
This attitude can be traced back to the French Revolution, when the forces fighting under a universal banner of "liberty, equality and fraternity" were pitted against the Church.
In contrast, the America to which pilgrims flocked in search of religious freedom, and whose revolution amounted to an assertion of national identity, has been able to reconcile identity and freedom in a way no country has been able to match. That acute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, long ago noted the "intimate union of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty" that was pervasive in America and made it so different than his native France.
The idea that strong identities are an inherent threat to democracy and peace became further entrenched in Europe in the wake of World War II. Exponents of what I call postidentity theories – postnationalism, postmodernism and multiculturalism – argued that only by shedding the particular identities that divide us could we build a peaceful world. Supranational institutions such as the EU, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations were supposed to help overcome the prejudices of the past and forge a harmonious world based on universal values and human rights.
While these ideas have penetrated academia and elite thinking in the U.S., they remain at odds with the views of most Americans, who see no inherent contradiction between maintaining strong identities and the demands of democratic life. On the contrary, the right to express one's identity is seen as fundamental. Exercising such a right is regarded as acting in the best American tradition.
The controversy over whether Muslims should be able to wear a veil in public schools underscores the profound difference in attitudes between America and Europe. In Europe, large majorities support a law banning the veil in public schools. In the U.S., students wear the veil in public schools or state colleges largely without controversy.
At the same time severe limits are placed on the harmless expression of identity in the public square, some European governments refuse to insist that Muslim minorities abide by basic democratic norms. They turn a blind eye toward underage marriage, genital mutilation and honor killings.
The reality is that Muslim identity has grown stronger, has become more fundamentalist, and is increasingly contemptuous of a vapid "European" identity that has little vitality. All this may help explain why studies consistently show that efforts to integrate Muslims into society are much less effective in Europe than in America, where identity is much stronger.
Regardless of who wins in November, the attitudes of Americans toward the role of identity in democratic life are unlikely to change much. Relative to Europe, Americans will surely remain deeply patriotic and much more committed to their faiths.
Europeans, meanwhile, may move closer to the Americans in their views. The recent shift to the right in Europe – from the victory of conservative leaders like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi to the surprise defeat of the leftist mayor of London, Ken Livingston – might partially reflect a belated awareness there that a unique heritage is under assault by a growing Muslim fundamentalism.
The logic of the struggle against this fundamentalist threat will inevitably demand the reassertion of the European national and religious identities that are now threatened.
Europeans are now saying goodbye to Mr. Bush, and hoping for the election of an American president who they believe shares their sophisticated postnational, postmodern and multicultural attitudes. But don't be surprised if, in the years ahead, European leaders, in order to protect freedom and democracy at home, start sounding more and more like the straight-shooting cowboy from abroad they now love to hate.
Mr. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He is the author, most recently, of "Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy" (PublicAffairs).
from the Brussels Journal, 2006-Sep-17, by Paul Belien:
Dalrymple on Decadence, Europe, America and Islam
An interview with Theodore DalrympleAnthony Daniels is a 57-year old recently retired psychiatrist. He began his career in Africa and worked for many years as a hospital and prison doctor in Birmingham before he moved to the South of France in 2005. Using the pen name Theodore Dalrymple he writes about the collapse of Western civilization in Europe, analyzing the social pathologies of our time. When he chose his pen name, he says, he opted for a name that would evoke the image of a severe and serious man. Though Daniels sets out to describe decadence, obviously not a cheerful topic, he himself is far from being a misanthrope. He is a “compassionate conservative,” The New York Sun wrote two years ago, “Stocky and balding, he has a wheezy laugh, a pugnacious mouth, and the devil-may-care smile of the born provocateur.”
Saturday morning Dalrymple gave a speech for Pro Flandria, a group of conservative, Flemish-secessionist entrepreneurs and intellectuals, in a renowned restaurant in Berlare, a small village not far from the Flemish town of Sint-Niklaas. The previous day, I collected Dr Daniels in Brussels, saving him from having to spend more time than necessary in a city he (like many) utterly dislikes, and drove him to Sint-Niklaas, a place well known to Mark Steyn, one of his fellow contributors to the American conservative monthly The New Criterion.We had a pleasant afternoon together, discussing various topics. Daniels/Dalrymple is deeply saddened at the plight of the Europeans who are at the lower end of the social scale. They have become victims of both the welfare society, which has made them utterly dependent on the state and robbed them of their self-respect, and of the hatred for Western culture, values and traditions – a hatred which our intellectuals and leaders cultivate. By destroying Western civilization the liberal élite is depriving the ordinary people of their sense of belonging to something worthwhile. As Dalrymple says of the people at the lower end of the social scale in contemporary Britain: “They are not highly educated, so they have no culture; there is no religion, there is no belief that the country is involved in a transcendental purpose, so there is very little left for them; they live in their own soap opera.”
Immigrants can give meaning to their lives in our decadent society by turning towards Islam. For our indigenous young people nothing of purpose is left. According to Dalrymple, his native Britain has probably gone furthest on the slope towards decadence, with more outspoken social pathologies than elsewhere. Fortunately, in the United States Western civilizational decline has not progressed to the extent that it already has in Western Europe. Overall America is a healthier society than Europe, although Dalrymple sees an impending danger: America might follow Europe's social and cultural decline if it loses its predominant role in world politics.Paul Belien: Mr Dalrymple, you are a well-known analyst of the cultural disease of our society. What do you see as the main problem?
Theodore Dalrymple: The underlying problem is a lack of purpose, a lack of feeling of belonging to anything larger than one's own little life. This gives rise to quite a large amount of social pathology.
PB: Does this have to do with immigration? Does the problem lie mainly with second generation immigrants? Or do we find the same problem among our indigenous population, the young people, as well?
TD: I think it is our indigenous population which suffers from a lack of purpose. They have no religious belief. Quite a large proportion of the population does not derive any selfrespect from having to work for a living because some people are no better off if they work than if they do not work. They also have no cultural and intellectual interests. Therefore they do not feel they belong to any larger project than their private lives.
PB: Isn't it paradoxical that this is happening in a time where people tend to study longer and be at school longer than any time before in history?
TD: What I am saying is not true of everybody, of course. I am talking about a section of the population. However, and unfortunately in Britain anyway, the so-called educational system has become a means of reducing youth unemployment, rather than providing people with either vocational training or intellectual and cultural capital which is of use to them throughout their lives. So the vast expansion of tertiary education in Britain – the government wants fifty per cent of the population to go to university – is just another means of disguising unemployment.
PB: To what extent has our welfare system exacerbated this sense of purposelessness in the younger generation?
TD: There certainly is a section of the population in which it has undermined this sense of purpose. Obviously it is not the majority of the population. However, a substantial proportion of the majority in the lower classes feel that if they work they are not very much better off than if they do not work. Therefore they actually resent working, in a sense understandably if you are no better off when you get up and go to work every day than when you don't. You can understand why people would feel bitter.
PB: For young immigrants things are easier if they are looking for a purpose: they can turn to Islam.
TD: Well, Islamic immigrants can. Other immigrants in Britain do quite well. For example if you take the Hindus: they have a lower unemployment rate than the native white population. Obviously, if you are looking for an existential solution some kind of fundamentalist Islam does appear to be that solution. Though it is a very poor and rather stupid solution, it offers a solution of a kind.
PB: I can understand that some immigrants, if they look at our culture and the decadence of it, they despise it. In a way they regard the Muslim faith as a kind of antidote to the decadence of the West. Do you agree with that analysis?
TD: I think that is right, though I do not accept what they are saying entirely. You see, one of the problems, in Britain anyway, is that those parts of the Western culture that they see are genuinely the least attractive side: gross promiscuity, the idea that one's whim is law. They do not understand anything of the better aspects of our culture. If we lack the confidence to pass our culture on to our own children it is hardly surprising that we do not have the confidence to pass it on to other people. If, for example, I ask a younger patient to name a British Prime Minister other than the present British Prime Minister or Mrs Thatcher (they have all heard of Mrs Thatcher) they will answer something like “I don't know, I wasn't born then,” as if one could not be expected to know anything except by personal acquaintance. Even our own children do not feel any connection with the past of their own country.
PB: Where does this come from, this Western pathology of having lost trust, confidence in their own culture?
TD: I am not quite sure where it comes from. I think the Second World War must have played a very large part in it, because people feel that a culture that produced Auschwitz must have something deeply wrong with it and cannot be worth preserving.
PB: You could also say that it was the loss of culture in the West that actually produced Auschwitz?
TD: I personally would say that. The answer to a lack of civilization is not barbarism; the response to barbarism is not to destroy civilization. However, that has been the response of intellectuals in the West and, of course, this has had its effect on the population as a whole.
PB: You are also very familiar with the United States, where you have often been, and you write mainly for American publications [The City Journal, The New Criterion, National Review]. Is the pathology as bad there or is it less obvious?
TD: It is better in the United States. It is not that the pathology where it exists is not severe – and it is very severe in parts of America as well. The difference is that in America it has not entered the core of the population. There is more resistance to it. I think, and this is very important, that Americans still believe in their own country. Americans believe that they are part of a larger project – that is that of the United States. This can sometimes have bad as well as good effects, but it does actually keep the civilization together. I think the United States is more civilized than Europe now.
PB: Of course America was not involved in the atrocities of the second world war – Auschwitz and so forth – to the degree that the Western countries were. And the welfare state is not so big there as it is here.
TD: That is true. However, it is also true that Britain was not involved in the atrocities either. Yet the culture in Britain has probably fallen apart to a greater extent than in many other countries in Europe.
PB: So what is the reason for that? Why is Britain in such a bad situation, even worse than continental Europe?
TD: I would not be too adamant that it is far worse than in continental Europe, because things are quite bad in Holland, too. There are, however, certain factors that might explain why the British situation is worse. I think the explanation is that Britain has lost power to a degree that is far greater than any other country. After all, Britain was a world power for 200 years. Today it is fundamentally of no bigger consequence than Luxemburg. In addition, Britain is itself just a province of the English speaking world, whereas for example France is still the center of the French speaking world, although of course the French speaking world is very much smaller than the English speaking world. This great loss of power has produced a great loss of confidence in the culture that once accompanied the exercise of that power.
PB: Then the relative decline of America might also lead to a dangerous situation for the Americans, in the sense that it might affect their cultural self-confidence.
TD: Yes, I think it could affect their cultural confidence. That could be a very bad thing for America and probably for the world because the Americans have some of the same causes of social pathologies that we have. If America remains the most powerful country in the world I do not think that pathology would expand, but if China becomes equal to the United States, or even more powerful, it might spell a lot of danger for the United States because many of the cultural phenomena that we see in Europe are visible in the United States. It is not as if they do not exist there.
PB: Do you see a way to remedy the situation in Europe?
TD: It will be very difficult. It would help if the government would get out of the way. It is necessary to reduce the welfare state. I think it is also necessary to halt the so-called “European project,” which in my view is a vast pension-fund for politicians who are thrown out of power in their own country. The European Union is fundamentally undemocratic, but it is worse because EU policies are actually obstructive of productive work. Underlying it all, however, we need to persuade people intellectually. If we do not persuade people that there is something valuable in our culture and our tradition – artistic, scientific, philosophical – then I do not see how we can preserve ourselves.
PB: And is there a role to be played by religion, for instance?
TD: I find this a difficult question because I am not myself religious. However, I am not anti-religious. I am pro-religion provided that it is not theocratic, so long as there is still a division between church and state. In Britain it has de facto been like this for a long time. Officially Britain is a Christian country with a state church but de facto it has been a secular society.
PB: You would not see secularization as cause of the problem?
TD: I think it is part of the cause of the problem, because if people cease to believe in a transcendental purpose in life then they seek it elsewhere. If, however, at the same time you have destroyed all other possible sources of transcendental meaning to life, then the destruction of religion is a problem. I personally do not have much of a problem with not being religious, because I have a belief in trying to contribute to the culture of my country. But if I did not have anything like that, or if I were not a doctor who felt that by research I could contribute something, or if I had no cultural interests, then what would be the purpose of my life other than the flux of day to day existence?
PB: Many young immigrants are looking to Islam in order to find a sense of purpose. This might be good as long as it is not theocratic?
TD: In prison I saw black people converting to islam. These were not immigrants of course, but native British-born people. Conversion to religion can lead to an improvement in day to day behaviour, if people do not become extremists, because religion can give a transcendent purpose. The question, however, is whether Islam is inherently unstable and will always tend to extremism. That is the question that has to be answered.
PB: What is your view? Is Islam inherently unstable?
TD: I personally think it probably is, because it does not have anybody to define the doctrine. There is no hierarchy in Islam.
PB: There is no Pope?
TD: There is no Pope, there is nothing to be laid down. A moderate person can always be outflanked by someone who claims to be more Islamic than he is. That is a very serious problem. Of course if you have a pope who himself is a theocrat, then that is a problem, too. But there are two things about Christianity which mark it out. The first thing is that it actually started out, and for quite a long time was, in opposition to a state and not itself a state. The second thing is that there has always been a theoretical divide between the Christian church and the state: the “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.” It has of course not always been in existence, but it has always been there in the doctrine as a potential space between church and state. And that does not exist in Islam.
PB: But isn't it strange that people who in are jail – and you have known a lot of them, for instance these black people you referred to – if they look for a religious purpose, they look to Islam rather than Christianity. Why is this?
TD: In the case of black people my explanation is the following: Most criminals at a certain age wish to give up criminality or want to find a reason to give up criminality. They do not want to come back to prison, they do not want to be a criminal anymore, they are looking for a reason not to be criminal, and religious belief is one reason to give up. However, they also do not want to feel that they have surrendered to what they believe they were struggling against for all those years. In a sense for a black person to convert to islam kills two birds in one stone. It answers his need for a religious reason to start behaving better and at the same time it also allows him to think that he has not surrendered to the predominant society around him against which he believes himself to have been in opposition for most of his life.
PB: How do you explain that when society has problems with Islam it is mainly with the young men and not with the young women?
RD: [sic -AMPP Ed.] I think the young women are not strongly Islamist on the whole. In fact, many of them are very anti-Islamic, or would be if they had the opportunity. I also believe that the main interest of Islam for young men in Western countries is the predominance that it gives them over women. I will give you the reasons why I have come to that conclusion, and I accept that they are not scientifically foolproof. There could be arguments against them.
There are large numbers of Muslims in British prisons today. I have noticed that their behaviour is not that of religious persons. They are not interested in hallal meat, they are not interested in praying five times a day, they are not interested in keeping ramadan (except as a reason not to go to court), but they are very interested in preventing their sisters from going out with a boy of their own choosing. Furthermore, if you go into the center of British towns with large Muslim populations you will see young Muslim men partaking in what I would say are generally pretty disgusting activities of popular culture, but you won't see any women. And finally in my work I used to see a lot of young Muslim women who had attempted suicide, or made a gesture of suicide in order to avoid a forced marriage, say a marriage with a first cousin `back home' – someone they had not met, who was less educated than they and whom they did not wish to marry. They knew perfectly well they have no choice in the matter; some of them might even be killed if they did not accept the marriage. You do not see young men trying to commit suicide because of forced marriages, even though they are partaking in those kinds of marriages as well. Hence, it is very different for the men than the women. If you put all these things together you could conclude that the main interest for Islam for these young men is the control over women.
PB: You see many young Islamic women or girls wearing veils or the headscarves, nowadays, when they did not do so before.
TD: It is very difficult to assess how much comes from a desire to do so from the girls themselves and how much from pressure from outside. A dean of a medical school told me a very instructive story. Four Muslim medical students, women, suddenly started appearing dressed in the full veil. The college authorities did not want this to continue. They found an old law which goes back well before there were any Muslim immigrants in Britian, which says that any doctor or medical student who examines a patient must reveal his face to that patient. In other words no doctor is allowed to examine a patient with his face covered. So the girls, the medical students, were told that they either had to remove the veil or they had to leave medical school. They removed the veil and told the dean afterwards that they had never wanted to wear it in the first place, but had been intimidated into doing so by certain islamists at the university. It is inherently difficult to know what the meaning of the veil is, it is very difficult to find out whether people are doing it voluntarily or involuntarily because on a micro-level people are now living in a totalitarian climate.
PB: In our Western societies.
TD: Within our Western societies there is a micro-totalitarian climate and to ask people what they mean by it is very difficult. It is a bit like asking people in North Korea whether they like the government.
PB: Of course this totalitarian mentality is also affecting the original population, who are not allowed to raise certain topics anymore.
TD: I do not know whether they are not allowed to, but they feel hesitant to. Maybe it is worse in Belgium than in England. The problem of course with not speaking our mind is that if we do not speak our minds there is likely to be an explosion.
from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2008-Sep-2, by Daniel Schwammenthal:
'I Fear for Germany'
Erich Honecker's heirs are making a remarkable comeback in Germany. The Left Party, an amalgam of the successors to the former East German Communist Party and disgruntled Social Democrats, is now the country's third-strongest political force. With about 15% public support, it is quickly closing the gap with the Social Democrats, whose popularity is at a historic low of 20%, according to a Forsa poll published last week.
With general elections scheduled for next year, it's even possible that the Communists may be able to return to power a mere 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Such a development would undermine nothing less than Germany's standing as a market economy and Western ally.
It is the Social Democrats who may pave the way for the Communists' relaunch. Currently in an uneasy grand coalition with the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats might be tempted to lead the next government by joining forces with the Green Party and the Left. Such a three-way coalition, were it to occur, already has enough votes in parliament to elect a Social Democratic Chancellor; it could possibly gain a majority next year.
While the Social Democrats have been cooperating with the Left in regional parliaments in East Germany, doing so in West Germany, let alone at the national level, has been taboo. Social Democratic leader Kurt Beck said last month that this won't change -- at least not for now. While ruling out cooperating with the Left next year, he added that "No one can know today what will exist in 2020."
That's not exactly reassuring. The recent speculation about a national alliance with the Communists has been fueled by the Social Democrats' about-face in the state of Hesse, in the former West Germany. Ahead of January's regional elections there, Social Democratic leader Andrea Ypsilanti solemnly pledged to keep a cordon sanitaire around the Left Party. That promise held until election day, when it turned out that she would need the Left's support to become governor.
She has been trying since March to form a government with the Left's help. The party agreed on Saturday to support a Social Democratic-Green coalition without officially joining it. The Social Democrats will discuss in the following weeks whether to accept this offer.
Ms. Ypsilanti's decision to break her election promise in Hesse may lead to the breakup of the grand coalition in Berlin, warns Christian Wulff, the Christian Democratic governor of Lower Saxony and one of Chancellor Angela Merkel's deputy party leaders. If Ms. Ypsilanti is elected governor with the votes from the Left, "nobody will believe the Social Democrats that they wouldn't do that with the Communists also at the federal level," he told the Bild am Sonntag.
By supporting a Social Democrat-Green government in Hesse, the Left can eat its cake and have it: The Communist party would wield power and thus gain prestige without having direct responsibility for the government's policies.
The Social Democrats, on the other hand, can only lose credibility. The Left is already picking up Social Democratic voters angered by the economic reforms of the previous Social Democrat-Green government in Berlin. In panic, the Social Democrats have been drifting leftward in the hope of regaining lost ground. But pushing a minimum wage and rolling back some of the welfare reforms hasn't helped them. Voters who want anti-capitalist polices seem to prefer the original Communists. Reneging on their election promise to keep the Left at arm's length may cause a further voter exodus of more conservative supporters to the Christian Democrats or other parties.
Considering the Left's success in driving Germany's economic debate from the opposition bench, it's not hard to imagine the damage the party could inflict once in national government. Its reach would go beyond just economic policy and affect foreign affairs as well.
That's a worrying prospect as Germany is already one of the weaker links in the Western alliance. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder successfully tapped into anti-American feelings when he disagreed with Washington's Iraq policy and tried to sabotage it. Mr. Schröder also pushed for closer ties with Russia while insisting on toothless diplomacy to stop Iran's nuclear program.
His successor, Angela Merkel, has had only limited success in reversing those polices. After all, Mr. Schröder's former chief of staff, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is her foreign minister.
If trans-Atlantic relations are still a little frosty under the grand coalition, wait until Berlin is run by a coalition government that includes the Communists. The Left Party has contacts to terror organizations around the globe. Spiegel Online documented on Sunday the party's friendly relations with the FARC in Columbia and Eta, the Basque separatists, among others. The Left Party also advocates Germany's pullout from both Afghanistan and NATO. Given that Germany's deployment of non-combat troops in Afghanistan is not particularly popular among Greens and left-wing Social Democrats either, it's not too far-fetched to see such a coalition actually bringing German troops home. Berlin wouldn't then even have to bother pulling out from NATO. The alliance would hardly survive such an act of betrayal.
"I fear for Germany," Mr. Wulff told Bild am Sonntag," as I know in which direction the journey with the Left is going." It is hard to call those fears exaggerated.
Mr. Schwammenthal edits the State of the Union column.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Aug-14, p.A12:
Basra and the Brits
A controversy has broken out in London over Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the honor of Britain's military, and Iraq. It's a reminder of the road America could have taken before the surge made victory possible -- and a warning to politicians who are slaves to public opinion in war.
The story starts with this spring's military offensive by the Iraqi government to oust the Shiite militias from the southern city of Basra. The British were given coalition control in the south starting in 2003. Yet when the Iraqi military ran into trouble at the start of their operation this year, the 4,100 Brits remained in their garrison at the airport outside the city. The Iraqis had to call in the Americans from the north for air cover and other support to help defeat radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. It was the first time the U.S. had deployed to the British-controlled region of Iraq in five years. The operation turned into a major success, with the Mahdi Army routed and the Iraq government in control.
But the British failure to act was an embarrassment, even a humiliation, and explanations have begun to emerge. All point to a failure of political leadership. It turns out that last September the British had struck a deal with Mr. Sadr, essentially ceding him control over Basra and releasing some 120 militia regulars from custody.
In exchange, the Mahdi Army let U.K. troops beat a retreat from their base inside Basra to the airport unmolested. The Times of London reports that under the deal no soldier could set foot back in the city without express permission from Defense Minister Des Browne. Reports from Iraq add that the British performance has led to significant cooling of relations between the U.S. and British military forces in Iraq.
The Brown government implicitly acknowledges the deal with Mr. Sadr -- albeit without apologizing to the people of Basra who were terrorized for half a year by the Mahdi Army. However, Whitehall rejects that any such "accommodation" prevented British participation in the first days of the battle of Basra. It says the Brits lacked the proper equipment to assist the Iraqis. Whether that's true or not, the messages that Mr. Brown had been sending from the day he became Prime Minister were clear enough. He wanted British soldiers far removed from any fighting, and the British officer corps heeded his wishes.
In a sad irony, the British disgrace in Basra has become another blot against Mr. Brown's leadership at home. Mr. Brown was finally able to oust Tony Blair as Labour Party leader and Prime Minister in part because the British public was tired of Iraq and Mr. Brown promised a withdrawal. As America pushed ahead with the military surge in 2007, Britain went in the opposite direction. Last September, Mr. Brown ordered the British contingent in southern Iraq drawn down quickly. In the new Prime Minister's sights was victory in British elections, even if it meant a lack of victory in Iraq.
In other words, Mr. Brown chose to pursue precisely the path that most of the American political establishment urged on President Bush at the same time. Mr. Bush resisted the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group path to retreat, and both Iraq and the American strategic position in the Middle East are far better for it. Mr. Brown took the path of least political resistance, yet now finds himself under criticism for having allowed the proud British military to fail in its duty. Barely 14 months in office, Mr. Brown is struggling to hold on as PM long enough to even contest the next election in 2010.
from the Times of London, 2008-Oct-6, by Tom Coghlan in Kabul and Michael Evans, Defence Editor:
We can't defeat Taleban, says Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith
The departing commander of British forces in Afghanistan says he believes the Taleban will never be defeated.
Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, whose troops have suffered severe casualties after six months of tough fighting, will hand over to 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines this month.
He told The Times that in his opinion, a military victory over the Taleban was “neither feasible nor supportable”.
The brigadier said that his troops had “taken the sting out of the Taleban” during clashes in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, but at a heavy cost. His brigade suffered 32 killed and 170 injured during its six-month tour of duty. The 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment alone lost 11 soldiers, most of them killed by roadside bombs or other explosive devices.
The brigadier's grim prognosis follows a leaked cable by François Fitou, the deputy French Ambassador in Kabul, claiming that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, had told him the strategy for Afghanistan was “doomed to failure”.
In the cable, Mr Fitou told President Sarkozy that Sir Sherard believed “the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption and the Government has lost all trust”. He said Sir Sherard had told him Britain had no alternative but to support the US, “but we should tell them that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one. The American strategy is doomed to fail.”
Brigadier Carleton-Smith admitted that it had been “a turbulent summer” but he said that the Taleban were “riven with deep fissures and fractures”.
He added: “However, the Taleban, tactically, is reasonably resilient, certainly quite dangerous and seems relatively impervious to losses. Its potency is as a force for influence.”
He indicated that the only way forward was to find a political solution that would include the Taleban. The Government of President Karzai has launched a reconciliation programme, although the hard core of Taleban commanders is thought to be implacably opposed to any compromise. Efforts are being focused on the so-called “tier-two” and “tier-three” Taleban, who are perceived to be less ideologically intransigent.
The brigadier said that in the areas where the Government had no control, the Afghan population was “vulnerable to a shifting coalition of Taleban, mad mullahs and marauding militias”. In other areas, however, progress was being made and children were going back to school. “We are trying to deliver sufficient security for a degree of normalisation,” he said.
The British commander said that more foreign trainers were needed to help to build up the competence of the Afghan National Army. He suggested that they would be provided by the Americans. He said that there had been a government vacuum for 30 years, and even now the central Government in Kabul did not view Helmand as a key province. He said that in some areas the Afghan people were now beginning to shift their allegiance towards traditional power structures “rather than the shadowy and illegal structures” of the Taleban and the warlords.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Sep-2, p.A20, by Marc Champion and John W. Miller in Brussels, and David Gauthier-Villars and Alessandra Galloni in Paris, with Gregory L. White in Moscow contributing:
EU Leaders Put Off Moves to Pressure Moscow
Energy Dependence Makes Tough Action Difficult at SummitThe European Union pledged Monday to help Georgia recover from Russia's continuing military intervention, but fears over Europe's dependence on Russia for energy and of splitting the EU prevented moves to pressure Moscow.
As hundreds of thousands of Georgians protested in the streets of Tbilisi against the presence of Russian troops, the EU's emergency summit in Brussels produced condemnation of Russia's actions in Georgia and of its decision to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two separatist territories in Georgia, as independent.
"The question is, what does Russia want?" said French President Nicolas Sarkozy at a postsummit press conference. He said it was now up to Moscow to decide whether to isolate itself politically by keeping its troops in Georgia or else withdraw and begin talks on status.
Russian officials including President Dmitry Medvedev, made similar demands in the run-up to Monday's summit, warning the EU would have to decide as it responds to events in Georgia what kind of relationship it wants with Moscow.
EU leaders agreed in their final statement to send Mr. Sarkozy and EU officials to Moscow Sept. 8 to assess Russian intentions. After that, the bloc will draw up a full response ahead of an EU-Russia summit in November, effectively giving Moscow two months' grace before any potential EU action.
The EU also said it would set up a donor conference for Georgia in the near future, discuss new free-trade and visa-facilitation agreements with Georgia and send an assessment team to Tbilisi ahead of a potential EU monitoring mission to help observe the cease-fire.
Still, the summit's final statement did little to penalize Moscow beyond suspending meetings on a new trade-and-investment agreement until Russia has pulled its troops back in accordance with the cease-fire deal Mr. Sarkozy brokered last month. Russia says it is already abiding by the deal.
"Russia represents a huge part of the world for Europe," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in an interview, summing up Europe's caution in provoking Russia. "If you ask me what does...this or that [Caucasus] country mean to Europe—all of this represents energy, gas and oil."
Russia is the EU's biggest supplier of natural gas and oil.
Mr. Kouchner said it wasn't realistic to adopt a confrontational approach toward Russia.
Instead, he said, Europe needed to continue its dialogue with Russia, a country that is a key player on hot-button diplomatic issues, including attempts to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions.
"The U.S. isn't going to wage war against the Russian army; that's clear," Mr. Kouchner said, his spacious office adorned with detailed military maps of Georgia. "We can't act according to the immediate interests of a U.S. administration that is going to change, or according to the impatience—which is totally legitimate—of certain former Communist-bloc countries."
EU leaders soft-pedaled any moves that could split the bloc, or the trans-Atlantic alliance—a longstanding Russian goal that Western diplomats say Moscow again appears to be pushing hard.
"The Georgian issue has brought the EU closer together," said Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, who has been closely involved in the Georgia crisis. The U.S., too, he said, has worked hard to keep in step with the EU. He said he had spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice 15 times since the crisis started, and he showed off cuff links she gave him.
The U.S. has been "very quiet about what our assistance plans are and we've been reticent about the negative steps we may take toward Moscow" because Washington wants the EU to take the lead in addressing the Georgia crisis, said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew J. Bryza, the U.S. State Department's point man in the Caucasus. He was speaking in the margins of a debate on the Georgia crisis hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels Monday.
Still, tensions remain between, on the one side, the U.S. and EU countries such as Poland that see Russia's actions as an immediate threat, and, on the other, EU members that don't. "Either we will get a united, effective EU response or we will not be credible," said Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, speaking at the debate.
While Moscow's message to the EU has been largely conciliatory, reassuring Europe that no return to the Cold War is on the table, Russia's leaders have made clear their desire to see Europe distance itself from Washington's tougher line on events in Georgia.
Russia's President Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in recent days have also sought to paint Russia as a new power center willing to stand up to U.S. hegemony. They have denounced Washington's supporters in Europe as shortsighted stooges and called for construction of a new security organization in Europe to supercede the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
"The authority will decline of those countries who've taken the line of servicing the foreign-policy interests of other countries," Mr. Putin told German ARD television late Friday, in an apparent reference to U.S. allies in Europe. Poland, for example, recently signed an agreement to host U.S. ballistic-missile interceptors. "We're relying on the support of our European partners," said Mr. Putin.
Russian officials appear increasingly confident the example of Georgia will make NATO's European members less willing to consider expanding the West's military alliance further into Russia's newly defined sphere of influence, a continuing U.S. goal.
"The unified West that was there in the Cold War is gone and won't come back," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, an influential Russian foreign-policy journal. On Russia's reassertion of a sphere of influence, he added: "I think, under certain conditions, Europe would be willing to accept this, but not the United States."
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney makes a tour of U.S. allies among Russia's ex-Soviet neighbors next week, avoiding Moscow.
from the New York Sun, 2006-Nov-14, by Daniel Pipes:
Steyn's New Book Combines Humor, Accuracy, Depth
The political columnist and cultural critic Mark Steyn has written a remarkable book, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" (Regnery). He combines several virtues not commonly found together — humor, accurate reportage, and deep thinking — and then applies them to what is arguably the most consequential issue of our time: the Islamist threat to the West.
Mr. Steyn offers a devastating thesis but presents it in bits and pieces, so I shall pull it together here.
He begins with the legacy of two totalitarianisms. Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed in a top-down manner,"so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures." As a result, the establishment has "come to regard the electorate as children."
Second, the Soviet menace during the Cold War prompted American leaders, impatient with Europe's (and Canada's) weak responses, effectively to take over their defense. This benign and far-sighted policy led to victory by 1991, but it also had the unintended and less salutary side effect of freeing up Europe's funds to build a welfare state. This welfare state had several malign implications.
- The nanny state infantilized Europeans, making them worry about such pseudo-issues as climate change while feminizing the males.
- It also neutered them, annexing "most of the core functions of adulthood," starting with the instinct to breed. From about 1980, birth rates plummeted, leaving an inadequate base for today's workers to receive their pensions.
- Structured on a pay-as-you-go basis, it amounted to an intergenerational Ponzi scheme under which today's workers depend on their children for their pensions.
- The demographic collapse meant that the indigenous peoples of countries like Russia, Italy, and Spain are at the start of a population death spiral.
- It led to a collapse of confidence that in turn bred "civilizational exhaustion," leaving Europeans unprepared to fight for their ways.
To keep the economic machine running meant accepting foreign workers. Rather than execute a long-term plan to prepare for the many millions of immigrants needed, Europe's elites punted, welcoming almost anyone who turned up. By virtue of geographic proximity, demographic overdrive, and a crisis-prone environment, "Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans," Mr. Steyn writes.
Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe: "Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare." Put differently, "Premodern Islam beats post-modern Christianity." Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." With even more drama, he adds, "It's the end of the world as we know it."
(In contrast, I believe that Europe still has time to avoid this fate.)
"America Alone" deals at length with what Mr. Steyn calls "the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia." Europe's successor population is already in place, and "the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be." He interprets the Madrid and London bombings, as well as the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, as opening shots in Europe's civil war and states, "Europe is the colony now."
The title "America Alone" refers to Mr. Steyn's expectation that America — with its "relatively healthy demographic profile" — will emerge as the lonely survivor of this crucible. "Europe is dying and America isn't." Therefore, "the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn't." Mr. Steyn's target audience is primarily American: Watch out, he is saying, or the same will happen to you.
Pared to its essentials, he counsels two things: First, avoid the "bloated European welfare systems," declare them no less than a national security threat, shrink the state, and emphasize the virtues of self-reliance and individual innovation. Second, avoid "imperial understretch," don't "hunker down in Fortress America" but destroy the ideology of radical Islam, help reform Islam, and expand Western civilization to new places. Only if Americans "can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world" will they have enough company to soldier on. Failing that, expect a "new Dark Ages ... a planet on which much of the map is re-primitivized."
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of "Miniatures" (Transaction Publishers).
from the Times of London, 2007-Jun-6, by Helen Nugent and Nadia Menuhin:
Muhammad is No 2 in boy's names
Muhammad is now second only to Jack as the most popular name for baby boys in Britain and is likely to rise to No 1 by next year, a study by The Times has found. The name, if all 14 different spellings are included, was shared by 5,991 newborn boys last year, beating Thomas into third place, followed by Joshua and Oliver.
Scholars said that the name's rise up the league table was driven partly by the growing number of young Muslims having families, coupled with the desire to name their child in honour of the Prophet.
Muhammad Anwar, Professor of Ethnic Relations at Warwick University, said: “Muslim parents like to have something that shows a link with their religion or with the Prophet.”
Although the official names register places the spelling Mohammed at No 23, an analysis of the top 3,000 names provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts Muhammad at No 2 once the 14 spellings are taken into account. If its popularity continues – it rose by 12 per cent last year – the name will take the top spot by the end of this year. It first entered the Top 30 in 2000.
The spelling Muhammad, like all transliterations, comes from replacing the Arabic script with what is deemed its closest Latin equivalent. There are many versions in Britain, depending on where the family are from and variations in pronounciation.
Muhammad, which means “one who is praiseworthy”, is often given to boys as an honorary prefix and is followed by the name by which they are commonly known. It is regularly cited as the most common name in the world, though there is no concrete evidence.
Mufti Abdul Barkatullah, a former imam at the Finchley mosque in northwest London, said: “Parents who name their son Muhammad believe that the name has an effect on their personality and future characteristics. They are saying that this boy will be of good character.
“Some people may not really understand the history of the Prophet Muhammad and the name but they still want the association so they can be recognised as one of his followers.
“In Arab countries, the name Muhammad is said when you don't know the name of someone. On the sub-continent, it is different: Muhammad can be used either before or after another name.
“When you get to the UK, it is essentially about translating the sound of the Arabic into English. A nonArab Muslim would have the name ending in -ed while an Arab Muslim would adopt the -ad ending.”
Overall, Muslims account for 3 per cent of the British population, about 1.5 million people. However, the Muslim birthrate is roughly three times higher than the nonMuslim one.
Statistics from the ONS show that Muslim households are larger than those headed by someone of another religion. In 2001, the average size of a Muslim household was 3.8 people while a third contained more than five people.
According to data from CACI Information Solutions, men who are named Muhammad are 5½ times more likely to go on holiday in Asia and twice as likely to live in Yorkshire than most other people.
Additionally, a man named Muhammad is most likely to be aged between 25 and 34 and to have an average salary of £25,000.
The leading name for girls born to Muslim parents in 2006 was Aisha, in 110th place. Its meaning is “wife of the Prophet” or “life”.
How do you spell that?
The different spellings of Muhammad in 2006 and the number of occurrences
Mohammed 2,833
Muhammad 1,422
Mohammad 920
Muhammed 358
Mohamed 354
Mohamad 29
Mahammed 18
Mohammod 13
Mahamed 12
Muhammod 9
Muhamad 7
Mohmmed 6
Mohamud 5
Mohammud 5
— Scholars and imams differ on why there are so many variants of the name
— Some say it is the result of phonetic translations by Muslims who moved here from abroad. Others say that it is merely down to the personal choice of the parents
The most popular names for baby boys in 2006
1 Jack 6,928, 2 Muhammad (all spellings) 5,991, 3 Thomas 5,921, 4 Joshua 5,808, 5 Oliver 5,208, 6 Harry 5,006, 7 James 4,783, 8 William 4,327, 9 Samuel 4,320, 10 Daniel 4,303, 11 Charlie 4,178, 12 Benjamin 3,778, 13 Joseph 3,755, 14 Callum 3,517, 15 George 3,386, 16 Jake 3,353, 17 Alfie 3,194, 18 Luke 3,108,19 Matthew 3,043, 20 Ethan 3,020
Source: Office for National Statistics/ The Times
from the New York Post, 2006-Nov-27, by Ralph Peters:
THE 'EURABIA' MYTH
MUSLIMS TAKE OVER EUROPE? SORRY, THERE'S NO CHANCENovember 26, 2006 -- A RASH of pop prophets tell us that Muslims in Europe are reproducing so fast and European societies are so weak and listless that, before you know it, the continent will become "Eurabia," with all those topless gals on the Riviera wearing veils.
Well, maybe not.
The notion that continental Europeans, who are world-champion haters, will let the impoverished Muslim immigrants they confine to ghettos take over their societies and extend the caliphate from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam has it exactly wrong.
The endangered species isn't the "peace loving" European lolling in his or her welfare state, but the continent's Muslims immigrants - and their multi-generation descendents - who were foolish enough to imagine that Europeans would share their toys.
In fact, Muslims are hardly welcome to pick up the trash on Europe's playgrounds.
Don't let Europe's current round of playing pacifist dress-up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebrenica.
THE historical patterns are clear: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened - even when the threat's concocted nonsense - they don't just react, they over-react with stunning ferocity. One of their more-humane (and frequently employed) techniques has been ethnic cleansing.
And Europeans won't even need to re-write "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with an Islamist theme - real Muslims zealots provide Europe's bigots with all the propaganda they need. Al Qaeda and its wannabe fans are the worst thing that could have happened to Europe's Muslims. Europe hasn't broken free of its historical addictions - we're going to see Europe's history reprised on meth.
The year 1492 wasn't just big for Columbus. It's also when Spain expelled its culturally magnificent Jewish community en masse - to be followed shortly by the Moors, Muslims who had been on the Iberian Peninsula for more than 800 years.
Jews got the boot elsewhere in Europe, too - if they weren't just killed on the spot. When Shakespeare wrote "The Merchant of Venice," it's a safe bet he'd never met a Jew. The Chosen People were long-gone from Jolly Olde England.
From the French expulsion of the Huguenots right down to the last century's massive ethnic cleansings, Europeans have never been shy about showing "foreigners and subversives" the door.
And Europe's Muslims don't even have roots, by historical standards. For the Europeans, they're just the detritus of colonial history. When Europeans feel sufficiently provoked and threatened - a few serious terrorist attacks could do it - Europe's Muslims will be lucky just to be deported.
Sound impossible? Have the Europeans become too soft for that sort of thing? Has narcotic socialism destroyed their ability to hate? Is their atheism a prelude to total surrender to faith-intoxicated Muslim jihadis?
The answer to all of the above questions is a booming "No!" The Europeans have enjoyed a comfy ride for the last 60 years - but the very fact that they don't want it to stop increases their rage and sense of being besieged by Muslim minorities they've long refused to assimilate (and which no longer want to assimilate).
WE don't need to gloss over the many Muslim acts of barbarism down the centuries to recognize that the Europeans are just better at the extermination process. From the massacre of all Muslims and Jews (and quite a few Eastern Christians) when the Crusaders reached Jerusalem in 1099 to the massacre of all the Jews in Buda (not yet attached to Pest across the Danube) when the "liberating" Habsburg armies retook the citadel at the end of the 17th century, Europeans have just been better organized for genocide.
It's the difference between the messy Turkish execution of the Armenian genocide and the industrial efficiency of the Holocaust. Hey, when you love your work, you get good at it.
Far from enjoying the prospect of taking over Europe by having babies, Europe's Muslims are living on borrowed time. When a third of French voters have demonstrated their willingness to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front - a party that makes the Ku Klux Klan seem like Human Rights Watch - all predictions of Europe going gently into that good night are surreal.
I have no difficulty imagining a scenario in which U.S. Navy ships are at anchor and U.S. Marines have gone ashore at Brest, Bremerhaven or Bari to guarantee the safe evacuation of Europe's Muslims. After all, we were the only ones to do anything about the slaughter of Muslims in the Balkans. And even though we botched it, our effort in Iraq was meant to give the Middle East's Muslims a last chance to escape their self-inflicted misery.
AND we're lucky. The United States attracts the quality. American Muslims have a higher income level than our national average. We hear about the handful of rabble-rousers, but more of our fellow Americans who happen to be Muslims are doctors, professors and entrepreneurs.
And the American dream is still alive and well, thanks: Even the newest taxi driver stumbling over his English grammar knows he can truly become an American.
But European Muslims can't become French or Dutch or Italian or German. Even if they qualify for a passport, they remain second-class citizens. On a good day. And they're supposed to take over the continent that's exported more death than any other?
All the copy-cat predictions of a Muslim takeover of Europe not only ignore history and Europe's ineradicable viciousness, but do a serious disservice by exacerbating fear and hatred. And when it comes to hatred, trust me: The Europeans don't need our help.
The jobless and hopeless kids in the suburbs may burn a couple of cars, but we'll always have Paris.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Never Quit the Fight."
from Radio Netherlands, 2007-Aug-14, by Mohammed Abdelrahman and Nicolien den Boer:
Let's call God Allah
The Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, wants people to start calling God Allah. He says the Netherlands should look to Indonesia, where the Christian churches already pray to Allah. It is also common in the Arab world: Christian and Muslim Arabs use the words God and Allah interchangeably.
Speaking on the Dutch TV programme Network on Monday evening, Bishop Muskens (pictured) says it could take another 100 years but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches. And that will promote rapprochement between the two religions.
Retiring
Muskens doesn't expect his idea to be greeted with much enthusiasm. The 71-year-old bishop, who will soon be retiring due to ill health, says God doesn't mind what he is called. God is above such "discussion and bickering". Human beings invented this discussion themselves, he believes, in order to argue about it.More than 30 years ago Bishop Muskens worked in Indonesia and, there, God was called Allah, even in Catholic churches. The Dutch should learn to get on spontaneously with different cultures, religions and behaviour patterns:
"Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years. In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can't we start doing that together?"
In the Arab world God is called Allah. The long history of Christianity in the Arab world led to the development of a rich Christian-Islamic theological vocabulary, which makes God a normal equivalent to Allah. Both Muslims and Christians use the word in the Middle East.
ar-Rabb
Apart from Allah, the term ar-Rabb (the Lord) is also widely used, although this appears far more often in the Arabic version of the Bible than in the Qur'an. In the Islamic context, references to ar-Rabb are normally found in the possessive form, such as Rabbi (My Lord). Interestingly, the word Allah was already in use by Christians in the pre-Islamic period.Bishop Muskens proposal will undoubtedly receive a warm welcome from the Islamic community in the Netherlands. Particularly as it follows last week's remarks by Geert Wilders about banning the Qur'an and, shortly before that, former Muslim Ehsan Jami's comparison of Muhammad with Osama bin Laden.
Attention
Perhaps this is the reason Bishop Muskens' remarks have received so much attention in the Dutch press. The bishop actually said exactly the same several years ago. He also suggested abolishing Whit Monday as a national holiday in favour of an Islamic religious day.In the past, Bishop Muskens has offended many Muslims. In 2005 he said Islam was a religion without a future because it had too many violent aspects. The bishop is also responsible for a number of controversial remarks. He caused uproar in the Netherlands when he said the poor had a right to steal bread if they were hungry. And he put the Vatican's back up with an appeal for the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Sep-20:
French Revolution
Sarkozy takes on the welfare state.Unveiling his domestic reform agenda in Paris Tuesday, Nicolas Sarkozy called for "a new social contract" for France. His proposed revision of French socialist tradition going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau is nothing short of revolutionary. His ability to deliver will make or break his presidency.
True to character, Mr. Sarkozy came out swinging. The new President declared that France's generous welfare state is "unjust" and "financially untenable," "discourages work and job creation," and "fails to bring equal opportunity." The result: France's jobless rate is the euro zone's highest.
The President wants "a new social contract founded on work, merit and equal opportunity." He promised to loosen restrictions on working hours and toughen up requirements for jobless benefits, to ease hiring and firing rules and reduce incentives to retire early.
Cautious optimism is in order. Over the summer, his new government moved gingerly. An autonomy plan for universities was watered down. A law assuring minimum transport services during strikes, intended to weaken the unions, was as well. On the plus side, wealth and income taxes were cut and the inheritance tax abolished. Fine. But considering his strong mandate and dominance of parliament, Mr. Sarkozy didn't overachieve.
The details of this week's proposals are sketchy but provide a foundation to build on. Echoing a frequent promise, the President said the law mandating a maximum 35-hour work week ought to be further relaxed to let the French--perish the thought--"choose work over leisure." Inexplicably, however, Mr. Sarkozy refrained from pulling the plug on a law that's come to symbolize France's slothful ways.
He showed more political courage in calling for an end to state-guaranteed job security at private firms. Such legal protections discourage companies from hiring new employees and spur outsourcing. He also took on the most coddled insiders of all, public-sector workers. State employees retire earlier with full and often better benefits than the rest of the population, which picks up the tab. Train conductors legally stop work at age 50 thanks to a rule dating from when they still shoveled coal into engines.
Scaling back these benefits invites confrontation with the most powerful constituency against change in France, public-sector unions. In 1995, when Jacques Chirac tried something similar, strikes brought the country to a standstill. But this isn't 1995, and unlike Mr. Chirac, Mr. Sarkozy won an electoral mandate for change. In a Opinion Way/Ajis poll published Tuesday, 51% of the French support Mr. Sarkozy's social policy, with 38% opposed. As for the vaunted "French social model," a bare 9% wants to "preserve it as is."
One of the biggest threats to Mr. Sarkozy's revolution may yet be from Mr. Sarkozy himself. In his first four months in office, the President has revealed a populist streak. He browbeats the European Central Bank to lower interest rates and sticks his nose into big business. Such interventionism harks back to old-style French economic management and is out of tune with the approach outlined yesterday.
Mr. Sarkozy's long-awaited speech sets the stage for the most important political battle in his first term. Whatever the President does in the next five years, he can't claim to have succeeded unless France breaks out of its economic slumber. His equally ambitious foreign policy depends on it, too. The President's prescriptions for the ailing French welfare state are hard to argue with. Now if only Mr. Sarkozy will apply them.
from Bloomberg, 2007-Aug-7, by Farah Nayeri:
Don't Have Kids, Pleads French Mom, Author of `Hello Laziness'
Brussels -- Corinne Maier's first bestseller, ``Hello Laziness,'' urged the French to avoid work. Her latest broadside advises them to shun babies.
Never mind that Maier, 43, has two children herself. Titled ``No Kid'' and emblazoned with a mock traffic sign showing a red diagonal slash across two children, Maier's new book offers ``40 reasons not to have a child.'' It's been simmering on French bestseller lists all summer.
Maier greets me in black jeans and sandals at the door of her century-old stone townhouse in Brussels -- bought last year with the help of royalties from ``Hello Laziness'' -- where she is ensconced with daughter Laure, 13, and son Cyrille, 11. Their father, a psychiatrist, spends half the week in Paris.
Throughout the interview, Maier proves a doting mother. She repeatedly interrupts our chat to ask Laure and Cyrille to read, eat, go upstairs and so forth. Her gripe isn't with children; it's with what children have done to her. Motherhood, she says -- becoming stern behind her round-rimmed glasses -- has turned her into a cop, putting her in ``a monstrous place.''
``If I could live my life all over again, I would do something completely different,'' she says half seriously, relaxing on a black leather divan in a living space sprinkled with rugs and contemporary art. ``I would focus so immediately on what interests me that I think I wouldn't have room for children. When you have a fascinating life, you don't need children.''
`Walking Milk Bottle'
The book's 40 reasons for avoiding kids, laid out in brief chapters of as few as two pages, start with the grim realities of childbearing and early motherhood: ``Labor: A Torture,'' is one, soon followed by ``Avoid becoming a walking milk bottle'' and ``Keep Your Friends.''
Maier also bemoans the dwindling of lust. ``Can you picture a movie like `Nine 1/2 Weeks' with children in the next room?'' she asks. ``The temperature would immediately drop by nine and a half degrees, even with super-sexy actors.''
The book gradually embraces broader themes, including overpopulation, pollution, the dictatorship of the child and the veneration of youth. At times redundant yet always thought- provoking, this is an amusing rant that makes valid points about children, parenting and society.
Raised in the freewheeling early 1970s, Maier swore she would never be ``dusty'' and old-fashioned. Once she had kids, though, she learned that ``you can't escape dust: As an adult, you do plenty of things that others before you have done.''
Purring Parents
In ``No Kid,'' she shatters taboos, attacking what she calls the ubiquitous ``purring'' about parenthood in discourse today. Why not show the rosy side -- the joy that children bring?
``The rosy side is shown so widely elsewhere that there was no point,'' she says with a chuckle.
What do her kids make of it? Laure steps into the living room alone, blonde-haired and barefoot in her camouflage pants. She knows what her mother writes about, though she hasn't read her books. (She prefers Harry Potter and Stephen King.)
Does ``No Kid'' worry her? ``No, it doesn't bother me,'' she giggles, ``because I know she really likes us deep down.''
Next on the divan is Cyrille, with cropped blond hair and a T-shirt displaying nautical knots. He wants to be a geologist: His room contains shelves full of beach pebbles, each labeled with its scientific name. He started reading one of his mother's books once and soon got bored.
``No Kid'' doesn't upset him, either.
``It's not that she doesn't love us,'' he shrugs. ``It's just that it's too much work.''
``No Kid'' is from Michalon (171 pages, 14 euros).
(Farah Nayeri is a writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
from the Telegraph of London, 2006-Dec-9, by Philip Johnston:
Adopt our values or stay away, says Blair
Full text of Blair's multiculturalism speech
Tony Blair formally declared Britain's multicultural experiment over yesterday as he told immigrants they had ''a duty" to integrate with the mainstream of society.
In a speech that overturned more than three decades of Labour support for the idea, he set out a series of requirements that were now expected from ethnic minority groups if they wished to call themselves British.
These included "equality of respect" - especially better treatment of women by Muslim men - allegiance to the rule of law and a command of English.
If outsiders wishing to settle in Britain were not prepared to conform to the virtues of tolerance then they should stay away. He added: "Conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed.
"If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us. The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means."
Mr Blair's volte face - just eight years ago he championed multiculturalism - was the culmination of a long Labour retreat from the cause. In recent weeks, Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly, John Reid and Gordon Brown have all played their part in a concerted revision of the Cabinet's stand which began in earnest after the July 7 suicide bombings in London last year.
Mr Blair, speaking in Downing Street, said the diversity of cultures in Britain should still be celebrated but the tone of his speech was against the ideology that became known as multiculturalism.
"The right to be in a multicultural society was always implicitly balanced by a duty to integrate, to be part of Britain, to be British and Asian, British and black, British and white," he said
The bombings had thrown the whole concept of a multicultural Britain "into sharp relief" and highlighted the divisions in society. While it was right that people should enjoy their own cultures, they should do so under a single set of overarching values.
"When it comes to our essential values, the belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage — then that is where we come together, it is what gives us what we hold in common; it is what givesright to call ourselves British," said Mr Blair.
"At that point no distinctive culture or religion supercedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom."
from City Journal, 2007-Apr-9, by Theodore Dalrymple:
The British Way of Murder
Surveillance won't guarantee good behavior.Britain is experiencing a spate of murders that suggests a population increasingly unable, or unwilling, to control itself. A recent survey suggested that the British are now more prone to knife-fights than any other people in Europe. Guns have also become fashionable, despite—or is it because of?—stringent laws against them. An emblematic recent murder was that of Krystal Hart, a pregnant 22 year-old, shot with two bullets in the head and then found in her apartment in an up-and-coming part of London, which she shared with her mother.
As with any widely publicized murder in Britain these days, an outpouring of sentiment ensued. Mourners left flowers (still in cellophane wrapping) at the site, and the press conducted interviews with the victim's relatives, who never seemed too distressed to grab a moment of fame, and who noted that the victim was a wonderful person. Then followed the typically emasculated detective, whose first thought, at least for public broadcast, was for the grieving relatives, and who said that this was a senseless murder, implying that perhaps there are perfectly sensible ones. Thus, the public gets the impression that what was terrible about the murder was not that it was contrary to common law—the nature of the victim being irrelevant—but that a young and pretty pregnant woman, “so bubbly and full of life,” died. If she were a person of different character—an old reclusive miser, say—it wouldn't have been so terrible, it seems, and certainly wouldn't have been worth publicizing.
Krystal Hart's boyfriend, who had impregnated her, lamented that he had so looked forward to starting a family with her. Some might say that he had already done so. But that was not his only involvement with the incident. Shortly before the murder, he had come to her apartment, and had a disagreement with an associate of one of her neighbors; both of them, separately, left the scene. Hart and the neighbor, it turns out, had a long-standing dispute about parking spaces, but also about something else, as yet unknown to the public. Their ongoing quarrel was so acrimonious that Hart's father—separated from her mother, as is now customary—had installed a closed-circuit television at the entrance to the apartment for security.
Thirty minutes after the quarrel, the neighbor's associate, his ego no doubt bruised by something said in the dispute, returned with a gun, probably searching for the boyfriend. Instead, after kicking the door down, he shot Krystal Hart.
The media reports of practically every murder in Britain now conclude with the words, “The police are studying the CCTV evidence.” Britain has by far the highest density of closed-circuit television cameras in the world, each Briton being filmed 300 times per day. But no amount of electronic surveillance can ensure common decency.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2007-Jun-28, p.A13, by Alan M. Dershowitz:
An Academic Hijacking
When a relatively small number of British academics tried to hijack the traditional trade union agenda of the British University and College Union by calling for an academic boycott of Israel, they expected little opposition. The union, after all, is British, and the nation whose academics were to be boycotted is Israel.
Anti-Israel sentiment among left-wing academics, journalists, and politicians in Britain is politically correct and relatively uncontroversial (as is anti-American sentiment). Several years earlier, a petition to boycott several Israeli universities initially passed but was later rescinded, and the British National Union of Journalists has also voted to boycott Israeli products. At about the same time, a British academic journal fired two of its board members apparently because they were Israeli Jews. Some popular British political leaders, most notoriously, London's Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, have made anti-Israel statements that border on anti-Semitism, in one instance comparing a Jewish journalist to a Nazi "war criminal."
Many of the academics who have been pushing the boycott most energetically are members of hard-left socialist-worker groups. These radicals devote more time and energy to international issues than to the domestic welfare of their own members, who have suffered a serious decline in salary and working conditions. Their pet peeve, sometimes it appears their only peeve, is the Israeli occupation -- not of the West Bank and, before its return, of Gaza but rather of all of Palestine, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. These are not advocates of the two-state solution, but of a one-state dissolution of Israel, with the resulting state being controlled by Hamas.
In a world in which dissident academics are murdered in Iran, tortured in Egypt, imprisoned in China and fired in many other parts of the world, the British Union decided to boycott only academics from a country with as much academic freedom as in Britain and far more academic freedom -- and more actual academic dissent -- than in any Arab or Muslim country. Indeed, Arabs have more academic (and journalistic) freedom in Israel, even in the West Bank, than in any Arab or Muslim nation.
But these union activists couldn't care less about academic freedom, or any other kind of freedom for that matter. Nor do they care much about the actual plight of the Palestinians. If they did, they would be supporting the Palestinian Authority in its efforts to make peace with Israel based on mutual compromise, rather than Hamas in its futile efforts to destroy Israel as well as the PA.
What they care about -- and all they seem to care about -- is Israel, which they despise, without regard to what the Jewish state actually does or fails to do. The fact that this boycott effort is being undertaken at precisely the time when Israel has ended the occupation of Gaza and is reaching out to the PA, and even to Syria, in an effort to make peace proves that the boycott is not intended to protest specific Israeli policies or actions, but rather to delegitimize and demonize Israel as a democratic Jewish nation. One union activist said on a BBC radio show that "Israel is worse than Stalinist Russia."
The boycotters know that Israel, without oil or other natural resources, lives by its universities, research centers and other academic institutions. After the U.S., Israeli scientists hold more patents than any nation in the world, have more start-up companies listed on Nasdaq, and export more life-saving medical technology.
Israelis have received more Nobel and other international science prizes than all the Arab and Muslim nations combined. Cutting Israel's academics off from collaboration with other academics would deal a death blow to the Israeli high-tech economy, but it would also set back research and academic collaboration throughout the world.
Moreover, many Israeli academics, precisely those who would be boycotted, are at the forefront in advocating peace efforts. They, perhaps more than others, understand the "peace dividend" the world would reap if Israeli military expenses could be cut and the money devoted to life-saving scientific research.
It is for these reasons that so many American academics, of all religious, ideological and political backgrounds, reacted so strongly to the threat of an academic boycott against Israel. As soon as it was reported, I helped to draft a simple petition in which signatories agreed to regard themselves as honorary Israeli academics for purposes of any boycott and "decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are excluded."
Working with Prof. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, and Ed Beck, the president of Scholars For Peace in the Middle East, we circulated the petition. I expected to gather several hundred signatures.
To my surprise, we have secured nearly 6,000 signatures, including those of 20 Nobel Prize winners, 14 university presidents as well as several heads of academic and professional societies. Three university presidents -- Lee Bollinger of Columbia, Robert Birgeneau of Berkeley and John Sexton of New York University -- have issued public statements declaring that if Israeli universities are boycotted, their American universities should be boycotted as well. Every day, I receive emails from other academics asking to be included as honorary Israeli academics for purposes of any boycott. We expect to reach at least 10,000 names on our petition.
It is fair to say, therefore, that the British boycott appears to be backfiring. British academics are on notice that if they try to isolate Israeli academics, it is they -- the British academics -- who will end up being isolated from some of the world's most prominent academics and scientists.
No one wants that to happen. Academics and scientists should collaborate with each other in the interests of promoting knowledge. The hope is that this ill-conceived boycott will be voted down by general membership of the university and college union, and that those radicals who are pushing it will be delegitimized in the eyes of the vast majority of British academics who will not want to see their union hijacked by single-issue bigots.
Mr. Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard University school of law and the author of "Blasphemy -- How The Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence" (Wiley, 2007).
from the Associated Press, 2007-Jun-2, by David Rising:
G-8 Protesters Clash With German Police
ROSTOCK, Germany -- Masked demonstrators showered police with grapefruit-sized rocks and beer bottles, then were driven back with water cannon and tear gas during a protest march Saturday against the upcoming Group of Eight summit in Germany.
The clashes left smoke from burning cars and the sting of tear gas drifting through the harborfront area in the north German port of Rostock. Some 146 police were hurt, 18 of them seriously.
Radicals "are smashing everything in their way to pieces," said Karsten Wolff, a police spokesman. There were no immediate numbers for arrests.
The officially permitted march preceded a three-day summit beginning Wednesday in the seaside resort of Heiligendamm, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosts the leaders of the other G-8 nations -- Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, Canada and the United States.
The leaders are expected to discuss measures against global warming, the fight against AIDS and poverty in Africa, and the world economy. As in previous years, the summit drew protesters of various stripes opposed to globalization, capitalism and the G-8 itself.
Most marchers were peaceful, but others pried up paving stones and broke them into chunks before charging police. Officers in helmets and full body armor fell back, then charged the demonstrators.
Five large green police trucks with twin water cannons mounted on top blasted groups of rioters. A police car was destroyed and several parked cars burned, spreading black smoke over the area.
Protesters torched a large blue recycling bin.
Police spokesman Frank Scheulen estimated the number of violence-minded demonstrators at about 2,000. Police put the size of the demonstration at 25,000, while organizers said it was 80,000.
Peter Mueller, who was among the demonstrators, had tears streaming from bloodshot eyes after the tear gas was released. "As long as the police were in the background it was OK, but as soon as one took a step closer, it went out of control," he said.
He shrugged. "What can you do? So ends the peaceful protest."
At one point, a line of police marched through a harborside street to scatter demonstrators, and were pelted with stones from behind. One of the organizers pleaded for calm from a loudspeaker.
"The police are heading back so we can hold our protest in peace, that is what we want," he said.
The march began without violence, and most of the demonstrators remained peaceful, gathering to listen to speeches from a stage in a large square near the waterfront.
But some taunted members of the 13,000-strong police detachment from around Germany, and several hundred wore bandanas across their faces with sweat shirt hoods pulled down low to obscure their identities.
The protesters from around Europe and the world gathered at two locations early in the day for rallies, then marched in two groups along three-mile routes to converge on the harbor for the main demonstration.
Police lined the path through the city, and helicopters flew overhead. Most shops and cafes were shuttered.
The protest was organized by several dozen groups under the motto "another world is possible."
"The world shaped by the dominance of the G-8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction and barriers against migrants and refugees," organizers said in leaflets handed out on the streets. "We want to protest against this and show the alternatives."
Dozens of different groups, including communists, anarchists and environmentalists, were taking part and messages were mixed: Some urged action from the G-8 countries in the fight against HIV/AIDS, African poverty and climate change, while others questioned the legitimacy of the G-8 meeting itself.
Kay Stenzel woke at 3 a.m. to drive in from the eastern city of Bautzen with four friends to voice their discontent with the G-8 leaders.
"They want to impose their wills upon the poor nations," he said, waving a red flag emblazoned with a black cat -- an animal he chose because it was "unruly."
On their Web site, organizers emphasized that they wanted a peaceful protest.
"There is no reason to be afraid to come to the big demonstration in Rostock," they said. "We do not expect major problems with the police."
from the Wall Street Journal, 2007-Mar-27, by Jacob Arfwedson:
The Status Quo Radical
PARIS -- French presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy is often portrayed in the foreign press as a maverick who advocates market reforms and pro-American positions. Yet a month before the first round of elections, his rhetoric smacks ominously of traditional Gaullist and statist ideology.
His campaign speeches have become diatribes against capitalism and global free trade, and his constant calls for interventionism bode ill for France should he reach the ultimate pinnacle. In a March 6 speech in the Parisian suburb of Cormeilles, for instance, he used the word "state" more than 70 times and the verb "protect" more than 40 times in outlining his economic program. When he did talk about issues such as capitalism, innovation or entrepreneurship, it was only in dismissive or disparaging terms.
"The state created France; the nation would not have existed without the state," he told his audience. After listing governmental achievements of the past 500 years, Mr. Sarkozy argued that the state is the people's primary mover and sole protector: yesterday against feudalism, today as "the only force opposing the markets." This type of rhetoric is designed to claw votes both from the left and from Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, which again is likely to turn out far stronger in a secret ballot than in the opinion polls since many people often feel uncomfortable admitting their sympathies for a xenophobic party to pollsters. Hence, Mr. Sarkozy's announcement in early March to set up a "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity" once he's elected.
He returned to the topic two weeks ago, saying that "immigration should not become a threat to [France's] identity" and that he "didn't want the extreme right to have a monopoly on the nation." While Mr. Sarkozy told an audience of young French last week that all you need is love, it is not at all clear that love will be the object of this new ministry. His eagerness to build a 24-hour government for all claims and grievances is obvious.
Politically groomed and trained to a large extent by departing President Jacques Chirac -- though Mr. Sarkozy is loath to admit any such affiliation -- the candidate proves an able pupil by excelling in the Chirac-esque trick of presenting two contradictory thoughts or proposals, often in the same sentence. The electoral logic is apparent, as the potential voter retains only what pleases him and ignores the rest. For instance, on the one hand Mr. Sarkozy likes to claim that the state "mobilizes, engages and undertakes." But then, in the very same speech, he'll argue that "the state, smothered by bureaucracy and debt, has become impotent." This is why, he says, he favors "neither laissez-faire, nor minimal government." We may well assume that government action, in Mr. Sarkozy's mind, is the key to solving any problem.
Albeit impotent, the state has the duty to protect -- so says Mr. Sarkozy, who has an ambition to protect everybody against everything, and especially against market forces. He boasts of protecting industry jobs and takes the credit for having "successfully rescued" Alstom in 2004 while he was finance minister. The "rescue" required a state-aid package that the European Commission approved only after much Parisian arm-twisting.
Yet he's not only the savior of labor; he's also the good shepherd of big business. One of his recurring campaign themes is the need to protect companies from globalization by, among other ways, putting an end to the alleged "overvaluation" of the euro and by imposing a European "community preference" against "social and monetary dumping." These vague ideas seem to be an attack against what is often called "unfair competition" from low-tax and low-wage European Union countries, primarily the new member states from the former communist East. "Monetary dumping" is an interesting twist and must be interpreted as an attack on the European Central Bank's independence. Presumably, the interest rates the ECB sets are too high for low-growth France. If the EU partners won't go along with him, he hints at the possibility of as-yet unspecified unilateral action.
For good measure, he claims that "Europe is the only region in the world where competition law exposes companies to predators of the entire world, because this legislation prevents them from merging and prevents the member states from helping them." Interestingly, France has bent EU antitrust law in both directions: first with the Alstom bailout, and last year by preparing a merger between French utilities Suez and Gaz de France in order to pre-empt an Italian company's rumored interest in the former.
This is all in stark contrast to what Mr. Sarkozy said last July when he started his campaign by denouncing the usual French blame game: "Whose fault is it? 'Globalization,' say some. 'Europe,' others claim. 'Liberalism,' say others. 'The immigrants,' yet others affirm. It is strange how we become creative when we have to find a scapegoat."
Yet Mr. Sarkozy's most recent stance amounts to exactly that same blame game he once criticized, and his new policy prescriptions contradict his former image as a champion of radical reform. In part, his about-face is surely a campaign ploy. But if his recent declarations and track record in government provide any guide to future policies, he will have proven once more that the winning electoral platform in France remains the defense of the status quo. The French should realize, though, that a state strong enough to give them everything they want is also powerful enough to take it all away.
Mr. Arfwedson is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe.
from BusinessWeek.com, 2007-May-7, by Carol Matlack:
Sarkozy Vows Reform: How Far Can He Go?
France's center-right President-elect has plans for labor and the economy, but those changes may not be big enough to satisfy the business communityIn any country but France, it would look like a mandate for sweeping change. On May 6, conservative Nicolas Sarkozy handily defeated Socialist S&eeacute;golène Royal to become President of France, after a campaign that drew stark contrasts between his support of free-market economics, and her more left-leaning platform.
Yet even Sarkozy's strong showing at the polls—just over 53%, with a near-record 85% turnout—won't easily translate into an overhaul of the country's stagnating economy.
Getting legislation enacted won't be a problem, because Sarkozy's center-right UMP party is likely to win a comfortable majority in parliamentary elections next month. But labor unions are already threatening strikes over some of his proposals, such as his plan to encourage people to work more than the current maximum 35-hour work week, by exempting them from taxes on overtime hours.
To defuse the labor protests, Sarkozy and his government will have to rally the country behind his program. Otherwise, the strikes could spiral into a crippling public backlash, as happened last year when mass protests forced the former center-right government to withdraw an unpopular youth employment law.
Hands Off Sacred Cows
Sarkozy has already laid out his economic program in considerable detail, promising action on key elements during his first 100 days in office. To boost employment, he would ease the 35-hour work week and tighten eligibility for unemployment benefits. To curb public spending, he plans to trim the civil service by replacing only half the workers who retire in coming years. And, in a dose of supply-side economics, he wants to trim inheritance and wealth taxes, as well as some business taxes, and introduce a tax deduction for mortgage interest payments as now exists in the U.S. and Britain.
But the 52-year-old Sarkozy—to address a question posed repeatedly during the presidential campaign—is not France's Margaret Thatcher. The economic program he has outlined so far would yield only modest improvement in growth and unemployment. To give the economy a real boost, Sarkozy would have to take aim at some of France's most sacred social protections. It's doubtful that most French people really want that. In fact it's not even clear that Sarkozy himself does (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/26/07, "French Elections: The Impact on Business").
One big problem is France's rigid anti-layoff laws, which force employers to engage in long, expensive negotiations in order to downsize. That has discouraged employers from hiring, and has led in recent years to a surge in outsourcing of jobs. Another big problem is the ballooning cost of government-paid health and retirement benefits, which saddle employers with some of the heaviest payroll taxes in the world.
Playing the Waiting Game?
Sarkozy is certainly aware of these problems. But despite prodding from the business community, he said little about them during the campaign. That's not surprising. The law that triggered last year's paralyzing strikes was a relatively mild plan to roll back anti-layoff protections for younger workers. Scaling back generous health and retirement protections would be politically explosive too—not just among Socialists and labor militants—but also among the millions of voters who supported Sarkozy.
Is Sarkozy planning to bide his time, hoping to enact incremental change and weaken the unions' grip before tackling more difficult reforms? That's anybody's guess.
For now, France Inc. is giving him the benefit of the doubt. The leading French employers' group, known as the Medef, on May 7 hailed his election as "a new page being turned for France," a sentiment echoed in statements by other business groups.
Investors reacted more cautiously, with the Paris stock market remaining flat on May 7, the first trading day after his victory. The market was rife with rumors, though, reflecting expectations that Sarkozy may exercise a dirigiste industrial policy—as he did previously as Finance Minister when he orchestrated a state bailout of engineering giant Alstom. A report by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, for example, said Sarkozy might use France's stake in the European Aeronautics Defence & Space Co., the parent of troubled planemaker Airbus, to force a management shakeup. Sarkozy's spokesman declined comment.
At least the new President will have a solid team behind him if he decides to tackle deeper economic reforms. His Prime Minister is likely to be either former Education Minister Fran&ccdeil;ois Fillon or the current Employment Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo. Both are seasoned, likeable politicians who could offset Sarkozy's often harsh and polarizing demeanor.
Staying the Same
Perhaps the best news of all for advocates of economic reform is that France's new President will be deeply engaged in economic policy. For the past 12 years, Jacques Chirac delegated that role to his Prime Minister and Cabinet, generally weighing in belatedly when crises arose. Sarkozy, in a jab at his predecessor during his debate with Royal on May 2, promised to "speak more frequently to the French (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/3/07, "Royal and Sarkozy Go to the Mat")."
Change is coming to France all right, but remember, this is the country that coined the adage, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."
Matlack is BusinessWeek's Paris bureau chief.
from Reuters, 2007-Jun-10, by Jon Boyle, with additional reporting by Crispian Balmer, Swaha Pattanaik and Francois Murphy:
Sarkozy poised for landslide parliamentary win
PARIS - French conservatives were headed for a parliamentary landslide after a first round legislative election on Sunday, bolstering President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to implement wide-ranging reforms.
A jubilant right said voters had decided to give Sarkozy the tools to carry out his pledge to boost growth, cut taxes and slash unemployment, but the left and centrists said a crushing right-wing majority was unhealthy and threatened democracy. Abstention looked set to hit a record of about 39 percent, against just 16 percent in the presidential election, reflecting deep voter fatigue after months of electioneering and a widespread feeling the centre-right was certain to win.
Pollster CSA said Sarkozy's bloc would win 440-470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly lower house after a second round of voting on June 17. IPSOS Dell pollsters saw the centre-right taking 383-447 seats against 120-170 for the mainstream left.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who won his seat outright on Sunday, said voters had given a "beautiful lead" to Sarkozy's allies, but warned that the job was only half done.
"Everything will really be decided next Sunday. That is why all the French will have to go and vote. Change is underway," he said in his Sarthe constituency west of Paris.
CSA gave the opposition Socialists, in disarray since May's third straight loss in presidential elections, just 60-90 seats compared to the 149 seats the party won in 2002 elections.
Senior Socialists appealed to voters to turn out en masse next week in a bid to stem the conservative "blue tide" that risked submerging the opposition in parliament.
"Come and vote, come for yourself, come for democracy, come for the Republic, come for France, come for social justice and come to help us reconstruct a new left," urged Socialist Segolene Royal, who remains popular despite losing out to Sarkozy in the May presidential elections.
EXTREMISTS LOSE OUT
Among the big losers on Sunday were extremist parties at both ends of the political spectrum.
The far-right National Front saw its vote halved to some 5 percent, with no seats in view, while the Communists suffered their worst parliamentary performance in postwar history, taking 5 percent of the vote, which could give between 6-13 seats.
Former leftist finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn said each Socialist deputy would be "an additional voice for democracy. In the Assembly, having 400, 450 right-wing deputies and a small number of left-wing deputies makes democratic debate impossible."
The Socialist campaign was dogged by infighting and finger-pointing after the defeat of Royal. She has indicated she would like to take over as Socialist party leader but remains a controversial figure within the left.
Francois Bayrou, the centrist who polled a strong third in last month's presidential vote, saw his support slump and said France's winner-takes-all system distorted democracy.
"France will regret this imbalance one day or another," said Bayrou, whose rebaptized Democratic Movement polled around 7.3 percent nationally and is expected to win 1-4 seats. The centrist won 18.6 percent in the presidential ballot.
Eleven government members were standing for election and Fillon has ruled they will have to quit if they lose. Government number 2 Alain Juppe, who faced one of the toughest fights in his Bordeaux fiefdom, appeared well placed for the run-off.
from the Times of London, 2007-Jun-18, by Charles Bremner:
Sarkozy honeymoon fades as the voters reject his `blue tidal wave'
Paris -- President Sarkozy has sealed his command of the French State for the next five years after voters yesterday gave his centre-right party a majority in parliament. The opposition Socialist Party made a surprisingly strong comeback after its first-round rout on May 6.
In the final bout of a two-month electoral season, Mr Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement and its allies won about 350 of the 577 seats. In the outgoing National Assembly they held 359.
Left-wing voters heeded alarm calls from the Socialist Party after the “blue tidal wave” towards the UMP in last Sunday's first round and raised its seats from 149 to more than 200. The Socialists spent the second-round campaign week fanning fears that François Fillon, the Prime Minister, was aiming to raise value added tax by two percentage points. The Communist Party, which had seemed destined for extinction, managed to save about half of its 21 seats.
The chief single victim of the swing back to the left was Alain Juppé, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was defeated in Bordeaux and resigned from the Government after one month as head of a new superministry of the Environment, Transport and Sustainable Development. Mr Juppé, a former Prime Minister and current Mayor of Bordeaux, was a long-serving lieutenant to Jacques Chirac, the last President. He returned to politics last year after receiving a six-month suspended prison sentence for corruption while he was deputy to Mr Chirac, then Mayor of Paris .
The absolute majority for the UMP and its new centre-party allies means that Mr Sarkozy has a clear mandate to push through his plans for jolting France out of its malaise.
Mr Fillon said that his Government would waste no time in using its majority to combat the “defeatism” which he said was suffocating France. “France is equipped with a majority to act,” he said.”
However, the revival of the Socialists from what seemed to be the edge of the electoral grave points to unhappiness among many over the President's radical plans for revamping the tax system to favour business and higher-earners.
This was the first time in three decades in which voters have returned the ruling party to parliamentary power. Mr Sarkozy, 52, managed to deprive the Socialists of their expected turn in office by convincing France that he, not they, could offer the clean break after 12 years under Mr Chirac, his boss. The Socialists, led by Ségolène Royal to presidential defeat last month, were partially saved by hostility to Mr Fillon's plans for a “social VAT”, which emerged after the first round. The Government is considering raising VAT to finance cuts in payroll taxes designed to give a boost to business.
While Mr Sarkozy's ministers hailed their clear majority, the Socialists were in near-triumphant mood. François Hollande, the party leader, said: “The blue wave that they promised us did not happen.” He thanked voters for giving the party 25 per cent more seats than in the last election. “Voters intended to create a counter force to balance the power of the Government,” he said.
The episode of social VAT was the first sign that the new President's extraordinary honeymoon with the public is reaching the end. Mr Sarkozy has called a special session of the new parliament for June 26 to begin passing his reforms, including loosening the 35-hour work week, guaranteeing minimum service during public transport strikes and clamping down on lawbreakers and illegal immigration.
He is also expected to reach out to members of the centrist and opposition camp when he appoints about a dozen new junior ministers in a small reshuffle of his month-old Government this week.
The future remains bleak for the Socialists. After losing three presidential elections in a row and destined for another five years in opposition, they are heading for a bout of blood-letting and recrimination.
Ms Royal, who won 47 per cent of the presidential vote, is trying to take over a party that has been run for the past decade by François Hollande, her domestic partner. Ms Royal remains popular with left-wing voters but is disliked by many senior figures in the party. They fault her for an incompetent campaign that blew the party's best chance of winning presidential power since 1988.
A consensus has emerged inside and outside the party that it can no longer patch over the split between reformers and old leftwingers. A group of reformers in their thirties and forties say it is time for new blood.
* * * * *
Poll figures
UMP 314
Other right-wing parties 32
Right-wing total 346
Democratic Movement 3
Socialists 185
Communist party 15
Green party 4
Other left-wing parties 22
Left-wing total 226
Others 2
Overall total 577
Votes cast 21.1 million
Turnout 60 per cent
Voting figures
44.5m registered voters
85% turnout for last month's presidential election
61% turnout in the parliamentary elections
9 parties gained more than 1 per cent of the vote in the first round, when 213,000 voted for the Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Traditions party
Source: Agencies
from the Associated Press, 2007-Jun-19, by Jenny Barchfield:
Diversity push for French Cabinet
PARIS -- President Nicolas Sarkozy sent a strong signal to France's disaffected minorities Tuesday by appointing an outspoken advocate of Muslim women and a woman of Senegalese origin Tuesday to his government - among the country's most diverse ever.
As junior minister for city policy, feminist activist Fadela Amara will oversee the renovation of dilapidated housing estates where many immigrants live - neighborhoods similar to the one where she grew up with her Algerian immigrant parents.
Senegalese-born Rama Yade was appointed to the new post of junior minister for human rights, an area Sarkozy has identified as a priority for his month-old government, which he reshuffled and expanded after his conservative party did not fare as well as expected in weekend parliamentary elections.
The nomination of three women with roots in Africa - his current justice minister, Rachida Dati, is of North African origin - is unprecedented in France, where previous governments had few nonwhites. The appointments highlight Sarkozy's determination that the corridors of power should better reflect France's ethnic and religious diversity and have more women.
They were also seen as an attempt by the blunt conservative to mend fences with poor immigrant neighborhoods where he is widely reviled for his tough stance against delinquency and illegal immigration. In 2005, he described troublemakers in a Paris suburb as "scum" - a comment that helped fuel three weeks of rioting in housing projects across France.
In another first, a woman was nominated to the Finance Ministry. Former lawyer and two-time Cabinet minister Christine Lagarde replaces Jean-Louis Borloo, who was promoted to de-facto deputy prime minister, heading a broad ministry that includes the environment - another of Sarkozy's priorities. Borloo took over from Alain Juppe, who resigned after he lost in the weekend elections.
France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe - about 5 million - and has wrestled with how to integrate them without weakening the secular traditions that are a foundation of the French state. Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, pushed through legislation to force Muslim girls to take off their head scarves in public schools - responding to concerns that Muslim fundamentalism and tensions stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were finding their way into classrooms.
Amara is the founder of "Ni Putes, Ni Soumises" - "Neither a Whore nor Submissive" - an outspoken group fighting to improve the lot of Muslim women and girls in impoverished neighborhoods. A defender of secularism and of the head scarf ban, Amara said Sarkozy respected her independence and outspokenness.
"I am a thorn in the side of both the right and the left, an honest woman who doesn't hesitate to speak my mind," she said on France-Info radio.
Amara said her priorities would be improving housing and fighting joblessness, which in many poor neighborhoods is twice the national average of around 8 percent, and even higher than that among youths.
Malek Boutih, of the opposition Socialists, called Amara "an exceptional woman" and said the post will give her the power to improve the lives of project dwellers.
"It is the first time that the person who is going to be dealing with them comes from there and is not from the other side of the barrier," Boutih told France-Info radio.
Ahmed El Keiy, editor in chief of Beur FM, a station aimed at France's North African population, called her appointment "a laudable effort to reach out" to minorities but warned that it might prove more symbolic than effective.
"She is a grass roots activist, but she'll have to prove she has the skills to be a junior minister," he said in a telephone interview.
Yade is the daughter of a prominent Senegalese diplomat and a rising star in Sarkozy's UMP party. The telegenic 30-year-old, with her braided dreadlocks, stands out in the sea of mostly middle-aged white men who still dominate French politics, even if the percentage of women in parliament grew in the weekend elections.
Sarkozy prioritized human rights in his May 6 election victory speech, saying that France would resist tyranny and dictators and "not abandon" Muslim women forced to wear full body coverings.
Lagarde, a former agriculture minister who used to head the prestigious American law firm Baker and McKenzie, will oversee reforms including tax cuts and a retooling of France's 35-hour workweek.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com's Political Diary, 2007-May-16, by John Fund:
Not So Cozy
Some say the turbulent marital histories of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton may affect how voters view their presidential campaigns. But these two have nothing on the major players in France's just concluded presidential election.
Newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy this week suffered the sting of news reports revealing that his own wife, Cecilia Sarkozy, didn't vote for him in the May 6 presidential runoff. She abstained from voting at all. The two were estranged until last year, and she only briefly appeared with him on the campaign trail.
Meanwhile, defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royal appeared at a post-election conference of her party on Saturday to assert herself as its new leader in next month's elections for parliament. She also announced she wanted to be installed as the Socialist presidential candidate for 2012 "within months" so as to avoid backroom maneuvering over the nomination. All of this came as quite a shock to Francois Hollande, her domestic partner of 25 years and the father of her four children. He is currently the head of the Socialist party and would be elbowed aside by Ms. Royal and presumably sidelined from politics.
It turns out that while Mr. Hollande and Ms. Royal had kept up appearances during the campaign, they were actually estranged. A new book called "Femme Fatale" by two journalists from the newspaper Le Monde reports that Ms. Royal launched her presidential bid in 2005 in part as payback for an alleged marital infidelity by Mr. Hollande. Ms. Royal is said to have warned her partner not to try to fulfill his own ambition to become the Socialist presidential candidate "or you will never see the children again."
That may explain why Mr. Hollande was decidedly cool to her candidacy, at one point telling reporters he would have had "greater legitimacy" as a presidential candidate. For her part, Ms. Royal noticed the lack of support from her own party's leadership. "Every morning I would open the newspapers and ask myself which Socialist was going to attack me over what I was saying," she complained at Saturday's party conference.
The French are famous for separating the private lives of their politicians from their public acts, but that now appears to be impossible. The new French president is moving into the Élysée Palace and his wife -- who did not vote for him -- apparently will not join him there. Meanwhile, Ms. Royal is openly trying to kill off the political career of her children's father to advance her own.
Leaving aside Mr. Sarkozy's bold policy agenda, French politics is now providing fodder stimulating enough even for U.S. gossip magazines. American politicians simply can't compete when it comes to the antics of the French ruling class.
from the Financial Times, 2007-Mar-18, by George Parker:
Poll finds 44% think life worse in EU
The malaise gripping the European Union as it approaches its 50th birthday this week is highlighted in a new poll which shows that 44 per cent of citizens think life has got worse since their country joined the club.
The poll suggests the bloc's 27 leaders have their work cut out to revive enthusiasm for Europe's project of “ever closer union” when they meet for official anniversary celebrations in Berlin next Sunday.
The FT/Harris poll, conducted in the EU's five biggest countries and the US, found that only 25 per cent of the Europeans questioned felt life in their country had improved since it joined the EU.
The poll illustrates a pervasive pessimism in Europe, but it also highlights the ambivalence of citizens towards the EU, 50 years after the bloc's founding Treaty of Rome.
In spite of many complaints about the EU, including a widespread view that it is too bureaucratic, only a minority think their country would be better off if it seceded from the union. Only 22 per cent of respondents in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain thought their country would be better off if it left the EU, against 40 per cent who believed it would be worse off.
Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency, wants to use the celebrations to recall the bloc's achievements and to map out tasks, including tackling climate change, peacekeeping and fighting terrorism and organised crime.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, wants to use a so-called “Berlin declaration” to kick-start a debate on reviving the stalled EU constitutional treaty. Ms Merkel wants to prepare a slimmer version of the treaty, rejected by French and Dutch voters in referendums in 2005, with the aim of having it ratified by 2009.
Britain, the Czech Republic and Poland have been the most resistant to any reference in the declaration to the constitution, but seem resigned to a coded reference to it in the declaration.
Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, said on Saturday: “We have reservations over some parts of the declaration, but if Poland did not sign it, we would be the only EU country not to do so.”
The FT/Harris poll, conducted between February 28 and March 12, found that 35 per cent of respondents thought the constitution would have a positive impact on their country, compared with 27 per cent who thought the opposite.
By far the most negative response (48 per cent) came from Britain. The treaty would give the EU a president and foreign minister, and lead to simplified voting rules and a reduction of national vetos in areas of judicial co-operation.
US respondents were less enthusiastic than Europeans about the prospect of the EU doing more in fields such as the economy and the environment.
from the Times of London via the Australian, 2007-Feb-25:
BRUSSELS: Europe is fast approaching a 50th birthday party, but nobody can agree what to write on the card.
A grand statement - the Berlin declaration - is planned next month to commemorate the founding in 1957 of what is now the EU, but the 27 member states are increasingly divided about what to celebrate.
Luxembourg is pushing for a prominent mention of the euro as one of Europe's greatest achievements. But this will not go down well in Britain and Denmark, where the single currency was rejected.
Poland and Italy want to emphasise Europe's Christian values but are opposed by the French, who prefer to keep religion out of politics. The Czechs and Poles want a strong statement on security, but the French and Germans are worried this will aggravate the Russians.
Germany and Spain are keen to look ahead to a revived constitutional treaty, which is upsetting the Dutch and British.
Diplomats are concerned that a well-intentioned gesture to celebrate 50 years of peace and prosperity now risks portraying Europe as factionalised and self-interested.
The text is due to be published on March 25 in Berlin because Germany holds the EU's rotating presidency. It will be drafted by Chancellor Angela Merkel, and discussed by European leaders in Brussels on March 8.
Fears the event could prepare the ground for new economic regulations and social directives have been stoked by a statement from nine member states that the anniversary should proclaim the "indispensable balance between economic freedoms and social rights, so the internal market can become an area also regulated by a social plan".
This declaration was signed by Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain.
To Britain and others, it sounds like a recipe for more red tape to burden business and more intervention in people's lives.
Ms Merkel, however, is understood to believe a positive reference to the "social dimension" will be necessary to convince France the EU has not become too pro-business.
This would help her campaign to revive the proposed constitution rejected by French voters in a 2004 referendum.
Former Iron Curtain countries are growing increasingly concerned that their experience under communism will be airbrushed out. After all, the 50th anniversary technically applies only to the six founding members - France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg. Most of the former communist countries did not join the EU until 2004.
Marek Cichocki, Warsaw's chief negotiator on the declaration, said: "It shouldn't simply be a self-celebration by the old member states. It should also make mention of the dark legacy of European policy."
from the Scotsman, 2007-Mar-11, by Bill Jamieson:
Another false EU summit
MAKE no mistake. This EU summit is a milestone. It "marks a sea change in Euro-pean thinking"... provides "new impetus"... "an ambitious agenda..." "the route to solving Europe's problem..."
No, not last week's epochal summit setting binding targets on renewable energy and cutting carbon dioxide emissions, championed by no less than Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, but the epochal EU summit in Lisbon in 2000. This was to create, I quote, "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010. The champion of Lisbon was no less than... Jose Manuel Barroso.
A reminder of Lisbon is due, and for these reasons. It has still, on its own lofty declaration, three years still to run. Europe's competitiveness and economic performance, while having improved a little, give no cause whatever for complacency. Unemployment across the G7 averages 5.4%, while in Germany it stands at 7.9% and in France 8.5%. EU summit declarations are one thing. Achievement is quite another.
Most important of all, we should be aware of the dramatic volte face now underway in Brussels as one set of priorities is swept off the table to make way for another, altogether more contemporary and fashionable - if utterly contradictory.
So important was the Lisbon Agenda to the future of Europe that its manifesto was re-launched in 2005, initial efforts having failed miserably and in many European countries the economic outlook had got worse. Rather than, as envisaged at Lisbon, the creation of 20 million new jobs and the achievement of an economic growth rate of 3% a year, in France and Germany unemployment remained stubbornly high.
Few would quibble with the laudable aims of last week's EU 'Green Summit'. The world would be a decidedly more pleasant place were we to cut our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce pollution. But such lofty declarations are little more than wasted hot air unless the specific targets and policies - the rungs on the ladder to achievement - are realistic and do not jeopardise the existing priorities that the EU has devoted serious resource to fulfil.
It is here that the Green Summit has already come under challenge. Last week, EU leaders, under the chairmanship of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed binding measures to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by the year 2020. Member states have also agreed to set a 10% minimum target on the use of bio fuels in transport by 2020.
Ambitious? Don't doubt it. From car engine sizes to the compulsory adoption of low energy light bulbs, it envisages a sweeping change in lifestyles. Barroso declared in Brussels that "these decisions are very important for the future of our planet, for the future generations, for the global community". And said Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair: "These are a set of groundbreaking, bold, ambitious targets for the European Union. It gives Europe a clear leadership position on this crucial issue facing the world."
He will not, however, be around to implement these measures.
It goes almost without saying that France negotiated a special clause to itself about the importance of nuclear energy - a topic that deeply splits the environmentalist lobby. President Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy targets if nuclear power was included and proposed that 45% of the mix come from non-fossil fuel sources. France gets 80% of its power from nuclear power plants.
But the Green Summit has already encountered some dissent. Of particular concern has been the dramatic switch from Barroso the champion of business to Barroso the Green Tsar, with a stream of climate change initiatives - many of them legally binding - now pouring forth from the European Commission. From Gunter Verheugen, the EU's industry commissioner, has come an accusation that "climate hysteria" has now gripped Brussels. "Two years it was all 'jobs, jobs. jobs'. Now it's 'climate, climate, climate.'"
What irks many of Europe's business leaders is that Barroso's earlier insistence on putting business first has been swept aside. The target to cut car emissions to 130 grams per kilometre - the toughest standard in the world - was agreed before a full assessment was made the impact on Europe's car industry. The worry is that European industry, particularly energy intensive companies, will simply move to India and China. Investment in European plants is already falling.
In an east-west split between new and old members, Poland and the Czech Republic were said to be at loggerheads with Germany, Britain and Italy. Those three countries led the push for a binding agreement that 20% of all Europe's energy should come from renewable sources by 2020.
Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, has described the targets as "unreasonable, nonsensical", and other EU government leaders argue that this summit is another example of the EU making promises it cannot keep. He also took a sideswipe at the dictatorial way in which binding long term targets were being declared. "We have grown up since the days of communism when we were given five year plans," he said. "We don't want to go back to that situation."
Ernest Antoine Seilliere, head of the Business Europe employers group, warned that the plans were uncosted, reliant on unproven technology and could force up power costs to industry.
And many would like to see the EU bureaucracy and its senior officials set an example by adopting energy-saving measures themselves. It was piquant that the declaration last Friday sparked some fun-poking at Barroso and his four wheel drive VW. Barroso dismissed such criticism as "over-zealous moralism".
To be fair, most commissioners drive cars that pollute at above-average levels. And British Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson has opted for a fuel-thirsty Jaguar.
The more serious criticism, however, is that the EU's planned reduction in emissions, inspired in large part by the Stern Report, should impose huge costs on current populations long before the benefits, if any, from emission reductions appear. And there is still such dispute about climate change that projections in the Stern paper for 100 years hence are just not credible. Those from the International Panel on Climate Change were based on economic modelling, with assumptions on economic growth and related emissions, which some leading economists claim to be deeply flawed. The worry looking forward is that last week's EU war on climate change will prove no more successful than the great Lisbon Summit on economic change launched seven years ago and now R.I.P.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-11, by Matthew Kaminski:
MADRID--Shrouded in white canvas, the memorial commemorating the March 11 terrorists attacks will be unveiled outside Atocha rail station here tomorrow, the third anniversary. Though the exact design is secret, the high glass structure is said to reflect light at different angles in tasteful tribute to the 191 lives extinguished that day.
It will be out of place in Spain. The aftermath of 11M--once eme, as that day in known in Spanish--has been anything but tasteful. If America unified following 9/11, Spain split along sharply sectarian lines within hours of the commuter-train bombings. An election swung from the ruling and favored center-right Popular Party, whose support for the Iraq war the left quickly blamed for inviting terror, lost to the anti-American Socialists. The Islamist architects couldn't have hoped for a better result in striking three days before polling day. But those traumatic events have been followed by others, shifting the course of Spanish history in ways no one then imagined possible.
The emotional legacy of 11M could be better appreciated a day before today's sober ceremony. An angry million or more were expected to march yesterday in Madrid against the sitting government's soft stance toward domestic terrorism. A fortnight ago, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero let a Basque ETA terrorist serve out his reduced sentenced at home. José Ingnacio De Juana Chaos, convicted in the murder of 25 innocent people, had been on hunger strike.
His release on "humanitarian grounds" was, to critics, only the latest Zapatero outrage. The government last year opened "peace talks" with ETA; the prime minister holds out hope for a settlement with the terror group even after ETA ended its "cease-fire" and blew up a parking garage at Madrid airport in late December, killing two. Previous Prime Minister José María Aznar, who didn't run for re-election after completing two terms, says the Zapatero government did the Madrid bombers' bidding by immediately yanking Spanish troops from Iraq upon taking office, and appeased terrorists again by courting ETA. As the Iraq withdrawal was "an act of cowardice," Mr. Aznar tells me that the De Juana Chaos case "reflects cowardly behavior and lack of dignity." Strong stuff that goes well beyond the usual partisan jabbing in democracy. Socialists retort that the Aznarites are hypocrites who also released ETA prisoners in their day. (Mr. Zapatero has declined interview requests from the Journal.)
There's more. The Zapatero government has encouraged Catalonia, the Basque Country and other regions in this highly decentralized state to seek new autonomy deals that call into question the current constitutional order, and may be a stepping stone to the possible break up of Spain.
And, to complete the picture of a state divided, wounds from Spain's awful 1936-39 civil war and the subsequent four decades of General Franco's dictatorship that most people assumed were long healed were ripped open by Mr. Zapatero. In a break with previous Socialist rulers, he openly plays politics with history. Rusting Franco-era statues are ceremoniously torn down. The church and the so-called bourgeoisie--the enemies for the divisive Second Republic of 1931-36--have come under attack. Anyone on the right is, often by implication, a fascist.
Since Mr. Zapatero took office--in reality, since the bombs went off--"we have seen the re-emergence of two Spains," says Hermann Tertsch, a senior correspondent at El Pais, a Socialist-leaning Madrid daily. "It's very, very tense," adds Mr. Tertsch, "close to real confrontation." Violent? "Anything can happen," he says, "anything." The post-Franco bipartisan "compact is destroyed," says Mr. Aznar. The danger: "Balkanization of the country," he says. "What need is there to do this?" Mr. Aznar asks in discussing his political opponent's policies. "Why--why risk everything, when things were going so well?"
In one of Europe's most dynamic economies and successful new democracies, such talk can at first smack of exaggeration. But it's not only anti-Zapatero partisans voicing these anxieties, which ultimately reflect the serious damage that terrorism has done to Spain's confidence and its institutions. "The attacks showed that the idea that the Spanish transition had finished was wrong," says Eduardo Nolla, a political theorist.
That such severe strains on a nation as old as Spain are the direct result of only a few dozen men mostly of Moroccan descent, who raised funds by selling hashish and set off homemade bombs, is hard to accept. So conspiracy theories abound. A chunk of Spain believes ETA was somehow involved in the attacks. Or Morocco's secret services; Rabat, after all, got a new government in Madrid far more to its liking. Or it was a left-wing coup. In polls, a third of Spaniards reject the official version: That an al Qaeda-style group pulled 11M off on its own.
More innocent explanations are that shoddy police work hindered the investigation and kept Spaniards guessing about the true culprits. Politicians aren't helping. Two years ago, a bipartisan investigation turned farce when both leading parties tried to twist the conclusions to their advantage.
The dominant presence in this edgy Spain is the leader, Mr. Zapatero. With an undistinguished academic and political record, little travel experience and no foreign languages--a man even Socialists didn't expect to win--he was once dismissed as the "accidental prime minister." With the tensions currently building up in Spanish politics, the country can ill afford any more accidents.
Mr. Kaminski is editor The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page.
from the Los Angeles Times, 2007-Mar-10, by Tracy Wilkinson:
Spain finding little comfort in terrorism trial
Three years after the Madrid bombings, the threat is believed to be growing as militants reorganize.MADRID — Inside a squat, red-brick courthouse here, defendants testified about the casual ease with which they obtained dynamite and then traded it to alleged terrorists in exchange for hashish.
In other testimony, a top police inspector, his face concealed, told the court that Islamist militants chose Madrid for their first act of mass murder in Europe because Spain was seen as an easy target. Another officer acknowledged that "we were always one step behind the terrorists."
The government had hoped the trial of 29 people accused in continental Europe's deadliest terrorist attack would console Spaniards by showing them that the culprits had been brought to justice. Instead, it has served as a reminder of how great the risks remain for a country that is still healing.
Three years after bombs ripped through four Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring nearly 2,000, Spanish officials and experts say the country is potentially in more danger now than ever before as extremist groups reorganize just beyond Spain's southern coast.
As the trial began here last month, more arrests and prosecutions were announced, and senior officials say radicals in Morocco and other parts of northern Africa, many with ties to Spain, increasingly take their cues from Al Qaeda.
Spanish authorities on Feb. 28 indicted Abdelilah Hriz, a 29-year-old Moroccan, as a principal author of the March 11, 2004, attacks, his fingerprints and blood allegedly found in an apartment where seven other key suspects blew themselves up to evade capture. Hriz is in custody in Morocco and expected to be extradited to Spain.
Investigators found DNA in the destroyed apartment that still has not been linked to any of the known perpetrators, indicating that additional suspects remain at large.
Networks organizing
Like Hriz, most of the accused in the train attacks are from Morocco or other parts of the Maghreb, the northwestern tier of Africa that also includes Algeria and Tunisia, a fact underscored by the faces and accents broadcast from the "11-M trial," so named for the date of the attacks. Nine of the accused are non-Muslim Spaniards.
Maghreb-based networks remain the most serious threat to Spain in terms of Islamic extremism, law enforcement officials said this week. They said militants had begun to set up a centralized command and a string of training camps in southern Algeria and northern Mali, and have launched recruiting efforts targeting their brethren who live in Spain.
"We are seeing the Al Qaeda-ization of the Maghreb militants, and that is the evolution that most worries us," a senior counter-terrorism official in the Spanish Interior Ministry said in an interview.
This metamorphosis, combined with the start of the 11-M trial and the anniversary of the attacks, has prompted authorities to raise the terrorism alert level nationwide, the official said.
Nearly 300 suspected Islamic militants have been arrested in Spain since the attacks. Roughly 80% are from the Maghreb, according to a study by Madrid's Elcano Royal Institute.
Last month, Ayman Zawahiri, the purported No. 2 in Al Qaeda, called on Islamic radicals in the Maghreb to "raise the flag of jihad" over North Africa and Spain "to once again feel the soil of Al Andalus beneath your feet," according to transcripts. Al Andalus refers to that part of Spain controlled by Muslim forces for seven centuries until their expulsion by a Roman Catholic army in 1492.
It was not the first time that Zawahiri or other Al Qaeda leaders had spoken of liberating formerly Muslim land "from Iraq to Al Andalus," but officials here say the allusions have increased in recent months, indicating that Spain is seen as part of the endgame and not just a country to be attacked along the way.
Al Qaeda threats were entered in the court record during a session of the 11-M trial this week.
Spanish 'occupation'
"It is undoubtedly true that Spain is much more of a target today than before," Fernando Reinares, former terrorism advisor to the Interior Ministry and senior analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute, said in an interview. He cited the combination of the renewed Al Qaeda threats and what he called the "synergy" between Al Qaeda and the Maghreb groups.
Probably as a recruiting tool, Zawahiri has also begun speaking of the goal of ending Spain's "occupation" of Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves inside Morocco.
In Ceuta, Spanish authorities in December arrested 11 people suspected of preparing attacks in Spain. Although all were Muslims of Moroccan descent, 10 of the 11 were Spanish citizens, either by virtue of birth in Ceuta or having lived there since childhood.
Ceuta has long been seen by Spanish law enforcement as a weak border; it is a short boat ride to the Spanish mainland — and continental Europe — and serves as a revolving door to thousands of Moroccan nationals who enter every day for work or study.
The suspects arrested in December included two brothers of Hamed Abderrahman Ahmad, known locally as the Spanish Taliban, who spent two years in custody at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He returned to Ceuta after his release in 2004.
In addition to the Ceuta ring, Spanish authorities say, they have thwarted two major plots since March 2004: plans to bomb Madrid's main court and to destroy two of Barcelona's most emblematic buildings. The suspects in the Barcelona plot, 11 Pakistanis, went on trial here this week, halfway across town from the venue where the train-bombing suspects are being prosecuted.
Charges in the train attacks include mass murder, terrorist association and supplying the explosives used to blow up the trains. The defendants facing the most serious charges could receive sentences totaling nearly 39,000 years because of multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. Under Spanish law, however, each sentence would be capped at 40 years. There is no death penalty in Spain.
Survivors keep watch
If the 11-M trial is a disturbing reminder for ordinary Spaniards, it is especially painful for survivors and relatives of the dead, many of whom attend the long, often tedious court hearings regularly.
In the courtroom, they sit a few feet from the defendants, most of whom are behind bulletproof glass. In the corridors, they sometimes mingle, silently.
For some of the survivors, psychologists say, it is important to attach a face to the horrors they suffered. Some say the trial has revived nightmares, but others cite a gratifying sense of vengeance at seeing the defendants in captivity.
Despite a pervasive climate of insecurity, said Myriam Fernandez Nevado, a Madrid-based political sociologist, "Spaniards have lived many years, decades, with terrorism, and they are very good at adapting, at rising from the ashes."
For at least one survivor, the trial has proved cathartic. Zahira Obaya, wearing an eye patch, arrived at the courtroom and sat as close as she could to the defendants. Her face was mangled and she lost an eye in the bombing.
Obaya, 24, has learned to live with her scars but wanted the alleged culprits to "see what they had done." Leaving the courthouse, an elated Obaya told reporters she felt as though she had "grown 5 centimeters."
Acrimonious partisan debate continues over the attacks and investigation. Some segments of the right-wing Popular Party, which was voted out of office days after the attacks, continue to insist that Basque separatists played a key role.
Popular Party members use the argument, not backed by evidence, in response to those who say the party's decision to send Spanish troops to Iraq made the country vulnerable to terrorists.
Polls show that about a third of Spaniards still are unsure of who was behind the bombings.
Many here hope the trial will clear up that confusion and allay doubts about the investigation was handled and how widely the planning and execution of the attacks extended.
"Spanish society needs a judgment and sentence from an independent institution," said Antonio Hernando, a congressman who is the ruling Socialist party's point man on national security. "This trial should provide that and allow people to definitively turn the page in terms of who was responsible for 11-M.
"But turning the page on the impact this has had on the country, that's another thing altogether."
from the New York Times, 2007-Feb-22, by Ian Fisher with Peter Kiefer contributing:
Italian Premier Resigns After Losing Foreign Policy Vote
ROME, Feb. 21 — Italy's fragile government snapped suddenly on Wednesday under the weight of its own internal divisions as well as a broader skepticism about the European role in the worldwide fight against terrorism.
Fernando Rossi, an Italian Communist Party senator, was one of two dissenters in a vote that unexpectedly doomed the Prodi government.
Prime Minister Romano Prodi, in office just nine months, submitted his resignation Wednesday evening after his governing coalition lost a key vote on foreign policy in the Senate.
Two far-left members of his coalition abstained amid tensions over whether Italy should continue to provide troops to Afghanistan and Mr. Prodi's support of an expansion of an American military base in Vicenza, in northern Italy.
With only a razor-thin majority, the abstentions killed the measure, aimed at gaining Senate support for Italy's foreign policy, and unexpectedly, doomed the government.
“I can't in any way give my vote to this government with this foreign policy,” said Fernando Rossi, a senator from the Italian Communist Party and one of the dissenters.
The vote took place the same day Britain announced a substantial reduction of its troops in southern Iraq, and a week after a European Parliamentary committee issued a strong report criticizing secret American flights in Europe of terrorism suspects.
But the government's collapse also reflected its own inherent weaknesses, possibly signaling that Italy's chronic political instability may be coming out of remission. In a nation that has had some 60 governments since World War II, Mr. Prodi has presided uneasily over a coalition of nine diverse parties, ranging from moderate Catholics to Communists.
“It's very bad,” said Roberto D'Alimonte, a professor at the University of Florence and expert in electoral law. “We still have to come to terms with a working political system. We do not have a working political system.”
There are many scenarios for what comes next — and one possibility, if not immediately likely, is a return to power of Silvio Berlusconi, whom Mr. Prodi defeated in elections last year.
As ministers met late into the night to discuss how to proceed, Mr. Berlusconi's supporters rallied outside the seat of government, waving banners and demanding that the government step aside.
“The country has been exposed, by a majority that isn't and by an incompetent government that has rejected parliamentary dialogue — a grave international humiliation,” Mr. Berlusconi told reporters.
For Mr. Berlusconi to return, new elections would have to be held, which at the moment seems several steps in the future.
After accepting Mr. Prodi's resignation, President Giorgio Napolitano will begin to consult with political parties on Thursday and will ask one of them to try to form a government.
Many political experts believed that Mr. Prodi would be given a chance to shuffle his cabinet in a way that would satisfy the parties already in the government. Then he would call for a confidence vote in Parliament.
But many experts noted that such a government would remain weak, with the deep splits over Afghanistan and the American base unresolved.
“Something has broken,” said Franco Pavoncello, the president of John Cabot University here and a political scientist. “This vote and the reaction of the government has created damage to Prodi's ability to last.”
In theory, the prime minister's term lasts five years, but Mr. Berlusconi is the only prime minister to have endured that long.
While the government's weakness made it liable to fall at any moment, its collapse on Wednesday came as something of a surprise. For months the government has been bickering internally — and weathering attacks by Mr. Berlusconi and other opposition leaders — over issues ranging from the budget to a proposed law giving rights to unmarried couples.
But foreign policy remained a particular weak spot. Essentially, Mr. Prodi and his ministers have sought to walk a difficult line, echoing much of the skepticism in Europe about President Bush and the war in Iraq while maintaining Italy's traditionally strong ties with America.
The government's far-left members, however, have strongly resisted the presence of nearly 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan. And last weekend, tens of thousands of people rallied against the expansion of the American-staffed NATO base in Vicenza, which Mr. Prodi's government reluctantly supported.
The splits grew deeper, and on Tuesday in Spain, Italy's foreign minister, Massismo D'Alema, himself a former prime minister, called for the Senate to endorse Italy's foreign policy. If it did not, he said, the government should “go home,” or step down.
In a long and impassioned speech before the vote on Wednesday, Mr. D'Alema defended his government's position on Afghanistan and the Vicenza base, in terms that he hoped would win the left's support.
“We have not supported the neoconservative politics of the American administration and we have not sent soldiers to Iraq,” he told his colleagues. “There is a profound difference between the military operations in Afghanistan, approved by the United Nations, and those in Iraq.”
He added that the support of expanding the base was essential to good relations with America. “To change course would be a hostile act against the United States,” he said.
In the end, the government needed 160 votes but received only 158 with the two abstentions. Opposition senators roared at the result, shouting immediately: “Resign! Resign!”
Many experts said they believed that Mr. D'Alema, one of the most powerful and experienced members of the government, would resign. And as Italy's leaders search for a broader solution in the next few days, there are several alternatives to a mere shuffling of the current cabinet.
The most dramatic, and perhaps least likely, is that Mr. Napolitano could call immediate elections. But he has said he will not do so until the current electoral law, instated by Mr. Berlusconi last year, is changed. Many experts blame the law for virtually guaranteeing a thin majority in the Senate no matter who wins, and thus destabilizing the political system.
Another option is the appointment of a temporary government made up of largely centrist technocrats. The aim would be to steer Italy toward new elections, most likely engineering a change to electoral laws first.
A final possibility involves peeling off the more centrist Union of Christian Democrats, a party long allied, if uneasily, with Mr. Berlusconi. Even as the government tottered on Wednesday, one party leader, Marco Follini, seemed to raise the possibility. “The moment has arrived to put into the pipeline a different center-left,” he told reporters.
But Professor D'Alimonte noted that the party did not have enough seats to allow Mr. Prodi to cast off the rebellious far-left of his own party. Simply adding on Mr. Follini's party remained a possibility, although Professor D'Alimonte noted that it also seemed a recipe for even deeper disputes since it shares little politically with the Communists who brought down the government.
from BBC News, 2007-Jan-6:
Paramedics 'on break' as man dies
An investigation is under way after paramedic crews could not attend to a man who suffered a fatal heart attack because they were on "rest breaks".
A rapid-response car was sent when a 999 call was made after the 73-year-old collapsed at the Edmonton Green shopping centre in north London.
But London Ambulance Service (LAS) confirmed the crews were on a break, under EU rules, when the call was made.
An ambulance arrived 20 minutes later but the man died shortly afterwards.
Attempts to resuscitate him in the ambulance and on the way to hospital failed.
Other ambulances
A London Ambulance Service spokesperson said: "Having looked at the availability of ambulances in the area during this period, we can confirm that two crews were on a rest break at Edmonton Ambulance Service at the time of the 999 call."
He said there were four other ambulances on duty in the area and available to respond to emergency calls when the second crew was allocated a break at 1257 GMT on December 31.
When the 999 call was received at 1322 GMT, with reports a man had collapsed in the shopping centre, a rapid response car was dispatched.
According to the spokesperson the car arrived at the shopping centre eight minutes later at 1330 GMT and the paramedic immediately started treatment.
Formal break
An ambulance was then sent at 1332 GMT, after becoming free from a previous incident, and arrived at the centre almost 10 minutes later, at 1341 GMT.
He said it took another "few minutes" to reach the patient.
No other details of the patient have been provided, but it was reported he was 73-years-old and had suffered a heart attack on a betting shop floor.
New arrangements giving ambulance staff a formal rest break during their shift came into effect in December last year, under the European Working Time Directive.
Anyone working a shift between six and 10 hours long is allocated a rest break of 30 minutes.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Oct-1, by Matthew Kaminski:
'Liberal' Europe?
Conservatives on the Continent don't necessarily care for free markets.LYON, France--To get a measure of where things stand in the battle of ideas in Europe today, one can do worse than check out the "summer university" put on by the Continent's center-right parties here last weekend. I found myself on a panel to discuss globalization and offered that conservatives might do well--at the voting booth and otherwise--to push free trade, liberalize markets, rein in farm subsidies, and keep Europe's door open to Turkey. Nothing controversial for this crowd, I assumed, with the possible exception of the last.
The reality check arrived from a German Christian Democrat. "For us, a human being is not only a function of production," he lectured from the floor. "Our voters are not signing up to . . . your neoliberal, neoconservative agenda." (Jeesh, I hadn't even mentioned Iraq.) A senior European executive sitting nearby passed a note, "Please tell him one can be Christian and Democratic and liberal."
Maybe so. Yet the German politician served up a good reminder that conservatism doesn't necessarily mean the same thing on this side of the Atlantic. In Europe's biggest country, as well as in France, right-wing rulers remain wedded to the nanny state--which emerged with Bismarck--and to close alliances with guilds and big business that tend to stifle competition. In her day, Margaret Thatcher never felt welcome on the Continent.
A lot has changed since the Iron Lady resided at 10 Downing Street. In spite of some recent victories for the dirigistes, the momentum is with free-market ideas, thanks in part to formerly communist Central Europe, whose zest for capitalism proved infectious back West.
Imagine an arc that starts with Spain, where former conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar planted strong reform roots, which the ruling Socialists haven't strayed from. Continue to Britain and Labour's Tony Blair, who embraced Thatcherism. Then come the Nordic countries that, despite their reputation as welfare utopias, implemented innovative policies to revive stagnant economies. Swedes can use vouchers for schools and other public services; the country dropped the death tax and partially privatized pensions. (Take note, GOP strategists.) This week a new center-right government comes into office in Stockholm with a pledge to cut taxes, privatize companies and hospitals, and end political control over universities.
Alas, the story line shifts dramatically in the heart of Europe--France and Germany. On the American spectrum, the nominally conservative politicians who lead both countries would be found somewhere left of the Democrats. German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year failed to win a clear mandate, forcing her into a "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats. With this unwieldy government in place, economic reform has gone nowhere. And even so, her Christian Democratic electoral platform was a hodge-podge, calling for a flat tax as well as a large hike in the VAT. (No prize for guessing which was implemented.) The center-right has been burned in two consecutive elections; many members blame their association with unpopular free-market policies.
The ruling Gaullists in France are even more unabashedly statist than the German right. With his recent success in saving Europe's farm subsidies, keeping Chinese T-shirts out of stores and Polish plumbers and other workers from crossing borders, blocking pan-European takeovers--the list goes on--President Jacques Chirac is arguably the greatest champion of what Americans might call leftist policies in Europe. His prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, this year made "economic patriotism" the fig leaf du jour for protectionism of all kinds.
Yet the campaign for next year's presidential elections is livening up the French debate. The leading candidate on the right, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants a break with the Gaullists. Mr. Sarkozy mocks the idea of a French "social model," saying it's neither social (what with chronic unemployment) nor a model (who wants to copy it?). Where Mr. Chirac represents the status quo, Mr. Sarkozy says France must move with the times, citing Britain and America as examples. "Sarkozy has decided to create a quasi-cultural revolution in this country by shooting down the myths, the phony 'consensus' that we have had," says Pierre Lellouche, a French MP and Sarkozy adviser. "For the first time the right is becoming right again." On the left, Ségolène Royal also challenges Socialist shibboleths by praising Blairism and saying globalization isn't all bad.
By next spring France is sure to see a generational change. But don't set hopes too high for one of ideas as well, says Alain Madelin, the country's most prominent laissez-faire politician. The Socialist old guard detests Ms. Royal. Mr. Sarkozy may be "pro-business" or "for lower taxes," but Mr. Madelin asks: "Does Sarkozy understand the mechanism of the market? No. His instinct is to intervene." And free-market ideas don't sell well on election day, says Mr. Madelin, who should know. He won 3.91% in the 2002 presidential vote.
Traditional labels, smudged elsewhere these days, are even less helpful to understanding politics in Europe. Best to set aside the old straight left-right line. Mr. Madelin suggests a return to the triangle used in the 19th century with conservatives, socialists and liberals (or free-marketers) at each point. The liberals are gaining in strength but have found, and need, supporters in both camps.
It can be confusing and surprising; the great intangible seems to be the quality of leadership, of which Europe hasn't had a surfeit in recent years. So Italy's Romano Prodi, leading a center-left coalition since spring, in the early days has proved far more audacious in prying open his country to competition than his predecessor, the "pro-free market" media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, was in five years in power. The imminent departure of the conservative Mr. Chirac--no matter who wins--looks likely to boost liberal economic ideas.
Yes, the battle is raging and its outcome far from decided.
Mr. Kaminski is editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page.
from the Scotsman, 2006-Sep-18, by Simon Johnson:
Sweden votes for welfare cuts as centre-right wins election
STOCKHOLM -- A CENTRE-RIGHT alliance led by the Moderate Party's Fredrik Reinfeldt won power in Sweden yesterday, ending 12 years of Social Democrat rule by vowing to lower taxes and trim the welfare state.
Mr Reinfeldt, who will be the next prime minister, declared victory in a tight election. Goran Persson, the Social Democrat prime minister, one of Europe's longest-serving leaders, conceded defeat after ten years in office and will quit as party chief.
According to almost complete results from Sweden's Election Commission, the four-party opposition bloc won 48 per cent of votes to 46.2 per cent for Mr Persson and his allies.
The result was a victory for the alliance's pledges to stimulate job growth by fine-tuning, but not dismantling, the welfare system.
Mr Persson, whose party has ruled Sweden for six of the last seven decades, had vowed to continue government largesse and keep one of the world's heaviest tax burdens.
Despite Sweden's strong economic performance under the Social Democrats, opinion polls had shown many favoured change due to voter fatigue with Mr Persson and a perceived lack of new ideas.
The election was closely watched by governments of other EU countries facing the need of welfare reform because of ageing populations and creaking pension and healthcare systems.
from the Telegraph, 2008-Feb-21, by Robert Winnett:
Biggest brain drain from UK in 50 years
Britain is experiencing the worst "brain drain" of any country as highly qualified professionals settle abroad, an authoritative international study showed yesterday.
Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years. There are now 3.247 million British-born people living abroad, of whom more than 1.1 million are highly-skilled university graduates, say the researchers.
More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate.
The figures, based on official records from more than 220 countries, will alarm Gordon Brown as tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent on educating graduates. The cost of training a junior doctor, for example, is £250,000.
The most popular destinations are English-speaking countries such as Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand and holiday areas including France and Spain.
Almost 60 per cent of those leaving take jobs, although hundreds of thousands of retired people live abroad.
The report is a statistical analysis which does not study the motivation for leaving Britain. However, high house prices and taxes and poor climate are frequently cited.
A spokesman for the Paris-based OECD said last night: "British people have lots of opportunities to move and work abroad so very highly-skilled people are travelling around. It is seen by many British people as part of their personal development to have some experience abroad."
Britain's exodus is far higher than any of the OECD's other 29 members. Germany has lost only 860,000 highly-skilled workers, America 410,000 and France 370,000.
The OECD found that 27.3 per cent of those emigrating had health or education qualifications, 37.7 per cent had humanities or social science degrees and 28.5 per cent were scientists or engineers.
Britain has a shortage of graduates in many of these fields and universities have long warned that some of the brightest hopes are being lost to higher salaries abroad.
The report cited research suggesting that 62 per cent of the world's "star scientists" live in the US, primarily because of the efforts made by American research universities to attract them.
Danny Sriskandarajah, a migration expert at the IPPR think-tank, said: "There is a long-term trend of British people lured abroad by a slightly better lifestyle. They are actively targeted by countries such as Australia and New Zealand."
The emigration was leading to a rapid change in British society as large numbers of highly-skilled immigrants moved to this country to replace those leaving, he said.
"Britain has been lucky - although it has lost substantial numbers of people, it has attracted more than a million skilled immigrants to replace them. If they stop coming then that would be a problem."
Figures from the Office for National Statistics last year, suggested that 207,000 Britons - one every three minutes - left in 2006. The emigration rate is at its highest since just after the Second World War.
The term brain drain was coined in the 1950s following the mass emigration of scientists and other experts to America. Tens of thousands of people also left the country to escape the industrial unrest and high taxes of the 1970s.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: "Ten years of Labour has re-created the brain drain. High taxes and Government interference are driving people away."
The study found that foreign-born people make up 8.3 per cent of Britain's population. A House of Lords report into the economic impact of migration is due next month.
Prof David Coleman, of St John's, Oxford, said the brain drain was "to do with quality of life, laws and bureaucracy, tax and all the rest of it".
Prof Christian Dustmann, of University College London, said: "The costs of leaving a country are substantial. The rewards must be very high."
from the Washington Post, 2006-Jul-16, p.A12, by Molly Moore, with researcher Corinne Gavard contributing:
Old Money, New Money Flee France and Its Wealth Tax
PARIS -- Denis Payre, a self-described French jet-setter, built a successful high-tech company from scratch, then decided to quit at age 34 to spend more time in France with his wife and young children.
Instead, Payre said, he was pushed into exile by the French government, which sent him a tax bill of nearly $2.5 million on paper assets he couldn't cash in.
"They were asking me to pay taxes on money I didn't have," Payre said. "I had no choice but to leave the country."
Payre, who moved his family to neighboring Belgium eight years ago, is today part of a sizable community of rich expatriate French driven out by the world's highest tax bills on wealthy citizens. The exodus continues: On average, at least one millionaire leaves France every day to take up residence in more wealth-friendly nations, according to a government study.
At a time when France is struggling to stay competitive in an increasingly integrated world, business leaders say the country can't afford to make refugees of some of its most established business families. They include members of the Taittinger champagne empire, the Peugeot auto magnates and leading shareholders of dominant retailers Carrefour and Darty. Also going are members of a new generation of high-tech entrepreneurs.
Socialist leaders and some government officials argue that the rich are merely trying to shirk their social responsibilities by fleeing the country with their millions.
"France is penalizing success in a big way," argued Payre, who is now 43 and has started a new company in Brussels that he said did nearly $32 million in business this year. "The loss in income for the government is the smallest part. The big issue is the loss of all that creative energy this country is dying for."
Payre said that when he decided to leave his high-tech company, Business Objects, in 1997, he owned shares that were worth $110 million -- on paper. French tax authorities required Payre to pay a wealth tax of 2.2 percent on the shares, based on what the shares would have been worth had he sold them at the market's highest point.
But Payre said that he didn't have access to them because of stock market regulations that limited his ability to sell and that, in any case, a market dip had devalued the shares below that peak.
The wealth tax -- officially called the solidarity tax -- is collected on top of income, capital gains, inheritance and social security taxes. It's part of the reason France consistently ranks at the top of Forbes magazine's annual Tax Misery Index -- a global listing of the most heavily taxed nations.
Wealthy citizens' tax bills can be higher than their incomes, according to tax analysts. President Jacques Chirac's government attempted to rectify that disparity last year with changes intended to guarantee that no one would pay more than 60 percent of income in taxes. But many businesspeople say actual maximum tax rates still hover at around 72 percent.
France's tax structure is more than a means of supporting the nation's expensive cradle-to-grave social services. It is deeply rooted in the nation's history and psyche, dating to the French Revolution of 1789, when impoverished peasants overthrew an obscenely wealthy aristocracy and sent many of its members to the guillotine.
"The French Revolution was not about 'equality and fraternity,' as people like saying," said Pierre-Francois Taittinger, the 80-year-old former chief of Champagne Taittinger, one of France's most renowned family businesses, which sold its controlling shares to an American company last year for a reported $1.5 billion. "It was about getting rid of the ruling class. French people don't like the rich -- unless they are soccer players."
Taittinger, who helped create the champagne label that is synonymous with luxury worldwide, said the French tax system not only helped force the sale of his family company but scattered the 38 family members involved in the corporation.
"Half of my family left France because of taxes," said Taittinger, who remained in France and is now mayor of one of Paris's districts. "They now live in England, Belgium and other countries where they were warmly welcomed -- unlike here."
France's opposition Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande said recently that his party's -- and his country's -- opposition to proposals to lower high-income taxes has nothing to do with disdain for the wealthy. "I don't have anything against rich people, as such," Hollande said in a recent political debate. "They have the right to be rich. But I can't accept that the richest can have their taxes lowered."
"This tendency to take from the rich and give to the poor which is supposed to solve all the problems in France is ruining the country," said Alain Marchand, who left France six years ago and now has a London-based consulting business that helps relocate French business leaders and entrepreneurs in England and other countries. "That's an incredibly stupid and narrow-minded vision of economic life."
Eric Pinchet, author of a French tax guide, estimates the wealth tax earns the government about $2.6 billion a year but has cost the country more than $125 billion in capital flight since 1998.
Business organizations and financial consultants say members of the new generation of business school graduates and high-tech entrepreneurs -- who see the tax structure as penalizing not only individuals but also companies' ability to compete -- are especially likely to flee the taxation.
In France, employers are required to pay social security taxes equal to 48 percent of each employee's salary. Labor laws make it difficult and costly to fire incompetent workers. "The way the French state is organized makes it impossible for big family corporations to stay on French soil," said 44-year-old Virginie Taittinger, who moved to Brussels two years ago. "If you add up all the taxes an employer has to pay -- social taxes, employee taxes, the wealth tax, taxes on profit -- even a successful business has a hard time surviving."
The flight has been aided by business-friendly rules of the 25-nation European Union that protect cross-border commerce and by a proliferation of cheap airlines and high-speed trains. Brussels has become a major destination for business emigres, who set up shop in the French-speaking city and frequently visit Paris, which is only 80 minutes away by train.
Suzanne Belgeonne, who heads a Brussels real estate agency, Le Lion, said that in the past decade she has sold dozens of houses to French expatriates in the city's toniest neighborhoods. The sales have risen "significantly" in the past four years, she said, as French buyers help fuel a property boom, especially in exclusive suburban enclaves of luxury villas and broad lawns.
"Rich French people like sticking together in the same neighborhoods," said Belgeonne.
from the Associated Press, 2006-Sep-14, by John Leicester and Omar Sinan:
Al-Qaida joins Algerians against France
PARIS - Al-Qaida has for the first time announced a union with an Algerian insurgent group that has designated France as an enemy, saying they will act together against French and American interests.
Current and former French officials specializing in terrorism said Thursday that an al-Qaida alliance with the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, known by its French initials GSPC, was cause for concern.
"We take these threats very seriously," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said, adding in an interview on France-2 television that the threat to France was "high" and "permanent," and that "absolute vigilance" was required.
Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, announced the "blessed union" in a video posted this week on the Internet to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
France's leader have repeatedly warned that the decision not to join the U.S.-led war in Iraq would not shield the country from Islamic terrorism. French participation in the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon could give extremists another reason to strike.
The national police had no immediate comment on the announced alliance, but officials have long regarded the GSPC as one of the main terror threats facing France.
French experts agreed, but also noted the group has been severely weakened by internal divisions, security crackdowns and defections in Algeria, a former French territory still working to put down an Islamic insurgency that reached its most murderous heights in the 1990s.
"The GSPC is losing speed and has suffered very significant losses in recent months," said Louis Caprioli, former assistant director of France's DST counterterrorism and counterintelligence agency.
Some GSPC fighters took advantage of a recent Algerian amnesty for Islamic insurgents and others have been killed, said Caprioli, who works for Geos, a risk management firm.
Of the 800 combatants that GSPC was estimated to have had last year, probably no more than 500 remain, and the group has had no operational cells in France since the late 1990s, he said.
But Caprioli and others also said an alliance of GSPC and al-Qaida could increase the terror risk for France — not least because al-Zawahri's designation of the country as a worthy target could inspire extremists to take action.
In his video, Al-Zawahri hailed "the joining up" of the GSPC with al-Qaida as "good news."
"All the praise is due to Allah for the blessed union which we ask Allah to be as a bone in the throats of the Americans and French Crusaders and their allies, and inspire distress, concern and dejection in the hearts of the traitorous, apostate sons of France," he said.
"We ask him (Allah) to guide our brothers in the Salafist Group for Call and Combat to crush the pillars of the Crusader alliance, especially their elderly immoral leader, America."
Although GSPC leaders had previously sworn allegiance to al-Qaida, al-Zawahri's video marked the first al-Qaida recognition of a union between the two, French terror experts said.
"From now on, the links are official, legitimate, and they are taking part in the same combat," said Anne Giudicelli, a former French diplomat specializing in the Middle East who runs the Paris-based consultancy Terrorisc.
Sarkozy said it was "not by chance" that al-Qaida used the emblematic Sept. 11 date to announce the insurgency movement's alliance with al-Qaida.
"But there is nothing new," he added, noting that the GSPC had done the same three years ago.
The GSPC, in its own statement on a Web site used by militants, confirmed the alliance and urged other militant groups to also join al-Qaida.
Giudicelli said the alliance could act as a green light for al-Qaida and GSPC militants to operate together and thus raises the risk for France.
"The Americans have become harder to target domestically, so they are trying to widen the field of action and strike their allies," she said.
Omar Sinan is based in Cairo, Egypt. Associated Press writer Verena von Derschau in Paris also contributed to this report.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2006-Sep-5, p.A25, by Bret Stephens:
In Britain, the Jihadi Is Us
LONDON -- Two bearded young men in a lounge at Heathrow Airport overhear an American journalist on the phone, describing his forthcoming trip to earthquake-ravaged Pakistan. He hangs up and a conversation with the journalist begins. The pair is headed the same way, to do their part in the ongoing reconstruction effort, though not for any government or recognized humanitarian agency. They are religious students, Muslims, and although they speak in the broad accents of northern England, they dress in the large white skullcaps, long white shirts and short white trousers in vogue with their set.
It's a mostly one-sided discussion. The more assertive of the two derides the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, dictator and Bush puppet. And speaking of puppets, he adds, how about the U.K.'s Tony Blair? At this he launches into a tirade against Anglo-American foreign policy. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is his main point of reference, the authoritative document about American designs.
This anecdote of nine months ago comes to mind on a current visit to Britain, where headlines are dominated by the news that a secluded former convent in East Sussex may have recently served as a terrorist training camp, disguised as a secondary school for Muslim boys. Fourteen suspects are in custody, on top of the 25 arrested in connection with last month's plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic. Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorism Branch, tells the BBC, "the number of people who we have to be interested in are into the thousands."
It is somewhat fitting that Terror Prep (if that in fact is what it was) should have been headquartered on what used to be Christian: Maybe there is a parable here about the eclipse in Europe of a waning faith by a stronger one. Traditional Britons especially see it that way, and while a large majority dislike the Bush administration and opposes Middle East adventurism, they also tend to regard their country's estimated 1.6 million Muslims as alien corn, people whose stern values are dangerously at variance with Britain's tolerant ones. Thus a recent poll finds that 63% of Britons believe that immigration laws ought to be "much tougher."
Yet there is also something too easy about this emerging consensus, which, roughly, wants Britain out of the Middle East and the Middle East out of Britain. What it neglects is the extent to which the attitudes of British Muslims perfectly reflect the attitudes of Britons generally.
Consider the findings of a July YouGov poll on the British view of America and Americans. Sixty-five percent of respondents consider Americans "vulgar"; 72% think American society is unequal; 52% take a negative view of American culture; and 58% believe the U.S. is "an essentially imperial power, one that wants to dominate the world by one means or another." Only 12% of Britons have confidence in U.S. leadership.
The figures would surely have been even more lopsided had the poll been conducted exclusively among British Muslims. But the significant fact here is that on the not-trivial question of attitudes toward the U.S., the Muslim minority population is well in tune with the British majority. Ditto for British views about Israel. On Saturday, the Times reported that anti-Semitic attacks in Britain were near a modern-day high, which the paper attributed to Israel's war with Hezbollah.
It's a fair bet that an overwhelming majority of Britons deplore these attacks, the perpetrators of which are often Muslim. But leave aside the act and examine the attitude. By a 3-1 margin, Britons blamed Israel for using "disproportionate" force in Lebanon, and more Britons are in sympathy with Palestinians than with Israelis. The view is even more skewed among the British intelligentsia: The British teachers' union recently voted a boycott of Israel, following a similar boycott (since rescinded) by British university professors of two Israeli universities.
Such views aren't just waterborne; they spring from the data set from which almost all Britons judge Israeli actions. Trevor Asserson, a solicitor, has compiled lengthy reports of BBC coverage of Israel: He finds that of 19 documentaries on Israel or the Palestinians aired by the BBC from 2000 to 2004 (as compared to only five about the earlier, nearer and far deadlier conflict in the Balkans), almost all were savagely critical of Israel. "The Accused" indicts Ariel Sharon as a war criminal; "Dead in the Water" alleges that Israel bombed an American ship in 1967 to disguise Israeli atrocities in the Sinai and to provoke an American nuclear strike on Cairo; and so on.
Compound this with the similar slant and tenor of nightly BBC coverage of Israel, the U.S., Iraq, Lebanon and Guantanamo Bay and it isn't hard to understand the sense of rage, easily descending to radicalism and violence, which typifies the political sensibilities of so many British Muslims.
True, other factors are at play. The unemployment rate of British Muslims is three times that of the overall population, according to a 2004 survey, and the country's Muslims tend not to participate in civic life. These details get lumped together in the catch-all of "social exclusion," and it's something that rightly concerns British policy makers.
Yet what really ought to terrify Britain's leaders aren't the conclusions that divide mainstream and Muslim Britain, but the premises that unite them. From the credence given to people like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, to the simplistic derision of the U.S. and the frenzied hatred of Israel, the two camps attend the same church and sing from the same hymnal. Until that changes, on one side or the other, Britain will have no respite from the encroaching terror. Or, to paraphrase Pogo: We have met the jihadi, and he is us.
from the Jerusalem Post, 2006-Jul-11, by Caroline Glick:
Our World: After Londonistan
In the wake of last year's terror attacks on London, the people of Britain seemed muster the will to rally around their flag. After years of denial, the country that gave Israel the British jihad bombers who blew up Mike's Place in 2003; gave Pakistan and America Daniel Pearl's British jihadist executioner; and gave America the British jihadist shoe bomber finally acknowledged that British jihadists were a problem for Britain.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair started to admit that the source of the terror was not poverty, Iraq, Afghanistan or Israel but the jihadist ideology propagated within Britain's Muslim community. Rather than make excuses for the murderers and their army of teachers and enablers, Blair began formulating a program to go after Britain's jihadist hotbeds that indoctrinate British born and bred Muslims to wage war against their country.
Yet, as Melanie Phillips points out in painstaking and hair- raising detail in her book Londonistan, Blair's efforts to curb the influence of radical jihadists and undermine their operations were quickly stymied. The multiculturalists who have taken hold of Britain's cultural, intellectual, judicial, ecclesiastical and political life attacked, blocked or watered down every single one of his anti-terror initiatives. In the end, far from winning over his seemingly endless critics, Blair backed down.
One of Blair's initiatives had been to establish a Task Force which would tackle jihadist Islam that had declared war on Britain. As Phillip's explains, "It would go into [Muslim] communities to actively confront what [Blair] called an 'evil ideology' based on a perversion of Islam and 'defeat it by force of reason.'"
Yet, with his anti-terror campaign torn to shreds, Blair allowed the very extremists he was seeking to counter to take over the Task Force. Not surprisingly these men - who included Swiss jihad apologist Tarik Ramadan and prominent British Hamas supporters - decided that the proper British response to the homegrown British jihadists who killed 52 of their fellow citizens was to surrender to their demands.
One of the chief demands of Britain's radical Muslims is for Britain to change its foreign policy regarding Israel and the US. The view that Britain should take a pro-Islamic stance on issues such as Hamas, the US-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to placate British Muslims has gained currency in British foreign policy circles.
Labor MP John Denhan, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee said in September 2005, "We need to recognize that some foreign policy has now a very direct impact on domestic policy. We may well need to ...be prepared to change the emphasis of our foreign policy in order to safeguard our security...It is no exaggeration to say that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is not simply a matter of foreign policy - it is a matter of British domestic security as well."
UNFORTUNATELY, Britain's efforts to appease its Muslim minority have only served to further radicalize its members. While Britain has all but outlawed the use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism;" as the British media studiously refused to publish the cartoons of Muhammed out of respect for British Muslims and systematically distorts the reality of the Palestinian jihad against Israel and the violence in Iraq; and while the British police takes the mildest view of overt Muslim incitement to wage jihad against Britain, the US, Israel and other Western democracies in mosques and on the streets of London, the latest Pew Global Attitudes poll showed that British Muslims have the most radical views of all European Muslims.
As Amir Taheri noted last week in The Wall Street Journal, only 32 percent of British Muslims have positive views of Jews while 71 percent of French Muslims reportedly have positive views of Jews. A majority of British Muslims hold a dim view of Westerners and 16,000 of them expressed an interest in carrying out terrorist acts.
ONE OF the casualties of Britain's tilt towards the jihadists is the struggle to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Last July, as the rotating head of the EU Presidency the British published an appeal to Iran to release political prisoners Akbar Ganji and Nasser Zar-Afshan. In the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's less than democratic electoral victory, Blair said, "It would be a serious mistake if he [Ahmadinejad] thought that we are going to go soft on them, because we are not."
Today, the British are soft and silent as thousands of Iranian protesters are rounded up, students and workers are brutalized, and women are attacked by secret police. And Britain played a central role in convincing the US to join Britain, France and Germany in trying to buy off the mullahs rather than confront their program to acquire nuclear weapons.
Indeed, today there is little difference between Britain's policy towards Iran's nuclear weapons program and that of the UN and the Arab and Muslim world. This past weekend, Ahmadinejad hosted the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well as the UN envoy for Iraq and the secretaries general for the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Teheran.
After participating Friday in a demonstration calling for Israel's destruction, Ahmadinejad addressed his distinguished audience and explained, "The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem."
He went on to say that anyone who supports Israel should expect to be attacked and demanded that Israel's supporters get rid of Israel themselves or face the wrath of Islam.
Although this was not the first time that Ahmadinejad specifically called for the eradication of Israel, his speech is nonetheless newsworthy because of his audience. Not only did none of those assembled condemn his call for Israel's destruction, they issued a condemnation of Israel of their own. They attacked Israel for "increasing aggression against the Palestinian people" and condemned the "silence" of the international community. The Teheran demonstrations were followed by similar ones in Turkey.
FOR ITS part the so-called international community in the EU and the UN leapt into action. Both issued statements condemning Israel for using "disproportionate force" against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. And like the Arab and Muslim states, neither the EU nor the UN felt the need to say anything at all about Iran's threat to "remove" Israel.
Phillips wrote Londonistan for the American rather than the British audience. She explained that she wanted to alert the Americans to the true status of their closest ally and by extension of the Anglo-American alliance. If Britain surrenders to the forces of jihad it will spell both a national security nightmare and a political disaster for America. As Phillips notes, on a cultural level, "Britain's already calamitous slide into cultural defeatism might boost similar forces at play in the United States."
Unfortunately, from the looks of things, those forces seem to have taken over the Bush administration. Like the British and the EU, Washington had no response to Ahmadinejad's latest statement of intentions about Israel and the rest of the Western world. Nor did the administration have anything to say about the silence of the Arab and Muslim states and the UN whose representatives seemed to accept Ahmadinejad's remarks.
Rather, on Friday, President George W. Bush stated that he sees reason for hope that the international community will come together to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons during the upcoming G-8 summit in Moscow. Moreover, on Saturday the Washington Post reported that Bush will announce a dramatic policy shift at the opening of that summit. Instead of attacking Russia for blocking all concerted international responses to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Bush will announce that he is rewarding Russian despot Vladimir Putin and risking the alienation of the Republican Congress in an election year by agreeing to sign a civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the man most responsible for Iran's free hand in developing nuclear weapons.
Bush's apologists claim that the deal will act as an incentive for getting Putin to stop supporting Iran and North Korea. Yet that rings hollow. It is hard to find compelling examples of states who behaved better after their bad behavior was rewarded.
One year after the London bombings, with Britain slouching towards dhimmitude and the Bush Doctrine in shambles, it is hard to keep from wondering what it will take for the free nations of the world to abandon appeasement and fight for victory.
from the British Press Association via 24dash.com, 2006-Aug-7, by Ian Morgan:
More British Muslims believe 'London terror bombings justified'
Almost a quarter of British Muslims say the 7/7 bombings can be justified because of the Government's support for the war on terror, according to an opinion poll.
And nearly half of those polled, or 45%, believe the 9/11 attacks on New York were a conspiracy between the US and Israel.
The survey, for a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary to be screened tonight, found Muslims under the age of 24 were twice as likely to justify the 7/7 attacks as those aged over 45.
It found 24% across all age groups either agreed or tended to agree that the 7/7 bombings were justified, although 48% said they "strongly disagreed" and 17% said they did not know.
The figures are significantly higher than those from a poll last month, in which 7% thought suicide attacks on civilians in the UK could be justified in some circumstances - rising to 16% if they were aimed at a military target.
Almost four in 10 surveyed for the Channel 4 poll believe another attack will be launched in the UK by British-born Muslim terrorists.
A third of those questioned said they would rather live under Sharia law in the UK than British law.
The survey also reveals concerns among Muslims about Britain's moral standards, with 40% saying it is a country of bad moral behaviour, and 66% saying parents allow their children too much freedom.
Half said that police stop and search too many Muslims and 44% said they would rather send their children to a Muslim school.
The poll was released just before Britain's most senior Asian police officer was expected to warn that anti-terror laws discriminate against Muslims and could "criminalise" ethnic minorities.
It was reported today that Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur will call for an independent judicial review to investigate what caused the "anger and resentment" of young British Muslims that lay behind the July 7 bombings in London.
Dispatches: What Muslims Want will be shown on Channel 4 at 8pm tonight.
from the New York Sun, 2006-Jul-11, by Daniel Pipes:
What British Muslims Think
The London transport bombings of July 2005 prompted no less than eight surveys of Muslim opinion in Britain within the year. When added to two surveys from 2004, they provide in the aggregate a unique insight into the thinking of the nearly 2 million Muslims in "Londonistan." The hostile mentality they portray is especially alarming when one recalls that London's police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, recently told the Times of London that the threat of terrorism "is very grim" because there are, "as we speak, people in the United Kingdom planning further atrocities."
The July 7 attacks: About one in 20 British Muslims has voiced overt sympathy for the bombings a year ago. Separate polls find that between 2% and 6% endorse the attacks, 4% refuse to condemn them, 5% believe the Koran justifies them, and 6% say the suicide bombers were acting in accord with the principles of Islam.
Without endorsing the attacks, far larger numbers show an understanding for them: Thirteen percent say the July 7 suicide bombers should be regarded as "martyrs," 16% say the attacks were wrong but the cause was right, while 20% feel sympathy for the "feelings and motives" of the attackers. A whopping 56% can see "why some people behave in that way."
Help the police? A worrisome number of Muslims would not help the police if they suspected a fellow Muslim was planning a terrorist attack, ranging in different surveys from 5% to 14% to 18%.
Violence acceptable? Before July 7, 2005, 11% found it acceptable "for religious or political groups to use violence for political ends," but only 4% thought so after the attacks, showing a rare improvement. Two polls turned up the identical figure of 7% of Muslims endorsing suicide attacks on civilians in Britain. (Among 18- to 24-year-olds, those most likely to carry out such an attack, the number jumps to 12%.) How about suicide attacks on the military in Britain? Positive answers came in at 16% and 21% (with 28% of 18- to 24-year-olds). Are the respondents themselves willing to embrace violence to bring an end to "decadent and immoral" Western society? One percent, or some 16,000 persons, answered in the affirmative.
Muslim or British: Polling indicates that a majority of Muslims perceive a conflict between their British and Muslim identities. Two polls show that only a small proportion identifies itself first as a British (7% and 12%), but they differ widely on the number who identify first with their religion (81% and 46%).
Implementing Islamic law: Muslims widely state that Shariah should reign in Britain. Forty percent approve of Shariah being applied in predominantly Muslim areas, and 61% want Shariah courts to settle civil cases among Muslims. All of 58% want those who criticize or insult Islam to face criminal prosecution. Schools should be prohibited from banning female pupils from wearing the hijab, say 55%, while 88% insist that schools and work places should accommodate Muslim prayer times.
Integration into Britain: In a nearly mirror image of each other, 65% say Muslims need to do more to integrate into mainstream British culture, and 36% say modern British values threaten the Islamic way of life. Twenty-seven percent feel conflicted between loyalty to fellow Muslims and to Britain. Of those who despise Western civilization and think Muslims "should seek to bring it to an end," 32% endorse nonviolent means and 7% violent means.
Attitudes toward Jews: Polls confirm that the anti-Semitism widespread in the Muslim world also rears its head in Britain. About half the Muslims polled believe that Jews in Britain have too much influence over Britain's foreign policy and are in league with the Freemasons to control its press and politics. Some 37% consider Jews in Britain "legitimate targets as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East," and 16% state that suicide bombings can be justified in Israel. (Among 18- to 24-year-olds, that number rises to 21%.)
In sum, more than half of British Muslims want Islamic law and 5% endorse violence to achieve that end. These results demonstrate that Britain's potential terrorists live in a highly nurturing community.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of "Miniatures" (Transaction Publishers).
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-May-21, by Daniel Schwammenthal:
Dutch Courage
A Muslim dissenter is no longer welcome in Holland.America welcomed a victim of political and religious persecution this week. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been living for years with death threats for her criticisms of radical Islam. But in the end it was not her former coreligionists who have caused her to seek refuge in the U.S. It was rather the native-born citizens of her adopted country, the Netherlands, that drove her off. If the reader will forgive a little indulgence in the soft bigotry of low expectations, it is the role of her fellow Dutchmen that is most worthy of contempt in this tale.
Ms. Hirsi Ali first achieved international prominence when Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street in 2004. The killer pinned a five-page manifesto to his victim's chest with the knife he'd used to kill him. The letter was titled "Open Letter to Hirsi Ali."
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch immigrant, a female member of the Dutch Parliament and an outspoken critic of Islam, particularly Islamic attitudes toward women. Ms. Hirsi Ali had scripted Van Gogh's film "Submission," on the mistreatment of Muslim women.
For making this film, Van Gogh was killed and, the letter from his killer explained, Ms. Hirsi Ali was condemned to "torture and agony." Holy war against the U.S. and Europe was also threatened. Already under police protection since 2002 for having renounced her faith, Ms. Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding. For the second time in her life she became a refugee, this time in her adopted homeland.
Now she is being put on the run again, this time by the Dutch who have grown tired of protecting such an outspoken critic of Islamic extremism. Last month a Dutch judge ordered her out of her apartment. Her fellow tenants had argued that her presence endangered them and lowered their property values, in violation of their "human rights." The judge agreed and ordered her evicted.
The final betrayal came last Monday when Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, from the supposedly liberal VVD party, told Ms. Hirsi Ali that she was no longer a Dutch citizen, or, to be more precise, never was one because she gained her citizenship with an incorrect name and date of birth. She had also already fled Somalia for Kenya when she applied for asylum in Holland. The funny thing is, Ms. Hirsi Ali admitted this years ago without prompting as much as a yawn from the authorities. But when a left-leaning state TV channel "exposed" these same facts nine days ago, in a report titled "The Holy Ayaan," Ms. Verdonk declared Ms. Hirsi Ali--a fellow party member and lawmaker--non-Dutch.
Bibi de Vries, another VVD parliamentarian, warned that "if anything happens to Hirsi Ali, there will be people within the VVD with blood on their hands." But Ms. Hirsi Ali does not plan to stick around long enough to prove Mr. de Vries correct. Last Tuesday, she announced that she would be moving to America, where the American Enterprise Institute has offered her a position as a fellow.
Many of her countrymen would like nothing more than to believe that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is leaving the Netherlands because she was caught in a lie. But this would be the biggest lie in this whole affair. The Somali-born politician is leaving--no, fleeing--her adopted homeland because the Netherlands and much of Europe prefer a traditional Muslim woman who keeps her mouth shut over one who objects to Islamic intolerance. Ms. Hirsi Ali could take the threats against her own life. But she could no longer take being abandoned by the Dutch simply for fighting for the values they taught her but now lack the courage to defend.
Luckily for Ms. Hirsi Ali, she has found a country that doesn't fear her willingness to criticize the religion into which she was born. While visiting the Netherlands last Thursday, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said the former Dutch legislator could come to the U.S. regardless of her status in the Netherlands. "We recognize that she is a very courageous and impressive woman, and she is welcome in the U.S."
How can it be that this recognition, so self-evident to an American official just passing through, has escaped most of the Dutch? Nearly half of her countrymen want her stripped of her citizenship. They have succumbed to the dangerous illusion that if only she were to go away, all the problems of radical Islam would go away with her. Ms. Hirsi Ali offered a final warning on that score this week. "I am . . . preparing to leave Holland," Ms. Hirsi Ali told reporters. "But the questions for our society remain. The future of Islam in our country, the subjugation of women in Islamic culture; the integration of the many Muslims in the West: It is self-deceit to imagine that these issues will disappear."
There are striking parallels between the way many in Europe view the U.S. and the way the Dutch and many Europeans view Ms. Hirsi Ali. Outrage over September 11 soon gave way to a reversal of cause and effect. The victim, the U.S., was held responsible for the destruction it supposedly brought upon itself through its policies and provocation of Muslims. Similarly, solidarity with Ms. Hirsi Ali quickly changed to attacking Ms. Hirsi Ali for being too provocative. Government adviser Jan Schoonenboom accused Ms. Hirsi Ali of "Islam bashing," a theme often repeated in the media.
Ms. Hirsi Ali might be the first, but won't be the last, post-9/11 dissident to seek refuge in the land of the brave and the free. And so, any recovery of property prices in Ms. Hirsi Ali's neighborhood will be short-lived. Where the defenders of democracy have to flee while the enemies of free society roam the streets, not only real estate is bound to become very cheap. So will be life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Mr. Schwammenthal is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
from the Jerusalem Post, 2006-May-24, by George Conger:
Study: Germans pessimistic on Islam
German public opinion believes a "clash of civilizations" is under way between Christians and Muslims that will lead to further domestic and international conflict, a report commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung finds.
Germany is in the midst of "a conflict spiral," researchers from the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research reported last week. "Conceptions of Islam were already negative" but have hardened "noticeably in recent times," the survey's authors Elisabeth Noelle and Thomas Petersen reported.
"Germans are increasingly of the opinion that a lasting, peaceful coexistence with the Islamic world will not be possible," Noelle and Petersen concluded.
Esteem for Islam in Germany has been falling precipitously since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and has been driven down further by outrage over the 2004 Beslan school attack in Russia and by a recent series of high-profile stories in the German press.
Concerns over an "honor killing" in Berlin, demands that schoolgirls be permitted to wear burkas, a surge in schoolyard violence involving Muslim immigrants, and the failure of Germany's three million Muslim immigrants to assimilate have deepened a "crisis of cultures."
The Allensbach survey of 1,076 German adults in early May found that 83% of the respondents associated Islam with "fanaticism," an increase of 8% from a similar poll in 2004.
Over 71% believed Islam to be "intolerant," a rise from 66% in 2004; 62% saw it as "backward," up from 49%; while 60% saw it as "undemocratic," an increase of 8% since 2004. Only 8% of the survey participants characterized Islam as peaceful.
When asked what keyword or phrase they associated with Islam, 91% of respondents stated that Islam implied discrimination against women.
Some 61% of Germans said they believed a "clash of cultures" already existed, while 65% said "they counted on such conflicts" to worsen in the future.
While two-thirds of the survey participants said they blamed religious fanatics, not Islam, for the conflict with the West, 40% of the participants said they would favor curtailing Germany's constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of religion in order to safeguard national security.
Asked if there should be a ban on the building of mosques in Germany as long as Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states banned church construction, 56% agreed, the survey found.
The Muhammad cartoon controversy had also exhausted the average German's willingness to engage in dialogue, Noelle and Peterson noted. "In view of the widespread feeling of being under threat, and the suspected intolerance of Islam, the readiness of Germans to show tolerance to the Muslim faith is sinking."
The survey findings were extraordinary in light of Germany's "special dislike of conflict," Noelle and Peterson noted. "One could even speak of a pronounced need for harmony by Germans," they said.
However, the "ditch has become deeper" between Islam and the West, the survey concluded, as "in most people's minds the Kampf der Kulturer has already begun."
from the Telegraph of London, 2005-Nov-15, by Mark Steyn:
Bicultural Europe is doomed
Three years ago -December 2002 - I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation: "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark."
At the time, this was taken as confirmation of my descent into insanity. I can't see why. Compare, for example, the Iraqi and the European constitutions: which would you say reflected a shrewder grasp of the realities on the ground?
Or take last week's attacks in Jordan by a quartet of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's finest suicide bombers. The day after the carnage, Jordanians took to the streets in their thousands to shout "Death to Zarqawi!" and "Burn in hell, Zarqawi!" King Abdullah denounced terrorism as "sick" and called for a "global fight" against it. "These people are insane," he said of the husband-and-wife couple dispatched to blow up a wedding reception.
For purposes of comparison, consider the Madrid bombing from March last year. The day after that, Spaniards also took to the streets, for their feebly tasteful vigil. Instead of righteous anger, they were "united in sorrow" - i.e. enervated in passivity. Instead of wishing death on the perpetrators, the preferred slogan was "Basta!" - "Enough!" - which was directed less at the killers than at Aznar and Bush. Instead of a leader who calls for a "global fight", they elected a government pledged to withdraw from any meaningful role in the global fight.
My point in that symposium was a simple one: whatever their problems, most Islamic countries have the advantage of beginning any evolution into free states from the starting point of relative societal cohesion. By contrast, most European nations face the trickier task of trying to hold on to their freedom at a time of increasing societal incoherence.
True, America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations, and then evolved into successful "multicultural" societies. But that's not what's happening in Europe right now. If you want to know what a multicultural society looks like, read the names of America's dead on September 11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Hispanic, Arab, Indian, Chinese - in a word, American.
Whether or not one believes in "celebrating diversity", that's a lot of diversity to celebrate. But the Continent isn't multicultural so much as bicultural. There are ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that's it: "two solitudes", as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there's three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing We are the World. But if there's just two - you and the other - that's generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it's no longer quite clear who is the majority and who is the minority - a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward.
Take Fiji - not a comparison France would be flattered by, though until 1987 the Fijians enjoyed a century of peaceful stable constitutional evolution the French were never able to muster. At any rate, Fiji comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, 46.2 per cent are Fijians and 48.6 per cent are Indo-Fijians; 50-50, give or take, with no intermarrying. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Col Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups, resulting in the Queen's removal as head of state and Fiji being expelled from the Commonwealth.
Is it that difficult to sketch a similar situation for France? Even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs federalists in Quebec. Picture a French election circa 2020, 2025: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly. The Chiraquiste crowd give a fatalistic shrug and Mr de Villepin starts including crowd-pleasing suras from the Koran at his poetry recitals. But would Mr Le Pen or (by then) his daughter take it so well? Or would the temptation to be France's Col Rabuka prove too much?
And the Fijian scenario - a succession of bloodless coups - is the optimistic one. After all, the differences between Fijian natives and Indians are as nothing compared with those between the French and les beurs. I love the way those naysayers predicting doom and gloom in Baghdad scoff that Iraq's a totally artificial entity and that, without some Saddamite strongman, Kurds, Sunnis and Shias can't co-exist in the same state. Oh, really? If Iraq's an entirely artificial entity, what do you call a state split between gay drugged-up red-light whatever's-your-bag Dutchmen and anti-gay anti-whoring anti-everything-you-dig Muslims? If Kurdistan doesn't belong in Iraq, does Pornostan belong in the Islamic Republic of Holland?
In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 per cent to 31 per cent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 per cent to 44 per cent.
So Europe's present biculturalism makes disaster a certainty. One way to avoid it would be to go genuinely multicultural, to broaden the Continent's sources of immigration beyond the Muslim world. But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancien regime of indolent geriatrics.
France faces tough choices and, unlike Baghdad, in Paris you can't even talk about them honestly. As Jean-Claude Dassier, director-general of the French news station LCI, told a broadcasters' conference in Amsterdam, he has been playing down the riots on the following grounds: "Politics in France is heading to the Right and I don't want Right-wing politicians back in second or even first place because we showed burning cars on television."
Oh, well. You can understand why the Quai d'Orsay is relaxed about Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third. You heard it here first. You probably won't hear it on Mr Dassier's station at all.
from Reuters, 2006-Apr-11, by Mark Trevelyan:
EU lexicon to shun term "Islamic terrorism"
BERLIN - The European Union, tiptoeing through a minefield of religious and cultural sensitivities, is discreetly reviewing the language it uses to describe terrorists who claim to act in the name of Islam.
EU officials are working on what they call a "lexicon" for public communication on terrorism and Islam, designed to make clear that there is nothing in the religion to justify outrages like the September 11 attacks or the bombings of Madrid and London.
The lexicon would set down guidelines for EU officials and politicians.
"Certainly 'Islamic terrorism' is something we will not use ... we talk about 'terrorists who abusively invoke Islam'," an EU official told Reuters.
Other terms being considered by the review include "Islamist", "fundamentalist" and "jihad". The latter, for example, is often used by al Qaeda and some other groups to mean warfare against infidels, but for most Muslims indicates a spiritual struggle.
"Jihad means something for you and me, it means something else for a Muslim. Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within yourself," said the official, speaking anonymously because the review is an internal one that is not expected to be made public.
EU counter-terrorism chief Gijs de Vries told Reuters that terrorism was not inherent to any religion, and praised moderate Muslims for opposing attempts to hijack Islam.
"They have been increasingly active in isolating the radicals who abuse Islam for political purposes, and they deserve everyone's support. And that includes the choice of language that makes clear that we are talking about a murderous fringe that is abusing a religion and does not represent it."
CARTOONS ROW
The language used in the West when discussing Muslims and terrorism, and especially the charge by critics of Islam that it is an inherently violent religion, are highly sensitive and topical issues in Europe.
Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, including one showing him with a bomb in his turban, provoked violent protests earlier this year in a number of Muslim countries where people saw them as blasphemous. At least 50 people were killed.
Figures like Muslim-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali argued during the uproar over the cartoons that within Islam exists a hardline, intolerant movement that rejects free speech and democracy and deserves to be exposed and criticised.
The EU official familiar with the "lexicon" review said the point of using careful language was not to "fall into the trap" of offending and alienating citizens.
"You don't want to use terminology which would aggravate the problem," he said. "This is an attempt ... to be aware of the sensitivities implied by the use of certain language."
An initial paper on the issue is expected to be adopted in June. "It is to help us understand what we are saying and try to avoid making mistakes. It's for the self-guidance of EU institutions and member states," the official said.
Omar Faruk, a Muslim British barrister who has advised the government on community issues, said there was a strong need for a "new sort of political dialogue and terminology".
Asked about the phrase "Islamic terrorism", he said: "Those words cannot sit side by side. Islam is actually very much against any form of terrorism ... Islam in itself means peace." [“Islam” is Arabic for “submission” (to the will of Allah). E.g., “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” (Allah, in the Qur'an, 8th book “The Accessions”, 12th verse) -AMPP Ed.]
The widespread use of the expression "just creates a culture where terrorism actually is identified with Islam. That causes me a lot of stress," Faruk added.
from the Associated PRess, 2005-Dec-1, by Raf Casert:
Belgians shocked to learn of suicide bomber
MONCEAU-SUR-SAMBRE, Belgium -- She was the typical girl-next-door — pretty daughter of a hospital secretary who grew up on a quiet street in this rust-belt town and finished high school before becoming a bakers' assistant.
Years later she was in Baghdad, carrying out a suicide bombing in the name of jihad — a disturbing sign of the reach of Islamic militancy.
Neighbors say Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up last month at age 38 trying to attack U.S. troops, had lived a conventional life but became heavily involved in Islam after marrying an Algerian.
"She was absolutely normal as a kid," said Jeannine Samain, who lives a few doors down from the Degauque family home in the shadows of a towering coal pile. "When it snowed, they would go to the hill together with the sled."
She recalled the last time she saw Degauque, eight months ago: "She was veiled. By that time she would just say 'bonjour' and that was it."
Authorities say Degauque carried out an attack Nov. 9 near an American military patrol in Iraq after entering the country from Syria a month ago, and was the only person killed.
"It is the first time that we see a Western woman, a Belgian, marrying a radical Muslim and is converted up to the point of becoming a jihad fighter," federal police director Glenn Audenaert said.
Authorities say Degauque had been a member of a terror group that embraced al-Qaeda's ideology. The group included her second husband, a Belgian of Moroccan origin who entered Iraq with Degauque and was killed in murky circumstances while trying to set up a separate suicide bombing.
Experts said converts to Islam like Degauque are often easy prey for extremists because their search for a new identity can make them impressionable.
"The phenomenon is not really new for the security services, but it is for the public. For them it is a real shock," said Edwin Bakker, a terrorism expert at the Clingendael Institute in the Hague, Netherlands. "They are looking for ... a new sense to their life."
Media reports said Degauque had problems with drugs and alcohol as an adolescent but later turned to a particularly strict form of Islam. Experts say that is a common pattern for Western-born recruits to Islamic radicalism.
When the woman's mother, Liliane Degauque, saw police coming to her doorstep on Wednesday, she said she knew immediately what it was about. She had heard reports the evening before that there was a terrorist attack on Nov. 9 by a Belgian woman and sensed it was her daughter.
"For three weeks already I tried to contact her by telephone, but I got the answering machine," she told the RTBF network on Thursday.
Monceau-sur-Sambret bristles with factory smokestacks and uneven cobblestone streets lead to cheap supermarkets in the town, located near the industrial city of Charleroi.
But the Degauques' brick home at 33 Rue de l'Europe is a touch more genteel than others. Liliane Degauque is a medical secretary and Degaugue's father, Jean, is a retired factory worker.
Authorities on Thursday formally arrested five of 14 suspects detained in dawn raids the day before and charged them with involvement in a terrorist network that sent volunteers to Iraq, including Muriel Degauque.
Nine were released. Those placed under arrest were a Tunisian and four Belgians, three with North African ancestry.
"This action shows how international terrorism tries to set up networks in western European nations, recruit for terror attacks in conflict areas and look for funds to finance terrorism," said Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt.
In France, police in the Paris region arrested a 15th suspect, a 27-year-old Tunisian thought to have contacts with the Belgian group.
Authorities said the Belgian network had been planning to send more volunteers to Iraq for attacks.
Belgium has been identified as a breeding ground for terrorists in the past and there are currently 13 Belgian and Moroccan nationals on trial for allegedly being members of an Islamic group suspected in recent bomb attacks in Spain and Morocco.
Islamic radical groups linked to the al-Qaeda terror network are suspected of setting up networks in Belgium and other European nations with large Muslim communities.
For many in Belgium, Wednesday's arrests were a chilling reminder that no one is immune.
"Belgium is directly involved in the terrorist threat," said Justice Minister Laurette Onkelinx.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Oct-17, p.A18, by Christopher Hitchens:
The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter's early writing for the stage was correctly described -- with no objection from him -- as "the theater of the absurd." But it has been left to the selectors of the Nobel in literature to make that definition postmodern and thus to drain it of all irony. Their choice of Mr. Pinter is a selection of absurdity quite detached from drama: a straight and philistine preference for the grotesque. "I have no idea why they gave me the award," said the playwright when the news was brought to him. This justified incredulity showed a brief flash of his old form.
But in point of fact, any thinking person knows precisely why he was this year's Laureate at a moment when a person of even average literacy might have lit upon Rushdie, Roth or Pamuk. Just as with the selection of Jimmy Carter for the "Peace" Prize, where the judges chose to emphasize the embarrassment they hoped thereby to visit on the Bush administration, the ludicrous elevation of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq.
Mr. Pinter's work, according to the clumsily-phrased Nobel citation, "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Let us agree that his early plays -- he has not produced anything worth noticing since the 1960s -- do indeed show an uneasy relationship between the banal and the evil. But let me offer you a stave from a poem he wrote in January 2003, titled "God Bless America": "Here they go again,/ The Yanks in their armored parade/ Chanting their ballads of joy/ As they gallop across the big world/ Praising America's God."
This, and other verses like it, were awarded the Wilfred Owen prize by a group of English judges. When re-reading Owen on "the pity of war," I invariably find that it is difficult to do so without tears. When scanning Mr. Pinter on the same subject, I cannot get to the end without the temptation either to laugh out loud or to throw up. The sheer puerility of the stuff is precisely a combination of banality with evil: a preference for dictatorship larded with obscenity and fatuity. (And scrawled, I might add, by a man who helped found the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic.) One has had more enlightenment, and been exposed to more wit, from the walls of public lavatories, such as those featured so morbidly in Pinter's early effort "The Caretaker."
The Nobel committee allowed Borges and Nabokov to go to their graves unrecognized, while choosing writers who it is difficult to remember without wincing. Last year's selection, of a mediocre Austrian Stalinist named Elfriede Jellinek, caused a few winces even in Stockholm. And Dario Fo? What can one possibly say -- except that the theater of the absurd is apparently always on the road. Jose Saramago can certainly write -- just as Frau Jellinek can certainly not -- but one is compelled to suspect that without his staunch post-1989 membership of the unusually degenerated Portuguese Communist Party he would not have been considered. As with the Peace Prize, the award of the laureateship for literature has come to approximate the value of a resolution of the U.N. Special Committee on Human Rights. The occasional exceptions -- I would want to instance Sir Vidia Naipaul in spite of his own toxic political views -- only throw the general sinister mediocrity into sharper relief.
And sinister mediocrity has become Mr. Pinter's stock-in-trade. Is it really believable that a conclave of righteous Scandinavians should have honored a man who said, in loud terms, that the mass murder in New York in September 2001 was a justified "retaliation"? A man who described the genocidal war-criminal Milosevic as the true leader of the "Yugoslavia" he had subverted and cleansed and destroyed? A man who said that George Bush and Tony Blair were "terrorists," while Saddam Hussein was not?
Even in his increasingly lame and slovenly literary output, Mr. Pinter always married politicization to illiteracy. His useless play "Mountain Language," extruded about a dozen years ago, drew attention to the plight of the Kurdish people but lost interest in them as soon as the subject crossed the border of the NATO alliance: Turkish Kurds were fine but Mr. Pinter would fight like a madman against any attempt to liberate their brothers and sisters in Iraq. Mildly rebuked by the American ambassador in London for "calling the U.S. administration a blood-thirsty wild animal" (I quote from Mr. Pinter's own narrative here) he replied: "All I can say is: Take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made." All he can say? Alas, yes. I have my own differences with the secretary of defense but this rhetoric is pathetic and nasty at the same time.
A luxurious literary/political salon, established by Mr. Pinter and his noble wife Lady Antonia Fraser to protest the Gulag-like character of the Thatcher regime, is often said to have dissolved because of unkind media ridicule. To the contrary: I know many people who used to attend that "salon," and I can tell you that it dissolved because of the irrational rages and hysterical harangues of its host, now garlanded for his services to the high calling of letters.
* * *
Is this depressing? I happen not to think so. The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements. Let us hope, then, that the day when the Nobel Prize is a local and provincial event has been brought closer. Especially in their opinions about peace and literature -- two matters that ought to concern all serious people -- the judges have brought absurdity upon themselves. Let us withdraw our assent from their fool's-gold standard, and see what happens. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.
Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (Eminent Lives, 2005).
from The Guardian of London, 2006-Apr-26:
Italian Communists make big gains
The general elections of April 9-10 saw a massive increase in communist representation in the Italian Parliament.
The Communist Refoundation Party vote increased both in percentage and in absolute numbers — from five percent achieved in 2001 to 5.8 percent in the Chamber of Deputies (from 1,867,712 votes to 2,229,604) and from 5.1 to 7.4 percent in the Senate.
It will now have 41 MPs in the lower house (up from 11) and 27 in the Senate (up from 3).
The Party of Italian Communists (a 1998 split from Refoundation) also fared well. From no respresentation in the previous Parliament it now has 16 MPs in the Lower House and 11 in the Senate (in coalition with the Greens).
This is the largest representation of Communists in the Italian Parliament since the 1991 dissolution of the old Italian Communist Party.
It was also the largest turnout of voters across Italy for 15 years, with a high 83.6 percent of the 47 million eligible casting a vote.
Under new election proportional representation (PR) rules for the lower house that were introduced last December, each party is able to elect a certain number of MPs depending on the amount of votes it receives.
The new system favours coalitions, parties belonging to a coalition must get more than two percent of the vote to be represented in parliament. Moreover, the winning coalition is automatically granted a so-called "majority award", that is, a minimum 340 of the 630 seats so that it receives a commanding majority.
A PR system continues to apply for the Senate, but the number of Senators (for a total of 315) allocated to parties depends on the vote reported in each single Italian region where there is also a regional "majority award".
For the first time Italians residing abroad (about one million) could cast a vote to be represented directly through six Senate seats and 12 deputies for the lower house.
After a long counting night, where the results seemed to contradict what the polls had predicted, Prodi's Union won over the centre-right coalition in the Senate thanks to the votes cast by the Italians abroad (four Senators for the Union, one for the right coalition, and one independent, who has declared he will support the winning coalition).
In spite of a slim majority of votes for the right coalition, the left Union has gained a Senate majority of 159 to 156 seats.
The voting for the lower house was clearer and favourable for the Union. The centre-left won by a very small margin of 25,000 votes but under the rules will be in a position to implement its program with 348 of the 630 seats.
During the next few weeks the MPs' agenda will include the installation of the new parliament which is to elect a new President of the republic, and finally, the new government has to be formed.
The Communist Refoundation Party will support a government with Romano Prodi as Prime Minister and will take part in it.
"A very important step has been taken", said the Party statement. "We defeated Berlusconi. Now we intend to lead Italy towards a change and help the rise of a new alternative left in Italy, which is now stronger after this election."
from Deutsche Presse-Agentur via news.MonstersAndCritics.com, 2006-Apr-29:
Communist leader is elected parliament speaker in Italy
Rome - Fausto Bertinotti, a former trade unionist who now heads the hard-left Communist Refoundation party, was elected speaker of Italy's Chamber of Deputies on Saturday with the support of Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition.
Bertinotti, who is 66 years old, received 337 votes - 32 more than the required majority - in a fourth round of balloting.
The result was greeted with relief by centre-left lawmakers, who were still attempting to elect their candidate in the Senate.
Friday's rounds of voting in the upper house were marred by chaos, controversy and Mafia-style coded messages that brought shame to the country's political elite.
In the fierce battle for control of the Senate, where Prodi enjoys only a wafer-thin majority, the centre-left's candidate, Franco Marini, came just one vote short of the required 162 majority at the end of a long day of voting that dragging on into the wee hours of the morning.
Marini, a close friend of Prodi, was defeated in two successive rounds because a handful of disputed ballots carrying the name 'Francesco' rather than 'Franco' were voided.
Political analysts said the mistaken identity was not an accident, but a coded message aimed at Prodi by disgruntled members of his broad coalition, which spans hard-line communists to liberals.
'A disconcerting debut for Prodi,' read the headline of a front-page editorial in the Rome-based daily La Repubblica that cast serious doubts over Prodi's ability to govern in the coming weeks following his narrowest of victories in this month's general election.
But Marini also faced formidable resistance from the candidate proposed by outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, elder statesman Giulio Andreotti. His better-than-expected showing suggested Berlusconi's strategy of fielding the seven-time premier in a bid to lure centre-left moderates to his side and throw a spanner in Prodi's works had, at least in part, succeeded.
Marini had a better chance of being elected on Saturday as a lower quorum was required.
Berlusconi, who has yet to concede defeat after the April 9-10 general election, has indicated he will hand in his resignation once the election of the two speakers is completed.
from Reuters, 2006-Jun-2:
Italy, UK to discuss Italian pullout from Iraq
ROME - Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi said on Friday the British and the Italian defence ministers would meet soon to discuss Italy's withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Prodi made the announcement to reporters after a working lunch with Prime Minister Tony Blair in Rome. A British official said the meeting would probably take place in a matter of days.
"The Italian and British defence ministers will meet soon to coordinate the details of the return of Italian troops. This will also be coordinated with local authorities who are in constant contact with the British command in Iraq," Prodi said.
Prodi, whose government was sworn in last month after his centre-left coalition narrowly won an April general election, has vowed to live up to campaign promises for a swift withdrawal of Italy's 2,600 troops in Iraq.
He has called the war in Iraq a "grave error".
Prodi said Italian troops in Iraq operated in an area under British command.
"Our decision (to withdraw) has been taken," Prodi said. "The question is how to put this into effect so that the situation remains under control and we don't lose those elements of security that are so necessary in this situation," he said.
from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2005-Feb-10, by Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch:
Willkommen to Hobbitland
In a recent television survey, Germans chose the epic "Lord of the Rings" as their favorite book. In so doing, they were paying homage not only to J.R.R. Tolkien's literary abilities but apparently also to their own emotional state. A large portion of German society would prefer to live in the hobbits' pastoral idyll, surrounded by windmills and small-scale rural technology -- far from Mordor, the mirror of western industrial society, where evil wizards challenge nature.
Unfortunately, Middle Earth has a few problems. Windmills don't create enough prosperity. It's getting uncomfortable in Hobbitland. For some ten years, wise economists have been pointing out that the foundations of the German welfare state must be modernized. Committees and advisory boards have debated for thousands of hours and produced tons of papers; talk shows on the issue resemble a babbling, infinite loop.
Agreement exists that things can't continue as before. But there's no sign of an awakening; more like submission to fate. The country is about as excited as a sick person giving his permission for an operation. Usually, the word "reform" conjures images of progress, stepping forward into a brighter future. But to German ears, the word "reform" sounds as threatening as the theme music of "Jaws." No other nation is as pessimistic as the Germans. In an international Gallup poll, only 13% believed the future would be better than the present.
A fog of negativity obstructs the view of the possibilities. Only few citizens really want more responsibility and less state. Most would like the government to take care of its little hobbits. The future should preserve as much as possible of the present. The taste of freedom and adventure scares Germans; the future should have the cozy smell of Grandma's recipes. This is what happens in a society where "progress" has become a dirty word. Technology is perceived only as a sinister threat.
The German motto is "don't take any risks" (except for 250 kph on the autobahn). The land of the economic miracle, the land of inventors and entrepreneurs, has turned into Hobbitland. The most daring vision of the future is to optimize the system of deposits on bottles. Germany is being left behind at the station, waving good-bye to progress as it chugs away.
* * *
A half century ago, when Ludwig Erhard promised "prosperity for all," the zeitgeist blew in the opposite direction. Even conservative intellectuals were infected with this faith in progress. They cleansed their political camps from the musty smell of retrograde hostility to technology and industry (emotions later taken up by the Greens). A period of unparalleled economic prosperity was set in motion.
Twenty years later, the German left shifted into reverse. In the late 1970s, the Greens succeeded in merging ultraconservative and left-wing positions into an apocalyptic worldview. The Green Party emerged from a combination of anti-capitalist ideology and conservative opposition to progress, which came together in the protest against nuclear power plants. The newly awakened pessimism about the future soon radiated deep into the Social Democratic Party and there led to an opportunistic greening. In the early 1980s, the Social Democrats took final leave of progress. This was illustrated, for example, in its change of heart on nuclear power: wholehearted support turned into uncompromising rejection.
Today, all parties are green; this attitude has taken over nearly the entire society. No technological innovation has been welcomed in Germany since the color television. New technologies are immediately blocked if a risk cannot be completely ruled out. This spirit has co-opted the rising elites in academia, churches, cultural institutions, media and the bureaucracy. Even at events organized by major industrial foundations, opponents of globalization, capitalism and genetic engineering, such as Vandana Shiva and Jeremy Rifkin, are firmly attached to the podiums. The hobbits have won.
The German hobbit's view of life is characterized by low expectations, constant emphasis on limits, nostalgia for the past, idealization of nature, and a deep-seated distrust of the workings of the market. When computers became affordable in the early 1980s, the German media discussed the new technologies from two points of view. First, computers were job-killers. Second, computers would lead to Orwellian surveillance of all citizens (the Green Party accordingly decided to boycott computers). When cell phones appeared, the danger of radiation from broadcast towers was the number one issue. The success of the Internet primarily triggered fears of being swamped with pornography and Nazi propaganda. Reproductive medicine? Frankenstein scientists are trying to clone people. Stem cell research? They're planning to use people for spare parts. Genetic engineering of plants? Monster tomatoes!
The idea that the future could perhaps be better than the present sounds like a crazy utopia in Hobbitland. Such views are no longer considered intellectually acceptable. Somewhere between "forest death" and "climate catastrophe," the yearning for progress died.
The German hobbits desperately want to be left alone. But the world won't do them this favor. Beyond their horizon of half-timbered houses and windmills, a restless, wide-awake world is surging. There, yesterday's poor are conquering today's markets. There, scientists are opening up new perspectives. There, people still want to rise to the challenge. Way too confusing and shrill for our hobbits.
Messrs. Maxeiner and Miersch, freelance authors, regularly address the German state of mind on their website, www.maxeiner-miersch.de. Belinda Cooper translated this article from the German.
from the Washington Post, 2005-Dec-13, p.A26:
Gerhard Schroeder's Sellout
IT'S THE SORT of behavior we have -- sadly -- come to expect from some in Congress. But when Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, announced last week that he was going to work for Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, he catapulted himself into a different league. It's one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It's quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany -- one of the world's largest economies -- leaves his job and goes to work for a company controlled by the Russian government that is helping to build a Baltic Sea gas pipeline that he championed while in office. To make the decision even more unpalatable, it turns out that the chief executive of the pipeline consortium is none other than a former East German secret police officer who was friendly with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, back when Mr. Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany. If nothing else, Mr. Schroeder deserves opprobrium for his bad taste.
But the announcement should also raise questions in German voters' minds about the real reasons Mr. Schroeder was so keen to see this pipeline project launched. The pipeline has cost Germany diplomatically by infuriating its Central European and Baltic neighbors. They point out that the Russian government chose to use the sea route rather than run a new pipeline alongside one that already exists on land, despite the far greater expense. The only possible reason for doing so was political: The Baltic Sea pipeline could allow Russia, a country that has made political use of its energy resources, to cut off gas to Central Europe and the Baltic states while still delivering gas to Germany. Many have wondered why Germany chose to go along with this project. Could it have been because the former chancellor realized that he was, in effect, creating his own future place of employment?
On a broader level, Mr. Schroeder's decision to swap his job with the German government for a job funded by the Russian government should raise questions for German voters about their country's relationship with Russia. During his seven years as chancellor, Mr. Schroeder went out of his way to ignore the gradual suppression of political rights in Russia and to play down the significance of Russia's horrific war in Chechnya. Throughout his term in office, Mr. Schroeder thwarted attempts to put unified Western pressure on Russia to change its behavior. We can only hope that Germany's new chancellor, Angela Merkel, uses this extraordinary announcement as a reason to launch a new German policy toward Russia, one based on something other than Mr. Schroeder's private interests.
from The Scotsman, 2005-Jan-22, by Susan Bell:
Self-doubt leaves French feeling down in the mouth
PARIS -- It is official: the French are a nation of depressed pessimists, wracked with self-doubt and unable to see a positive future.
This gloomy portrait of the current state of Gallic morale - or rather the lack of it - was made public yesterday in a damning report by France's prefects, the country's top administrators.
"The French no longer believe in anything," the report said. "That is the reason that the situation is relatively calm, for they believe that it is not even worthwhile expressing their opinions or trying to be heard any more."
The country's 100 prefects went on to use the words "lifelessness", "resignation", "anxiety" and "pessimism" to describe the attitudes they believe prevail in France today.
The report, which is dated December 2004 but has only just been made public, would appear to be contradicted by the three days of strikes launched by public sector workers this week.
However, analysts point to the fact that disillusionment and apathy are so great that not even France's formerly powerful unions were able to predict the turnout for the strike. Opinion polls show that 65 per cent of the French support the strikers, leading observers to say that the country is showing its discontent by proxy via the strikers.
"It's a fact: France and the French are pessimists," said Alain Duhamel, a respected French commentator.
He said: "The French doubt themselves and worry about the future. They do so more than the citizens of neighbouring countries, even when those neighbouring countries are doing less well than we are and have a more negative future ahead.
"France has been anxious about its future, about its way of life, for the last 30 years, ever since the employment crisis and doubts about identity, ever since the absence of clear perspectives and collective projects."
Politicians agree that the French are particularly upset about the drop in their purchasing power, which has led to strong group pessimism even if individual confidence is quite high.
This fear for the country's economic future is illustrated by the fact that the French are among the most assiduous savers in the world, putting aside an average of 16 per cent of their income.
Pierre Taribo, writing in L'Est Républicain, agreed with Mr Duhamel. He wrote: "One is forced to say that the French no longer believe in very much. Confronted with the reality of an open economy, clearly showing less and less appetite for politics, they are disillusioned and doubt everything from Chirac to the government and the Right, which is accused of every ill, to the Left, which has no projects, and the unions, whose activism no longer inspires a reflex of blind adhesion."
All this gloom could have serious repercussions. Jacques Chirac's centre-right government fears that widespread pessimism could have a negative effect on the referendum on the European Union constitution scheduled for later this year.
The prefects' report also warned that it played into the hands of the extreme right-wing National Front party.
from Reuters, 2007-Apr-27:
French said to outpace Americans in French-bashing
PARIS - The French dislike themselves even more than the Americans dislike them, according to an opinion poll published on Friday.
The survey of six nations, carried out for the International Herald Tribune daily and France 24 TV station, said 44 percent of French people thought badly of themselves against 38 percent of U.S. respondents who had a negative view of the French.
Only 14 percent of Germans, 25 percent of Italians, 29 percent of Spaniards and 33 percent of Britons had a negative view of the French, according to the Harris/Novatris poll, which questioned more than 1,000 people in each country.
Looked at from another perspective, the Germans have the highest regard for their neighbours, with 73 percent saying they had a positive view of the French.
By contrast, some 63 percent of Italians had a positive view of the French, 54 percent of Spaniards, 51 percent of French, 41 percent of Britons and just 35 percent of Americans.
Relations between France and the United States plunged following Paris's fierce opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Thursday's poll said 74 percent of Americans said whoever wins the second round of France's presidential election on May 6 should try to improve relations with the United States.
Some 41 percent of French agreed, but 20 percent believed Paris should be even more distant with Washington.
from the Guardian UK, 2005-Jun-12, by Will Hutton of The Observer:
When France sneezes ...
The political and social convulsions afflicting our neighbour will have severe repercussions for the rest of EuropeThe fifth republic has run out of breath, declared François Bayrou, the leader of France's centrist UDF party last week, after the landmark 'no' vote in the referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty. It was a sentiment echoed by Jean-Marc Ayrault, leader of the parliamentary socialists. 'This is the end of a political cycle,' he said. 'There are parallels with the death of the Fourth Republic.'
The British don't get the French. This is a civilisation we have been fighting against and with for the best part of 700 years. But what animates our nearest European neighbour and makes it so combustible is as much a surprise now as it was when the French Revolution burst upon Europe.
Now, two of France's leading parliamentarians are warning that the political institutions of the French state are bankrupt and that another political convulsion is on the way. And when France convulses, Europe changes. We'd better take notice.
The French Revolution changed Europe for ever; the bankruptcy of France's political system in the 1930s and consequent French weakness created the opening for Hitler's armies. Then it was the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 under De Gaulle that allowed successive French Presidents to pursue European integration with such vigour. Without the concentration of power in the President, on which De Gaulle insisted, along with the evisceration of its national assembly, France could not have driven European integration as hard as it did. Where France goes from here will have an impact on all of us.
Every European democracy is suffering from a crisis of democratic engagement and an enfeeblement of political parties, but the rot has gone furthest in France. The presidency, the supposed embodiment of the state, is structurally unaccountable.
When things go well or there is a consensus, the lack of accountability is not exposed. Challenge the system with continuing high unemployment or the need to create a consensus when none exists, as over the treaty, and suddenly its frailty is exposed.
Nor can the National Assembly solve the problem because it is constitutionally weak. It is set up to be cipher of the executive rather than challenge it. As a result, the political parties are even weaker in their capacity to create a national argument and hook up with their political base.
Power sits with the executive nationally - the President - or locally in the mayoralty, with big city mayors being key political actors. Parliament does not provide the political platform from which to build a constituency, launch an argument or build a career.
As a result, the democratic disconnection in France is even more pronounced than in Britain. There's an understated sense of disaffection and fragmentation; French cafes, for example, no longer seem to bring people together but, rather, they emphasise their separateness. Africans hawk cheap tat in the streets, an unintegrated and unwanted subculture. Brutal new shopping precincts, car parks and roads arbitrarily cut through familiar communities.
French youth culture wants to embrace the latest from Britain or America, but also wants to be French and doesn't know how. Four years after university, 40 per cent of graduates are still unemployed.
Ariane Chemin, a writer for Le Monde, captured contemporary France perfectly in her piece on Compiègne, a typical commuter town 64 kilometres east of Paris. With the aid of some local estate agents, she plotted the 'no' vote against the price per square metre of property, advancing through the town and its outlying villages quarter by suburban quarter.
The correlation between low property prices and readiness to vote no was perfect. The part of town where the Africans were most visible and social housing most evident registered the biggest no vote at 77.24 per cent.
But in Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, the gilded village retreat of Compiègne's professional classes and Parisian second home-owners, the yes vote was 65 per cent. In the suburbs in between, even with a socialist mayor calling for a yes, the denizens of small, three-bedroom houses voted no by 64 per cent.
This is the France over which President Chirac presides. He and the constitution which confers on him such power is the France of Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, but the rest of Compiègne gazes on in mute disaffection and gathering anger. Its deputy in the National Parliament might as well not exist; its President and the aristocrat Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, speak a language, come from a class and represent a political system that is light years away from their daily experience.
Meanwhile, unemployment is ever-present, as high now as it was 20 years ago, and the town in which they live has become a dystopian aggregation of new car parks, soulless shopping malls and aggressive African street vendors. Would you vote yes?
France's political and economic crisis has been more than a decade in the making. The tiny yes vote for the Maastricht treaty in 1992 was one storm warning; another has been the rise of the racist and xenophobic Jean Marie le Pen as a national figure. Yet another was the balkanisation of the left vote in the presidential election in 2002, so that the run-off was between Le Pen and Chirac, giving Chirac a ridiculous majority.
While corporate France has restructured and raised its productivity to the highest in the industrialised West, easily surpassing the US, the rest of the French economy has been becalmed. There is no dynamic service sector; no lively property market, with all the jobs and rising consumer spending that spin off it; no sustained effort to make the public sector more responsive to citizen's wants. Above all, there is no sense of forward movement; the pervasive fear is that the future will be worse than the present.
Last week, de Villepin, promising a focused 100-day effort to lower unemployment, proposed some modest reforms to make it easier for small firms to hire new workers. Besides the scale of what has to be done, it's almost laughable. France has to open up and build its own version of what has worked in Britain and Scandinavia, but it can't do that without leadership and a proper national conversation.
And it can't do that without a root-and-branch reform of its political system. Until France resolves its crisis, there will be no movement in developing the EU.
Europe is in new territory. Turkey's chances of joining the EU are near zero and in Britain, the argument about Europe that has rendered the Conservative party unelectable for more than a decade is over, because French-led European integration is over.
The way is open for a reunited Tory party to challenge for the electoral middle ground, a new political reality for which the British left is wholly unprepared. When convulsion hits France, Europe changes and we're only at the beginning.
from the Telegraph of London, 2005-Oct-10, by Peter Allen:
Cells at France's Palais de Justice condemned as 'squalid and inhumane dungeons'
Paris -- The European Council's commissioner for human rights has described conditions in the prison in France's most august court building as the worst he has seen.
Alvaro Gil-Robles said the cells in the historic Palais de Justice in Paris were squalid and inhumane.
Describing them as "dungeons", he said: "It is incredible that people are imprisoned in such conditions, without ventilation and without natural light. I have never seen a worse prison." Mr Gil-Robles, 60, an academic lawyer and Spain's former national ombudsman, spent 16 days in France last month inspecting prisons, detention centres and mental hospitals.
In a meeting last week with Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, he said he was astonished that such "squalid and inhumane conditions" should exist at the Palais de Justice, the vast complex that houses the supreme court of appeal and criminal courts.
The palais is situated on the beautiful L'Île de la Cité, a few hundred yards from Notre Dame cathedral. But in its "dépôt", human rights organisations have uncovered evidence of prisoners, mainly illegal immigrants, going without food, drink and lavatory paper as they huddle together for warmth. There have been numerous violent attacks and cases of detainees mutilating themselves and smearing their blood on the walls.
"You are drowned in the middle of all of those excluded from society and also the mad and the ill," said 55-year-old Farouk, a former prisoner.
Jean-Pierre Dintilhac, a former public prosecutor, said: "The basement of the palais dates from another age."
The interior ministry said that Mr Gil-Robles's findings would be studied diligently.
from the Associated Press, 2006-Mar-17, by John Leicester:
French Protests Nothing Like Those of '68
PARIS -- Tear gas. Students clashing with police around the famed Sorbonne university in Paris. Barricades in the capital's streets. Is March 2006 proving to be May 1968 all over again? So far, no. While comparisons between the student protests of then and now are tempting, they are also misleading.
The young protesters of '68 wanted to turn French society upside down. "Break the old molds" was one of their many slogans.
Their children want not revolution but status quo: the same access to pensions, jobs, prosperity and generous welfare systems their parents enjoyed. In short, a comfortable European lifestyle that many feel is under grave threat.
It's a sign of Europe's malaise that French students have trouble seeing a rosy future. While they dance, whistle and bang drums on their boisterous marches through Paris' Left Bank, idealism, hope and answers seem sadly lacking.
With nearly 1-in-4 French youths and young adults unemployed, many fret about how they will find work, make their first down payment on an apartment, afford to start a family.
They study, earn diplomas, but often are resigned to finding nothing more rewarding after graduation than unpaid internships. The most disenfranchised - immigrant youths in depressed neighborhoods that went up in flames during riots last fall - don't even expect those.
In '68, France was still riding the wave of fast growth and almost full employment that followed World War II, the so-called "Thirty Glorious" years until the 1973 oil crisis when the economy grew at an annualized 5 percent clip.
Those days are long gone.
This week, students turned the '68 slogan "the boss needs you, you don't need him" on its head, hollering: "Give us an indefinite job contract!"
The catalyst for all this angst was a new type of contract that loosens France's highly protective - critics say rigid - labor law, the hallowed "Code du Travail."
The contract will let companies fire workers under 26 years old without giving a reason during their first two years in a job. President Jacques Chirac's conservative government argues that the new degree of flexibility will prompt employers to hire thousands of youths, knowing they will be able to get rid of them if things don't work out.
For British or American workers used to more open labor markets and fewer protections, the notion that their first job might not last long - and definitely won't last for life - may not seem strange.
But French youths are aghast that the protections afforded to their parents - however unaffordable in today's ultra-competitive global economy - are slipping out of reach.
They see jobs and economic growth shifting to rising powers like China, with its legions of cheap laborers and a Communist Party that forbids them from unionizing, and wonder how they will survive. For many, globalization is a threat, not an opportunity.
Chirac's government says it is precisely because of the challenge of globalization that France must reform. But the youths - who fear becoming as disposable as tissue paper - aren't buying it.
John Leicester, the AP's Paris bureau chief, has reported from France since 2002.
from National Review Online, 2006-Mar-25, by Larry Kudlow:
Paddle the French Fanny
They sure need it.Why is it that so many French people would rather riot than work?
For nearly a fortnight, French students repeatedly have taken to the streets in protest of a modest labor reform proposed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. It seems that Villepin had the audacity to suggest that companies hiring workers under the age of 26 have the ability to fire those workers in the first two years of employment. Villepin's far-from-Draconian reform is a reaction to the country's government-planned entitlement state, overregulated labor laws, and sky-high jobless rate.
But French students apparently prefer their little worker's paradise just the way it is. The overall jobless rate in France hovers around 10 percent, so-called “youth unemployment” is 23 percent, and in some of the Muslim-heavy suburbs, joblessness is nearly 50 percent. Some paradise.
In France, you see, companies don't grow because it's too costly to hire while it's against the law to fire. Hence, since they rarely add jobs, French businesses under-perform, under-produce, and under-employ. Think of it: It's awfully tough to increase output without a growing workforce to produce it.
The Villepin reform, of course, would make it a lot easier for firms to hire since they would no longer have to lock-in high wages and benefit costs without first confirming worker productivity, at least for two years. But in response to this mild capitalist reform, a reported 500,000 students have emerged in angry protest. There's now even a threat of a general strike, with government unions, trade unions, and student unions possibly teaming together to shut down the entire French economy (or what's left of it).
Of course, it wasn't all that long ago that young Muslims rioted and vandalized urban centers across France. Their beef was cultural in nature, but it was also rooted in the fact that France is anti-opportunity, anti-wealth, anti-jobs, anti-markets, anti-work, and anti-capitalism.
Indeed, at the heart of the French problem is a statist-run socialist economy that is massively overtaxed and overregulated. France's public government sector, for instance, accounts for more than 50 percent of GDP. In other words, private business in France is in the minority.
Added to this, France's top personal tax rate is 48 percent, with a VAT tax of nearly 20 percent. So that means French laborers face a combined 68 percent tax rate on consumption and investment. No wonder France has created less than 3 million jobs over the past twenty years, compared to 31 million in the United States. Economic growth in “cowboy capitalist” America has exceeded that of France's worker paradise by nearly 50 percent.
In a dramatic speech to the European Parliament last summer, British Prime Minister Tony Blair hit the mark when he criticized all Western European economies for their inability to compete on an acceptable global level. Asked Blair, “What type of social model is it that has 20 million unemployed in Europe? Productivity rates falling behind those of the USA? That, on any relative index of a modern economy — skills, R&D, patents, information technology — is going down, not up?”
Financial Times international editor Olaf Gersemann blames French and European unemployment on high minimum-wage requirements and overly strict employment-protection laws. Gersemann, who scathingly criticized Western Europe in his book “Cowboy Capitalism,” says these labor-market regulations have created millions of involuntary unemployed throughout Europe, affecting immigrants in particular. He writes, “Most French, German, and Italian voters simply refuse to accept the necessity of a Thatcher-Reagan style economic revolution.” He notes that per capita income in the U.S. now exceeds that of France by close to 40 percent, with Germany and Italy lagging even further behind.
All of this is reminiscent of the British disease of the 1960s and '70s. Back then, striking labor unions closed down the English economy again and again, and it took until the early 1980s for Margaret Thatcher to put an end to it. At one point, the Iron Lady actually called in tanks and troops to stop the print unions from shutting down Fleet Street. (This is what turned media-magnate Rupert Murdoch into a pro-capitalist Thatcherite.)
Is there a Thatcher that can save Gaul? Perhaps. French Interior Minister Nick Sarkozy is a strong law-and-order man. He's the one who ended the Muslim riots. More, he is reputed to be pro-market and pro-American. The question is, can Sarkozy wake up this nation of economic sleepwalkers and bring them into the 21st century? He ought to take a big paddle to the collective French fanny. They sure need it.
— Larry Kudlow, NRO's Economics Editor, is host of CNBC's Kudlow & Company and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow's Money Politic$.
from the Times of London, 2006-Apr-10, by Philippe Naughton:
Chirac ditches jobs law after protests
French student leaders celebrated "a decisive victory" today after President Chirac announced that he was ditching a contentious new jobs law that would have made it easier for employers to sack young workers.
The cave-in was announced in a brief statement from the Elysée Palace after two months of protests brought millions onto the streets of France.
"The President of the Republic has decided to replace Article 8 of the law on equal opportunities with measures in favour of the professional insertion of young people in difficulty," it said.
The decision is a major blow to the credibility of M Chirac and his protégé Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister who had been groomed to replace M Chirac in next year's presidential elections.
It was M de Villepin who championed the First Employment Contract (CPE) as an attempt to bring down youth unemployment from an average of over 22 per cent. The law would have allowed employers to fire workers under the age of 26 without giving a reason during their first two years of employment. It provoked the most serious mass protests France has seen since the student strikes of May 1968.
In a televised address, a sombre M de Villepin said: "The necessary conditions of trust and serenity were not present, either among young people or businesses, to allow the implementation of the First Employment Contract."
The Prime Minister explained that his original legislation - introduced after a frenzy of rioting in immigrant estates around Paris and other cities late last year - had been designed to curb the "despair of many youths" while striking a better balance between flexibility for employers and security for workers.
"This was not understood by everyone, I'm sorry to say," he said.
M Chirac signed the CPE into law earlier this month, but had already announced that it would be immediately suspended while conservative deputies tried to find a way out of the crisis.
Unions and student groups, which had been demanding the measure's complete withdrawal, were to meet later today decide what further action to take, although some student leaders suggested that the battle was now over.
Bruno Juillard, a key student leader, hailed M Chirac's announcement as "a decisive victory", but urged the protestors to keep up the pressure until Parliament votes on a new law superceding the CPE.
Another student leader, Julie Coudry, called immediately for protesters to lift the blockades that have paralysed dozens of French universities so that students could prepare for end-of-year examinations. "The CPE is dead, the CPE is well and truly finished," she said.
"If there is a new text in which the CPE does not appear, that will mean it has been withdrawn. That is what counts," added Francois Chereque, head of the CFDT union.
from the Associated Press, 2005-Nov-16, by Elaine Ganley:
Car Torching a Tradition in France
Revenge or Just for Fun: Car Torching Is a Suburban Tradition in FrancePARIS -- The torching of thousands of cars by restive suburban youths across France in the last few weeks has drawn worldwide attention, but it's a tactic with a long tradition in this country.
Whether for revenge, crime or simply for sport, French youths have been setting cars aflame for decades.
They torched cars during France's first major bout with suburban violence in the 1980s in tough neighborhoods ringing Lyon.
Gangs over the years have stolen cars to use for other crimes, then burned them, said criminologist Alain Bauer, president of the French National Crime Commission.
And in the 1990s, youths in Strasbourg began torching cars to mark the New Year.
"It was like a fun thing to do," Bauer said. Each year, "they burned 10, 20, 50, then 100. It became a tradition. This tradition spread all over the country."
Setting cars afire has a symbolic impact, Bauer said.
"In France, a car is like a jewel," he said. "You use it not only to work but as a representation of your social status."
National police said Wednesday that almost 9,000 vehicles cars, buses, motorcycles had been set afire since the Oct. 27 start of the urban unrest that began in a northeast Paris suburb and spread to poor suburbs and towns around France.
But between January and the end of October, 30,000 cars had already been torched across the country, National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said in an interview published Tuesday in the daily Le Monde.
The unrest that started Oct. 27 reflects long pent-up frustrations of despairing suburban youths often the children of Muslim North African immigrants who face daily discrimination on the job market and elsewhere and are locked out of mainstream French society.
One difference between the unrest in the 1980s and the more recent burnings is that rioters in Lyon positioned the cars between themselves and police to use the vehicles as "weapons" against security forces "like throwing stones," said Bauer.
In addition to crime and sport, car torchings have a "tribal" dimension among suburban gangs.
from Time Magazine, 2005-Nov-14, by Charles Krauthammer:
What the Uprising Generation Wants
France's underclass is tired of being shut out. And time is on their side.The gendarmes have weapons. the kids they face in the street have mostly stones and Molotov cocktails. It is a mismatch. But it's the cops who are the heavy underdogs—the cops and the France that the cops alone represent in those burning godforsaken ghettos where most Frenchmen dare not go.
On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble)—young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?
If you needed a snapshot of the balance of forces in this civilizational struggle taking place in France, consider only the incomprehension and inertness of the official French response. The President didn't say a word for 10 days. The state of emergency wasn't declared until Day 13. Meanwhile, the Interior Minister and Prime Minister offered dueling slogans and empty promises, with an eye more on their upcoming presidential contest than on the fire this time.
The best way to know the future is to look at simple demographics. There are an estimated 5 million Muslims in France. Of course, no one knows for sure, not just because of the uncounted illegal immigrants but because in France the government is prohibited by law from even asking about ethnicity and religion. It is not surprising that you don't deal with a problem whose very contours you refuse to see or even inquire about.
France thus is approaching 10% Muslim. But things do not stand still. Even if there were no further immigration, which is a pipe dream, birth rates alone will soon drastically alter the balance. Muslims have the highest birth rate—three times the rate of non-Muslims—of any demographic group in Europe. The most common name for a newborn in neighboring Brussels is Mohammed. Childbearing rates among non-Muslim Frenchmen are well below replacement levels. The old French, like the rest of Europe, are literally disappearing.
“With current trends,” Professor Bernard Lewis has said, “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century.” The future? “Europe will be part of the Arab west, of the Maghreb [Muslim northwest Africa].” Today's rioting youth are just a bit ahead of their time in claiming their upcoming patrimony.
The ethnic underclass, jobless and futureless, warehoused in sterile and isolated block housing, has been seething for decades. France has responded with willful blindness (even before this intifadeh, France was experiencing dozens of car arsons a night, but you did not hear about it because official France just accepted this as the norm) and pacification, creating a lavish welfare system to keep its angry youth well clad, well fed and well provided with cell phones.
But they want more than cake for eating. They want a future. The rest of France has for decades been wanting only a present—just a few more years of fine wine and steady work in a superregulated, 35-hr.-workweek, cozy social compact that makes it almost impossible for a worker to be fired and almost impossible for the offspring of immigrants to be hired.
The only possible way out for France is to undertake the kind of self-reformation that America did in the 1960s, when it finally began welcoming African Americans into mainstream society and spent two generations pursuing that goal. But the prospects for success in France are far fewer, because even if France changed, woke up and welcomed those it had once invited, it is very late. The grandparents who first came would have eagerly accepted the invitation. But their young have grown up in an alienated monoculture that has contempt for the godless decadence of French secularism with its empty churches, sexual license and existential ennui. France doesn't want them. They don't want the France they are throwing rocks at. But they are not leaving. And they are growing.
France always thought it had one last resort, one ready strategy for fending off the rage of its Arab street: beyond avoidance lay appeasement. No country in the West has done more to cultivate world Arab opinion, to appease Arab terrorists, to ostentatiously oppose American Middle East policy (Iraq above all), to champion the signal Arab cause of Palestine. It was no accident that Yasser Arafat chose Paris as his place to die—Paris, after Jerusalem, his second holiest city.
Paris burns anyway. As the French seem to learn every 70 years, appeasement does not work. It merely whets the appetite. And the angry alien young were already hungry.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Nov-8, by Joel Kotkin:
Why Immigrants Don't Riot Here
France's rigid economic system sustains privilege and inspires resentment.The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural "understanding" of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country's grim banlieues (suburbs). What has been largely ignored has been the role of France's economic system in contributing to the current crisis. State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The European Dream," and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity.
Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.
To make matters worse, the elaborate French welfare state--government spending accounts for roughly half of GDP compared with 36% in the U.S.--also forces high tax burdens on younger workers lucky enough to have a job, largely to pay for an escalating number of pensioners and benefit recipients. In this system, the incentives are to take it easy, live well and then retire. The bloat of privileged aging blocks out opportunity for the young.
Luckily, better-educated young Frenchmen and other Continental Europeans can opt out of the system by emigrating to more open economies in Ireland, the U.K. and, particularly, the U.S. This is clearly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains leave in droves. Some 400,000 European Union science graduates currently reside in the U.S. Barely one in seven, according to a recent poll, intends to return. Driven by the ambitious young, European immigration to the U.S. jumped by 16% during the '90s. Visa applications dropped after 9/11, but then increased last year by 10%. The total number of Europe-born immigrants increased by roughly 700,000 during the last three years, with a heavy inflow from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and Romania--as well as France. These new immigrants have been particularly drawn to the metropolitan centers of California, Florida and New York.
The Big Apple offers a lesson for France. An analysis of recent census numbers indicates that immigrants to New York are the biggest contributors to the net growth of educated young people in the city. Without the disproportionate contributions of young European immigrants, New York would have suffered a net outflow of educated people under 35 in the late '90s. Overall, there are now 500,000 New York residents who were born in Europe (not to mention the numerous non-European immigrants who live, and prosper, in the city).
Contrast this with Paris, where the central city is largely off-limits to immigrants, in some ways due to the dirigiste planning that so many professional American urbanists find appealing. Since Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, uprooting many existing working-class communities, the intention of the French elites has been to preserve the central parts of the city--often with massive public investment--for the affluent. This has consigned the proletariat, first white and now increasingly Muslim, to the proximate suburbs--into what some French sociologists call "territorial stigma." In these communities, immigrants are effectively isolated from the overpriced, elegant central core and the ever-expanding outer suburban grand couronne. The outer suburbs, usually not on the maps of tourists and new urbanist sojourners, now are home to a growing percentage of French middle-class families, and are the locale for many high-tech companies and business service firms.
The contrast with America's immigrants, including those from developing countries, could not be more dramatic, both in geographic and economic terms. The U.S. still faces great problems with a portion of blacks and American Indians. But for the most part immigrants, white and nonwhite, have been making considerable progress. Particularly telling, immigrant business ownership has been surging far faster than among native-born Americans. Ironically, some of the highest rates for ethnic entrepreneurship in the U.S. belong to Muslim immigrants, along with Russians, Indians, Israelis and Koreans.
Perhaps nothing confirms immigrant upward mobility more than the fact that the majority have joined the white middle class in the suburbs--a geography properly associated here mostly with upward mobility. These newcomers and their businesses have carved out a powerful presence in suburban areas that now count among the nation's most diverse regions. Prime examples include what demographer Bill Frey calls "melting pot suburbs": the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles; Arlington County, Va.; Essex County, N.J.; and Fort Bend County in suburban Houston. The connection between this spreading geography and immigrant opportunity is not coincidental. Like other Americans, immigrants often dramatically improve their quality of life and economic prospects by moving out to less dense, faster growing areas. They can also take advantage of more business-friendly government. Perhaps the most extreme case is Houston, a low-cost, low-tax haven where immigrant entrepreneurship has exploded in recent decades. Much of this has taken place in the city itself. Looser regulations and a lack of zoning lower land and rental costs, providing opportunities to build businesses and acquire property.
It is almost inconceivable to see such flowerings of ethnic entrepreneurship in Continental Europe. Economic and regulatory policy plays a central role in stifling enterprise. Heavy-handed central planning tends to make property markets expensive and difficult to penetrate. Add to this an overall regulatory regime that makes it hard for small business to start or expand, and you have a recipe for economic stagnation and social turmoil. What would help France most now would be to stimulate economic growth and lessen onerous regulation. Most critically, this would also open up entrepreneurial and employment opportunity for those now suffering more of a nightmare of closed options than anything resembling a European dream.
Mr. Kotkin, Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library, 2005).
from the National Post of Canada, 2005-Nov-8, by Nidra Poller:
Intifada a la francaise
PARIS - The French government is faltering as the flames of urban warfare spread from Paris to over 300 towns. Schools, warehouses, gymnasiums, bus depots, restaurants and shopping malls are being sacked and burned. Journalists, ambulance personnel and firemen are being attacked. Even armour-clad riot police now fear for their lives, as some of the protesters have equipped themselves with guns.
President Jacques Chirac, supposedly recovered from a stroke suffered in August, is out of commission. His dauphin, Dominique de Villepin, makes pompous proclamations while trying to roast his arch-rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in the flames of immigrant rage. But the plain-spoken Mr. Sarkozy did not summon this rage on his own. It has been simmering for years in the form of a steady increase in lawless, anti-social behaviour.
Until now, the angry Muslim men who constitute the bulk of the rioters have been allowed to masquerade as victims. It is a common refrain that these second- and third-generation North African immigrants have been marginalized by a racist French society. But much of what goes under the name of harassment is simply the half-hearted intrusion of the forces of order into territories that have been conquered by another system of values. In Muslim ghettoes, pimping, drug dealing, theft, terrorism and Islamic law mix and match. The block of working-class suburbs, or banlieues, in the Seine St-Denis region outside Paris, is especially lawless.
These areas are hardly dismal, dilapidated hellholes. Most of the housing and infrastructure is decent. Those who wish to pursue clean, honest lives have plenty of opportunities to do so. The insurrection spreading through France cannot be understood through the traditional Marxist prism of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. These problems exist in all nations. What is different in France's Muslim ghettoes is a tradition of hate and xenophobia, one which the state has until now either ignored or encouraged.
In June, 2004, a huge demonstration was staged in Paris to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a brief visit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Posters depicted Bush as the world's worst terrorist. By my first-hand observation, roughly one-third of the marchers came from hard-left parties and organizations: communists, socialists and ecologists, labour unions and wilted flower people. Another third were militant Muslims, many of them with checkered kaffiyehs. The other third were raunchy nihilists high on drugs and beer, marching with pitbulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising "a Paris comme a Falluja la guerilla vaincra" (In Paris as in Falluja, guerrilla warfare will triumph).
The same media that are now tallying up the number of cars torched and lecturing Sarkozy on the virtues of tolerance didn't seem much put out by such displays. The hard words were aimed at Bush, after all -- so the hatred expressed was seen as unremarkable, even admirable.
In the same way, much of France ignored the cries of "death to the Jews" that went up in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that began in 2000, and which eventually blended in with the anti-war demonstrations of 2003. Incendiary, sometimes bloodthirsty slogans against Israel and the United States became commonplace.
For five years, resentful French Muslims have been fed a steady diet of romanticized violence -- jihad-intifada in Israel, jihad-insurgency in Iraq, jihad-insurgency in Afghanistan. When they started firebombing synagogues and beating up Jews in the fall of 2000, the media dutifully reported that these thugs were products of the "frustration" felt in regard to the treatments of Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia. France's own government was full of hectoring words for the Americans, after all. The protesters were very much on message.
In elite French society, the enemy was clearly identified: not Islamism or Islamofascism, not the stewing mobs in the Paris suburbs, not Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, but the British and U.S. troops in Iraq. The burned-out cars and buildings that litter French streets are the domestic residue of the jihadi cult that these French Muslims have been drugged on through al-Jazeera, and which has been legitimized by a French intellectual class that has always romanticized resistance in all its forms.
Perhaps some of the journalists, political scientists, intellectuals and public officials who've been peddling this merchandise meant it to remain an abstract ideological diversion. France is a long way from Iraq, after all. But now that the militancy is being turned on the French state itself, they are suddenly shocked at what they've sown.
Things could get worse. Until the state can exert its authority, restore order and protect its citizens, there is a danger that images of charred bodies will replace pictures of burnt cars.
For decades, the French media and government have been painting a rosy picture of social harmony within their borders. When the truth suddenly burst out with guerrilla warfare in the streets, the public was totally unprepared, as were the police and even the army. They might all have known that this is the terrible price to be paid for turning a blind eye to those who preach violent resistance.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Nov-9:
Eyes Wide Shut
Pictures of the worst urban violence in France since World War II are capturing the world's imagination. Only the French themselves aren't necessarily watching the same thing as the rest of the planet.
The country's largest private television network, TF1, refrains from airing footage of burning cars or buildings. "We know that it's the type of thing that provokes contagion," Robert Namias, the head of the station's news division, told the Journal yesterday. He added that the government hadn't tried to influence its editorial decisions.
The state-owned television channels, France 2 and France 3, have stopped reporting on the number of cars torched by rioting young immigrants every night. "Do we have to exercise self-censorship, to exercise censorship? Must we show everything, explain everything? Those are the [questions] that we've faced" throughout the rioting, said Paul Nahon, the deputy director general for news at France 3. (For the record, 1,173 went up in flames overnight Tuesday, compared with 1,408 the night before, with violence reported in 226 towns across France.)
Explaining their restraint, TV execs say that they want to avoid inciting further violence. We've quibbled with al Jazeera's news judgment in airing any al Qaeda video that comes its way. But the riots in France have become a "national emergency," as President Jacques Chirac declared yesterday, playing out in the streets of the country's cities. Pretending otherwise won't help France understand or come to grips with the problems in the burning banlieues that have caught most of France -- certainly, consumers of its television news -- by surprise. They shouldn't have been.
from the Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-Nov-6, by Mark Steyn:
Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands
Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.
Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''
''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.
The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.
The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''
Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,'' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.''
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''
What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.
A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.
If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.
from the Washington Post, 2005-Nov-4, p.A19, by Molly Moore:
Rioters Attack Trains, Schools and Businesses in the Paris Suburbs
Villepin Urges 'Return to Calm,' but Government Offers No Plan to End ViolencePARIS, Nov. 3 -- The street rampage of angry youths continued to expand across immigrant-dominated suburbs of Paris Thursday, with gangs attacking commuter trains, elementary schools and businesses in an eighth night of violence, according to local police officials.
French government leaders met in emergency sessions for a second day but again failed to agree on how to stem the violence.
Rock-throwing gangs attacked two trains linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle Airport, dragging out a conductor and smashing windows. Other attackers torched a car dealership, supermarket and gymnasium in violence in at least nine impoverished towns and communities populated primarily by immigrants and first-generation French citizens. A large percentage of the area's population is Muslim.
Police reported that guns were fired at police in the town of La Courneuve, north of Paris, and at firefighters in two other communities. Police said no one was reported hit in the shooting.
Police unions proposed curfews and reinforcements from the French military to curb the violence. Law enforcement officials had prepared for more unrest Thursday night, the Muslim holy night of Eid al-Fitr, with the deployment of 1,300 police officers on the streets of the inflamed suburbs, officials said.
Local police officials estimated that as many as 175 cars and trucks were set ablaze by marauding rioters Wednesday night and Thursday morning as many residents of the towns' high-rise, subsidized housing projects cowered inside their apartments.
In the northern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, youths torched a Renault car showroom and attacked two elementary schools, a post office and a shopping center. Rioters overturned and burned a French TV truck in the northern suburb of Le Blanc-Mesnil and pelted a police station in the western town of Hauts-de-Seine with gasoline bombs, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported.
Rioters sought targets of opportunity or taunted groups of riot police crouched behind shields.
"Order and justice will be the final word in our country," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said after a series of meetings with cabinet ministers Thursday. "The return to calm and the restoration of order are the priority -- our absolute priority."
Villepin proposed no action to bolster public statements, which have had no discernible effect on the violence. The cabinet has weighed proposals for a forceful response against concern that such a move would merely bring more rioters onto the streets.
"We see the situation in certain neighborhoods is not getting better at all, but degenerating," Socialist Party leader Jean-Marc Ayrault told French LCI television. He said President Jacques Chirac's government "did not know how to take control."
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said in a television interview that he believed the rioting "was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized." He said law enforcement authorities did not know who was organizing the violence and offered no evidence to support the statement.
Most of the unrest is occurring in Paris's northern suburbs, but violence has also broken out in towns on the western and southern edges of the city. French officials have neglected the high-rise housing projects of the suburbs, similar to inner-city slums in the United States, for decades. Many analysts see the violence as a response to high unemployment and lack of services.
The rioting began after two teenage Muslim boys -- a 17-year-old immigrant from Tunisia and a 15-year-old whose parents are from Africa -- were electrocuted when they hid in a high-voltage power substation while trying to avoid a police checkpoint in the northeastern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
French officials formally opened an investigation into the case Thursday -- a week after the boys died. A third youth, of Turkish descent, was injured in the incident and is being treated in a hospital, according to his family.
Family members said the youths were being chased by the police. Police officials deny that.
from the Associated Press via the Guardian of London, 2005-Nov-5, by Jamey Keaten, with Scheherezade Faramarzi and Cecile Brisson in Paris contributing:
Rioting Spreads Beyond Paris Suburbs
AUBERVILLIERS, France - Marauding youths set fire to cars and warehouses and pelted rescuers with rocks early Saturday, as the worst rioting in a decade spread from Paris to other French cities. The U.S. warned Americans against taking trains to the airport via strife-torn areas.
A savage assault on a bus passenger highlighted the dangers of travel in Paris' impoverished outlying neighborhoods, where the violence has entered its second week.
Attackers doused the woman, in her 50s and on crutches, with an inflammable liquid and set her afire as she tried to get off a bus in the suburb of Sevran Wednesday, judicial officials said. The bus had been forced to stop because of burning objects in its path. She was rescued by the driver and hospitalized with severe burns.
Justice Minister Pascal Clement deplored the incident, saying it caused him ``great emotion.''
Rioters burned more than 500 vehicles Friday as the unrest grew beyond the French capital for the first time. Unrest returned to the streets in the evening and early Saturday, the ninth night in a row.
Police said troublemakers fired bullets into a vandalized bus and burned 85 more cars in Paris and Suresnes, just to the west. In Meaux, east of Paris, officials said youths stoned rescuers aiding someone who had fallen ill.
Meanwhile, warehouses in Suresnes and Aubervilliers, on the northern edge of Paris, were set ablaze. Officials said other fires raged outside the capital in Lille, Toulouse, and Rouen, while an incendiary device was tossed at the wall outside a synagogue in Pierrefitte, northwest of Paris.
Some 30 mayors from the Seine-Saint-Denis region where the unrest started Oct. 27 met Friday to make a joint call for calm. Claude Pernes, mayor of Rosny-sous-Bois, denounced a ``veritable guerrilla situation, urban insurrection'' that has taken hold.
A national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon, said there appeared to be no coordination among gangs in different areas. But he said youths in individual neighborhoods were communicating by cell phone text messages or e-mails - arranging meetings and warning each other about police operations.
The violence started Oct. 27 after the accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, dominated by low-income housing projects.
Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing.
During the day Friday, the burned remains of at least 520 cars littered Parisian streets, an increase from previous nights. Five police officers were lightly injured by youths throwing stones or bottles, the Interior Ministry said.
At a depot in Trappes, to the southwest, 27 buses were incinerated, officials said.
The commuter train line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport ran limited service Friday after two trains were targeted Wednesday night.
The U.S. Embassy called the protests ``extremely violent'' and warned travelers against taking trains to the airport because they pass through the troubled area. Russia, meanwhile, warned citizens against visiting the suburbs.
The Foreign Ministry said it was concerned that foreign media coverage was exaggerating the situation. ``I don't have the feeling that foreign tourists in Paris are in any way placed in danger by these events,'' ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said, adding that officials were ``sometimes a bit surprised'' by the foreign coverage.
Still, the violence has alarmed the government of President Jacques Chirac, whose calls for calm have gone unheeded.
``This is the first time (suburban violence) has lasted so long and the government appears taken aback at the magnitude,'' said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for Study of French Political Life.
There were ``few direct clashes'' with security forces late Thursday and early Friday, however, no bullets fired at police, and far fewer large groups of rioters, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Instead, Cordet said, the unrest in Seine-Saint-Denis was led by ``numerous small and highly mobile groups'' that burned 187 vehicles and five buildings, including three warehouses.
The unrest erupted with youths angered over the deaths of Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, who were electrocuted when they hid in a power substation in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
Traore's brother, Siyakah Traore, called for protesters to ``calm down and stop ransacking everything.''
``This is not how we are going to have our voices heard,'' he told RTL radio, adding his voice to neighborhood groups working to stop the violence.
Dozens of residents and community leaders were stepping in to defuse tensions, with some walking between rioters and police to urge youths to back down.
Abderrhamane Bouhout, head of the Bilal mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, said he had enlisted 50 youths to try stop the violence. ``We've had positive results,'' he said.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jun-17, by Paul Johnson:
What Europe Really Needs
The Continent has turned its back on both the past and the future.That Europe as an entity is sick and the European Union as an institution is in disorder cannot be denied. But no remedies currently being discussed can possibly remedy matters. What ought to depress partisans of European unity in the aftermath of the rejection of its proposed constitution by France and the Netherlands is not so much the foundering of this ridiculous document as the response of the leadership to the crisis, especially in France and Germany.
Jacques Chirac reacted by appointing as prime minister Dominque de Villepin, a frivolous playboy who has never been elected to anything and is best known for his view that Napoleon should have won the Battle of Waterloo and continued to rule Europe. Gerhard Schröder of Germany simply stepped up his anti-American rhetoric. What is notoriously evident among the EU elite is not just a lack of intellectual power but an obstinacy and blindness bordering on imbecility. As the great pan-European poet Schiller put it: "There is a kind of stupidity with which even the Gods struggle in vain."
The fundamental weaknesses of the EU that must be remedied if it is to survive are threefold. First, it has tried to do too much, too quickly and in too much detail. Jean Monnet, architect of the Coal-Steel Pool, the original blueprint for the EU, always said: "Avoid bureaucracy. Guide, do not dictate. Minimal rules." He had been brought up in, and learned to loathe, the Europe of totalitarianism, in which communism, fascism and Nazism competed to impose regulations on every aspect of human existence. He recognized that the totalitarian instinct lies deep in European philosophy and mentality--in Rousseau and Hegel as well as Marx and Nietzsche--and must be fought against with all the strength of liberalism, which he felt was rooted in Anglo-Saxon individualism.
In fact, for an entire generation, the EU has gone in the opposite direction and created a totalitarian monster of its own, spewing out regulations literally by the million and invading every corner of economic and social life. The results have been dire: An immense bureaucracy in Brussels, each department of which is cloned in all the member capitals. A huge budget, masking unprecedented corruption, so that it has never yet been passed by auditors, and which is now a source of venom among taxpayers from the countries which pay more than they receive. Above all, règlementation of national economies on a totalitarian scale.
The EU's economic philosophy, insofar as it has one, is epitomized by one word: "convergence." The aim is to make all national economies identical with the perfect model. This, as it turns out, is actually the perfect formula for stagnation. What makes the capitalist system work, what keeps economies dynamic, is precisely nonconformity, the new, the unusual, the eccentric, the egregious, the innovative, springing from the inexhaustible inventiveness of human nature. Capitalism thrives on the absence of rules or the ability to circumvent them.
Hence it is not surprising that Europe, which grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, before the EU got going, has slowly lost pace since Brussels took over its direction and imposed convergence. It is now stagnant. Growth rates of over 2% are rare, except in Britain, which was Thatcherized in the 1980s and has since followed the American model of free markets. Slow or nil growth, aggravated by the power of the unions, fits well with the Brussels system and imposes further restraints on economic dynamism: Short working hours and huge social security costs that have produced high unemployment, over 10% in France and higher in Germany than at any time since the Great Depression which brought Hitler to power.
It is natural that high and chronic unemployment generates a depressive anger which finds many expressions. One, in Europe today, is anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Another is exceptionally low birthrates, lower in Europe than anywhere else in the world except Japan. If present trends continue, the population of Europe (excluding the British Isles) will be less than the United States by midcentury--under 400 million, with the over-65s constituting one-third of that.
The rise of anti-Americanism, a form of irrationalism deliberately whipped up by Messrs. Schröder and Chirac, who believe it wins votes, is particularly tragic, for the early stages of the EU had their roots in admiration of the American way of doing things and gratitude for the manner in which the U.S. had saved Europe first from Nazism, then (under President Harry Truman) from the Soviet Empire--by the Marshall Plan in 1947 and the creation of NATO in 1949.
Europe's founding fathers--Monnet himself, Robert Schumann in France, Alcide de Gasperi in Italy and Konrad Adenauer in Germany--were all fervently pro-American and anxious to make it possible for European populations to enjoy U.S.-style living standards. Adenauer in particular, assisted by his brilliant economics minister Ludwig Erhardt, rebuilt Germany's industry and services, following the freest possible model. This was the origin of the German "economic miracle," in which U.S. ideas played a determining part. The German people flourished as never before in their history, and unemployment was at record low levels. The decline of German growth and the present stagnation date from the point at which her leaders turned away from America and followed the French "social market" model.
There is another still more fundamental factor in the EU malaise. Europe has turned its back not only on the U.S. and the future of capitalism, but also on its own historic past. Europe was essentially a creation of the marriage between Greco-Roman culture and Christianity. Brussels has, in effect, repudiated both. There was no mention of Europe's Christian origins in the ill-fated Constitution, and Europe's Strasbourg Parliament has insisted that a practicing Catholic cannot hold office as the EU Justice Commissioner.
Equally, what strikes the observer about the actual workings of Brussels is the stifling, insufferable materialism of their outlook. The last Continental statesman who grasped the historical and cultural context of European unity was Charles de Gaulle. He wanted "the Europe of the Fatherlands (L'Europe des patries)" and at one of his press conferences I recall him referring to "L'Europe de Dante, de Goethe et de Chateaubriand." I interrupted: "Et de Shakespeare, mon General?" He agreed: "Oui! Shakespeare aussi!"
No leading member of the EU elite would use such language today. The EU has no intellectual content. Great writers have no role to play in it, even indirectly, nor have great thinkers or scientists. It is not the Europe of Aquinas, Luther or Calvin--or the Europe of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Half a century ago, Robert Schumann, first of the founding fathers, often referred in his speeches to Kant and St. Thomas More, Dante and the poet Paul Valery. To him--he said explicitly--building Europe was a "great moral issue." He spoke of "the Soul of Europe." Such thoughts and expressions strike no chord in Brussels today.
In short, the EU is not a living body, with a mind and spirit and animating soul. And unless it finds such nonmaterial but essential dimensions, it will soon be a dead body, the symbolic corpse of a dying continent.
Mr. Johnson, a historian, is the author, among others, of "Modern Times" (Perennial, 2001). His most recent book is "Washington," due this month by HarperCollins.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Oct-17, by Ann Mettler:
Reform Assassination
As governments and interest groups gear up for the special summit on the future of the European social model at Hampton Court later this month, the usual divisive rhetoric is heating up. Politicians attack "neo-liberalism," trade unions vow to defeat "Anglo-Saxon capitalism" and NGOs oppose Brussels' "pro-business" reforms.
The truth is, anybody who dares to question the current social model -- which has given us 20 million unemployed people and a decade of low economic growth in some of Europe's largest countries -- is immediately subject to these ugly and destructive labels. In the debate over the European social model, it is always those favoring the status quo, despite its obvious setbacks, who claim the moral high ground. They are Europe's true conservatives, desperately holding on to the privileges earned during the post-war boom, when Europe's economy was competitive and growing rapidly. These industrial romanticists reject the reality of the modern knowledge and service economy -- an economy that is no longer based on class war and smoke-stack industries.
Today, over 70% of Europe's gross domestic product is generated by services, many of which are high value added, provided by skilled knowledge workers. These workers need greater flexibility, more opportunities to enter and exit the labor force and demand a system where individual effort and risk-taking pays off. The landscape of companies has changed dramatically as well. The next time social advocates attack "pro-business" policies, maybe they should keep in mind that some 98% of European companies are small and medium sized enterprises, over 90% of which are so called micro-enterprises with less than 10 employees. In fact, the average European company has three employees.
Reformers are trying to take account of these cataclysmic changes in our socio-economic landscape, while also preparing for what will be the greatest challenge of all: Europe's impending demographic crisis. Already today, 12 of the European Union's 25 member states have declining populations, a trend that is set to continue and accelerate in coming decades. Yet reformers are always on the defensive, desperately trying to explain that the status quo with its ballooning budget deficits, prohibitively expensive social systems and government subsidies for dying industries is simply not sustainable. Without far-reaching structural reforms, the European social model will simply collapse. Therefore, anyone who sets out to reform the European social model is trying to save the model, not destroy it.
Virtually all European reformers are subject to character assassination by vested interests which have a vital stake in sustaining the status quo. It is an irony that so many of these vested interests preach participatory democracy and freedom of speech -- privileges which they flat-out deny to those whom they disagree with. The reformer is the enemy, whom they try to silence, ridicule and discredit.
Just look at what happened to Paul Kirchhof, Angela Merkel's former shadow finance minister. Until the day the German opposition chancellor candidate nominated him, he was universally respected as one of the country's foremost tax expert. After all, he could look back on a distinguished academic career and a remarkable period as judge on the constitutional court where he made himself a name as an integer jurist whose judgment showed great concern for the weak and underprivileged. But as soon as he became politically active, he was defamed as someone who would bring "social coldness" to Germany, a campaign so successful that it probably cost Ms. Merkel an outright victory in last month's election.
And we can all still remember how last spring, Frits Bolkestein, the former European Union Commissioner, was called a monster in France because he wanted to complete the internal market in services as Europe's founding fathers first proposed 50 years ago. Or José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, who was accused by self-appointed social advocates of "wanting to destroy the Lisbon Agenda" because he points out, rightly, that Europe's social-market economy cannot survive without a market to sustain the social.
Little wonder then that the voice of reform is generally so silent. Not because there are not millions of Europeans who are willing to embrace the necessary reforms and demonstrate their support at the ballot box but because these people -- who hold jobs, who run companies, who work hard to pay their taxes -- are not organized and can therefore not match the public advocacy and media campaigns of full-time interest groups. Supportive gestures for reform typically come from economists, who too often confuse rational analyses geared towards an elite audience with public advocacy. Reformist political leaders have a difficult plight: they face the wrath of vested interests, must fight against negative headline-grabbing journalism and operate without any organized base of support. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that while much of the rest of the world is enjoying greater economic growth and less unemployment, Europe is hobbling along in endless debate, trying to bring onboard interest groups whose power and survival -- and sometimes even financial support -- depends on opposing reforms.
It is indispensable for a healthy and participatory democratic culture to have voices on both sides of a debate and to respect each other's differences. Anti-reform advocates must accept that they do not have a monopoly in defining what good social policy is. They must understand that reformers are trying to improve people's lives. After all, which democratically elected politician would successfully run on a platform that would impoverish and humiliate voters?
Europe cannot advance through stagnation, paralysis and angst. What has made us strong and successful over time has been a proud history of reform and innovation. Politically, reform is neither left nor right, but is about leaders who fight with conviction and sincerity for a better life for their citizens. We would be well advised to treat our reformers with the respect and dignity they deserve. Who, if not they, will help European citizens to embrace a new economic reality, while treating the interests of future generations as seriously as we treat our own?
Ms. Mettler is executive director of the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jun-23, by Tunku Varadarajan:
Prophet of Decline
An interview with Oriana Fallaci.NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."
In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.
It is a shame, in so many ways, that "vilipend," the latinate word that is the pinpoint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A "vilification," by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid--hardly fitting for a grande dame.
"When I was given the news," Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch. The complainant, one Adel Smith--who, despite his name, is Muslim, and an incendiary public provocateur to boot--has a history of anti-Fallaci crankiness, and is widely believed to be behind the publication of a pamphlet, "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," which exhorts Muslims to "eliminate" her. (Ironically, Mr. Smith, too, faces the peculiar charge of vilipendio against religion--Roman Catholicism in his case--after he described the Catholic Church as "a criminal organization" on television. Two years ago, he made news in Italy by filing suit for the removal of crucifixes from the walls of all public-school classrooms, and also, allegedly, for flinging a crucifix out of the window of a hospital room where his mother was being treated. "My mother will not die in a room where there is a crucifix," he said, according to hospital officials.)
Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: "The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" She then says "Phwah, phwah," and gestures at slashing her wrists. "He committed suicide!" Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. "What could Seneca do?" she asks, with a discernible shudder. "He knew it would end that way--with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing."
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!"--a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. "In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour--Europe needs a Cavour." Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent." She professes to "cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow."
Here she pauses to light a slim black cigarillo, and then to take a sip of champagne. Its chill makes her grimace, but fortified, she returns to vehement speech, more clearly evocative of Oswald Spengler than at any time in our interview. "You cannot survive if you do not know the past. We know why all the other civilizations have collapsed--from an excess of welfare, of richness, and from lack of morality, of spirituality." (She uses "welfare" here in the sense of well-being, so she is talking, really, of decadence.) "The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." The force with which she utters the word "dead" here is startling. I reach for my flute of champagne, as if for a crutch.
"I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."
Ms. Fallaci, who made her name by interviewing numerous statesmen (and not a few tyrants), believes that ours is "an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century." Of George Bush, she will concede only that he has "vigor," and that he is "obstinate" (in her book a compliment) and "gutsy. . . . Nobody obliged him to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did."
But it is "Ratzinger" (as she insists on calling the pope) who is her soulmate. John Paul II--"Wojtyla"--was a "warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America," but she will not forgive him for his "weakness toward the Islamic world. Why, why was he so weak?"
The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself," from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: "The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure."
"Ecco!" she says. A man after her own heart. "Ecco!" But I cannot be certain whether I see triumph in her eyes, or pain.
As for the vilipendio against Islam, she refuses to attend the trial in Bergamo, set for June 2006. "I don't even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty."
At this point she laughs. Bitterly, of course, but she laughs.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-May-9, p.A23, by Brian M. Carney:
Europe Hasn't Outgrown 'That '70s Show'
BRUSSELS -- Is the European "social model" doomed? It's a question that comes up with increasing frequency as unemployment across Western Europe has climbed into the double digits and economic growth has ground to a virtual halt across much of the Continent.
Updated GDP figures for the euro zone are due out this week, and growth rates are expected, once again, to disappoint. Last month, both the European Commission and the European Central Bank cut their annual growth forecasts for the euro zone to 1.6% from 2%, and that ugly word recession is in the air.
The European Union's much-ballyhooed "Lisbon Agenda" -- which was supposed to revive growth in Europe -- was really not an agenda for reform at all. It was, instead, simply a statement of nice things the EU would like to see happen to the European economy to help it compete with the U.S. -- such as raising employment levels, increasing R&D spending, and so on.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, almost none of those things have happened, and halfway through the 10-year timetable of "Lisbon," the European economy is in at least as bad a shape as it was when Lisbon was announced in 2000.
Given that Europe's streak of economic underperformance can now be measured in decades, perhaps a better question to ask is: Why does anyone think that a system of generous welfare benefits, high taxes and harsh restrictions on hiring and firing would ever produce anything like a dynamic, growing economy? Why does anyone assume that there is such a thing as a "European model," rather than just a collection of ill-conceived policies having a predictably depressing effect on the economy and job creation?
Of course, Europe did have growth, once. Indeed, for 25 years or so after World War II, European growth was something of an economic miracle, bringing countries like Germany out of hyperinflation and poverty into the first rank of world economies. Along with Germany, Britain, France and Italy rank among the world's biggest economies; and the European Union, considered as a whole, rivals the U.S. for the title of the world's largest economy.
In other words, per the conventional wisdom, Europe had low unemployment and high growth in the past, so it can again. Unfortunately, the argument is wrong. A fundamental change occurred in Europe between the salad days of the 1950s and '60s and today, and Europe never recovered. In a word, the 1970s happened.
In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe, just slightly above the U.S. level of 25%. In 2002, U.S. taxes ate 26% of the economy, but in Europe spending had climbed to 42%, a 50% increase. Over the same period of time, unemployment in Western Europe has risen from less than 3% to 8% today, and to nearly 9% for the 12 countries in the euro zone. These two phenomena are related; in a country with generous welfare benefits, rising unemployment increases government spending rapidly.
But here a third element enters the picture, creating a feedback loop that explains why the Continent will never regain the halcyon days of postwar growth. As spending goes up, higher taxes must follow to pay for those benefits. But those taxes, usually payroll taxes, must be collected from a shrinking number of workers as jobs are cut. This in turn increases the cost of labor and decreases the benefit of working rather than collecting unemployment or welfare checks. As Martin Baily, a former head of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, has described, this can lead to a spiral of rising taxes and falling employment, especially when welfare payments are high, as they are in most of Western Europe.
The result is predictable -- more jobs are lost, the tax base shrinks, and taxes must go up further to pay for yet more welfare benefits, making work less attractive and not working more attractive.
In the 1970s, unemployment went up everywhere in the developed world. But on the Continent, it never went down. Britain and the U.S. both saw major economic reforms in the early 1980s and subsequently recovered from the '70s. The Continent did not, and it's endured the pain of that lost decade ever since. As the nearby chart shows, growth has gone up a little at times, then back down, but unemployment in Continental Europe has remained stuck in a narrow range for three decades.
Western Europe jumped the track and fell into an economic ditch in the 1970s along with the rest of the world. But the Thatcher and Reagan reforms that pushed Britain and the U.S. back onto the rails were never tried on the Continent, and most of those countries have been spinning their wheels ever since.
Rather than ask whether the "model" is doomed, it would be better to question how it ever attained the status of a model at all. The welfare state worked in Europe for two decades because so few people needed it; growth was strong, employment high and actual benefits paid were low. When the world economy hit a speed bump following the collapse of the Bretton Woods arrangement in 1971, both government spending and unemployment went up, and the system of incentives and benefits now enshrined as the "European model" was tested and found wanting. The result is permanently higher unemployment and taxes, a nasty mix.
In the U.S. and the U.K., a combination of tax cuts, labor-market reforms and deregulation starting in the 1980s broke the downward spiral in which the Continent still finds itself. In the 1990s, the U.S. added welfare reform to the mix. Unfortunately, the prospects for Europe are not particularly bright right now. German unions -- and even some members of the German government -- have in recent weeks taken to denouncing American capitalists as "locusts" and "bloodsuckers." Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, perhaps the only politician in Europe who counts Ronald Reagan as a hero -- and admits it -- just had his coalition emasculated by special interests at home.
Sadly, it appears as if Europeans will be watching reruns of their own version of "That '70s Show" for years to come.
Mr. Carney is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jun-3:
The European Disease
Economic anxiety is a product of the welfare state.No one knows for sure to what extent economic anxiety influenced the decisive "Non!" by French and Dutch voters against the new European Union Constitution this week. But one thing is certain: The French and much of the rest of the European Union have much to be economically anxious about.
The French unemployment rate has hovered around 10% for nearly a decade, and almost half of the jobless have been out of work for at least a year. If the U.S had an unemployment rate as high as France, there would be about six million more non-working Americans--the equivalent of placing every worker in Michigan on the jobless rolls.
Our point here isn't to engage in gratuitous French-bashing. The truth is that the economic anemia afflicting France has become the standard bill of health to varying degrees in virtually all of the nations of Old Europe, particularly Germany and Italy. Once upon a time the intellectual elites in Europe and the U.S. trumpeted the economic accomplishments of European social welfare state policies. Today the conclusion is nearly inescapable that this economic model simply doesn't work to create jobs, wealth or dynamism.
As the nearby table shows, the U.S. has substantially outperformed Old Europe in wealth and job creation. The economic growth rate of the European Union nations since 2003 has limped along at about half that of the U.S. In the 1980s and '90s the U.S. created about 40 million new jobs; Western Europe created some 10 million, well over half of which were in the public sector. If this divergence in economic performance continues for 40 years, the American worker will be roughly twice as wealthy as his European counterpart.
Two Economic Models
Rates for 2003-05 (1Q)
U.S. EU Unemployment Growth
Source: OECDThe Europeans have created a vast constellation of domestic policy interventions that are cloaked in the seductive rhetoric of compassion, fairness and cultural sophistication. These policies include highly generous welfare benefits for the unemployed; state ownership and subsidy of key industries (such as Airbus); rules that make it difficult to hire and fire workers; prohibitions against closing down plants; heavy protections of labor unions against competitive forces; mandatory worker benefit packages that include health insurance, child care allowances, paid parental leave, four to six weeks of vacation; shortened work weeks; and, alas, high taxes on business and labor to pay for these lavish benefits.
In sum, European nations penalize work and subsidize non-work, and, no surprise, they have gotten a lot of the latter and far too little of the former. By contrast, the U.S. model--allegedly cruel and "laissez-faire"--has done much better both by economic growth and worker opportunity.
The frustrating irony is that, at the very moment in history when Europe's model is in disrepute, many U.S. politicians still want to emulate it. In Congress today there is some bill to provide virtually every social welfare benefit that Europe now offers. And the Congressional Budget Office predicts that if America's federal entitlement programs are not reined in, by 2030 government's share of the U.S. economy will close in on 50% of GDP, or even more than Europe's share today. The good news is that at least Washington has begun to debate how to reform these programs.
Which brings us back to the future of the EU. We have consistently supported European integration, especially the liberalizing and efficient force of the euro. But most of the economic maladies that face France and Germany today are incidental to whether the EU itself gains or loses power in the months and years ahead. In many ways the European Union has always been the right answer to the wrong question. The common market was originally established with economic goals in mind: to reduce trade barriers (which has been a good thing), followed years later by a single, stable currency (another good thing).
But the Brussels bureaucracy has to this day purposely ignored the Continent's central ailments: high tax rates, bloated welfare benefits and industrial policies that pick winners and losers, usually the latter. Those topics are essentially taboo in Brussels, which has pursued an economic "harmonization" strategy in part to inhibit the benign impact of tax cutting and tax competition among member countries by creating a de facto multi-state cartel. The nations that have prospered the most in recent years--Ireland in the 1990s, now the nations of Central Europe--are those that have resisted the harmonizing orders.
Europe is now paying a high price for this failed experiment with welfare state socialism. Today's populist revolt against economic integration in France and Germany suggests that these nations remain mysteriously impervious to the need for change. A bigger mystery is why some American politicians are so intent on repeating Europe's mistakes.
from the Times of London, 2005-Sep-20, by Anthony Browne:
How Germany twisted the knife
Any lingering EU hopes of economic reform have been terminated by the election result“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was of course writing about Paris in 1789, but Eurosceptics are starting to feel the same about Brussels in 2005. Being modern-day Brussels, the revolution is neither quick nor bloody, but painfully drawn out and (usually) diplomatic. In the capital of Europe, it is difficult to escape the feeling that, wherever you look, the regime is changing.
The small but increasingly bouncy band of Eurosceptics in Brussels already had springs in their steps from the EU’s constitutional crisis, its budget crisis, its economic crisis, its euro crisis, its crisis of legitimacy and its Turkey crisis. Now there’s the German crisis. This isn’t just a leadership crisis in the EU’s biggest member country. It’s far more serious: it’s a roadblock in the EU’s last remaining escape route from its troubles.
The EU’s malaise is so deep that the 25 commissioners who make up the European Commission, the driving force behind the Union, are holding an extraordinary seminar today to discuss what the point of the EU is. They have all these powers — but what should they do with them? In a month’s time, the heads of government are repeating the exercise at an informal summit at Hampton Court Palace. To loosen tongues, there will be no aides, and only one item on the agenda: “Whither the Union?”
The construction of Europe has been driven forward by the collective effort of building a succession of “big projects” — the single market, the single currency, the accession of Eastern Europe. But the latest grand projet that Brussels strived so hard for, the European constitution, has been guillotined by French and Dutch voters.
Now, whichever direction the EU tries to move in, it gets stymied. There are many who want to build a “common area of justice and security”, harmonising criminal and justice systems — but member states such as Britain have too many doubts. Many in Brussels want to build a common foreign policy, backed up by an EU seat at the UN and a European army, but there are too many national foreign and defence ministers who like having a job.
Tony Blair wants to scrap the Common Agricultural Policy and spend the EU’s trillion-euro budget promoting industries of the future rather than potatoes, but it’s no contest against Europe’s farmers. The philosophical divisions about the purpose of the EU are so great that the members can’t even agree on its seven-year budget.
From the Brussels and London perspective, the German election did have a silver lining for the next best thing to a big project — Turkey’s membership of the EU. It will now be far harder for the Chancellor-presumptive, Angela Merkel, an avowed Turkosceptic, to block its entry into the Union. But the problem is that the vast majority of the European people in most European countries — including France, Germany and the Netherlands — is strongly opposed. The more the EU courts Turkey, the deeper its crisis of legitimacy.
The European Commission, under free-marketeer José Manuel Barroso, had identified the sclerotic economies and record unemployment as the EU’s biggest problem, and made liberalising economic reforms, including taming welfare systems, its top priority. This was the new big project. The only problem was that the Commission has virtually no powers here: all it can do is shout from the sidelines. But the electorates — damn them — keep shouting back: “No!” Whatever the French voted for in their constitutional referendum, and whatever the Germans voted for in their election, there was one thing they both voted against: scaling back their beloved social model. Germans were offered free-market reforms by Frau Merkel, but her vote slumped. In total, more people voted for left-wing anti-reform parties than pro-reform ones.
Mr Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, tipped to be the next president of France, saw Frau Merkel’s victory as so essential to economic reform — and so essential to Europe’s future — that they both snubbed Chancellor Schröder by publicly wooing her before the election. But now, even if Frau Merkel becomes chancellor, she will have no mandate to reform Europe’s biggest and most troubled economy. That is the significance of the German crisis: it has all but killed off the EU’s hopes of significant economic reform.
Senhor Barroso has pledged to do what he can to boost reform, in particular to stop his officials pumping out business-hobbling directives, and even to start scrapping them. Promising a new era of deregulation, he said last week that they were no longer in the heroic era of Jacques Delors, issuing “a new directive every day”.
But the prospect of having to scrap one by one the laws that their predecessors put together has sent the Brussels army of idealistic Eurocrats into despair. They came here with a mission to build Europe, not knock it down.
Having healed the divisions of the Second World War, Europe’s “ever-closer union” has run into the buffers, and no one knows where to go. It is often said that the EU is like a bike: stop pedalling forward and you fall over. But, having reached a dead end, the euro-bike is not just standing still but trying to pedal backwards.
The Brussels revolution obviously will not provoke the bloodshed of the French one, but it is producing an eerie, nervous atmosphere. Tensions between member states are sparking bitter disputes. The days of certainty are over. One European diplomat confided: “There’s just a big vacuum.”
Bliss indeed, for the Eurosceptics.
from the Associated Press via the Taipei Times, 2005-Oct-12:
Germany under Merkel set for deep paralysis
POISONED CHALICE: While Angela Merkel may have secured the chancellorship, the deal that got her there gives her opponent's party an equal Cabinet presence
BERLIN -- Angela Merkel becomes chancellor, but outgoing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats get an equal number of seats in her Cabinet. Germany's "grand coalition" deal ends weeks of political crisis but seems a recipe for paralysis -- and another early election.
Still, on issues from reforming the welfare state to tackling high unemployment, there is a chance for some common ground -- and legislators from both parties could team up to enable Merkel to push through parts of her reformist agenda.
The stakes are high for Germany and Europe, which is struggling to find a way to pay for its social protections while improving sluggish growth amid global competition from countries where businesses aren't weighed down by European-style benefits and payroll taxes.
Indeed, the muddled result in Germany -- Europe's largest economy -- is emblematic of a wider malaise at the heart of Europe: People seem to be aware of the need for the type of painful reform that Merkel represents but are afraid of granting a mandate for its execution.
Merkel, a former scientist, herself once dismissed the idea of a coalition involving the Social Democrats, describing it as "stagnation."
But she had to strike the deal because she couldn't secure an outright majority to enact changes such as making it easier to fire workers at small companies or for companies and workers to opt out of the regional wage bargaining favored by unions. The Social Democrats have vowed to stop such changes.
And she'll have to turn the Foreign Ministry over to the Social Democrats, who applauded Schroeder's willingness to stand up to Washington over the war in Iraq. She and the Social Democrats have opposite stances on EU membership for Turkey -- she is against, they are in favor.
She has said she would continue Schroeder's policy of supporting reconstruction in Iraq by training security personnel outside the country without sending German troops.
There might be room for some horsetrading on the key economic questions. For instance, the left could agree to some loosening of worker protections, so long as the regional wage system isn't touched.
And the two sides appear to have common ground on fixing Germany's budget deficit, which will require restraint in new spending.
The result will be both parties favoring their centrist wings; the advocates of market reforms in the Social Democrats and the union-friendly members of Merkel's Christian Democrats. Merkel went so far as to praise Schroeder's limited reforms, such as cutting long-term jobless benefits; she just said they didn't go far enough.
But as might be expected with a marriage of convenience, the coalition is not generating much enthusiasm. Bild, the country's biggest paper, lamented "Grand Coalition: We Pay and Pay and Pay," referring to expected revenue-raising measures to fix the budget deficit.
Merkel is hardly a Margaret Thatcher, who as British prime minister in the 1980s launched a sweeping attack on labor unions. Instead, she campaigned on a modest pledge to trim payroll taxes by two percentage points -- but wanted to make up the lost revenue by raising value-added tax.
One secret weapon of the new government: low expectations.
If people anticipate it will be able to do nothing, even minimal reforms will look like success. So it was with the last time Germany tried a left-right coalition, from 1966-69; many though [sic (thought) -AMPP Ed] it wouldn't last, but it held out for three years.
If Merkel reads her history she may note that after the two parties worked together, the next election produced a government led by the Social Democrats.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Nov-14:
Schroeder Wins...
Remember Gerhard Schröder's strangely jubilant posturing after Germany's Sept. 18 elections, claiming victory even though his Social Democrats came in second? Turns out, the departing Chancellor wasn't suffering from temporal delusion after all -- he did really win.
Mr. Schröder didn't even need a recount or to stuff the ballots to make his claim come true. All he needed was a designated new Chancellor, the Christian Democrats' Angela Merkel, who was ready to pay a heavy price to become his successor.
And so she did. Last Friday, the Christian and Social Democrats agreed to a coalition treaty -- a detailed and binding wedding contract that will guide this government throughout its term in office. On economics, the treaty offers up a policy mix of Keynesian pump-priming, tax hikes, obsessive budget balancing and old-style state planning that is more "red," in hue and substance, than even the previous red-green government.
Rather than just a coalition of the lowest common denominator, the next German government in fact looks destined to be even lower. It manages to combine the worst ideas from both parties. Take the value added tax (VAT) for example. Before the election, Ms. Merkel advocated raising it to lower statutory unemployment insurance payments for workers and employers. The Social Democrats opposed the idea, saying it would dampen consumer demand.
What was the outcome? Instead of raising VAT by just two percentage points, as the Christian Democrats wanted, the new government will raise it by three points to 19%. But the Social Democrats have succeeded in making sure that more of the proceeds will be used to reduce the deficit than to lower non-wage labor costs.
It gets worse. The Social Democrats pushed through an all-time favorite among left-wing populists: high marginal tax rates. The top rate for single households earning more than €250,000 (for couples the threshold is €500,000) will rise to 45% from 42%. Even the optimists among the Social Democrats don't believe that it will "generate" much revenue but milking the rich apparently is always good propaganda. Most likely, though, it will drive out many of the country's most talented and productive people, reducing growth and tax revenues along the way. Instead of "social justice," Germany will get the poetic variant.
The whole government program is myopically focused on balancing the budget -- actually to reduce the deficit to below 3% as required by the euro zone budget rules. But the emphasis is more on opening new revenue sources than cutting spending. What's more, a balanced budget is not an end it itself -- it has yet to produce a single job. It is Germany's unwieldy welfare state, restrictive labor market and confiscatory tax code that have produced years of anemic growth, 11.6% unemployment and rising national debt. But those real problems are barely addressed.
To make matters even more confused, the balanced budget orthodoxy is contradicted with a good dose of traditional demand-side policy. The government wants to spend an additional €25 billion over the next several years to "shape" economic policy, as they like to say in Germany, improving such things as transport infrastructure and R&D. To finance these plans it wants to sell some of the Bundesbank's gold reserves. Talk about easy money.
All this muddled policy means the government will probably still have to take on another €40 billion in new debt next year and the deficit isn't scheduled to fall below 3% of GDP until 2007.
Ms. Merkel's campaign push for a leaner state, less red tape and more individual responsibility are missing from her governing agenda. Even where the new government has identified a problem correctly, such as Germany's insufficient spending on scientific research, it resorts to the typical corporatist remedy of pouring more government money on it.
And even where the new government plans to cut tax exemptions and subsidies, it does so in a non-systematic fashion without bringing about a more transparent tax code. What a contrast to Ms. Merkel's shadow finance minister during the election campaign. Paul Kirchhof advocated a 25% flat tax in return for scrapping all tax loopholes. This was denounced as "Manchester Capitalism" -- a libel that probably contributed to the CDU's disappointing election results. Now, Germans will lose many of the same subsides anyway but without getting lower tax rates in return. Call it "Berlin Capitalism."
As disappointing as the government's future policy looks destined to be for anyone who hoped for real change in Germany, those measures that the "Grand Coalition" decided to postpone or shelve altogether are equally telling. Back in spring, both parties agreed to cut the federal corporate tax rate to 19% from 25%. The new government will supposedly address this issue, as well as an income tax reform -- but only in 2008! In the meantime, companies will be offered more favorable terms for asset depreciation -- further complicating the tax system. International investors are much easier to impress with competitive tax rates than complicated lectures from accountants trying to explain the country's latest tax loophole.
The Christian Democrat plans to make it easier for individual firms and employees to change the terms of the country's collective bargain agreements have been scrapped altogether. The only bit of labor reform the Grand Coalition agreed on is to extend the probation period to two years from the current six months. Effectively abolishing Germany's strict labor protection for new hires in the first 24 months is a modest step in the right direction -- but not more than that.
Once safely ensconced in the Chancellory, Ms. Merkel can try to revive her campaign ideas. But her room for maneuver is very limited in a coalition where the junior partner acted like the stronger party in the coalition talks. She must know that her government can fall at any hint of breach of contract.
If all parties approve the coalition treaty at conferences in the coming days, Ms. Merkel is destined to make history on Nov. 22 by becoming the country's first female chancellor. If she doesn't manage to inject more of her original free-market ideas into the coalition, that might be all she will be remembered for.
from Reuters, 2005-Sep-12, by Alister Doyle and Stephen Brown with additional reporting by John Acher, James Kilner and Terje Solsvik:
Norwegians turn to left to oust government -polls
OSLO - A Norwegian "Red-Green" alliance led by former Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg looked set to oust the right-wing government in an election on Monday after vowing to spend more oil cash on welfare, according to exit polls.
Stoltenberg's centre-left alliance led Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik's Conservative, Christian Democrat and Liberal bloc, and their far-right parliamentary allies, by as much as 90 seats to 79 in the 169-member parliament in opinion polls.
"We have an historic opportunity to set a new course for Norway," said Kristin Halvorsen, leader of the Socialist Left Party which would have its first taste of power in a government led by 46-year-old Stoltenberg.
But official projections showed a close race, after a contest that became a cliffhanger in the final week following a solid Labour lead in all opinion polls this year. At one point, official projections forecast a government win.
Bondevik's popularity has slipped despite Norway being rated by the United Nations as the best country to live in every year since he took power in 2001.
Norway is the third largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia and Russia, making its 4.6 million people among the wealthiest in the world.
Labour, which accuses Bondevik of giving the rich too large a share of oil revenues through tax cuts, was last in power under Stoltenberg from 2000-2001. It has dominated Norwegian politics since World War Two and was the architect of its welfare state.
Norway has amassed huge savings from the oil that began to flow in the 1970s, setting aside $190 billion so far for future generations, or $41,000 for each Norwegian.
But some Norwegians would like to see the benefits now, and the far-right Progress Party, a parliamentary ally of Bondevik's government, proposes using it to pay for Mediterranean holidays for pensioners.
It also wants tight controls on immigration, in a country with one of the lowest levels of immigrants in Europe.
The Progress Party had its best result, gaining 13 seats to a total of 39 according to official projections which would make it the biggest party on the right. Its leader Carl Hagen said he now had "a new dream, that the Progress party will be what the Labour party was in the previous century."
PROMISE OF JOBS, WELFARE
Hassan Abdillahi, a 41-year-old of Somali origin, was happy that the centre-left looked like defeating the right and keeping Hagen away from power.
"It's great, I like that very much. They are not racist, they will create more jobs and they are good for the country as a whole," he told Reuters.
Labour wants to halt Bondevik's tax hikes so more can be spent on schools, job creation, health care and the elderly. It also favours taking Norway into the European Union, but is unlikely to raise the issue soon as most Norwegians oppose it.
Its allies in government would be the rural Center Party and the Socialist Left, which calls the United States the "greatest threat to world peace" and is against Norway's NATO membership.
Norway has 350 troops stationed in Afghanistan and about 20 soldiers with NATO forces in Iraq, though it did not support the U.S.-led invasion.
Bondevik, a teetotal Lutheran priest, had warned voters Labour's spending plans would derail Norway's economic boom and push up interest rates.
Tor Vaz Deleon, a 42-year-old businessman heading home to watch the results, likely by about midnight (2200 GMT), was unhappy at the prospect of a more leftist government in Norway.
"Having the Socialists in a Red-Green coalition government would be the worst result. It will be a nightmare for companies, they will tax the hell out of business," he said. "But it's very close and not over yet."
If official results confirm the exit polls, Bondevik is likely to offer to stay on as a caretaker prime minister until October 14 when he presents a draft 2006 budget.
The Norwegian crown rose after the release of the opinion polls showing a centre-left win and was slightly stonger at 7.8141 per euro at 1949 GMT. Labour's spending plans are expected to put pressure on the central bank to raise rates, making the Norwegian currency more attractive to investors.
from Reuters UK, 2005-Sep-13, by Terje Solsvik:
Norway's victorious Red-Green alliance to up welfare
OSLO - A Norwegian "Red-Green" alliance that wants to spend more of the nation's oil bonanza on welfare has beaten the centre-right government in an election but faces weeks of wrangling to hammer out common policies.
Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said he would inform King Harald on Tuesday of his defeat in Monday's vote -- assuming the final count confirmed the result -- by an alliance led by former Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, 46.
Bondevik said he would stay on as a caretaker until parliament opens in mid-October. His four-year-old alliance comprises his Christian People's Party, the Conservatives and Liberals.
"We don't have a good answer," Bondevik, 58, said when asked why voters had ditched his tax-cutting government even though U.N. surveys have rated Norway as the best place in the world to live every year since he took power in 2001.
"Norway can do better," Stoltenberg said of Bondevik's defeat, saying that tax cuts had betrayed Nordic traditions of equality despite U.N. plaudits and an oil-backed economic boom.
"Many people agree with us that we have fantastic possibilities and that we could use our money better," he said.
With 98.3 percent of the votes counted, Stoltenberg's alliance had a majority with 88 seats in the 169-seat parliament. Bondevik's minority coalition and its informal ally, the anti-immigrant Progress Party, had 81 seats.
Far-right Progress, sometimes likened to France's National Front or Austria's Freedom Party, became the second biggest party with 37 seats behind Labour's 62.
Norway is overflowing with cash as the world's biggest oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. A fund saving surplus money for future generations recently reached $190 billion (104 billion pounds), or about $41,000 for each of Norway's 4.6 million citizens.
JOBS, SCHOOLS, ELDERLY
Stoltenberg, an economist who was prime minister from 2000-01, advocates more spending on jobs, education and care for the elderly.
First, however, he will have to work out a joint platform with his partners, the Socialist Left and the Centre Party. Many financial analysts fear that a shift to higher public spending could stoke greater pressures for interest rate rises.
Stoltenberg says Labour will raise taxes slightly, back to 2004 levels, and will not go on a spending spree of oil cash that could derail the economy.
"In the next few days we will start negotiations ... we will have some tough rounds," Stoltenberg said. He declined to discuss what might happen if talks on a common platform failed. Norway's constitution limits elections to one every four years.
The dominant force in Norwegian politics since the 1930s, Labour has not ruled in partnership with other parties since just after World War Two. And the Socialists have never been in power.
The Socialists favour a six-hour working day, want to build hundreds of kindergartens and favour buying back shares in part-privatised former state monopolies like Statoil. And their programme denounces the United States as "the biggest threat to world peace."
"We must have a negotiated result that all three parties can be happy with," Socialist leader Kristin Halvorsen said. It is unclear how far her demands, or high spending promises by the Centre Party, will be met by Labour.
Labour's very success in building one of the world's most generous states has all but eliminated its traditional working class base, forcing it to seek partners in a bid to win power.
Still, Monday's election was a rebound from a long slide, with Labour winning 62 seats in parliament against 43 in 2001. The Socialists lost eight seats to 15, sapped by Labour, while the Centre Party gained one to 11.
Labour wants to take Norway into the European Union, but is unlikely to raise the issue soon as most Norwegians oppose membership.
(Additional reporting by Stephen Brown, John Acher, James Kilner, Ina Vedde Fjarestad, Jan Oscar de Besche and Richard Solem)
from the Australian, 2005-Sep-20, by Emma-Kate Symons:
Merkel's stumble buoys old Europe
Paris -- ANGELA Merkel's humiliation in the German elections has set back the cause of economic reform in Europe, particularly in neighbouring France where the forces of inertia led by President Jacques Chirac are gaining ground.
Germany's so-called Margaret Thatcher who flirted with a flat tax and championed bold structural economic reforms was until the closing weeks of the campaign expected to secure a decisive victory over Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
A clear Merkel win would have given a much-needed boost to critics of the European social model with its high taxes and expensive social welfare systems, from Tony Blair in Britain to French presidential aspirant Nicolas Sarkozy.
But now Mr Blair, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, and Mr Sarkozy, who is engaged in a fierce battle for the 2007 presidential nomination with his rival - French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin - cannot be certain of a strong ideologically friendly ally in Berlin.
A friend of Ms Merkel's, Mr Sarkozy is the Interior Minister and head of France's ruling centre-right UMP party. He has called for a "rupture" with the politics of the past 30 years during which Mr Chirac has held most of the senior posts in French politics.
Like Ms Merkel, he is an admirer of the US, an opponent of Turkish entry to the EU, and a vigorous campaigner for economic liberalisation.
For Mr Chirac, who defends the French social model and Mr de Villepin's criticisms of globalisation, Ms Merkel's failure to secure a working majority at the ballot box will be a comfort.
Despite a historic affinity between his UMP party and the Christian Democrats, Mr Chirac built up a close relationship with his friend Mr Schroeder.
The Franco-German couple dubbed Old Europe by critics such as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have driven the politics of the EU for decades, no more so than when Mr Chirac and Mr Schroeder teamed up to oppose the US invasion of Iraq.
Ms Merkel foreshadowed a break with the cosy Berlin-Paris axis when she questioned the merits of the E40 billion-a-year common agricultural policy of generous farming subsidies - a policy that benefited France above all EU countries and also delivered billions of euros of assistance to German farmers.
But now Mr Chirac's obstinate refusal to countenance any reform to the costly subsidy system will continue unchallenged by any invigorated reformist chancellor in Germany.
At home, the 72-year-old President is enjoying a small rise in popular support - despite continuing high unemployment and his controversially secretive admission to hospital after a mini-stroke.
After the election results came in, French Defence Minister Michel Alliot-Marie said: "The Germans responded in a way that certainly does not allow for the implementation of a totally liberal (capitalist) model."
France's Minister for European Affairs, Catherine Colonna, said that whoever became German chancellor, the Franco-German alliance would remain the "engine of Europe".
But in an editorial headlined "stalemate in Germany", Le Figaro's Pierre Rousselin lamented the worrying result of a "government deprived of the necessary authority to undertake radical reforms".
"We could have looked forward to an acceleration of reforms in Europe with an effect of contagion on neighbouring countries, notably France," he wrote.
"European politics, broken down since the no to the referendum (on the proposed EU constitution) in France risks being more paralysed than ever."
from The Telegraph, 2005-Jul-5, by Hannah Cleaver:
Former prisoners try to save Berlin Wall memorial from bulldozers
Berlin -- Former political prisoners of the socialist East German regime were gathering near Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin last night, as they launched a desperate attempt to prevent bulldozers levelling a memorial site for redevelopment.
Protesters were preparing to chain themselves to more than 1,000 crosses erected as an unofficial memorial to those who died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall.
Father Vinzenz, a priest known for his work with prisoners, blessed the crosses, as former dissidents began to occupy the site next to the historic crossing-point hours ahead of a deadline early today for the site to be cleared by its owner, the investment company Hamm.
The conflict over the unofficial memorial has pitched the former prisoners, relatives of the wall's victims and the Church against an unlikely alliance of the Left-wing Berlin city senate and the developers.
Alexandra Hildebrandt, 45, owner of the privately-run Berlin Wall Museum close to the site, erected the memorial on rented land, placing one nine feet tall cross for each of the 1,065 people killed on the Wall between its construction in 1961, and 1989, when it was torn down.
She also built a reconstruction of the wall along one side of the rented land, close to where the real one ran. The entire memorial immediately became controversial, with critics saying that it ran the risk of giving the ''Disney treatment'' to the Berlin Wall.
But during the nine months it has been standing, the memorial, with each cross bearing the name and picture of one wall victim, has slowly won approval from local residents and proved a draw for tourists visiting the German capital.
Hamm was preparing to send in bulldozers early this morning to clear the site in preparation for selling the valuable land.
Court decisions had ruled in the company's favour.
Mrs Hildebrandt, who has been paying £9,600 a month to rent the land, says there is no buyer and the clearance is unnecessary.
"It is a political decision," she said. "We are trying to raise the €36 million euros [£24 million] we need to buy the land ourselves but it is a race against time. They [Hamm] just want to curry favour with the city government.
"We are living in a city where communists and half-communists are in power."
Although no one in the Berlin senate would now style themselves a communist, it is run by a coalition of the Social Democrat Party and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the East German socialist party.
The culture senator in whose area of competence the dispute falls is Thomas Flierl, a PDS member and a former member of the East German socialist party who worked in the cultur e ministry in 1989.
Checkpoint Charlie - the only official crossing-point during the Cold War - is unaffected. It consists of a reconstructed hut in the middle of a busy road, and a repainted sign warning "You are now leaving the American sector", just in front of the crossing from what was West, into East Berlin.
There is no central memorial for those killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall, although several sites throughout the city bear impromptu, and often unofficial, crosses or stones.
from Deutsche Welle, 2005-Jul-5:
Wall Memorial Razed in Berlin
A controversial memorial to honor people who died while trying to flee the former East Germany by crossing the Berlin wall was demolished early Monday despite fears that the action could harm the city's image.
To prevent the demolition, protesters -- some of whom had been imprisoned by the East German regime -- had chained themselves to a few of the 1,065 wooden crosses that stood near the former Checkpoint Charlie border crossing between sections of a fake Berlin Wall.
But police officers cordoned off the area to let construction workers begin to dismantle the field of crosses and two mock slabs of the Berlin Wall erected in memory of those who died attempting to escape communist East Germany.
The forced removal of the display came about because the memorial's initiator had refused to take it down despite demands by the land owners to do so. Alexandra Hildebrandt, who also runs the nearby Checkpoint Charlie museum, insisted on keeping the crosses even though she had lost the lease on the land.
No money from Bush
Hildebrandt had tried to come up with millions of euros to buy the land, even reportedly writing to US President George W. Bush to help her keep the memorial intact.
The demolition was opposed by several groups, including the representatives of Republicans Abroad and several members of Berlin's opposition Christian Democratic Union. The city's tourism head had also voiced his concern that removal would not help the city as thousands of tourists visited the site each day.
But the city's government, which consists of Social Democrats and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party to the former East German communist party, never saw the privately organized memorial as part of Berlin's concept to remember the Wall.
City officials plan to build a Cold War museum near the site while an official Wall memorial already exists on Berlin's Bernauerstrasse.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Apr-4, by Matthew Kaminski:
The Second Coming of Franco
MADRID -- In the middle of the night, veteran politicians are disappearing without a trace across Spain. A few weeks ago here, Francisco Franco met this fate. The former dictator's last statue in the capital was secretly removed, leaving steel wires atop an empty dais in front of the environment ministry.
"I used to bring visitors there to show them how well we had reconciled ourselves with the past. No one in Spain cared about it," says Pedro Schwartz, an economics professor whom Franco's regime exiled as a student. "If they didn't tear it down 30 years ago when he died, why now?"
The purge of historical relics is a sign of the times in Spain. Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero won a surprise victory only three days after the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings. He inherited a traumatized and divided nation and in the past year has made sure to keep it that way.
A useful enemy for the new Spanish Socialists?
In addition to the confidential protocols razing the monuments, the Socialist government recently ordered the national television to produce new documentaries on the horrors of the civil war and the Franco era, drawing an implicit link with today's right in Spain.
The irony of using means that El Generalissimo himself might have appreciated may be lost on the Socialists. But it's working. The political debate over Spain's authoritarian past -- put to rest by successive left- and right-wing governments since the transition to democracy in the late 1970s -- is alive again. Neglected and forgotten before, Franco's empty plot is now adorned with flowers and banners.
The Socialist government is also taking on the Roman Catholic Church, reviving that civil war-era tension. Their tone is distinctly anti-clerical. Military chaplains may be fired, children tax credits cut, and religious education limited. To be fair, no priests have been shot or churches looted, but the Catholic leadership is on the defensive.
In foreign affairs, Mr. Zapatero finds inspiration from the Franco days. "Neutrality" and the "third way," with a healthy dollop of anti-Americanism, are in again. Last week, the 43-year-old lawyer from León laughed it up with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, selling him military weapons. Another favored friend is Fidel Castro. In this Spain, George Bush and Tony Blair are vilified.
In Europe, the "third way" amounts to blindly following France and Germany. In one of his first acts, just after yanking Spanish troops from Iraq, Mr. Zapatero signed away his country's voting powers in the new EU constitution. Twice, he called on U.S. allies on the ground to follow Spain out of Iraq. According to one source, Mr. Zapatero bet his cabinet colleagues that John Kerry would win and was confident enough to cater a party to celebrate.
It would be unfair to say that such things must be expected when a left-wing government takes power in Spain. This one breaks radically with former Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, who in 14 years kept the Socialists in the Spanish and European mainstream. "With the Gonzalez government, there was mutual respect," says Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the opposition Popular Party. "That's gone now." Mr. Gonzalez, a business who's kept a lower profile in recent years, last week criticized the government in the Spanish daily El Pais, speaking out in public more vocally. The private hostility between him and Mr. Zapatero is no secret.
Amid all the petty fights over Franco and Fidel, real and growing tensions in Spain that could without exaggeration tear this country apart are left ignored to fester. The Basque Country, an autonomous region in the north, elects a new regional parliament on April 17. Nationalists look to win their first ever majority, paving the way for a referendum there -- in contravention of Spanish laws and constitution -- on a breakaway plan.
In a Europe of blurring borders, this fight isn't about local democracy anymore. Spain already has Europe's model constitution for a decentralized, multiethnic state; the Basque Country runs its own schools and police force. Money and precedent are what's really at stake. The Basques, along with the Catalans, are rich regions fed up with subsidizing poorer parts. Although only a fifth of tax revenues flow to the central government, local politicians are feeding the resentment to win votes.
This bug is catchy. Bierzo, a region north of Madrid, wants its own "Basque plan" as does the rich Arán valley near Catalonia. The backlash from the poorer regions of Spain is starting to grow. How Spain handles this emerging crisis will be a lesson for all of Europe. Many EU states are home to national minorities who want to wrestle more power from the capitals.
Former Prime Minister José Maria Aznar banned the political wing of the Basque terrorist group ETA and threatened to suspend local autonomy if anyone broke the law to push a breakaway. A state that can't uphold its constitution won't be around for long. As with all other issues, Mr. Zapatero has short-term political goals foremost in mind. He talks vaguely about negotiations with the Basques, and rules out any tough moves, courting voters in those regions.
All this prompts an impolite question: Is this man whom some call the "Spanish Neville Chamberlain" a fool? Far from it. Mr. Zapatero, a cipher a year ago, sits securely atop the opinion polls. Most Spaniards consider him highly simpatico. No matter what the rest of the world thinks, they like him, along with Spain's lower profile on the world stage and his pacifist, dictator-friendly views.
The Aznar government gave Spain a big say at the table of powers, most visibly but far from alone in the decisions that led to the war on Iraq. But Ana Palacio, the Aznar-era foreign minister, points out now: "People didn't want to be in the front line. They want to enjoy their lives" in a newly prosperous Spain -- letting others deal with the world's problems.
Mr. Zapatero tells us something discomforting about the current state of European politics. The prime minister smartly left pro-market Aznar-era economic policies in place. In this "new European" state, hatred of America -- not capitalism -- is the unifying myth of choice for the European left. As long as the economy stays strong, people will be happy to indulge in populism that gives them easy opt outs.
So Spain, bloodied by Islamic terror, does little today to aid the struggle for democracy in the Muslim world. Here, America's post-9/11 story passed through a post-modern European looking glass. The backpack bombs that claimed 191 lives on Madrid commuter trains that March 11 morning were expected to be a wake-up call about Islamic terrorism. How naïve. No, Spain blamed its own leaders, withdrew into a shell and opened old wounds from decades ago. A year later, Spain may be divided in spirit and, soon enough, in body. But Mr. Zapatero is more popular than ever.
Mr. Kaminski is deputy editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
from the Associated Press, 2005-Oct-19, by Maria Jesus Prades:
Spanish Judge Issues Warrant for Three GIs
MADRID, Spain -- A judge has issued an international arrest warrant for three U.S. soldiers whose tank fired on a Baghdad hotel during the Iraq war, killing a Spanish journalist and a Ukrainian cameraman, a court official said Wednesday.
Judge Santiago Pedraz issued the warrant for Sgt. Shawn Gibson, Capt. Philip Wolford and Lt. Col. Philip de Camp, all from the U.S. 3rd Infantry, which is based in Fort Stewart, Ga.
Jose Couso, who worked for the Spanish television network Telecinco, died April 8, 2003, after a U.S. army tank crew fired a shell on Hotel Palestine in Baghdad where many journalists were staying to cover the war.
Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian, also was killed.
Pedraz had sent two requests to the United States — in April 2004 and June 2005 — to have statements taken from the suspects or to obtain permission for a Spanish delegation to quiz them. Both went unanswered.
He said he issued the arrest order because of a lack of judicial cooperation from the United States regarding the case.
The warrant "is the only effective measure to ensure the presence of the suspects in the case being handled by Spanish justice, given the lack of judicial cooperation by U.S. authorities," the judge said in the warrant.
The Pentagon had no immediate information and said it was looking into it.
U.S. officials have insisted that the soldiers believed they were being shot at when they opened fire.
Following the Palestine incident, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said a review of the incident found that the use of force was justified.
In late 2003, the National Court, acting on a request from Couso's family, agreed to consider filing criminal charges against three members of the tank crew.
Fort Stewart spokeswoman Jennifer Scales said the three no longer are assigned to Fort Stewart or the 3rd Infantry Division.
De Camp, who is now an adjunct mathematics professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., said three investigations into the incident — two military investigations and one by the Committee to Protect Journalists — had exonerated all three men.
"We had no clue there were journalists over at that hotel," he said. "We would not have shot at them."
The retired officer also said his men were constantly taking risks by letting people get close to their convoy so that they could verify whether they were enemy combatants.
When asked if he would turn himself in, de Camp said, "I don't know, I've got to get some legal advice."
Pilar Hermoso, an attorney for Couso's family, welcomed the decision, although she recognized that it would be difficult to get the soldiers extradited to Spain, the state news agency Efe reported.
Small protests over the killing have been staged outside the U.S. Embassy in Madrid nearly every month since Couso's death.
Under Spanish law, a crime committed against a Spaniard abroad can be prosecuted here if it is not investigated in the country where it is committed.
from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Mar-21, by Pete du Pont:
Europe's Problem--and Ours
Will the EU choose collectivism over individualism? Will we?Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, was recently in Washington to meet with President Bush and release his new book, "On the Road to Democracy." When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Velvet Revolution came to Czechoslovakia, Mr. Klaus became finance minister in the new democracy. He became prime minister in 1992, and later president. His market principles replaced communism with freedom and choice; he liberated prices and foreign trade, deregulated markets and privatized state ownership of assets. Communism was dismantled and prosperity came to his country.
But now President Klaus sees an unsettling new challenge: the zeal of Old Europe--France, Germany, Brussels--to impose collective choices on New Europe--Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Ireland. "Ten years ago," Mr. Klaus writes, "the dominant slogan was: 'deregulate, liberalize, privatize.' Now the slogan is different; 'regulate . . . get rid of your sovereignty and put it in the hands of international institutions and organizations.' "
"The current European unification process is not predominantly about opening up," he continues, "It is about introducing massive regulation and protection, about imposing uniform rules, laws, and policies." It is about a "rush into the European Union which is currently the most visible and the most powerful embodiment of ambition to create something else--supposedly better--than a free society."
The force that is creating these pressures is indeed the European Union. Its constitution must be ratified by all member states; four of the 25 nations have done so, and referendums will be held in France and the Netherlands this spring. If ratified, the EU will become the primary source of legal authority in Europe with "primacy over the law of member states." In other words, the 25 members of the European Union Council of Ministers--not the 750 members of the EU Parliament--will make the laws for 450 million people previously citizens of 25 independent countries.
So what is making President Klaus "more and more nervous" about the Czech people's future? His conviction that the authors and enforcers of the new EU Constitution believe:
• That "competition is not the most powerful mechanism for achieving freedom, democracy and efficiency, but rather an unfair and unproductive form of dumping."
• That "intrusive regulation, ruling and intervening from above are necessary because market failure is more dangerous than government failure."
• That "the premise that government is ultimately a benevolent force, obliged to guarantee equal outcomes by redistributing benefits and privileges between individuals and groups."
Could the Brussels bureaucracy, for example, constitutionally impose France's 35-hour work week on the other 24 nations in the European Union? Indeed it could, and with a vote of only 15 of the member states (if they represented 65% of the population of the EU). A state voting "no" would have the law imposed upon it.
It seems likely that the European Union intends to centralize decision making in Brussels, while President Klaus believes in "the inherent morality of markets, in the ethics of work and saving, in the crucial link between freedom and private property. It is not possible (or desirable) to legislate a better world from above or outside."
Come to think of it, hasn't this very same debate dominated public-policy decision making in America? Whether the government should have the power to make collective decisions for us or people have the power to make individual decisions for themselves?
It began in the Depression, when capitalism appeared to have failed and it seemed Franklin D. Roosevelt's collectivism would do better. That government-knows-best philosophy pretty much dominated the country--with some respite during World War II and the immediate postwar years--for half a century. In the 1960s and '70s government grew; regulation increased; crime rose while the prison population dropped; schools lowered their standards and limited testing; and the distribution of wealth became more important than its creation. As Lyndon Johnson said, we must accept "greater government activity in the affairs of the people." Richard Nixon's wage and price controls and higher taxes continued the trend.
Then came Ronald Reagan with the opposite view, and the 1980s and '90s saw an America in which liberty was believed more important than equality; expanding markets became more important than expanding government. Welfare was replaced with work, expanded police forces and mandatory sentencing drove crime rates down, education began a return to testing and standards, and the creation of greater individual and national wealth became our economic focus.
President Bush has continued the individualist perspective. With the exception of his steel tariffs catastrophe, he has worked to increase trade. He has reduced taxes to increase individual opportunity and grow the economy. He favors the ownership society--he hopes to expand the 52% of Americans who own stock and the 69% who own their own homes--and believes that Social Security retirement accounts should be owned by individuals too. The No Child Left Behind Act tried to bring higher standards to public education, but this is an area in which the United States still follows the Brussels model--public schools are run by the government, and families are not allowed to choose the best school for each of their children.
Establishment thinking, of course, predicts that individualism will be a catastrophe, but the opposite turns out to be true. Reagan's tax cuts were called--by Republican Howard Baker, no less--a "riverboat gamble," yet they launched a strong economic expansion. His missile defense system was ridiculed by Ted Kennedy as "star wars" and his challenges to the Soviet Union denounced as reckless and irresponsible, and yet they consigned communism to the dustbin of history. Sen. Pat Moynihan and Children's Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman both predicted that welfare reform would drive the poor deeper into poverty, but it cut the welfare caseload in half and allowed millions of people--mostly women--to go back to work and improve their lives and opportunities.
So as communism disappeared in Eastern Europe and Reagan's philosophy dominated American thinking, individualism has been on the rise. But a nation's belief in individualism is often overwhelmed by a warm and persuasive governmental benevolence that will in the end limit our opportunities. In Europe we see its growing power in Brussels; in America we see it in the current Social Security debate.
Establishment America favors collectivism--the collectivism of public education and our current Social Security, and higher taxes to limit individual choices and increase government choices. So President Klaus's thinking deserves some consideration, for if Brussels and Blue America prevail, our lives will be very different indeed.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.
from Die Welt, 2004-Nov-20, via The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, 2004-Dec-6, by Mathias Dopfner:
Europe - Thy Name is Cowardice
[original in German: Europa - dein Name ist Feigheit -AMPP ed.]
A few days ago Henryk M. Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe - your family name is appeasement."
It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true.
Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to agreements. Appeasement stabilized communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany in that part of Europe where inhuman, suppressive governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.
Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.
Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore 300,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, to issue bad grades to George Bush. A particularly grotesque form of appeasement is reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere by suggesting that we should really have a Muslim holiday in Germany.
What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians and directed against our free, open Western societies.
It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than the great military conflicts of the last century-a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by tolerance and accommodation but only spurred on by such gestures, which will be mistaken for signs of weakness.
Two recent American presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement:
Reagan and Bush. Reagan ended the Cold War and Bush, supported only by the social democrat Blair acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic fight against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.
In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society's values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China.
On the contrary-we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to the intolerant, as world champions in tolerance, which even (Germany's Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we're so moral? I fear it's more because we're so materialistic.
For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy-because everything is at stake.
While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in American know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive. We'd rather discuss the 35-hour workweek or our dental health plan coverage. Or listen to TV pastors preach about "reaching out to murderers." These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor's house. Europe, thy name is cowardice.
from the Associated Press via the Guardian UK, 2005-Mar-19, by Janelle Stecklein:
Thousands Protest Iraq War Across Europe
LONDON - Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters demonstrated across Europe on Saturday to mark the second anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, with 45,000 Britons marching from London's Hyde Park past the American Embassy to Trafalgar Square.
British elections expected in May lent an added charge to the largest protest, in London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair's staunch backing of the war has diminished his base of support.
Police said about 45,000 demonstrators participated in a march; organizers put the number at 100,000. Several army veterans were among the crowd.
``I disagreed with (the war) to start with because I was suspicious of the weapons of mass destruction claims,'' said Ray Hewitt, 34, a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. ``I saw the Iraqi army in 1991 and we destroyed it.''
In Istanbul, Turkey, an estimated 15,000 people - some carrying signs reading ``Murderer Bush, get out'' - marched in the Kadikoy neighborhood.
Two marchers dressed as U.S. soldiers pretended to rough up a third, dressed as a detainee with a sack on his head in a mimed criticism of U.S. abuse of prisoners.
In the southern Turkish city of Adana, home to a Turkish military base used by American forces, protesters laid a black wreath in front of the U.S. Consulate, the Anatolia news agency reported.
In Poland - which commands a multinational security force in Iraq that includes 1,700 Polish troops - about 500 protesters marched to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, holding banners reading ``Pull out from Iraq now'' and ``Poles back to Poland.''
``We are protesting this war in Iraq because it has no point. Only innocent people are killed, and nothing good results from it,'' said Klaudia Kosicinska, a 17-year-old high school student.
At an anti-war march in the industrial city of Katowice, protesters - including one dressed up as a blindfolded Statue of Liberty - urged the United States and Britain to leave Iraq.
In Athens, about 3,000 trade unionists, members of peace groups and students, brought the city center to a standstill for about three hours as they marched to the U.S. Embassy.
In Sweden, about 300 protesters filled Sergel Square in downtown Stockholm, chanting: ``USA, out of Iraq!''
The protests were nowhere near as big as those in February 2003, just before the war when millions marched in cities around the world to urge President Bush and his allies not to attack.
``People have become apathetic about this, it's no longer something they walk around thinking about every day,'' said Linn Majuri, 15, a protester in Stockholm.
With international forces still facing violent opposition in Iraq, protesters were divided about what to demand from leaders now. While some wanted a full troop withdrawal, others argued that would leave Iraqis in a worse position than before the invasion.
``We got the Iraqis into this mess, we need to help them out of it,'' said London protester Kit MacLean, 29.
Security was heavy outside the U.S. Embassy in London, where cement barricades and metal fences blocked the building, as they have since Sept. 11. Two former British soldiers placed a cardboard coffin bearing the words ``100,000 dead'' outside the U.S. compound.
With music and banners, marchers in Rome called for the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq. ``Iraq to the Iraqis!'' read one banner.
In Oslo, Norway, about 400 people rallied to demand that the 10 Norwegian officers in Baghdad be sent home. Norway has previously withdrawn 150 soldiers from Iraq.
``It's becoming more and more embarrassing that we are in the 'coalition of the willing' when many other countries are withdrawing,'' said Ingrid Fiskaa, head of the peace activism group Fredsinitiativet, which organized the event.
Many at the London protest voiced anger at Blair, who has been Bush's staunchest ally in Iraq despite strong domestic opposition to the war, especially among members of his Labour Party.
Some at the protest said they couldn't support Blair, but didn't know whom else to vote for. The opposition Conservatives strongly backed the war while the third-largest party, the Liberal Democrats, opposed it. Several smaller parties are running anti-war candidates in hopes of loosening Blair's hold on power.
``I think it's outrageous what Blair and Bush think they can get away with,'' said retiree John Salway, 59. ``I'd like to think we can put a dent in their arrogance.''
---
Associated Press writers Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland; James C. Helicke in Istanbul, Turkey; Paris Ayiomamitis in Athens, Greece; Mattias Karen in Stockholm, Sweden and Frances D'Emilio in Rome contributed to this report.
from the New York Post, 2003-Aug-14, Ralph Peters:
EUROPE: WORLDS APART
LIFE may not be predictable, but Europeans are. If we criticize them publicly, they splutter, outraged that we don't recognize their perfection. They can dish it out abundantly, but continental Europeans can no more take criticism than their welfare armies could have taken Baghdad.
The only thing you can get for free from Europeans is advice. And they're always ready to give us plenty of it, as they've been doing for more than two centuries.
Still, behind the easy pleasure of poking fun at European pretensions, there are serious - and hardening - differences between Americans, who embrace the future, and the French or Germans or Belgians who cling to the past.
None of those differences go so deep as our opposing concepts of freedom.
For Europeans - excluding the Brits, who are more like us than they sometimes find comfortable - "freedom" means freedom from things: from social and economic risk, from workplace insecurity and personal responsibility, from too much competition in the marketplace or too much scrutiny of governing elites.
Socialism, a doctrine born in Europe, struck very deep roots. The collective takes priority over the individual. The European social contract amounts to this: We will not let the talented rise too high, and we will not let the lazy fall too low. "Equality" doesn't mean equal opportunities, but equal limitations.
For Americans, freedom means the freedom to do: To make our own way, to struggle, achieve, to rise (to climb social, educational or economic ladders), to move beyond our parents' lot in life and give our children better chances still.
We are products of the immigrant spirit and the pioneer mentality. Our ancestors (as well as today's new immigrants) dared to take a chance, instead of remaining in the "old country," with its degrading social and economic systems.
The Europeans with whom we must deal today are those whose ancestors lacked the courage to pack their bags and board the ships in Hamburg or Antwerp or Danzig. They chose a miserable security over hope that carried risks.
The American Revolution was entrepreneurial and constructive. The French Revolution was vengeful and destructive. Even during the Great Depression, when extremist ideologies achieved their greatest popularity in the United States, nothing approaching a majority of Americans signed up for any totalitarian creed of either the right or left. In the words of Huey Long, who for all his faults spoke for the average Joe, we never stopped believing in the possibility of "every man a king."
Europeans are content with "every man a servant," as long as the terms of service are not too severe and the position comes with job security. Hitler did not cement his hold on power with anti-Semitism - that was an add-on - but with works projects, with jobs for Germans, with a promise of economic security, however low the level.
The Bolsheviks never preached liberty. Their credo was the nanny state, a "fair share" for the workers and the promise that decisions would be made "for the good of all."
We elevate the individual; Europeans worship the group. We dream. Europeans fear. Indeed, the only belief that has been pronounced dead more often than religion is the American dream. Professors write its obituary almost daily. The rest of us live it.
Life isn't fair, of course. But too much enforced "fairness" robs life of its vitality. We Americans live in the one country where each of us, regardless of race or religion, has the chance to realize our potential. Reaching that potential is up to us. But our laws and our culture don't stand in our way.
There are, of course, many further differences between us and the Europeans, but the greatest other distinction relates to the first: American is the land of second chances. And of third, fourth and fifth chances, if only we have the gumption to seize them.
In Europe, there's little provision for late bloomers. The placement tests the student takes as a teenager determine his or her academic, economic and social fate to an extent that would spark another revolution in America.
Here, attending Harvard is no guarantee that you'll succeed in life - it just gives you a head start out of the gate. On the other hand, beginning your academic career at a community college doesn't mean you can't climb to the highest income levels.
Europeans accept their fates. Americans make their own.
Most Americans would be astonished if they understood how few opportunities there are for Europeans to pursue adult education, to change careers, to learn new skills - or to recreate their lives. It's an adult version of being forced to retain your identity in junior high school forever.
Europeans demand security, no matter the price. Americans want a shot at the title.
And so it comes to pass that, as America seeks to change the world for the better, Europeans are content to let dictators thrive and populations suffer - as long as Europe's slumber is not disturbed.
Strategically, Europe is in danger of becoming the greatest impediment to positive change in the world. Europe clings to the international status quo, no matter how dreadful, simply because risk has been bred out of its culture. This leaves the United States (and Britain) with the choice of doing that which is necessary and just without Europe's support, or accepting the rules that made the 20th century history's bloodiest.
Europeans are correct when they insist that America has become a danger. We are, indeed, a tremendous threat to their self-satisfaction, to their dread of change, to their moral irresponsibility and to their dreary, state-supported cultures.
Our ancestors chose a new kind of human freedom. Europeans have resisted it ever since.
Ralph Peters, a frequent Post contributor, is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
from the Telegraph of London, 2005-Jan-30, by Clare Chapman:
'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners — who must pay tax and employee health insurance — were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.
She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.
Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job — including in the sex industry — or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.
The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.
When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.
"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."
Miss Garweg said that women who had worked in call centres had been offered jobs on telephone sex lines. At one job centre in the city of Gotha, a 23-year-old woman was told that she had to attend an interview as a "nude model", and should report back on the meeting. Employers in the sex industry can also advertise in job centres, a move that came into force this month. A job centre that refuses to accept the advertisement can be sued.
Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits.
"Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" said Miss Ulyanova.
Ulrich Kueperkoch wanted to open a brothel in Goerlitz, in former East Germany, but his local job centre withdrew his advertisement for 12 prostitutes, saying it would be impossible to find them.
Mr Kueperkoch said that he was confident of demand for a brothel in the area and planned to take a claim for compensation to the highest court. Prostitution was legalised in Germany in 2002 because the government believed that this would help to combat trafficking in women and cut links to organised crime.
Miss Garweg believes that pressure on job centres to meet employment targets will soon result in them using their powers to cut the benefits of women who refuse jobs providing sexual services.
"They are already prepared to push women into jobs related to sexual services, but which don't count as prostitution,'' she said.
"Now that prostitution is no longer considered by the law to be immoral, there is really nothing but the goodwill of the job centres to stop them from pushing women into jobs they don't want to do."
from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2004-Nov-12, by Stephen Brown:
The Death of the Dutch?
The recent assassination of Dutch author and moviemaker, Theo van Gough, by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam should come as no surprise to those familiar with the condition of multiculturalism in Holland. Earlier this year, the Dutch government became the first Western state to admit that the multicultural experiment, the biggest socialist fraud ever to be foisted on countries since the Soviet one, is a colossal failure.
This admission came in the form of an all-party parliamentary report that basically concluded, among other things, that Muslim immigrants, who make up almost one million of Holland’s 16 million inhabitants, are refusing to integrate. These immigrants, largely concentrated in the cities where they constitute a large percentage of urban populations such as in Rotterdam, choose to live together in their own ‘ghettos’ where they have built up parallel societies to that of the host country. And it is not going to get better. According to the report, between 70 and 80 per cent of Dutch-born immigrants, mostly from Morocco and Turkey, refuse to intermarry with native-born Dutch and are importing their spouses from their home countries.
Ironically, it is the emphasis Dutch governments have placed on multiculturalism that has helped lead to its inevitable downfall. The report states that, in planning their ‘perfect’ society, the biggest mistake the lib-left multiculturalists made was to have immigrant children educated in their own languages, which has resulted in an ethnic separatism in society. This voluntary apartheid from the mainstream has reached the point where it is dangerous for white Europeans to venture into some immigrant neighborhoods where they are regarded as either “an enemy or victim.” The growth of this parallel world has also corresponded with a growth in discomfort among the native Dutch toward the newcomers and a loss of a feeling of security, which is largely due to the new immigrants’ propensity for crime, violence and overrepresentation in the criminal system.
The report concludes that the ethnic ghettos must be broken up and the immigrants made to become Dutch if the country is not to come apart.
But it is probably already too late for that. In the first place, trying to break up the Muslim ghettoes would be like trying to dissolve San Francisco’s Chinatown or New York’s Harlem. Secondly, there is the little problem of Muslim fundamentalism that the dangerously naïve multiculturalists have let into the country like the proverbial wolf into the sheepfold.
A substantial portion of the Muslim population Holland has imported since the sixties, while not violent, abhors Dutch society, the most liberal in all of Europe. Many of these new immigrants hold in disdain women’s rights, freedom of expression, homosexuality, drugs and all the other trappings of Dutch liberalism, and believe their way of life and beliefs are superior to those of their host country. In fact, such immigrants are not averse to replacing the ‘corrupt’ Dutch system with sharia, but by legal, non-violent means.
More importantly, though, for Holland’s existence, this population also contains a minority of Islamist fanatics, such as the one who killed van Gogh, who want to replace the Dutch system with an Islamic theocracy by violent means, kill all the unbelievers in the country and wage jihad to the ends of the earth. It did not help that the Dutch government assisted in funding some radical mosques that indoctrinated young Dutch Muslims into their way of hatred, while Saudi Arabia supported others (no surprise there). Dutch Muslims have been found on the battlefield in Kashmir and elsewhere; but they may soon not have to leave home to fight the Holy War. A letter van Gogh’s assassin left on his victim’s body says there will be more killings.
There are also indications that Islamists are organizing a European army. According to one report, hundreds of European Muslims received military training in Afghanistan and returned home to train hundreds more. They apparently have been buying weapons on the Eastern European black market and have even rented isolated tourist resorts to conduct training sessions. So the underground intelligence war going on all over Europe may soon turn hot, and the assassination of van Gogh may have been its first shot. Such an Islamist crusade would most likely take the form of an I.R.A.-style guerilla war where the multiculturalism-created ghettoes, like the Catholic ones in Northern Ireland, would serve both as bases and as hideouts.
And it is not as if the people in Holland can rely on the law to protect them. Like in other western countries, it has been twisted and weakened so badly the last 30 years to match leftist ideology that it is sometimes a hindrance in combating the Islamist danger. Legal technicalities, for example, prevented the conviction of 12 Dutch Muslims last year for providing support to a North African terrorist organization, while another four Islamist terrorists, accused of planning to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris, walked out of a Rotterdam court free men in 2002. And even after the Dutch parliament voted to expel 26,000 failed refugee claimants last February, Europe’s first mass expulsion of such people, the Justice Ministry had to admit that if they did not accept the free flight home and a cash bonus, many would have to be let loose on Holland’s streets because of human rights laws.
And what is the response of the oh-so-clever Dutch leftists to the multicultural mess they have created? Like after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been either silent or offered only more of the same. The truth be told, they do not know what to do and are simply engaging in helpless, useless gestures, as reports come in this week of retaliatory attacks for van Gogh’s death against mosques and a Muslim school.
But one observer of Dutch society, interviewed by a European newspaper, says there was already a furtive and creeping migration of the Dutch elite and of money out of Holland before van Gogh’s murder because of the “Moroccan threat.” And if the situation begins to spiral out of control, you can definitely expect more ‘progressive’ rats to abandon the Dutch ship of state they were so instrumental in sinking.
from the Daily Telegraph of London, 2005-Jan-31:
Iraq confounds the prophets of doom
That elections are a better thing than tyranny seems a truth so obvious as not to be worth stating. Yet such were the passions aroused by the Iraq war that many Western observers now find themselves hoping, disgracefully, that that country's first free poll will fail.
Left-wing commentators, in Britain as in much of Europe, have focused disproportionately on the difficulties that any state must undergo during a transition process. To many of them, every terrorist bomb, every murdered election official, every sign of heightened military alertness - even the loss of a British aircraft - makes a nonsense of Iraq's democratic aspirations.
Yesterday's high turnout, in defiance of the gunmen, should be celebrated. Of course the Iraqi insurgency is an important story. But this does not explain the loving attention devoted to each setback faced by the forces of order. Compare yesterday's reports with those by the same commentators during South Africa's first democratic election. Then, too, there were many technical problems: electors who were not properly registered, voter intimidation, long queues. But these things were set in their proper context, as the backdrop against which the moving drama of people casting their first ballots was being played out. No one suggested that the clashes between IFP and ANC supporters in Zululand undermined the whole process. No one argued that the backlash by a handful of black homeland chieftains and Boer irreconcilables made South Africa unfit for democracy.
Looking to hang their doubts on something specific, the cynics focus on the ejection of the Sunni Arabs from their traditionally dominant position, and the prospect of a permanent Shia majority. There is plainly some truth in this analysis. A combination of sulkiness and intimidation has led to large-scale abstentions among those who prospered most under the old regime: Saddam's townsmen in Tikrit, for example, seem largely to have stayed at home. Meanwhile, the Shias, sensing that they may be the masters now, have flocked to the polls in huge numbers. None of this, though, is an argument against conducting a ballot. To return to our earlier parallel, no one contended that the likelihood of a permanent ANC majority - or, to make the analogy more precise, a permanent black majority - invalidated the concept of South African democracy. No one wrote sympathetic pieces about the plight of the Afrikaners as they lost their hegemony.
In any case, why assume the worst? It is possible that Iraq will become a second Lebanon, in which different religious groups refuse to accept each other's legitimacy; or a second Iran, led by Shia ayatollahs. Equally, though, Iraq may turn into a secular democracy - imperfect, no doubt, as all states are, but far happier than it was. After all, the Iranian people are clamouring louder than ever against government by their mullahs. It is surely somewhat patronising to believe that their Iraqi co-religionists want to saddle themselves with their own theocracy. Remember that this is an election to a constituent assembly, not a full parliament: though their votes may be few, Sunni Arabs will almost certainly be given a voice in framing the constitution commensurate with their real numbers. The more fair-minded among them have long since accommodated themselves to the new reality.
No democratic election is flawless. It is human nature that the loser in any system should blame the system rather than himself: think, for example, about our own squabbles over postal voting, the West Lothian Question, or the wording of referendums. But, yesterday, Iraq became the most democratic country in the Arab world. What a pity that so many writers who, in other circumstances, are optimists about human progress, should shut their eyes to what is happening. In their determination to say "I told you so", they are coming perilously close to siding with jihadi murderers. Shame on them.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Jan-31, by Samuel Gregg:
Corporatism, Entrepreneurship and Faith
In a world saturated by polls, one occasionally encounters findings that reveal something meaningful about different cultures. This can be said of recent findings produced by the European Commission about entrepreneurship in the European Union and the United States.The survey indicates that almost twice as many Americans (28%) as Europeans (15%) are contemplating starting their own business. Moreover, the gap is increasing. In America, those considering starting a business increased by percentage points since 2003, compared to only percentage points in the EU.
In the same survey, 61% of American respondents affirmed that they would prefer self-employment. By contrast, only 45% of Europeans agreed. The figures were especially low in Finland (28%) and the Netherlands (33%). Job security was the prime reason Europeans gave for preferring being employed by a company rather than being their own masters.
Commenting on the poll, the European Commission stated that a major reason for the EU's weak entrepreneurial culture was European entrepreneurs' difficulty in finding sufficient financial backing from banks. Another reason mentioned was fear of failure.
There is validity to these explanations. Other causes include the EU's stifling regulatory environment and crippling taxes, which disincentivize potential entrepreneurs. Then there are the notoriously bloated welfare systems that even some left-wing European politicians concede have contributed to Western Europe's culture of welfare dependency.
There are, however, less well-known factors contributing to Europe's entrepreneurial malaise. First, there are the "corporatist" arrangements installed throughout Western Europe by Social Democrat and Christian Democrat governments following World War II.
Partly inspired by certain schools of Christian social thought, corporatism seeks to reduce social tensions -- what France calls le fracture social -- by corralling business leaders and employees into confederations of employer associations and workers' councils that, under government supervision, negotiate everything from salaries to pension benefits.
These systems proved successful at neutralizing radical left-wing elements within West European trade unions. Gradually, however, they became engines for stagnation. They have, for instance, a vested interest in more regulation. Growing regulation gives corporatist bodies reasons to build empires of bureaucrats to help employers and workers negotiate their way through the jungle of rules and by-laws.
The same regulations give corporatist bodies every reason to discourage anyone who suggests that reducing regulations might encourage the emergence of new businesses built by entrepreneurs.
There is, however, another element that explains various differences between America's business culture and Europe's. Put simply, it concerns Western Europe's increasingly secularist -- that is, practically atheist -- moral culture.
The classic definition of a practical atheist is one who lives and acts as if God does not exist. Though we do not often think about it, practical atheism has very real implications for society, including business.
It is difficult for people with atheistic mindsets to be what John Paul II calls "people of hope." Those with no hope have only the present. They have no compelling reason to be interested in the future -- for themselves or for others. Why should those who refuse responsibility for the future, or those who do not concern themselves with it because they will have departed this life in 30 years' time, care about unsustainable levels of welfare dependency, paralyzed labor markets, or crippling regulation?
The idea that there is something wrong with foisting the payment for one's present comfort onto future generations (as many Western Europeans seem content to do) is incomprehensible to secularist minds. For if we believe that all that matters is our own present satisfaction and that no one owes anything to others, then it does not seem unjust to mortgage the future of others -- even our own children. The same deadly logic lies just beneath the surface of Lord Keynes' celebrated quip that "in the long run, we are all dead."
It is easy to oversimplify. While Americans are commonly regarded as more religious than West Europeans, America has its fair share of practical atheists. Nonetheless, people of faith -- real faith -- are people of hope. They are realists, but not pessimists. They are prudent risk-takers, but not inordinately afraid of taking risks. They care for the needy, but not for welfare dependency.
If Western Europe is to become an entrepreneurial society, it requires more than greater access to capital. It demands nothing less than a cultural revolution: one that not only sweeps away corporatist structures and complaisant attitudes towards regulation, but also relights the fire of hope that only comes from the virtue of faith. And that is the work of evangelization.
Mr. Gregg is director of research at the Acton Institute.
from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2004-Dec-14:
The Christ-less-mas Spirit
Christmas comes but once a year, and this year it brings with it Europe's most brazen attempts to prove its multiculturalist mettle.
The most publicized secularization of the season this year may be the manger makeover unveiled at Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London. Standing in for Joseph and Mary are soccer star David Beckham and his pop-singer wife, Victoria, hardly a beatific couple.
It's also Christ-menos in Barcelona, where the city council approved a modernized crèche dreamed up by local art students. Even the baby Jesus is missing in this setup, which replaces the holy family with a businessman on a mobile phone, a delivery man with a gas bottle and a blind man -- figures the students somehow found "more emblematic" of the city known for the soaring towers of Gaudí's La Sagrada Familia cathedral.
We might chalk up these revisionist crèches to commercialism and (bad) avant-gardism if they didn't reflect a broader movement in Europe. It wasn't that long ago that Rocco Buttiglione submarined his European Commission candidacy by admitting his religious beliefs, and that filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's murder was taken as a sign that the famously tolerant Dutch must bend even further.
This philosophy is as misplaced as it is ineffectual. As Muslim attorney Waleed Aly recently wrote in the newspaper the Australian, responding to a controversy over Christmas decorations in Sydney: "Denying the Christianity in Christmas or, worse, doing away with it altogether, helps no one. This is not multiculturalism. It is anticulturalism."
Perhaps the lesson lies in a third example of multiculturalism gone wild. A teacher in Como, Italy, tried to accommodate her non-Christian students by allowing them to substitute "this is the day of virtue" for "this is the day of Jesus" in a carol. The change sparked outrage throughout the town -- except among the students, who chose simply to sing the original lyrics and move on.
from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2004-Mar-18, by Robert Spencer:
The Rise of "Eurabia"
Now that Spain has rejected its pro-American government in the wake of the Madrid bombings and Osama bin Laden has effectively become the Spanish Foreign Minister, the question is not so much “Why did this happen?” but “What took so long?” What is really surprising is not Spain’s spectacular act of appeasement but the fact that the anti-terror Aznar government bucked Europe’s prevailing winds in the first place. For over thirty years, Europe — including Spain — has been preparing for this moment: doing everything possible to transform itself into the newest homeland of a resurgent political Islam.
The renowned historian Bat Ye’or explains that the European Union has since 1973 been constructing “a whole infrastructure of alliances and economic, industrial, media, cultural, financial bonds with the countries of the Arab League.” This new Euro-Muslim entity — which she has dubbed “Eurabia” — has been consciously intended to become “a counterweight to American power” on the world stage, “whose aim was to separate and weaken the two continents by an incitement to hostility and the permanent denigration of American policy in the Middle East.”
Eurabia is a political and economic entity. Through a succession of international agreements, Europe agreed to support the Islamic world’s political aims — particularly its anti-Israel stance — in exchange for favored treatment in Arab world markets. Observes Bat Ye’or: “From the outset the [Euro-Arab Dialogue] was considered as a vast transaction: the EC agreed to support the Arab anti-Israeli policy in exchange for wide commercial agreements.”
The fallout has been cultural and demographic as well, as Bat Ye’or details in her forthcoming book, Eurabia. In exchange for the opening of Arab markets, Europeans encouraged Muslim immigration into Europe, discouraged assimilation of these immigrant populations, and fostered the dissemination in Europe of Islamic perspectives on history and contemporary politics. Meanwhile European foreign policies were brought into harmony with the aims and goals of the Islamic world.
This “shifting of Europe into the Arab-Islamic sphere of influence,” Bat Ye’or explains, was intended to break the “traditional trans-Atlantic solidarity.” To deflate American power and assure themselves a steady supply of oil, European leaders accepted “the traditional cultural baggage of Arab societies, with its anti-Christian and anti-Jewish prejudices and its hostility against Israel and the West.” In exchange for markets in the Islamic world, Europe turned its back on its Judeo-Christian heritage and set the stage for its own Islamization. At the highest political level, Europe, including Spain, has been selling its soul for decades now — giving up, in effect, its blood for oil (not to mention the blood of countless Iraqis and others who had to suffer under the heel of tyrants with whom Europe happily did business.)
Ironically, incoming Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero declared: “We’re aligning ourselves with Kerry. Our alliance will be for peace, against war, no more deaths for oil.” Yet Zapatero and his new government, not the existing order, represent the Europe that has been giving up her life for oil for thirty years now. After all, according to United Press International, it was Spain’s European Union colleague, France, that accepted bribes from the Iraqi oil ministry in exchange for opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.
Zapatero is trying to convince the world to see his election not for what it is — the biggest radical Muslim victory since 9/11, or even the Khomeini revolution in Iran — but simply as a referendum on Iraq. He has castigated Bush and Blair for their “lies.” However, in the caves and highlands of Afghanistan, the Al-Qaeda leadership is not interested in the niceties of legality, disclosure and intelligence that are currently swirling in the West around the Iraq invasion. They see the war in Iraq as a jihad — indeed, as one segment of a global jihad — and they will not see Spain’s withdrawal from Iraq as anything but a victory for jihad and confirmation that terror works.
This fact remains quite aside from all questions of the validity of the Iraq invasion. Osama bin Laden, if he is alive, and other radical Muslim terrorists will see it the same way they saw Bill Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia in the 1990s: as proof that the West is weak, unwilling to fight, and ripe for the plucking. Now that Al-Qaeda has adjusted Spain’s foreign policy with a bombing, will they not be justified in thinking they can adjust her domestic policies — and religion, and culture — with a few more bombings?
The greatest glories of fabled Al-Andalus may yet lie in the future.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
from The EU Observer, 2004-Dec-7, by Honor Mahony:
Multiculturalism is failing, says German opposition leader
The leader of the main opposition party in Germany, the Christian Democrats, has said that multiculturalism is failing.
Speaking at the party's annual conference on Monday (6 December) in Düsseldorf, Angela Merkel criticised her country's attempts to promote multiculturalism saying, "the idea of a multicultural society cannot succeed".
"It is condemned to fail from the outset. Multiculturalism is not integration", she said.
The CDU leader added that the idea of a multicultural society "leads to [ethnic communities] living beside each other, rather than with each other".
Mrs Merkel's speech to the party faithful is part of an overall attempt to rebrand the conservative opposition which has been wracked recently by internal fighting - particularly over health reform proposals.
The main message was patriotism - something that is expected to be a big theme for the national elections in 2006.
Mrs Merkel also made reference to 'leitkultur' or 'leading culture'. The expression is in itself controversial - when it was first raised around four years ago it caused a huge storm of debate in the country.
Germany has the largest population of foreigners in the EU with about seven million immigrants - of whom the biggest proportion are Turkish.
The conference continues today with a discussion on the integration of immigrants.
A new immigration law will come into force on 1 January. It foresees compulsory language courses for new arrivals to the country.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Jan-10, p.A13, by Daniel Schwammenthal:
Welfare Uber Alles
BRUSSELS -- Rolf John was living the American Dream -- German style. For several years, the unemployed ex-banker received about $2,400 a month in German welfare checks to pay for his Miami Beach apartment, living expenses and a housekeeper who also doubled as his driver.
This is, of course, much more money than Mr. John, better known in Germany as "Florida Rolf," would have ever received in the fatherland -- but you see, it's not his fault that the cost of living in sunny Florida is so much higher than in Osnabrück, his rainy hometown in northern Germany. And Mr. John could not be expected to return to Germany because such an imposition might have worsened his depression, his psychiatrist feared.
Upon reading Florida Rolf's story in the mass circulation Bild-Zeitung in 2003, millions of Germans, this writer included, found themselves joining Mr. John in depression, wondering whether it's not an imposition for most Germans to live in their country. If you are forced to fork out half of your salary to the government so that it can pay for, among other excesses, Florida Rolf's year-round tan in a gated community in Miami, complete with swimming pool and sauna, you are entitled to occasional cynicism.
Granted, this is an extreme case, but it is also a symptom of a deeper malaise: Such abuse can only happen in a welfare system that has spun completely out of control. One third of Germany's GDP goes to social spending -- and the trend points upward. As even Germany's punishing payroll taxes are no longer enough to pay for the country's burgeoning unemployment, welfare, health care and pension costs, the government is forced to pile on more and more debt, which has already reached 66% of GDP and keeps rising. Some 25% of the federal budget goes just to interest payments.
To complain about the "entitlement mentality" among his fellow Germans, as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder just did a few months ago, is to miss the point. For the homo oeconomicus germanicus, it makes perfect sense to demand and accept every possible government handout. After all, as long as Germans have a job, (almost 11% of the work force is without one), they are paying a lot into the system. Moreover, when living on the dole is more profitable than hard work, it is absolutely rational behavior to queue for those welfare checks. It's the system that needs fixing, not the German people.
At last, this year will bring some progress. Not least thanks to stories like that of Florida Rolf, Germans are more ready than ever to accept economic reforms. Particularly within the mainstream media, there is broad agreement -- bridging the usual left-right divide -- that reforms are necessary.
Among the Continent's three big economies, Germany, France and Italy -- which together account for almost 70% of euro-zone output -- Germany must be considered the one-eyed among the blind. It is not only ahead in the reform debate but has also actually begun to implement some reforms. While reform has come in fits and starts, one of the changes that recently came into effect will dramatically change Germany's hitherto incredibly generous unemployment benefits.
Until last year, Germany's unemployed received up to 67% of their last salary for one year and after that up to 57% almost indefinitely. Given this generosity, it is no coincidence that of the 4.4 million unemployed, more than 1.7 million have been jobless for a year or more. This January, though, the benefits for long-term unemployed were drastically cut. In return, the government broadened the possibilities for those out of work to beef up their welfare checks by taking up low-paying jobs. As a matter of fact, the unemployed will now have to accept almost any job or risk further benefit reductions.
This is all to the good. Sadly, however, the Schroeder government didn't have the courage to implement the necessary labor-market deregulation, such as easing hiring and firing rules, to help assure that all unemployed Germans suddenly expected to show more initiative can actually find work.
Moreover, except for some cosmetic changes, Germany hasn't even started to tackle its huge social security problem. As in most industrialized countries, Germany's society is aging, putting enormous pressure on the country's pay-as-you-go pension system. For U.S. citizens worried sick about their country's own social security liabilities, a word of comfort: If Germans had America's Social Security system, they would consider their pension problems solved. Mandatory contributions of only 12% of gross salary? That sounds like utopia in Germany, where contributions make up around 20% of gross salary. Even those calling the loudest for social security reform in Germany would think it an enormous success if the country were able to hold its current contributions stable -- not very likely though under the current conditions.
The longer the government drags its feet, however, the more painful the inevitable reforms will be. One way or the other, the German dream will soon end. Six weeks' paid vacation, a 35-hour workweek and early retirement at 58 will soon be something German schoolchildren will read about in history books. As if remembering an era not yet quite lost, a theater in Hamburg recently organized an evening under the motto "No Work -- a Hymn to Laziness," with songs and texts all in praise of sloth. In homage to Florida Rolf, the venue was decorated with tropical decors and the organizers offered cocktails and exotic food.
Florida Rolf himself, meanwhile, had to return home last May, despite his allergy to his homeland -- but at government expense, of course. The public outrage about his welfare abuse triggered one of the fastest legislative acts in German history. In record time, the government passed the "Lex Florida Rolf" to curtail welfare payments to Germans living abroad. Mr. John immediately sued to be allowed to go back to Florida -- with his welfare checks fully reinstated, naturally. The case is still pending, but who knows, Mr. John, now 65, may yet enjoy his state-funded retirement on Miami Beach, margarita in hand.
Mr. Schwammenthal is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
from the Associated Press, 2004-Sep-21, by Barbara Borst:
U.S. declines to back poverty declaration
The presidents of Brazil and France inspired 110 countries to back a new declaration to fight hunger and poverty and to increase funds for development, but the United States was not among them.
On the eve of the annual gathering of the General Assembly, more than 50 heads of state and government joined a debate at the United Nations on Monday that focused on the impact of globalization and on ways to finance the war against poverty.
French President Jacques Chirac called the pledge to take action "unprecedented."
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared that "the issue of hunger has once and for all become a political priority."
Asked whether he was concerned by the lack of US support for the initiative that he launched, Silva told journalists that the United States had taken an important step by sending a representative.
US Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman said during Monday's debate that her government objected to proposals for international taxes, saying that they would be inherently undemocratic and impossible to implement.
US President George W. Bush skipped the two high-level meetings, but his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday also will emphasize international humanitarian concerns as the world body begins two weeks of meetings amid an upsurge of violence in Iraq and a massive humanitarian crisis in western Sudan.
One session focused on a UN report, released in February, that said the income gap between the richest and poorest countries has widened during the past four decades and that the vast majority of the world's population could fail to see the benefits of globalization. More than 1 billion people were living on less than $1 per day in 2000, the report said.
Chirac, who traveled to New York solely for Monday's meetings, said he and Silva would propose new approaches to fund the alleviation of poverty, although the meetings resulted in no specific proposals.
"I believe taxation is a necessity," he said at a press conference following the meeting.
The large number of supporters for the declaration creates "a new political situation" for the United States, Chirac said.
"You can't oppose that forever," he declared.
The French president, the most outspoken critic of the US-led war in Iraq, was to head back to Paris Monday night and won't cross paths with Bush.
The US president, who has focused on Iraq in his last two speeches to the General Assembly, is making a dramatic shift this year. He said in his radio broadcast Saturday he would "talk about the great possibilities of our time to improve health, expand prosperity and extend freedom in the world."
Monday's meeting was aimed at setting the stage for a General Assembly summit next year to assess progress toward meeting the goals of the 2000 Millennium Summit. Those goals include halving the number of people living in dire poverty from 2000 levels, and ensuring that all children have an elementary school education, that all families have clean water and that the AIDS epidemic is halted - all by 2015.
"Progress in eradicating extreme poverty has been uneven," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said during the meeting. "With creativity and political will, we could do much better."
The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, which was established in 2002 by the International Labor Organization, a UN agency, urged policy-makers in the February report to set fairer rules for trade and immigration so that millions of people can benefit - not suffer - from globalization.
Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa, who chairs the commission with Finland's President Tarja Halonen, said the disparities between the world's rich and poor countries was politically unsustainable.
"For me and for the people of Africa, the status quo is not an option," he said. "It is verily unacceptable."
The final declaration didn't focus on a specific proposal but committed governments to take "resolute and urgent actions" to ensure that the 2015 goals are met, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where the need is greatest.
"The greatest scandal is not that hunger exists, but that it persists even when we have the means to eliminate it," the declaration says. "It is time to take action. Hunger cannot wait."
from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2005-Jan-10, by Brian M. Carney:
Social Darwinism, French Style
What you see depends on where you stand, so it isn't surprising that if you ask an old-style industrialist what your country needs to shape up its economy, the answer is -- more old-line industrial giants.
French President Jacques Chirac asked the CEO of France's oldest industrial conglomerate what France should do to get its economy back on track. The answer -- surprise! -- is that France needs to do more to support and encourage growth and innovation at France's traditional industries. So last week the French president duly announced the creation of an industrial policy agency which will be provided with $2 billion over three years to boost French industry.
Jean-Louis Beffa, the chairman and CEO of Saint-Gobain, itself the product of Louis XIV's own industrial policy, is expected to make his report public this week, but he's already been speaking out on its finer points. France should look to Japan, Mr. Beffa avers, for a model of how to structure its economy. That Japan is only now awakening from almost 15 years of stagnation that was largely the result government-guided resource misallocation seems to bother Messrs. Beffa and Chirac not at all. Mr. Chirac sees his new agency as one that will give birth to Europe's next Arianes and Airbuses.
Perhaps he should be thinking about how to create the next Microsoft or Cisco instead. The trouble with trying to pick winners and give them the funds they need to succeed lies not so much in who gives them the money as in the impossibility of knowing in advance who the winners are going to be. This is not a question of skill; the best manager in the world is as likely as not to be wrong -- about what their customers want, what they're willing to pay for it, etc. -- close to half the time.
Companies spend a lot of time and money on customer research, "opposition" research and market analysis to try to improve this percentage. But at the end of the day, the only way to know for sure whether a product will sell is to put it out on the market and see if someone buys it. There are no sure things. This fact is of fundamental importance to understanding the operation of a free market.
The private sector plays this game better than the government for two reasons. It is not because governments are "stupid" and businesses are smart; there are plenty of badly run, blundering companies in the world and there are plenty of smart public servants. No, private businesses succeed in putting profitable, innovative products on the market because: 1. Companies are sensitive to price signals; and 2. There are lots of companies and their employees competing for sales and profits.
As consumers, we tend to think of prices as the little stickers on the things at the supermarket. But if you are a computer or consumer-products maker, prices are your connection to the outside world. By moving them up or down, you discover what customers are willing to pay, what price might induce a competitor's customer to switch, which customers are extremely price sensitive and which less so, and so on. This information is not just nice to have; it's essential -- because it's the only really solid information a business has on the preferences of its customers.
Government tends to work at a handicap in this regard because it gets very little pricing information about the value of its services. Taxes aren't paid by choice and expenditures generally do not have the discipline of having to generate a return on investment. Of course, taxpayers are customers of a sort, and they vote, but not very often. And when they do, the noise-to-signal ratio is often too high to determine just what it is they want for their money or how much they're willing to pay. But that's a topic for a different column.
Consumer choice works, of course, only when there are a lot of competitors for a consumer's favor. Over time, free markets provide what people want because a lot of different businesses are out there trying to give it to them. Any one particular venture may get it wrong, but the sheer number and variety of firms competing makes it more likely that someone, somewhere, will come up with the next big thing. When they do, they'll know it because customers will beat down their doors to buy it and they'll have to expand production or raise prices or both.
Which brings us back to Mr. Beffa's notion that the French taxpayer's money would be best spent trying to "strengthen the strong." Since France has a certain number of established and successful companies, and those companies by their sheer mass are capable of creating large numbers of jobs at once, Mr. Chirac, the argument goes, would spend his money best by supporting those companies' attempts to innovate.
Now, if you are the CEO of a company three centuries old, the idea of commandeering state resources to fund your own research has, no doubt, a certain appeal. The state cannot replicate the market -- although Jimmy Carter once forlornly tried to construct an artificial oil market in the U.S. -- so it inevitably turns to the old hands. Mr. Beffa's Saint-Gobain has been around for 340 years. But, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek noted, we'll never know what wasn't invented because government poured its immense resources into promoting this or that, even when it achieved some success.
So by supporting a limited number of projects, and possibly crowding out other, potentially more-successful ones, the French state vitiates one of the market's chief advantages -- the diversity of approaches that comes from multiple actors all autonomously pursuing their own projects and succeeding or failing on their merits. And by doing it with taxpayer funds rather than private capital, the state short-circuits the private sector's other virtue -- access to information about the price, and so the value, of the goals that it is attempting to pursue.
This leads to inefficient use of human and capital resources and deep structural problems in the economy, a la Japan 15 years ago. If Mr. Beffa wants France to adopt a Japanese model, he should consult a history book that doesn't end when the Nikkei average was at 50,000. Japan has had a long, painful hangover from the days when MITI picked the winners and a cozy corporatist arrangement greased the wheels of growth over there. The country is still trying to sort out the mess that resulted.
Of course, funding research at established companies has two big benefits from where Messrs. Beffa and Chirac are sitting. But neither has anything to do with the economy or innovation. From Mr. Chirac's perspective, big, established companies are far easier to exercise political influence over than tiny, disparate upstarts. Witness the arm-twisting that went into the Sanofi-Aventis merger last year. And for Mr. Beffa, a policy of subsidizing research at the established players discourages competition from upstarts that might upset the positions of those players in French industry. "Strengthen the strong," indeed.
Mr. Carney is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
from Reuters, 2004-Nov-29:
Paris: French troops fired on Ivorian crowds
Paris - French soldiers opened fire on crowds of angry youths during days of mob violence and looting in Ivory Coast earlier this month, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said.
French forces had previously said they fired warning shots during the unrest, but Alliot-Marie told France's RTL television on Sunday night the troops had most probably "made full use of their weapons" in some cases.
The mob violence erupted after government forces killed nine French soldiers and an American aid worker in a bombing raid on the rebel-held north, prompting the former colonial power to destroy most of Ivory Coast's small air force in retaliation.
The Ivorian government has repeatedly accused French forces of firing on crowds of unarmed demonstrators, particularly at the Hotel Ivoire in the main city, Abidjan. Paris has insisted the protesters were often armed with guns and machetes.
Alliot-Marie said the French troops sometimes had no choice but to open fire, particularly when they were returning from other parts of the country to protect French and other foreign nationals from attack in Abidjan.
"When they tried to stop our armoured vehicles from getting to Abidjan, to stop them from protecting our citizens and other foreigners who were victims of the violence, they had to fire," she said.
"Naturally, they fired warning shots and in some cases, most probably, they had to make full use of their firearms. That is the reality. There was nothing else that could be done."
Around 8 000 expatriates fled the world's top cocoa grower as militant supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo went on a looting rampage for several days. The government says 57 people were killed and more than 2 200 injured in the unrest.
Alliot-Marie said the troops had also fired to disperse crowds blocking two bridges linking residential and commercial parts of Abidjan to the airport.
She said the crowds were being forced to block the bridges by other protesters carrying arms.
"(The French troops) had to stop this crowd coming into contact (with the expatriates) otherwise there was a risk of a real massacre," she said.
The defence minister said the troops had remained calm throughout their mission.
"Faced with a crowd which was, after all - this has not been said enough - well-armed with Kalashnikovs (automatic rifles) and pistols and not just machetes, they showed composure and restraint," she said.
from the Chicago Sun-Times, 2003-Sep-14, by Mark Steyn:
Don't wait for government protection
On Sept. 11, 2001, the first individual to be named among the dead was the wife of the solicitor general, Barbara Olson, whom I'd sat next to at dinner a couple of months earlier. On Sept. 11, 2003, I woke to the news of the death of the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, whom I also sat next to a couple of months ago, at a conference. I can't claim anything other than the most casual acquaintance with either lady, but even an accidental proximity to the victims of terrible murder is sobering.
Lindh was a charmer, even if you didn't agree with a word she said. It wasn't until afterward that I found out she liked to refer to Bush as ''the Lone Ranger'' and that she'd complained about the United States dropping a bomb on six al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen: ''It is a summary execution that violates human rights,'' she said. ''Even terrorists must be treated according to international law.'' She believed in the so-called Swedish model, a phrase which to Don Rumsfeld probably means Anita Ekberg but which Swedes understand as the most advanced form of European cradle-to-grave welfare democracy. Conversely, the American model with its bizarre preoccupations -- guns, abortion, lethal injection, military budgets, non-confiscatory taxation -- strikes most European politicians as something from the Stone Age.
But, for the second time in as many weeks, I find myself wondering where European statism is heading. In France, where the death toll in the brutal Gallic summer is now up to 15,000, the attitude of Junior to the funny smell coming from gran'ma's apartment was the proverbial Gallic shrug and a demand that the government should do something about it. On Thursday, Swedes, though more upset, took much the same line: The government should have done more for Lindh.
''This can happen to anyone, anywhere,'' said Annika, described as ''a 24-year old bystander,'' at the scene of the attack. ''She should have had bodyguards.''
There seem to have been an awful lot of bystanders to Lindh's stabbing -- in broad daylight, in a crowded Stockholm department store, after being pursued by her assailant up an escalator. Granted that most of the people bystanding around were women, it still seems odd -- at least from this side of the Atlantic -- that no one attempted to intervene or halt the blood-drenched killer as he calmly left the store. I'm inclined to agree with Jimmy Hoffa that I'd rather jump a gun than a knife -- and evidently Jimmy's luck ran out eventually -- but, if just a handful of the dozens present, had acted rather than bystanding, Lindh might still be dead but her killer would be in jail and not en route, like the late Prime Minister Olav Palme's murderer, to becoming yet another man who got away.
''It's terrible wherever it happens,'' said Fredrik Sanabria. ''But you think you would be safe from this kind of violence in a country like Sweden.''
Really? Why would you think that? Sweden's violent crime and murder rates have been going up, up, up over the last quarter-century. But just about every Swede quoted in every news story seems mired in what National Review's Dave Kopel described, after 9/11, as ''the culture of passivity.'' The lone exception was Lanja Rashid, a Kurdish immigrant. ''If I had been there at the stabbing, I would have ripped his face off,'' she said. ''We Swedes have to think again. How could he have got away? How could people just stand back and watch?''
You can blame it on a lack of police, as everyone's doing. But Lindh's killer didn't get away with it because of the people who weren't there but because of the people who were: the bystanders. When I bought my home in New Hampshire, I heard a strange rustling one night, and being new to rural life, asked my police chief the following morning, if it had turned out to be an intruder whether I should have called him at home. ''Well, you could,'' said Al. ''But it would be better if you dealt with him. You're there and I'm not.'' That's the best advice I've ever been given.
This isn't an argument for guns, though inevitably Sweden has gun control, knife control and everything else. It's more basic than that: It's about the will to be a citizen, not just a suckler of the nanny-state narcotic. In Lee Harris' forthcoming book Civilization And His Enemies, he talks about the threat of societal forgetfulness: ''Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.''
Lindh would have thought that was just American cowboy talk: too raw, too primal to be of relevance in Europe. But I don't think so. On 9/11 the only good news that lousy day was that the fourth plane never got to slice through the White House. That's because a bunch of passengers decided they weren't going to follow FAA regulations and outmoded 1970s hijack procedures but instead rose up against the terrorists. ''C'mon, guys, let's roll!'' said Todd Beamer. They could have used him in that department store.
That's the big lesson I took away from Sept. 11: Don't be passive. After 9/11, my wife bought me a cell phone, so that in the event I found myself in a similar situation I could at least call my family one last time. It's not much use up here in the mountains, so I never bothered getting it out of the box. If I ever am on a hijacked plane, while everyone else is dialing home, I'll be calling AT&T or Verizon trying to set up an account. But, of course, no one will ever hijack an American plane ever again -- not because of idiotic confiscations of tweezers, but because of the brave passengers on that fourth flight. That's why, three months later, the great British shoebomber had barely got the match to his sock before half the cabin pounded the crap out of him. Even the French. To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.
from Reuters, 2004-Oct-5:
Tax on Men for Violence on Women Proposed
STOCKHOLM - A group of Swedish parliamentarians proposed levying a "man tax" to cover the social cost of violence against women.
"It must be obvious to all of us that society has a huge problem with male violence against women and that has a cost," Left Party deputy Gudrun Schyman told Swedish radio on Monday.
"We must have a discussion where men understand they as a group have a responsibility," said Schyman, one of the party members to sign the motion for debate on the new tax.
Sweden already has the highest taxes in the European Union as a percentage of gross domestic product to pay for its famous but hard-pushed cradle-to-grave welfare program.
It is also one of the world's most advanced nations in terms of gender equality, but Schyman said in a headline-hitting 2002 speech that discrimination in Sweden followed "the same pattern" as in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
from National Review Online, 2003-Nov-18, by Amir Taheri:
The London Streets
Who are these anti-Bush people?LONDON -- George W. Bush's visit to London this week will be historic for at least two reasons. He will be the first U.S. president to come to Britain on a state visit. He will also observe a bizarre political marriage: one between the remnants of the Marxist-Leninist Left and militant Islamists. Negotiated over the past two years, the "wedding," will be celebrated in a mass demonstration against Bush's visit.
The demonstration is organized by a shadowy group called "Stop the War Coalition," part of the Hate-America-International, which has orchestrated a number of street "events" in support of the Taliban and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein since 2001.
When I called the coalition to ask whether the idea was to stop all wars, a spokeswoman assured me that this was not the case.
She referred me to the first article of the coalition's charter that states: "The aim of the coalition is simple: to stop the war currently declared by the United States and its allies against 'terrorism.'"
"We really want to stop Bush and Blair from going around killing babies," she said. "Our objective is to force the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan."
But what if a U.S. withdrawal means the return of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein?
"Anything would be better than American Imperialist rule," she snapped back.
Who are these nostalgics of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein?
The coalition has a steering committee of 33 members. Of these, 18 come from various hard left groups: Communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, and Castrists. Three others belong to the radical wing of the Labour party. There are also eight radical Islamists. The remaining four are leftist ecologists known as "Watermelons" (Green outside, red inside).
The chairman of the coalition is one Andrew Murray, a former employee of the Soviet Novosty Agency and leader in the British Communist party. Cochair is Muhammad Asalm Ijaz of the London Council of Mosques. Members include John Rees of the Socialist Workers' party and Ghayassudin Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament. Tanja Salem of the Al-awdah (The Return) group, an outfit close to Yasser Arafat, is also a member along with Shahedah Vawda of "Just Peace," another militant Arab group, and Wolf Wayne of the "Green Socialist Network."
A prominent member is George Galloway, a Labour-party parliamentarian under investigation for the illegal receipt of funds from Saddam Hussein. In his memoirs, Galloway says that the day the Soviet Union collapsed was "the saddest day" of his life.
Galloway says the only terrorism in the world today comes from the United States, not from organizations such as al Qaeda or the remnants of the Iraqi Baath party.
The coalition was created in London in September 2001, at first as an exclusively leftist concoction bringing together the remnants of the Stalinist "peace movement" of the 1950s, diehard "no nukes" activists, and some fellow travellers.
The coalition has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. For the first time ever it has brought together all radical leftist and anarchist groups. Under its umbrella march such traditional former archenemies as Stalinists and Trotskyites.
But the coalition's biggest success is the alliance that it has forged between the extreme Left and militant Islamist groups. This would have been unthinkable even a couple of years ago. The Left always regarded Islam as a "relic of feudalism" and an instrument of reactionary Arab regimes. For their part, the Islamists regarded leftists as atheist enemies who had to be put to the sword.
The first to advocate a leftist-Islamist alliance against Western democracies was Ayman Al Zawahiri al Qaeda's #2.
In a message to al Qaeda sympathizers in Britain in August 2002, he urged them to seek allies among "any movement that opposes America, even atheists."
The idea has received strong support from Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal."
In his book Revolutionary Islam, published in Paris last month, Carlos, who says he has converted to Islam, says he has advised Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, to forge an alliance with "all guerrilla, terrorist and other revolutionary groups throughout the world, regardless of their religious or ideological beliefs."
Carlos says Islam is the only force capable of persuading large numbers of people to become "volunteers" for suicide attacks against the U.S.
"Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the US," he says.
This week's anti-Bush demonstration in London will mark the emergence of a coalition the hard core of which consists of the radical Left and militant Islamism. Around it we find other groups who hate the U.S. for different reasons. There are supporters of free abortion, opponents of capital punishment, anti-globalization fanatics, advocates of the Kyoto protocol on the environment, and anti-Semites who believe the Jews control the United States. But a good part of the planned demonstrations will, as always, consist of what Lenin called "the useful idiots", men and women of good faith whose political naiveté makes them natural targets for experts in agitprop.
But why are these people taking to the streets?
One reason is that the parties, groups, and individuals involved have consistently failed to find a place in the normal institutions of British democracy.
The 60 or so leftist and Islamist groups involved in this odd enterprise have never managed to win more than one half of one percent of the votes in any British general election. Nor have they succeeded in winning a single seat in parliament or a majority in a single municipal council.
Those who can never win elections, always take to the streets. Street politics enables them to escape debate on complex issues that cannot be reduced to a few simplistic slogans.
Britain's participation in the war against terrorism was the subject of four exhaustive debates in the House of Commons in 2001 and 2002, each followed by a vote that Prime Minister Tony Blair won.
Street politics is for those who wish to abolish individual political judgment, the cornerstone of democratic life. Street politics encourages the irrational tendencies of crowds that could turn into hunting packs or lynch mobs. Power won in the streets produces only ochlocracy (rule by the worst).
To make sure that no discordant voice is heard, the organizers of the demonstrations have announced that only "authorized" t-shirts, hats and other paraphernalia will be allowed. Only four slogans are permitted: "Stop Bush," "Stop Blair," " U.S. Out of Iraq and Afghanistan," and " Bush Go Home!"
The demonstration's security force, made up of muscular Marxists and Islamists, has instructions to prevent any sign of pro-American sentiments. A group that has said it wants to take part in the demonstrations with t-shirts saying "Bush-Cheney: Four More Years!" has been warned of "dire consequences."
The London demonstration is planned and will be supervised in the best Stalinist traditions still in force in North Korea.
In countries that suffer under despotism, the street is, at times, the only space available to the opposition. This is why we hear so much about the so-called "Arab street." But do we need a "British street" that disdains the institutions of democracy, including mainstream political parties, and the parliament?
Amir Taheri, and NRO contributor, is an Iranian author of ten books on the Middle East and Islam. Taheri is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.
Read how the radical left in the west is systematically facilitating Islamofascist terrorism: Solidarity With Terror, from Front Page Magazine, 2004-Jul-2, by Lee Kaplan
from highclearing.com, 2004-Feb-22, by Jim Henley:
to me.) Oh wait. It was just last month. Now Matt is gently suggesting that there's something to this education makes you liberal stuff after all. ("Indeed, the right normally lauds this fact," Matt continues, "liberalism is for wussy 'intellectuals' and 'special interest groups' (i.e., black people) while regular (white) people vote Republican."When All the Time There's This Great Plank in Your Own - Matthew Yglesias picked up on a Volokh thread about whether stupid people are conservative, smart people are liberal and, one presumes, people of average intelligence are moderates, and writes
This is all well-and-good, but the fact remains that people with a lot of schooling really do tend to be liberals.It seems like just last month liberal bloggers were proclaiming the left wing bias of academia a myth. (See Kevin Drum and Jesse Taylor and letters from Kevin and Chad Orzel
Anyway, don't worry about me. I can keep up.
What may be happening here is a familiar phenomenon: "progressives" tend to forget what they know about perceived self-interest, and class interest, when it comes time to explain themselves. If you see higher education as not just a system of transmitting wisdom but a process of reinforcing a set of values and a sense of identity, the "liberalism" of the highly-schooled seems easy enough to explain. Modern liberalism as it has evolved from the Progressive Movement period forward is an ideology of managerialism. Unruly society needs guidance to overcome the "short-sighted" perspectives of economic actors and citizens. American managerialist liberalism abjures absolute control over the totality of daily life, at least in theory, but still believes that there needs to be "someone at the wheel."
In some ways, the liberal managerialist vision may be even more attractive than the Leninist one to intellectuals, and this may have as much to do with its outlasting Leninism as the fact that the American-liberal version of Vanguard Theory is more in touch with reality than outright socialism proved to be. Under communism, the ruling class has to do even the scut work of planning - running the factories, deciding where every box of pencils gets shipped and so on. In American managerialism, aka liberalism, the Vanguard only has to do the cool jobs. The boring stuff (to your Kennedy School type) is outsourced to Republicans, Chamber of Commerce types who get a long leash but still must, when the government speaks, obey.
Plus, in the managerial-liberal state, the managerialist has the additional frisson of knowing how tough his job is. She or he does not have the socialist's conviction that of course an entire political economy can be guided from above by a sure hand. Rather, she or he has some sense that society is as massive and complex as a rodeo animal (the metaphor probably isn't the one that comes to her mind), as inertial as a tractor-trailer. The managerialist doesn't imagine that she can rewire the guts of the bronco - it will still be what it is - but judicious pressure should suffice to prevent it careering into the rails and keep it pointed in the right direction.
What is the "right direction" is subject to change, of course, and guess who decides.
Anyway, the last three paragraphs are a detour from what I set out to write, a bit of off the cuff speculation. Getting back the the idea of "someone at the wheel," the central metaphor for the welfare state, the point is simply that there is no shortage of willing hands, One way to look at it is that since managing a society is conceived as an intricate undertaking, naturally it is seen as requiring specialized training. That means the willing hands will be in school for awhile. The managerial class is large. It includes not just elected and appointed officialdom, but the class of civil servants and, around them, the advocacy groups and journals of opinion. The longer anyone spends in post-secondary education, particularly in the departments dedicated to training "the leaders of tomorrow" - political science, administration, education and the other humanities departments that even Chad Orzel's letter concedes skew left politically - the more likely they are to know, like and identify with the trainees. Shared circumstance becomes shared values - that would seem to be the very meaning of class consciousness.
Matt is a great guy. I get to see him every couple of months, on average, at blog-related gatherings, and I always look forward to it. He makes relatively little money and lives on a dodgy block. But because of his job with the American Prospect and the connections there and from Harvard, Matt is a junior member in good standing of the managerial class, and one with a bright future ahead of him because of his talent and energy. Because Matt is a great guy, people that know people like him are unlikely to find the type inherently frightening or alien. People that don't know a lot of Matts - country people, business people, people who majored in other subjects, you name it - are more likely to see the managerial class purely in terms of the power it wields, to regard it as the bronco regards the rider.
This has everything to do with why the white working class is not as reliably liberal as liberals think it should be.
But there's another way of looking at it too. I follow Matt's philosophy posts as best I can, and his point about the unpopularity of consequentialism among philosophers has relevance:
[C]onsequentialism suffers from a fatal flaw as a moral philosophy. Namely, it doesn't lend itself to the construction of normative philosophical ethical or political theories, since it implies that you ought to be asking an economist or a sociologist or a political scientist what to do and not a philosopher. Thus, folks who study philosophy and become convinced that consequentialism is correct are not likely to make careers for themselves as moral philosophers. They'll either do work in metaphysics, epistemology, etc. or else not do philosophy at all, leaving the moral philosophy jobs to be taken by sundry Kantians or Williams/Nussbaum-style mysterians. Something similar could be said about philosophy of mind and identity theory.
Turning this around, we can see that departments of political science and public administration will be happiest with a world view that maximizes the amount of politics and bureaucracy. Conservatism figures we already know how society should be run. Conservatives don't need managers, they need police. Libertarians figure society can largely run itself. Libertarians need all kinds of things, but not a lot of politicians or civil servants. Liberalism's two rivals lose by default.
The other class interest angle is revenge, but I've written about that before.
from the BBC, 2003-Nov-17, by Tamsin Smith, BBC reporter in Rome:
Italian group backs Iraq fighters
A group of Italian militants involved in staging anti-war protests is raising funds to support the armed Iraqi resistance, the BBC has learned.
The discovery comes as Italy mourns 19 men killed in a suicide attack in Iraq last week.
The "Antiimperialista" organisation's internet campaign asks people to send "10 Euros to the Iraqi resistance".
They say they have collected 12,000 euros ($14,165) in the past eight weeks and admit the money used could be used to buy weapons.
The Antiimperialistas are a group of European anti-war and anti-globalisation supporters.
They are currently organising an anti-war demonstration in Italy next month, and it remains to be seen whether news of the fund-raising activities will deter more moderate anti-war activists from attending.
The organisation's Italian branch says the money will be given to an Iraqi resistance group known as the Iraqi Patriotic Opposition.
Independent Iraqi sources in London say the leaders of this group have a long history of association with the Baath party and are now back in Iraq supporting the armed resistance.
``To think there are people in Italy collecting money in order to kill our heroes is really a shame''
Lucio Malan
Forza Italia PartyThe Italian spokesman of the antiimperialistas, Moreno Pasquinelli, says the money collected so far is in an Italian bank account.
Mr Pasquinelli said it would be taken to Iraq in January. He was candid when asked about raising money for the Iraqi Patriotic Opposition which says it actively supports military resistance.
"Its not our affair how they use this money. If they want to use it to print papers for example, or to buy weapons in order to fight for the Iraqi independence," he said.
"We support the armed struggle in Iraq. our money is to help them, it doesn't matter to us if they use it buy weapons, Kalashnikovs, or medicines for people."
When asked to confirm if the money raised could be used to buy weapons he admitted: "Yes they could, and why not?"
Shame
The Italian Interior Ministry refused to comment, saying the matter was with the security services.
Lucio Malan, a senator from the governing Forza Italia Party, was shocked to hear about the campaign.
"The first word that comes to my mind is shame and horror," he told BBC Radio Four's Today programme.
"They are raising money against people (Italian troops) who are defending the peace, the security of the people of that country. They have not killed or wounded anyone in that country they are helping to take away unexploded bombs."
He said the group's activities "collecting money to give it outspokenly to terrorist groups" was certainly illegal in Italy.
from the Telegraph, 2003-Aug-23, by Mark Steyn:
Iraq may be on the edge but France has hit rock bottom abyss
'The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell," thundered George Galloway last month. "Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour."
As usual, George was a little off. The gates of hell are on the périphérique and it's 100 degrees at midnight in the pissoir on the Metro. To date, two US soldiers are believed to have succumbed to the heat in Iraq, whereas over 10,000 people have succumbed to it in France.
That would make George's brutal Iraqi summer about one five-thousandth as lethal as the brutal Gallic summer, which has killed more people than the brutal Afghan winter (now 23 months behind schedule), the brutal Iraqi summer and the searing heat of the Guantanamo torture camps combined and multiplied by a thousand.
Certainly, Iraq has its problems. Jacques Chirac, en vacances just up the road from me in North Hatley, Quebec, took time out of his three-week holiday to issue a statement on events in Baghdad, where 20 people died on Tuesday. But he didn't bother to interrupt his vacation to issue a statement on events in France, where so many people have died, the funeral homes are standing room only and they're having to store bodies in the freezers at the fruit and veg markets.
Now that his old pal and nuclear client has been removed from power, M Chirac is utterly irrelevant to the future of Iraq. But surely France still falls within his jurisdiction, doesn't it?
And where are the Red Cross and Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and all the other noisy humanitarians? If 10,000 Iraqis had died of dysentery on George W Bush's watch, you'd never hear the end of it. A few weeks back, with three fatal cases of cholera, the Humanitarian Lobby was already shrieking that we stood on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe.
France isn't on the edge, it's in the abyss. When I motored round Iraq a couple of months ago, the hospital wards were well below capacity. Yet in France the entire health system – or that percentage of it not spending August at the beach – is stretched beyond its limits (35 hours a week, 44 weeks a year). Why aren't Médecins Sans Frontières demanding to be allowed in to take over?
There's an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different disasters on American TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But 10,000 French can die, and even the French don't seem to care – or not too much, and not with any great urgency.
Bernard Mazeyrie, managing director of France's largest undertakers, told the New York Times that several of the bereaved were in no hurry to bury their aged loved ones: "Some, he said, informed of the death of relatives, postponed funerals, not to interrupt the August 15 holiday weekend, and left the bodies in the refrigerated hall." Au bord de la mer? Ou au bord de ma mère? Hmm. Tough call.
I don't know what M Chirac heard in the dépanneurs and resto-bars of Quebec this week, but what I heard south of the border was complete amazement at how a nominally First World country could be so insouciant about an entirely avoidable Third World death toll. President Bush and the entire Washington press corps are spending a month in heat equal to the brutal Parisian summer, and he's playing golf in it all day while they stand around watching; in Phoenix tomorrow and Monday, it will be an unremarkable 105. This isn't about the weather.
In Paris this spring, a government official explained to me how Europeans had created a more civilised society than America - socialised healthcare, shorter work weeks, more holidays. We've just seen where that leads: gran'ma turned away from the hospital to die in an airless apartment because junior's sur la plage. M Chirac's somewhat tetchy suggestion that his people should rethink their attitude to the elderly was well taken. But Big Government inevitably diminishes its citizens' capacity to take responsibility, to the point where even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the state should do something about.
Meanwhile, Maggie Pernot wrote the other day to chide me for my continued defence of the Rumsfeld Death Camps at Guantanamo. The prisoners, she complains, are "kept in tiny, chainlink outdoor cages where they were likely to be rained upon". In fact, they have sloping roofs and cool concrete floors, perfect for the climate. If they had solid walls rather than airy wire mesh, they'd be Parisian sweatboxes and everyone would be dead. By contrast, if those thousands of French pensioners had been captured by the Marines and detained by Rummy in Cuba, they'd be alive today.
Mme Pernot writes from St Julien, France. That's right: she's surrounded by an actual humanitarian scandal on all sides but she'd rather obsess about an entirely fictional one. Heat getting to you, Madame? Or just the unusual odour from the flat next door?
from the Associated Press, 2003-Sep-9, by Joseph Coleman:
Absent doctors blamed for French heat wave deaths
Report also implicates understaffed hospitals and bureaucratic nightmares for letting down elderlyPARIS -- A scathing French government report Monday blamed hospital understaffing during summer holidays, chronic bureaucratic snags and a dearth of elderly care for the 11,400-plus death toll in this summer's brutal heat wave.
Also Monday, the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics estimated 1,000 to 1,400 people died in the Netherlands from the heat that gripped Europe this summer -- higher than an earlier projection of 500 to 1,000.
The French report, ordered by the Health Ministry, pointed to disarray and lack of communication between weather officials, emergency services and hospitals, and said that a "massive" exodus of doctors on August vacation left many elderly to fend for themselves.
"Hospitals found themselves in growing difficulties to provide personnel in a sufficient number," said the 47-page report, with some 100 additional pages of graphs and charts. The study also said France's 35-hour workweek had cut into hospital staffing.
Michel Combier, president of the National General Practitioners Union, said it was unfair to blame doctors and other health care workers for going on vacation at the same time as everyone else.
"The problem wasn't that everyone was on vacation, but that the alert system was too weak to allow for hospitals to get everyone back working," Combier told The Associated Press. "And the catastrophe, of course, was totally unpredictable and out of the ordinary."
The government has put the provisional death toll at 11,435 from the heat wave, which brought choking temperatures of up to 104 in the first two weeks of August in a country where air conditioning is rare. The heat baked many parts of Europe, killing livestock and fanning forest fires.
The high death toll -- no other European country even came close -- has triggered an emotional debate in France over shortcomings in its highly regarded health system. The government is considering eliminating a national holiday to raise revenues for elderly care.
The French joie de vivre has also come under scrutiny, since some of the elderly victims died alone in their homes while families were away on lengthy August holidays. Authorities reportedly had difficulties making contact with survivors who were away at the beach or vacationing in the mountains.
The report listed several major factors in the high death toll.
Among them was a lack of coordination between meteorological agencies and health care institutions. The report said better methods should be developed to communicate early warnings of potentially dangerous weather conditions to health authorities.
The study also took hospitals and clinics to task for being able only to respond to demands rather than take initiative in a crisis.
Bureaucratic divisions also played a part, meaning there was little sharing of information between ministries and emergency services. France's system of tallying death tolls was blamed for being too slow to alert authorities to a crisis.
The report also said many general doctors -- who provide a large part of the care for France's elderly -- were away on vacation.
and more hospital beds than expected were taken out of service for the summer.
The number of patients in France's city hospitals was already "intolerable" by Aug. 10, and peaked two days later, with hospitalization rates five times what they were last year at that time, the report said.
"Despite all their efforts, personnel were unable to stop the almost total flooding of emergency services and the intolerable crowding of hospital corridors," the authors wrote.
In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit doctors for hospitals, the study said.
The report called for an alert system to identify and check up on vulnerable elderly people, emergency coordination between weather agencies and the health system and a reform of emergency services to gear them more toward the aged, among other steps.
Patrick Pelloux, president of the Emergency Hospital Doctors Association of France, said a significant increase in funding would be needed to strengthen services for the elderly.
"It's necessary to give considerable means at the level of emergency services so they can work in close coordination with general doctors," Pelloux told France-Info radio.
from the New York Post, 2003-Oct-8, by Kate Sheehy:
PARIS HAILS 'CITIZEN' COP-KILLER MUMIA
October 8, 2003 -- The French-fried brains of Paris have stooped to yet another low - bestowing the title of honorary citizen on notorious convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The last time the wacky weasels handed out the title was in 1971 - to Pablo Picasso.
"Mumia is a Parisian!" Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe shouted as he pumped his fist to the cheers of the crowd of about 200 mostly left-wing activists in a bizarre city ceremony over the weekend.
Abu-Jamal - a radical former Black Panther whose real name is Wesley Cook - was convicted in 1982 for the fatal, coldblooded shooting of Philadelphia city cop Daniel Faulkner during a routine traffic stop.
His death sentence was overturned in 2001, after years of outcry from everyone from international rights groups to a slew of Hollywood stars.
He remains on Pennsylvania's death row while an appeal is pending.
Delanoe claimed that the move to honor the U.S. felon was done to show support for France's opposition to the death penalty. The land of the guillotine abolished capital punishment in 1981.
"As long as there is a place on this planet where one can be killed in the name of the community, we haven't finished our work," Delanoe said, referring to the death penalty as "barbarity."
But one U.S. political analyst called the move merely a Parisian poke at Americans.
"[It's] a chance for France to tweak America's nose and try to proclaim their cultural superiority for not having capital punishment," Sterling Burnett, of the National Center for Policy Analysis, told Cybercast News Service.
Angela Davis, also a former Black Panther and now a professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, accepted an honorary medal and certificate from Parisian officials in Abu-Jamal's name.
In doing so, Davis hailed the convict's "profound sense of humanity" while ripping U.S. "racist attacks against immigrants," as well as its "aggression against the Iraqi people."
With Post Wire Services
from Ananova.com, 2003-Nov-3:
Burglars scared off by corpse
Two French burglars who broke into a house were scared off when they came across the body of the owner - who died years earlier.
The noise of the burglars breaking into the Paris apartment woke a neighbour, who went to investigate.
She saw the two men running off and went inside the apartment to find the body of the 70-year-old owner.
The woman called police, who confirmed the man had died of natural causes - about four years ago.
Neighbours say they hadn't noticed the man had not been seen for so long because he was very quiet and kept himself to himself.
The caretaker of the building said: "He was a nice old man who lived alone and didn't speak with anyone."
from the Associated Press, 2002-Nov-4:
Saddam banks on protesters to quash effort to strike Iraq
CAIRO, Egypt -- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said in a rare interview that he believed the American and British determination to make war on Iraq could collapse under the weight of anti-war sentiment in the two countries.
"Time is in our favor, and we have to buy more time, hoping that the U.S.-British alliance might disintegrate because of ... the pressure of public opinion on American and British streets," Saddam told the Egyptian weekly Al-Osboa in the interview published Sunday.
"The demonstrations in the Arab and Western world include hundreds of thousands of peace-loving people who are protesting the war and aggression on Iraq," he said, apparently referring to protests in the United States and around the world last month.
Pointing to Arab public opinion as a force in Iraq's favor, Saddam also appealed to Arab leaders to defend Iraq. Arguing that Washington's goal was to control Mideast oil, he said that after attacking Iraq, U.S. forces could strike at other Arab countries and non-Arab Iran.
Most of Saddam's statements were standard Iraqi rhetoric -- he blamed "Zionist schemes" for Iraq's troubles and said invading Iraq would not be "a picnic" for American and British forces.
But his references to anti-war demonstrations in the West were the first signal he believed protests could undermine President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the chief advocates of attacking Iraq.
Al-Osboa said the interview took just over two hours and was conducted at one of Saddam's presidential palaces on the outskirts of Baghdad, with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz present.
Reporter Sayed Nassar made the trip from his hotel in Baghdad to the interview in three different government-owned luxury cars, each with curtains over the side windows.
While the United States has said it wants to oust Saddam to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Iraqi president maintained in the interview that America's real design is to take control of Middle East oil to serve the interests of its ally, Israel.
"The Arab oil will be under the U.S. control and the region, especially where oil flows, will be under full American hegemony. All this serves Israel's interest with the aim of turning it to a vast empire in the region," Saddam said.
U.S. officials have consistently argued their goal is not to control Iraq's oil.
Saddam said that Washington's plan was to first attack Baghdad, then other "rebellious Arab capitals" that oppose American control over the region.
Saddam said that while the United States has far greater military power than Iraq, U.S.-led coalition forces could not expect to walk over Iraq as they did the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"We will never make it a picnic for the American and British soldiers," he said.
from the Associated Press via CNN, 2002-Aug-26:
Sweden's health becomes political issue
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Sweden exudes good health and well-being in summer. The air smells of pine trees and people of all ages bicycle and stroll well after dinner under the late-setting sun.
But as Swedes return from country cottages and Mediterranean beaches and prepare for an election September 15, they are grappling with a vexing problem: one of every six working-age Swedes is off work because of illness or injury.
The number of people on government-paid sick leave has doubled in five years, and welfare benefits for the sick and disabled now exceed the government's military and education budgets combined.
In all, about 340,000 Swedes -- one in every 26 of a population of 8.9 million -- are getting sick pay from the National Social Insurance Board, a third for longer than a year. An additional 470,000 are on disability pensions -- early-retirement benefits paid by the government to those who stop working before the retirement age of 65. These often are bigger than regular pensions.
Sick Swedes -- and what makes them sick -- are one of the main election issues.
The governing center-left Social Democratic Party, seeking to extend an eight-year spell in office, has commissioned studies and written reports saying job conditions are getting harder and more stressful.
Opponents, led by the center-right Moderate and Christian Democratic parties, say the government is looking for a cure in all the wrong places. The problem, they say, is not workers' health but cushy welfare policies that are eroding the work ethic.
Whatever the explanation, the cost -- about $12 billion a year, or 16 percent of this year's national budget -- worries officials.
"I don't think we can accept any higher costs. Then we risk having to change compensation levels and the sickness insurance loses its function and legitimacy," said Rolf Lundgren, chief economic analyst at the National Social Insurance Board, which picks up the tab from the employer after a worker's second week of absence due to sickness.
Sweden has long been viewed by many as a model welfare state, characterized by high taxes, extensive government benefits and a relatively small gap between rich and poor.
Although social benefits were scaled back somewhat during a recession in the mid-1990s, subsidized health care and compensation pay for unemployment or parental leave. The system is financed by some of the highest taxes in the world on income, wealth, property and purchases.
Sick leave amounts to 80 percent of a worker's pay. The maximum benefit is 623 kronor a day, or about $65. After taxes that adds up to about $1,500 a month -- about what many workers get for four 40-hour weeks.
Sick leave pay is subject to income tax, which ranges from 30 to 60 percent.
Workers who have taken time off contend the pressures and strains of the job are legitimate reasons for going on sick leave.
"The wheels are spinning too quickly," said Anna Eriksson, 29, a nurse who took off for two months last year, calling herself burned out. "The working environment simply has become tougher. You have to do twice the work you did before."
Anbritt Ludvigsson, a 60-year-old payroll administrator who has been on paid leave for 18 months, said a combination of family problems and a heavy work load disabled her.
"I couldn't log onto the computer. I had forgotten everything," she recalled, struggling to hold back tears.
Opponents of the generous policies say that paid sick leave has come to be seen as an entitlement rather than a benefit and that frivolous claims are partly to blame for the abrupt rise in sick leave since 1997, when only about 170,000 Swedes received payments.
Swedes "need to be pampered, placed on treadmills and surrounded by fruit baskets to cope with work," book publisher Helena Riviere wrote in an opinion article for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
Riviere said the generous leave policies invite people to abuse the system by calling in sick simply because they're "fed up with work or dissatisfied with their lives in general."
A recent survey of 2,000 Swedes by the polling institute Temo found that 60 percent believe it's acceptable to call in sick for reasons other than illness -- for family problems or stress, for example.
"If people continue using sickness compensation like this, there won't be much left over for those who really are sick," said Eric Jannerfeldt, a spokesman for the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, which represents employers.
The business group estimates the value of lost man-hours at $16 billion a year.
Economists Magnus Henrekson and Mats Persson say the high sick pay may be part of the problem. In an article for an academic journal, they linked variations in sick leave during the past five decades to changes in the compensation system.
Their theory doesn't explain why sick leave numbers started growing in 1997 after a steady decline in most of the '90s. But Henrekson and Persson note the surge intensified in 1998 after the Social Democratic government raised compensation levels to 80 percent of wages from 75 percent.
"One thing is certain. When you raise compensation levels, more people take advantage of the system," Henrekson said.
Sick leave also is high in neighboring Norway, which has higher compensation than Sweden, but it is lower in Denmark and Finland, where compensation is lower. Other European countries report lower rates than Sweden, but direct comparisons are difficult because of variations in data.
Labor Minister Mona Sahlin blames the problem on too much work being done by too few workers. She says job cuts and restructuring throughout the Swedish economy during a recession in the early 1990s increased the strains on workers.
Other experts concur that an aging work force, economic globalization and public sector cutbacks explain some of the surge in sick leave claims.
Still, Sweden remains a world leader in labor safety and social welfare. Most employees have a 40-hour week -- and get overtime if they work more -- and the law guarantees five weeks of vacation a year.
Work-related deaths are among the lowest in the world, and workplace safety is closely monitored. Life expectancy has increased over the last decade by 2.5 years for men, to 76.9, and by 1.6 years for women, to 81.8.
"They really take care of you here," said Samantha Budd, a British researcher who works for drug maker AstraZeneca in Soedertaelje, south of Stockholm. Her move to Sweden from the United States allowed her more time off, a slower work pace and ergonomic office furniture tailored to her body.
"If it has slipped in standards, what was there before? It's hard to imagine," she said.
from the New York Times, 2002-Sep-24, by Warren Hoge:
Swedes Are Out Sick Longer, and Budget Is Ailing
LIDINGO, Sweden - Anki Stenemyr, an energetic 58-year-old personnel manager in a Stockholm engineering consultancy, survived a sideswipe auto collision in July 2000 with no noticeable injuries but suffered lingering pain from whiplash.
Now, two and a half years later, she is still on government-paid sick leave, resting at her comfortable three-story home on this island community in Stockholm's suburbs, with breaks for stretching drills in her living room, restorative walks through pine woods and the occasional round of golf.
She is one of the Swedes exercising the most generous absentee rights in the world in such growing numbers that the country's cradle-to-grave welfare budget faces a cash crisis.
A government report this month showed that one in 20 Swedish workers were on sick leave for more than a week last year, double the European Union average, and that paid sick leave averaged nearly 25 days, up from 14 days in 1998. An average of 430,000 Swedish employees, 10 percent of the country's work force, is on sick leave at any given time.
According to another study, carried out for the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise by the research firm Temo, 62 percent of the employees interviewed said they had taken sick leave when they were not really sick and that they felt there was nothing wrong in doing so.
"For a long time, the slogan in Sweden was, `Do your duty, claim your rights,' " said Dr. Eric Jannerfeldt, 57, medical adviser to the confederation, which is Sweden's principal business association. "Now it's becoming more and more just, `Claim your rights.'
Under the Swedish system, a person does not need a doctor's excuse until the eighth day out and can take up to a week off six times in a year before employers can act to move the person onto government support. The first day of sick leave is unpaid, the next two weeks are paid at the 80 percent rate by the employer, and then the government takes over.
The government pays a benefit equal to 80 percent of a person's salary during sick leave, no matter how long, and an additional 10 percent in what is called "contract insurance" for the first three months. This public outlay has grown to $5.3 billion annually from just over $2 billion in 1998.
Getting a doctor's certificate often takes just a phone call. The Temo study showed that physicians routinely approve sick leaves solely at a patient's request.
"It takes 30 seconds to write a doctor's note," Dr. Jannerfeldt said. "It can take an hour to convince someone that he or she is ready to go back to work, and meanwhile your waiting room is filling up."
Employers are responsible for steering employees with long-term health problems into government-run rehabilitation programs. Mrs. Stenemyr, for example, has easy access to doctors, physical therapists and psychologists, who have mapped a program for her aimed at getting her ready to take a new job by this January - but only for 20 percent of her normal work time.
Seated with a thick file of medical reports on her lap, she told of how in the months after her accident she developed headaches, felt her limbs go heavy, got persistent infections, repeatedly fell asleep, lost the ability to make decisions, and experienced what she called "burnout and angst."
She held up a handwritten list of rehabilitation instructions prepared by one of her therapists and recited: "I must accept that my body cannot do too many things at once. I must learn to say, `No.' I must take care to get sleep. I must think of myself. I must do things that are fun. I must get the `musts' out of my life."
Moving briskly about the house, answering questions with occasional bursts of laughter and giving her husband affectionate hugs, she didn't look like the sickly and depressed person the paperwork described.
Even acknowledging the long-term effects whiplash can have, did she believe she was that person? "I must believe," she said. Suggesting it was the only way she could guarantee her future, she added, "I don't want to give up."
Magnus Henrekson, 44, an expert on Sweden's sick leave program from the Stockholm School of Economics, said he thought that the government coddles patients and builds a dependency that retards rather than speeds their return to healthful life.
"What happens is that the person becomes `clientified,' " he said. "If the responsibility for recovering is taken away from you, you lose the motivation to get better. If I get up every morning and ask myself if I have any ailments, I will find them."
A study he did showed that when the government made benefits more generous, people took more days off. In 1998, Prime Minister Goran Persson increased the government's benefit from 75 percent to 80 percent of salary, and the average number of days spiked upward each year thereafter, from 11.1 in 1997 to 24.4 in 2001.
There is a self-perpetuating momentum for the numbers to keep rising because all parties to the arrangement benefit in some way. Employees get time off when they want it, employers gain a way of moving underperforming workers out of jobs with the appearance of decency that the Swedish caring tradition demands, and the government can claim one of the lowest rates of unemployment in Europe even though a great number of workers are idle.
As for the public, by voting the governing Social Democrats of Prime Minister Persson back into power on Sept. 15, Swedes reaffirmed their belief in the provision of wide-ranging public benefits and their willingness to pay the highest taxes in Europe to finance them.
The sharp rise in absentees reflects larger changes in Swedish society, said Mats Lindgren, 43, strategic adviser to Kairos Future, a business consultancy. "Work as a measure of life has a much lower priority than it used to, so if work is no longer what gives you your energy, it's easier to take a day off," he said. "It's about feeling good rather than doing good. You could say the trend has gone in that direction."
Sweden's work force is getting markedly older, a development that could account for some of the increase. Figures from the National Social Insurance Board reflect particularly sharp rises in sick leave among the elderly and among women, with women over 60 taking an average of 36 sick days a year.
Dr. Jannerfeldt said that the high cost of the rapidly expanded benefit would not by itself sound alarm bells among Swedes. "The consequence of all this that Swedes might most care about in the long range is that we might not have enough money one day for the people who really need it," Dr. Jannerfeldt said.
Where people in other societies might conclude the system was being exploited by cheats, Swedes do not. "A central part of Swedish thinking is that people basically are honest and decent," said Olof Ruin, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Stockholm. "Equality is a big Swedish thing, and we still believe that people do not misuse the welfare system."
Mr. Persson argues that the problem lies not with slacking employees but with poor workplace environments and insensitive managers. "People do not run away from work," he said in a campaign speech. "We must not hunt sick people but improve workplaces that make people sick."
This explanation sits oddly, however, with Sweden's reputation for creating workplaces that are oases of calm, studied by care-conscious businesses around the world.
Barbro Sjolander, 51, is the chief executive officer of Respons, a firm with 800 full-time receptionists in 12 call centers around Sweden handling queries from people looking for phone numbers and addresses. Eighty of the receptionists are on sick leave now, a slightly lower number than last year, and Ms. Sjolander attributed the decrease to the attention her managers paid to employees. Her firm offers employees free gym cards and on-site massages.
"It is so important to us that our people be well off, and we realize that there are lots of things behind sick leave like personal problems, maybe taking care of an old parent, feeling lonely and depressed," she said. "We try to focus on our sick people, call them at home, tell them we want them back, not in a punishing way, but in a supportive way."
But didn't she ever get angry over the large numbers of absentees? "No, we don't think that way in Sweden," she said. "You shouldn't blame people for being sick."
from Reuters Market News, 2002-May-4:
Swedes less well off than poorest Americans -study
STOCKHOLM, May 4 (Reuters) - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed on Saturday.
The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the centre-right opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy after decades of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.
The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.
Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800 compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study showed.
"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's President Fredrik Bergstrom and chief economist Robert Gidehag said.
International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.
"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.
AMERICANS CAN BUY MORE
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.
This meant that Swedes stood "below groups which in the Swedish debate are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over six percent while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet but the trend is clear."
According to HUI figures, in 1998-99 U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.
The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services which are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.
According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the centre-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.
from the Times of London, 2001-Sep-26, Roger Boyes:
Greens set to quit German coalition
BERLIN - The Government of Gerhard Schröder was beginning to buckle yesterday as the Greens, the junior coalition partner, openly challenged the German Chancellor’s policies and threatened a revolt.
Reeling after 16 regional election defeats — including a 5 per cent drop in the vote in their Hamburg stronghold at the weekend — the Greens seemed to be ready to jump ship.
“It could be that in three weeks we will have a Grand Coalition,” Daniel CohnBendit, a Green member of the European Parliament, said, predicting the end of the Social Democratic-Green coalition Government.
It seems almost certain that the Greens will not take part in a future government.
The Greens were seen as too leftist, too soft on crime and too willing to accept illegal immigration, according to party analysts dissecting the results of the Hamburg elections on Sunday. But the key dividing issue was the war against terrorism. Between one third and one half of Green deputies would vote against German participation in future American-led military strikes, Herr Cohn-Bendit said.
“If that happens, the Foreign Minister would have to go,” he added, referring to Joschka Fischer, a leading Green politician. Such a backbench revolt — coming soon after similar defections on the issue of the Macedonian arms-gathering operation, in which Nato peacekeepers collected arms from ethic Albanian rebels in the former Yugoslav republic — would be a devastating blow to the Chancellor, who has promised “unlimited solidarity” to the United States.
Herr Schröder’s instinct is to try to sidestep the problem by delaying a parliamentary vote on German military participation in an attack on Afghanistan for as long as possible. None the less, parliament is obliged to debate every overseas combat mission.
The Greens seem to be even more deeply divided than at the time of the Kosovo war. Then, memorably, an angry Green supporter hurled a can of red paint at Herr Fischer, hitting him on the ear. The vote in favour of a military mission was carried, but not before the hall was cleared by rumours that some delegates were armed and ready to fight for their pacifist principles.
The same level of barely suppressed hysteria is again swaying Green sentiment. At least seven out of 16 regional associations of the Greens are declaring themselves against the use of German soldiers and the mood is hardening against military action.
“A cold wind is blowing in our faces,” Herr Fischer said, expressing his concern about the arguments that still have to be won if the Government is to hold together.
Party managers are hoping to defer big decisions until late November, when a Green Party congress will debate the ethics of the war against terrorism. But there is a head of steam gathering behind the Green rebels.
With national elections due in a year’s time, the Government is in a very weak position. Green weakness translates in turn into weak German Government responses. Herr Schröder, however, is too shrewd to switch coalition partners on the brink of a war. He will try his utmost to keep the Greens in harness until at least the summer of 2002. After next year’s election he will probably have the luxury of being able to switch partners.
Note the Maitreyanesque syncretism the Pope hints at in the following article:
from Reuters, 1999-Oct-28, by Gideon Long:
Pope decries world's ``scandalous inequalities''
VATICAN CITY, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Pope John Paul on Thursday decried the ``scandalous inequalities'' between the world's rich and poor and said the use of religion as a pretext for war was a blatant contradiction.
In one of his hardest hitting speeches against the perceived ills of modern society, the 79-year-old Pope said the technological revolution of the late 20th century had failed to bring with it spiritual and moral advancement.
``As we survey the situation of humanity, is it too much to speak of a crisis of civilisation?,'' he asked thousands of worshippers in St Peter's Square in a speech to mark the end of a five-day inter-religious assembly at the Vatican.
``We see great technological advances, but these are not always accompanied by great spiritual and moral progress,'' he said. ``We see, as well, a growing gap between the rich and poor -- at the level of individuals and nations.''
``(We lack) the collective will to overcome scandalous inequalities and to create new structures which will allow all peoples to have a just share in the world's resources.''
The Pope, looking preoccupied and frail, sat hunched in his chair throughout the ceremony but his voice was firm as he returned to themes which have run through his speeches with increasing regularity in recent years.
CRISIS OF CIVILISATION
``Surely this is not the way humanity is supposed to live,'' he said. ``Is it not therefore right to say that there is indeed a crisis of civilisation which can be countered only by a new civilisation of love...?''
The Pope was joined on a platform in front of the vast facade of St Peter's by Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who is on a nine-day visit to Italy and the Vatican.
The two religious leaders, who have met several times before during the Pope's 21-year pontificate, greeted each other at the end of the ceremony, embracing and exchanging a few words.
During his speech, the Pope said that teaching peace, solidarity, justice and liberty was not enough. ``It must be translated into action,'' he said.
As examples of believers who had done just that, the Polish pontiff cited Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa, who worked with the poor in Calcutta.
The Pope, who leaves on a two-day visit to New Delhi next week, said the two icons of 20th century India were ``unforgettable witnesses...who have had such an impact on the world.''
CALL FOR RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE
The Pope renewed his call for an end to wars -- ``conflicts that linger like festering wounds and cry out for a healing that never seems to come.''
He said all religious believers had a duty to distance themselves from violence and intolerance.
``Any use of religion to support violence is an abuse of religion. Religion is not and must not become a pretext for conflict, particularly when religious, cultural and ethnic identity coincide,'' he said.
``To wage war in the name of religion is a blatant contradiction.''
Despite his bleak portrayal of a world in crisis, the Pope said there were some grounds for optimism.
``I am convinced that the increased interest in dialogue between religions is one of the signs of hope present in the last part of this century,'' he said.
``Yet there is a need to go further.''
Also see an interview with Christopher Hitchens regarding Mother Theresa.
from TPD 1999-Oct-14, from Investors Business Daily:
A Lesson From Germany
Germany's Social Democrats suffered another defeat at the polls last weekend. The beneficiaries of the party's mounting losses are the Communists. It's a disturbing trend that should serve as a warning to U.S. politicians who would expand the reach of government.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats lost their sixth straight state election Sunday. The Social Democrats lost because of backlash over Schroeder's proposal to cut $16 billion in government spending.
Though the Christian Democrats gained from the Social Democrats' losses, Communists benefited as well. Voters on the east side of Berlin - the former communist section - increased their support for the Communists (the Party of Democratic Socialism) to 39.5% from 36.3% in the previous election.
The Communists - thought to be dead as a political power in western Europe nearly 10 years ago - picked up even more votes in the former West Berlin, where they took 4.5%; they had only 2.4% of the vote in 1995.
Overall, the Communists took 3 to 4 percentage points more of the vote than the 14.6% they received in 1995.
In earlier elections in other German states, the Communists displaced Schroeder's Social Democrats as the No. 2 party behind the Christian Democrats.
The leftward shift is the inevitable result of a government retracting a part of its largess. Many Germans have become accustomed to generous government programs. If they believe the party that's most responsible for the giveaways - the Social Democrats - will cut back on the dole, they'll vote for the party that promises to keep the programs going.
In the U.S., both parties have been guilty of heaping taxpayer cash on voters. With the next presidential election in a little more than a year, the promises have picked up speed. Both Democratic candidates - Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley - have been promising to open the Treasury doors ever wider. At times it seems they're trying to outdo President Clinton, who hasn't exactly been a skinflint with other people's money during his term.
Neither has Congress done much to slow the growing wave of programs that gush out of Washington. Republicans are trying to trim roughly $16 billion from the 2000 budget. In a $1.77 trillion budget, that's a scant amount. Yet GOP leaders are fretting that even such a modest change will hurt them politically because voters have become addicted to the programs.
Years of wealth redistribution in Germany have quietly empowered the Communists. Take heed, American politicians. Be careful that you don't enable the far left even more with free spending that will eventually have to be restrained.
Too many Americans are already hooked on programs they don't want to give up.
from TPDL 1999-May-19, from the Wall Street Journal, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft:
How Washington Subsidizes Europe
LONDON--Tony Blair was at it again last Thursday. In Aachen, Germany, where he received the grandiose Charlemagne Prize as a "good European," Britain's prime minister spoke of the Balkans conflict, reiterating that it must be pursued to the end, with "no compromises, no fudge, no half-baked ideals."
This fit the pattern by which, since the strange war-that-isn't-a-war-began, Mr. Blair has successfully represented himself as the most resolute leader of any NATO country, a contrast not least with the wavering President Clinton. Mr. Blair's sub-Churchillian rhetoric seems to have impressed many Americans.
In The New Republic, Dana Milbank writes that "finally, Americans have a leader who is acting presidential," giving a "courageous signal that he would use ground troops if necessary to defeat the Serbs in Kosovo. Refusing to negotiate with Milosevic, he urged other NATO members to stand firm with him. . . . Unfortunately, this leader is Tony Blair."
Not all Americans have been so impressed by Mr. Blair. Patrick Buchanan points out that if an army is sent to the Balkans, it won't be British troops slogging toward Belgrade. In this at least Mr. Buchanan is right. When you hear Mr. Blair's gung-ho talk, bear in mind that the U.S. contribution to the NATO bombing campaign, in terms of sorties flown and bombs dropped, has been at least 75%. Bear in mind that successive British governments have cut and cut again our armed forces for more than 40 years, leaving the defense burden to the Americans.
This represents a change. Sixty years ago the U.S. had a tiny army; and taken over the whole 20th century, American casualties have not been huge by European standards. Fewer than half a million Americans have been killed in combat, against a million British, two million French and more than five million Germans.
And yet, having pointed this out in print, it occurred to me that the comparison was not wholly fair. The U.S. entered World War I late, and thus managed to avoid the slaughter of the Somme and Verdun in 1916. In World War II, which America also entered late, all the Western allies managed to avoid that kind of slaughter: The heaviest casualties by far were on the eastern front.
But since 1945, the story has been very different. Well nigh 100,000 Americans have been killed in war in the past 50 years, 33,000 in Korea and 59,000 in Vietnam, which is far more than the rest of NATO put together. NATO as such has not fought a war until this year. It was a mutual defense alliance, and a remarkably successful one, which, one might have thought, could have wound itself up after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War, with congratulations all around on a job well done.
The congratulations were particularly deserved by the Americans, whose contribution had been disproportionate financially as well as in terms of manpower. Even during the Cold War, the European contribution to the defense of the West was inadequate, and declining. That was notably true of Mr. Blair's country.
In the 1960s, the late Philip Larkin wrote two sour little political poems. One was inspired by the then Labor government's boast that the state was now spending more on education than defense, and wondered who would now protect us from the Russian tanks, "the Light Horse of the LSE?" (London School of Economics).
The other paid ironic "Homage to a Government": "Next year we are to bring the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right. / Places they guarded, or kept orderly, / Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly. / We want the money for ourselves at home / Instead of working. And this all right."
Many of those soldiers were brought home as part of an inevitable retreat from empire, but Larkin had a broader point. We did want the money for ourselves, and we did reduce our military spending in a way that went beyond the shedding of imperial commitments.
This struck me forcibly when reading a new book on the Korean War. Although the British contribution there was modest compared with the American, several famous regiments that fought near the Imjin added fresh luster to their names: the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Middlesex Regiment, the Royal Ulster Rifles, the King's Own Scottish Borderers, the Eighth Royal Irish Hussars, the Gloucestershire Regiment.
The alarming thing about this tally of heroic names is that none of them exist any more. They have all been disbanded or amalgamated. Bear that in mind when you listen to Mr. Blair talking big about warfare.
Bear in mind, too, the pattern of British government spending over half a century. The proportion spent on defense went from 24% in 1951, to 18% in 1961, to 11% in 1981, to less than 7% in 1997. By contrast, health and welfare took between them 22% in 1951, 26% in 1961, 38% in 1981 and 53% in 1997. Nor is this a party question, whatever Larkin implied. Britain was governed by Conservatives from 1979 to 1997.
And bear in mind what may be most remarkable of all: that Britain has fewer men under arms today than it did in the 1780s, when we were unsuccessfully fighting the pesky American rebels. Just what ground troops would Mr. Blair send in even if he wanted to?
What all this illustrates is the awkward postwar relationship between the U.S. and Western Europe. If the choice is between "guns or butter," then the Americans have chosen guns, and the Europeans have chosen butter--but protected by American guns.
To European eyes, the Americans have an exiguous welfare state. For that matter Europeans are surprised by how hard Americans work, how modest their pay often is, and how short their vacations are. Europeans have by contrast lavish welfare, high wages and creature comforts to the point of luxury.
Whether, or for how long, this is sustainable in its own terms is one question. As the Germans drily say, "We have the youngest pensioners in Europe, and the oldest students, the shortest working week and the longest holidays." Thoughtful observers committed to the welfare state, as well as those more critical of it, can't help noticing that the proportion of the populace engaged in productive work is rapidly shrinking, while the proportion supported by the work of others rises.
And while this has happened, the American taxpayer has paid more for the cost of NATO than all other organization members together. You don't need a business degree to see that the Americans have for decades been indirectly subsidizing the European welfare state, to some degree at the expense of American domestic prosperity. German workers enjoy their regular paid holidays in health spas thanks to the Pentagon and the American public. That is awfully generous of you guys, and rather ignoble on our part.
It might be said on Mr. Blair's behalf that he has been an advocate of a common European foreign and defense policy, something for which the case looks more urgent than ever today. But leave aside the political difficulties (can one seriously envisage a European army which included French troops embarking on a war which the Paris government disliked?). Who is going to pay? It doesn't look like the European social democracies are. Least of all does it look like Britain is, at least under its present prime minister, who believes that the Labor Party's electoral chances were previously ruined by the fear of higher taxes, and who came to power himself with a solemn promise not to increase the income tax. As for Kosovo, the conflict looks all too likely to end in half-baked fudge or compromise, Mr. Blair's bluster notwithstanding.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include "The Controversy of Zion" (Perseus, 1997), which won a National Jewish Book Award.
(The following article is somewhat sympathetic with the Keynesian globalist school; it is included for the information it contains.)
from the Times of London, 1999-Apr-22, by Anatole Kaletsky:
The global economic crisis has secured the victory of the Third Way
We're all Blairites nowWhen Tony Blair arrives in Washington today to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Nato and to deliver one of his famous seminars on the Third Way, he ought to express some thanks for the unsung heroes of his political triumphs. When he goes to the tomb of the unknown soldier in Arlington, he should pray not only for the Nato pilots in Kosovo, but also for the shanty dwellers of Thailand, the hungry pensioners of Russia and the jobless workers of Korea, who have become the unwitting shock troops of the Third Way's global victory over the dark forces of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.
The great global economic crisis, which started in Thailand and Indonesia nearly two years ago and reached its apogee last summer with the financial collapse in Russia, was one of the luckiest breaks that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair ever had, even in their amazingly lucky careers. Not only did the misfortunes of Thailand, Korea and Russia end up actually helping both the American and British economies. They also, by testing to destruction the free market economic principles of the 1980s, created a worldwide constituency for the Third Way.
The Blair-Clinton style of politics has suddenly become all the rage, even among the predatory capitalists of Wall Street and the former economic fundamentalists of the Republican Right. Peter Lilley's proclamation this week that the market had its limits is only the latest conversion to the new consensus. Nobody seems to believe any longer that markets work best if businesses are simply left to their own devices or that capitalism can avoid booms and busts without active government intervention.
In short, the Third Way faith in "smart" government seems to have triumphed completely over the Thatcher-Reagan doctrine that government is the problem and market forces the solution.
But what has all this to do with the global economic crisis? We can feel free to review the crisis as a historical phenomenon now that it has been declared more or less officially over by Michel Camdessus, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
The crisis had profound ideological effects. These were highlighted in the televised address given by President Clinton this Tuesday on the unlikely subject of "the global financial architecture". President Clinton committed himself to interventions in the ultimate free market - the global financial system - of a kind that American governments have resisted for decades. He said that international financial markets need to be closely regulated by international agencies; that Western countries must commit large sums of public money to Third World debt relief and to safety nets against future financial crises; that Western banks must make large contributions to the losses suffered by developing nations and developing countries must expose their domestic economic policies to unprecedented external surveillance if they want to enjoy the benefits of Western capital. All of these policies would have seemed wildly heretical in the years of the free market consensus and similar proposals for "a new financial architecture" were being ridiculed in Washington, Bonn and Tokyo as recently as a year ago. It is worth recalling that as recently as last summer, George Shultz, the respected Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, was seriously proposing the total abolition of the IMF and the World Bank.
An even more important consequence of the global crisis has been the total rehabilitation of the sort of active economic management officially abandoned during the monetarist heyday of free markets. In such former bastions of laissez faire monetarism as the IMF and the bond houses of Wall Street, it is now completely taken for granted that capitalist economies need to be actively managed, either by politicians or by public officials, in order to avoid booms and busts.
The idea that central bankers and finance ministers are inherently incompetent to manage economic cycles, while bond traders always know what they are doing, seems so stupid it is not even treated as a joke. As for the protestations by the European Central Bank and the Bundesbank that interest rates should not be used as an "instrument of counter-cyclical demand management", people in Washington and on Wall Street respond with cynicism. American bankers argue: "These people in Frankfurt are just lying; trust me, they are not as stupid as they sound."
Even the West's actions in Kosovo have been profoundly affected by new attitudes to national sovereignty, global interdependence and international regulation. Nato's intervention is exactly analogous, and closely related, to the way that global financial institutions such as the IMF and the various G7 bodies took upon themselves unprecedented powers to intervene in the domestic economic affairs of stricken developing nations in the name of the global economic stability and financial probity. Ideologically the global financial crisis has dealt a crushing blow to the 1980s doctrines of market fundamentalism and laissez faire geopolitics, opening the field to the universalism and interventionism of the Blair-Clinton Third Way. But the crisis has also helped in a more mundane sense.
The unprecedented political popularity of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair is a direct byproduct of the global economic crisis. On the basis of all political precedents, the British and American governments should now be in the depths of their mid-term popularity slumps. Yet both Clinton and Blair are as popular today as when they were elected. To many observers this breakdown of the standard political cycle may appear a mystery. But it is quite comprehensible from an economic point of view. Politicians get elected by promising prosperity, low inflation, low taxes, good public services and low interest rates. They are then punished by the voters when it becomes apparent that they cannot deliver. This normally happens after two years or so. This time, however, neither the British nor American government is succumbing to such a cycle, and the reason is closely connected with the crisis in emerging markets.
This crisis triggered panic in Western financial markets and caused serious suffering for tens of millions of people in developing countries who lost their businesses, savings and jobs. But for Britain and America, whose economies have been growing strongly on the basis of domestic consumption and investment since the mid-1990s, the deflationary shock from emerging markets has been almost completely benign. By early 1997 governments and central banks were already under pressure to raise interest rates and restrain inflation. The godsend for Blair and Clinton was that the global financial crisis intervened, obviating these anti-inflationary measures.
To take the most obvious example, it is almost certain that British interest rates would have been raised a good deal further last year had it not been for the Russian crisis. Whether this more abrupt monetary tightening would have led to a bigger slowdown and a steeper rise in unemployment would have depended on the skill of the Bank of England. But the blame for the resulting economic hardships would certainly have fallen on the Blair Government. A similar story can be told about America, where the strength of the economy and the popularity of Bill Clinton have both been clearly linked to the stellar performance of Wall Street. And nobody on Wall Street any longer disputes that the effect of the crisis in emerging markets on share prices has been extremeley benign, by eliminating inflationary pressures and thus pushing interest rates downwards.
The question now is whether these benign effects begin to turn malignant. If, as seems likely, world recovery accelerates strongly in the next 12 months, will policymakers in the US and Britain take the unpopular measures needed to control inflation? Or will they be lulled into a false sense of security by their surfeit of good luck?
from http://www.thevanguard.org/columns/981008.htm:
NEXT UP FOR NAFTA: BRITAIN? 8 October 1998 Copyright © Rod D. Martin
When I was a student at Cambridge some years ago, a close friend of mine, who happened to be an important official in the Tory Party, used to bemoan the fact that Britain was being swallowed up by the socialist beast that is the European Union. He was (and is) a romantic sort, and we spent many cold afternoons along the Cam, drinking tea and fondly remembering the days of Empire and glory, with no small admixture of sadness.
One day it came to him. "You know, Rod," he said, in that most regal of accents, "what we really need to do is get together a sort of club, a partnership of all the English-speaking peoples. That's it! We can call it the English-Speaking Union; and we can trade together and keep our own governments and we'll never have to put up with the Frogs again!"
It was not a bad thought, and we have wistfully remembered it all these years.
Now, perhaps, the time has come. Late this summer, the publisher Conrad Black delivered an extraordinary lecture to the London Center for Policy Studies. His thesis: that Britain should pull away from the developing European superstate -- with its penchant for socialism, bureaucratic regulation and anti-Americanism -- and join the North American Free Trade Agreement instead. It was not quite the English-Speaking Union, but it was enough to make my friend beam with pride in Queen and country.
The problem from the English perspective is simple: Britain must be part of a free-trade zone, but many of Her Majesty's subjects are increasingly dubious about trading their democratic institutions for the unelected bureaucracy of Brussels. They are unhappy that the Queen's profile will no longer grace their currency, they are alarmed that they are increasingly a tiny minority in a superstate that shares neither their history nor their values nor their common law tradition nor their worldview. But they are thoroughly non-plused at the prospect of following Hong Kong into submission to a socialist, largely-hostile foreign government. And yet that submission increases every day.
A North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement makes far more sense for all concerned. Besides sharing America and Canada's core political and economic culture, the UK is the largest foreign investor in the US. Britain's economic ties to other potential NAFTA members such as Chile and Argentina run long and deep, and keeping Sterling viable not only maintains British sovereignty but blunts the challenge to the dollar of the nascent ECU and Yen blocs as well. British NAFTA membership also reinforces NATO at a time when the Old World Order is reasserting itself, encourages the accession of other non-American members (thus curtailing the rise of regionalism), and helps ensure that NAFTA never has the sort of supranational institutions that many Americans fear and which the Europeans have embraced. It's a good deal all around.
Unfortunately, few have seen this until recently. Despite the fact that until the last 50 years the most prominent enthusiasts for a single European state were Napoleon and Hitler, contemporary American policy makers have generally tended to support the pan-European project without looking too closely at its implications. But keeping Germany from running amok, and keeping Russia from running through Germany, does not require the EU. America not only has no strategic need to encourage the construction of a European confederation, but in fact such a development actually harms American interests.
A profound anti-Americanism lies at the heart of most European federalist thinking. The French in particular have pushed the pan-European project as a means of "resisting" America politically and culturally. The late President Mitterand actually said he supported Euro-integration because "we are at war with America." Nor is this anti-Americanism merely jealousy of America's superpower status. Continental Europe, dominated for a quarter-millennium by left-wing Enlightenment thought, holds a deep hostility to the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" democratic capitalist values of concern for individual freedom, suspicion of the state and devotion to ancient constitutions.
Because Great Britain -- unlike most of the Continent -- lives and breathes these values, it will always be at the periphery of a new European order; forever outvoted, outnumbered and outgunned. Yet Britain is at the center, geographically, culturally and politically, of an Atlantic community, just as it has always been. The choice should not be hard to make.
A league of trading nations, united only by their economic interest and their common defense needs, yet in every way separate and sovereign, is an excellent and indeed revolutionary idea in the cause of liberty. It is appropriate that it should spring from the Anglo-American axis, the cradle of freedom in our world; and it is time. America and Britain owe a debt to Conrad Black; and both nations should move forward as rapidly as possible to once again stand against the "freedom" which is not free that forever spews forth from the Continent.
Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 8 October 1998.
excerpts from the address of Pope John Paul II, 1994-Nov-10:
[...]
16. The term jubilee speaks of joy; not just an inner joy but a jubilation which is manifested outwardly, for the coming of God is also an outward, visible, audible and tangible event, as St. John makes clear (cf. 1 Jn. 1: 1). It is thus appropriate that every sign of joy at this coming should have its own outward expression. This will demonstrate that the church rejoices in salvation. She invites everyone to rejoice, and she tries to create conditions to ensure that the power of salvation may be shared by all. Hence the year 2000 will be celebrated as the Great Jubilee.
[...]
51. From this point of view, if we recall that Jesus came to "preach the good news to the poor" (Mt. 11:5; Lk. 7:22), how can we fail to lay greater emphasis on the church's preferential option for the poor and the outcast? Indeed, it has to be said that a commitment to justice and peace in a world like ours, marked by so many conflicts and intolerable social and economic inequalities, is a necessary condition for the preparation and celebration of the jubilee. Thus, in the spirit of the Book of Leviticus (25:8-12), Christians will have to raise their voice on behalf of all the poor of the world, proposing the jubilee as an appropriate time to give thought, among other things, to reducing substantially, if not canceling outright, the international debt which seriously threatens the future of many nations. The jubilee can also offer an opportunity for reflecting on other challenges of our time, such as the difficulties of dialogue between different cultures and the problems connected with respect for women's rights and the promotion of the family and marriage.
[...]
from TPDL 2000-Mar-29, from the Washington Times, by Helle Bering:
Something rotten in Britain
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been on a tear through his country's institutions since taking office in 1997, is finding that reform can be a two-edged sword. Among the more astonishing issues facing the progressive-minded Labor leader is the question of whether he should take paternity leave from running the country when the Blairs' fourth child is born.
Mrs. Blair, who is due in May, has made no secret of her preference. Meanwhile, the Labor government has proposed increasing both maternity and paternity leave to 13 weeks, from the current eight weeks for women and six for men. So, why not the prime minister, too? Feminists, needless to say, are overjoyed at the example this would set.
The problem is that the proud father is not very keen on the idea at all because it means handing over the reins of government power. Further, it would mean placing them in the hands of people Mr. Blair does not particularly trust, his primary rival within the Labor Party, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, or Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who hails from the left-wing of the Labor Party which Mr. Blair has battled bitterly for power.
In fact, it would mean losing control. And for 13 weeks? Mr. Blair would suffocate from frustrated ambition. Said the distressed prime minister last week, "I haven't decided yet. Of course there is a strong case, but I have got to make sure the country is properly run, too."
Which brings us to the topic of constitutional reform. In this area, too, Mr. Blair has applied himself assiduously only to find that the results have blown up in his face. Since arriving in office Mr. Blair has taken it upon himself to reform the House of Lords, allegedly making it more democratic, but also making it more Labor-friendly. He has weakened the power of the British government itself by devolving power to Northern Ireland (or at least he has tried), to Scotland and to Wales. London itself has become the object of power devolution (about which more later).
However, while power is seeping from Westminster, it is not necessarily seeping through the fingers of the Blairites, who have shown themselves to be as ruthless at power-brokering as the Labor Party Marxists were in the old days. Mr. Blair's track record when it comes to packing the devolved assemblies with his own people is no less hard-nosed for being Third Way.
In the most entertaining left-wing critique of the Blair period yet, "Cruel Britannia" by Nick Cohen, a columnist for the London Observer newspaper with distinctly socialist leanings, the embittered author writes, "You realize that Britain will soon be a collection of truly weird islands. People will be voting almost monthly in referendums and on citizens' juries; in parish, local, mayoral, regional, Parliamentary and Euro elections. Yet, the only Labor candidates the exhausted electors will be able to support will be Blairite." The charge that Mr. Blair is a "control freak" is heard more and more from the left.
While the rest of us may not be weeping too may tears because Mr. Blair is waging war on his own Labor radicals, in a larger sense it raises disturbing questions about his credentials as a democrat. Clearly, something is rotten in Britain.
This realization may well be at the root of the ongoing and highly entertaining race for the post of mayor of London, which will be decided May 4. It seems that Londoners in protest against Mr. Blair's tactics have set their minds on an absolutely appalling candidate. Their choice is Ken Livingstone also known to his foes as Red Ken - the fire-breathing former leader of the Greater London Council, a Marxist-dominated institution that was abolished by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s. London has since been governed in a partnership between the government and its 33 boroughs. It was one of Mr. Blair's election promises to resurrect the long-abolished post as mayor of London - yet another check on the power of Westminster.
It has turned out, however, that one of Mr. Blair's harshest critics, the same Mr. Livingstone, was the overwhelming favorite among Londoners. He was certainly not the favorite of his party. Mr. Blair's preferred choice is an exceedingly unprepossessing member of Parliament, Frank Dobson, a Laborite whose beard has been the subject of much commentary in the London papers, mainly because he refused to shave it to conform to the zippy forward-looking Blairite image. By rigging the selection process, the Labor Party narrowly escaped nominating Mr. Livingstone, who turned around and made good on his threat to leave Labor and run as an independent - which hardly caused a dent in his popularity.
A headline in the Guardian newspaper just about said it all: "The control-freak gets his comeuppance." Now, should it happen that Mr. Livingstone and Mr. Dobson end up splitting the Labor vote, causing the Conservative candidate to coast to the seat of power on a plurality, that would be comeuppance indeed. Perhaps paternity leave may start looking quite appealing by then.
from TPDL 2000-Aug-7, from The Wall Street Journal opinion pages, by Susan Lee:
On Drug Prices, a Dose of Reality
If you want cheap medicine, go to France. If you want medical innovation, stay far away.Last week the country's blabberpuss in chief delivered a huge rant about prescription-drug prices. My first reaction was--shrug--just part of the pre-election bloviating. But then I paused; maybe there is something to what he said, I thought.
Generally speaking, I have suspicions about the drug industry. How do they get those plumpy profit margins year after year? So I wonder if there's something, well, untoward about how they price their goods. Not that I would want to tell them how to price their goods, and certainly not that I want the government to tell them. I accept the argument that price controls would lead to less research and development and less drug innovation. But sometimes I just wonder what the deal is.
So I wonder about those people in Maine who either have been getting on buses to go to Canada or filling their prescriptions at their local drugstore knowing that right across the border there were Canadians doing the same and paying way less--70% less is what one hears over and over. Of course, Canada has price controls on drugs, and I know that price controls stifle research and development. I understand that Canada is a free rider on all our excellent research, and I know that Canadians have to wait months and months and sometimes over a year longer than Americans do to get new drugs. But still I wonder.
Anyway, I jumped on the Web and came up with a paper that set my mind at rest--``Making Sense of Drug Prices'' by Patricia M. Danzon, a professor of health-care management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Ms. Danzon dumps on a bunch of studies showing that prices are higher in the U.S. than Canada--one of which reported U.S. prices were 72% higher. Well, it turns out that none of the studies included prices of generic drugs, and that omission, right off the bat, pushes up U.S. prices, because generics account for 40% to 50% of all prescriptions written in the U.S. Using 1992 data, Ms. Danzon found that a person buying drugs in Canada would have paid on average 3% more.
Moreover, it turns out that Canada is not the only country with higher drug prices, on average, than the U.S. For example, a person would have paid 27% more in Germany and 44% more in Switzerland. Which means that if U.S. prices are in fact untoward, they aren't all that untoward.
However, Prof. Danzon did find some countries where consumers do pay less. In Japan, drugs cost 8% less and in France, 30% less. France caught my eye: 30% less is a lot less. France, of course, strictly regulates both manufactures' prices and retail margins. So I wondered what is happening to research and development and the discovery of new drugs in France.
The answer is unsettling. France is not a serious country when it comes to the frontiers of medicine. Or even approaching the frontiers. (Of course, one might argue that France is not a serious country, period.) Viewing Europe as a whole, France has a huge pharmaceutical industry. It is No. 1 in drug production and No. 2 in employment in the drug industry. So you would think it would be at least in the top two of R&D spending. Wrong. It is number three. (In 1997 the U.S. accounted for 36% of company-financed R&D, France only 9%.)
Moreover, it's not clear what, exactly, France is spending its R&D money on. If you look at global drugs developed between 1975 and 1994, the U.S. can claim 45% of them, but France is at the bottom of the list (after countries like Belgium, Sweden and "others"), with only 3%. Indeed, France seems to be a perfect example of how low-price countries exhibit low R&D spending and even lower claims to discovering new drugs.
All of which brought me back to the phenomenon of people busing themselves across national borders to buy cheaper price-controlled drugs. If we all were free-riders on innovative drugs, pretty soon there would be no innovative drugs. So now I am wondering: Would I rather pay a ton of money to cure myself of Alzheimer's or spend a lot less on some compound with bull's blood that didn't cure me of anything much?
from Agence France-Presse, 2003-Jun-6:
France braces for new nationwide protests over pension reform
PARIS - France was bracing for a fresh wave of protests this week against the government's plans for pensions reform, with rail and air traffic expected to be severely disrupted and end-of-year exams in jeopardy.
Transport workers, teachers and air traffic controllers were to lead a nationwide day of strikes and demonstrations among public sector employees on Tuesday, the day the controversial pensions bill is to go before parliament.
A similar strike brought France to a halt last week, with about 80 percent of flights in and out of the country's airports cancelled, metro and train services disrupted and many schools closed.
Although the long Pentecost (Whitsunday) holiday weekend marked a partial truce in the bitter clash over the proposals, travelers in Paris faced ongoing minor disturbances Sunday on bus, metro and regional express train lines.
About two out of three high-speed TGV trains were running on schedule Sunday, according to the state-owned SNCF rail company, which attributed some delays to hardliners who blocked the railway lines overnight.
Despite the mounting pressure on his year-old center-right government, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has refused to withdraw the reform plan, which calls for employees to work more years in order to get a full pension.
The bill, drawn up after months of negotiations with union and business leaders, is designed to ensure that France's "pay-as-you-go" pensions system does not go bankrupt as the baby-boom generation ages.
The country's second largest union CFDT has accepted the draft, but two hardline unions that are powerful in the public sector -- the CGT and FO -- have spearheaded protests and are demanding that the plan be renegotiated.
"The government is in a position of weakness, the movement is well-established," CGT leader Bernard Thibault told AFP, adding that Tuesday's protests would show that the unions had dug in their heels "for the long term".
The unions have the backing of teachers, who on Tuesday will walk off the job for the 11th time since the start of the school year, with pensions reform only one issue on their long list of grievances against the government.
There were growing fears that the baccalaureat exam for some 600,000 students completing their secondary school education -- which starts Thursday -- could be disrupted if teachers maintain their action.
Denis Paget, national secretary for the main secondary school teachers' union SNES, called for a fresh strike on Thursday should the government fail to meet teachers' demands.
"The government must not use the baccalaureat as a weapon to make us give in," he told the newspaper Le Parisien on Sunday, charging that the country's leaders had made sure exams would be given "in the worst possible conditions".
But in comments to the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche, junior education minister Xavier Darcos shot back: "Exam candidates should not become the victims or hostages of social conflict."
Raffarin was expected to consult on Monday with Education Minister Luc Ferry, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and other cabinet members to discuss ways to avert a crisis and ensure that end-of-year exams proceed normally.
Ferry is due to meet with union leaders on Tuesday.
"We're waiting for very strong gestures" on the part of the government, Paget said.
from TPD 1999-Nov-23, from the Electronic Telegraph, by Patrick Bishop in Paris:
French call strike over shorter working week
THE French are bracing themselves for a winter of discontent as workers begin a series of protests over the introduction of a 35-hour-working week.
In Paris, the Metro platforms are ankle deep in rubbish after cleaners downed brooms to draw attention to their worries. Tomorrow the city centre is expected to be paralysed by stoppages called by three Left-wing trades unions. Transport workers, shop assistants, taxi drivers, computer technicians and civil servants will all be making their concerns felt in the traditional French way by staging strikes in the coming days and weeks.
Reducing the working week from 39 hours to 35 was a promise of Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister, and his Socialist Party during the 1997 spring legislative election campaign. The revolutionary measure was supposed to drive down the country's 12.5 per cent unemployment rate, then the third highest in Europe.
According to European Union figures, French workers were in the middle of the working hours table in Europe, averaging 39.7 per week in 1997 against 44 hours in Britain and 40.1 in Germany. They will now be among the lowest performers in terms of time at the workplace. All companies with more than 20 employees will have to observe the shorter week. Smaller businesses have until 2002.
The move was been bitterly criticised by French employers and conservative politicians, including President Chirac, who argued that it would reduce France's competitiveness and destroy jobs rather than create them. It might have been assumed, though, that the measure would find favour with the workforce. Instead, unions have announced a series of disturbances in advance of the second reading of the law, which comes into effect in the new year.
Hailed on the Left as an imaginative and humane concept in dealing with unemployment, the theory failed to translate smoothly into practice. On examining the small print, employers found that the legislation gave them an opportunity to introduce flexible working hours and do away with traditional privileges and breaks They have also been able to extract incentives such as paying reduced social charges and to insist on wage freezes as the price for accepting the change.
Employees in companies that have already voluntarily adopted the practice have found that their work patterns have been disrupted and their wages frozen sometimes for years in advance. One car worker complained recently that the only change in his life was that he turned up half an hour earlier each day and left half an hour later, which, he said, had hardly enhanced his existence.
Nor are there many signs in the first phase of its application that the measure will do any serious damage to the unemployment figures. The Employment Minister, Martine Aubry, has claimed that reducing hours has already created 125,000 new jobs and could generate up to 600,000 when the law is fully applied.
Unemployment has fallen to a little over 11 per cent recently but most analysts put this improvement down to a general upturn in the economy unrelated to the reduction in the working week. Some business experts say that the measure may have a beneficial effect on the French economy by breaking up traditional work patterns.
from the Electronic Telegraph 1999-Jan-12, by Susannah Herbert in Paris, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000117596329453&rtmo=lwnzQSSt&atmo=99999999&P4_FOLLOW_ON=/99/1/12/work12.html&pg=/et/99/1/12/work12.html:
Director charged because staff work too hard
A FRENCH company director is to be prosecuted after job inspectors staked out his electronics factory and discovered his employees were working too hard.
Bernard Rocquemont, who was head of Thomson Radars and Counter Measures, faces a £20,000 fine and a suspended prison sentence if found guilty. He is accused of doing "clandestine work" at the company's factory in Elancourt, outside Paris.
The case, to be heard at Versailles court, is part of a campaign by France's job inspectorate against staff who put in unpaid overtime and exceed the official working week, now 39 hours and soon to be 35 hours. It is the first time that a law generally used to close sweatshops of illegal workers has been used against executives.
Recent targets of the job inspectors include the electronic firm Siemens, the furniture group Ikea, the supermarket chains Carrefour and Casino, plus the telecommunications manufacturer Alcatel.
The inspectors' methods include hanging around in company car parks, noting number plates. They also check computer records and office diaries for evidence that managers are working longer hours than they should.
In one instance, the inspectors tried to make Alcatel pay 3,000 fines, each more than £500, after noting down every daily and weekly infraction of the employment conventions. The case fell down on a technicality.
In the Thomson RCM case, the inspectors noted that the average working week for the 1,300 "cadres" or senior engineers and managers in its Elancourt factory was, at 46 hours, seven hours longer than the legal norm. None was being paid overtime.
The inspectors' raids marked a break with a long-held assumption that cadres - skilled, salaried professionals - are above the rules governing the working days of ordinary factory and white-collar wage earners. Traditionally, skilled jobs were not defined by hours worked but by tasks achieved. In keeping with their quasi-executive status, cadres did not claim overtime. However, since the inspectors' operation, the cadre tradition of staying late to finish an important order or close a crucial deal has become a liability.
Firms such as Thomson RCM have had to take drastic measures to send their workaholics home. The Elancourt plant these days is closed at 7pm sharp, 15 minutes after an alarm sounds telling everyone to clear their desks. Like assembly-line workers, cadres must now fill in the equivalent of weekly time-sheets.
Despite these measures, plus a series of new contracts bringing every detail of working conditions and timetables within the law, M Rocquemont still faces prosecution as the head of Thomson RCM. His case is an embarrassment for the Employment Minister, Martine Aubry, who has tried to bring the job inspectorate to heel. She fears that their zeal is breeding antagonism to the 35-hour week.
The ministry's attempts to encourage negotiation rather than strong-arm tactics have been largely successful. But in the Rocquemont case, the Versailles public prosecutor has proved particularly persistent, choosing to explore the case's implications rather than let it drop. Neither M Rocquemont, who is at another Thomson subsidiary, nor Thomson RCM would comment.
from the Electronic Telegraph 1998-Feb-11, by Susannah Herbert in Paris, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000117596329453&rtmo=LKlNhidd&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/98/2/11/wfre11.html:
France cuts the working week to aid unemployed
A BILL cutting the French working week from 39 hours to 35 was approved by the National Assembly yesterday after Right-wing opponents abandoned any serious attempts to modify it.
The measure, which the Socialist government claims will help solve the unemployment crisis, has been attacked by the employers' federation as "precipitous, costly and archaic".
Yet, despite business claims that the new law will raise employers' costs by 11.4 per cent and destroy more jobs than it will create, the government insists that it offers new hope to France's three million unemployed.
Although the bill's principal advocate, Martine Aubry, the Labour Minister, claims it will create between 300,000 and 700,000 jobs over five years, one recent study admits that, in a "worst-case scenario", the scheme could mean the loss of 100,000 jobs.
The bill, which will be formally adopted this spring after passing before the Senate, rules that all companies with more than 20 employees must comply with the shorter week by Jan 1, 2000. Smaller companies have two extra years to get in line.
All companies which implement the shorter week and hire new workers before the deadline will be rewarded with subsidies. The cost of these subsidies to the taxpayer is currently incalculable, but the bill's staunchest opponents, the Federation of Metalworking Industries, claims that each job "created" by the law will have a £60,000 price tag over the next five years.
As even the government's economic advisers admit, the law is fraught with practical problems. An adviser to Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister, said: "It makes more sense politically than economically. It has to go ahead because it was a manifesto promise, but the trick now is to find ways of hollowing it out so it doesn't actually damage the economy."
One of the bill's main flaws is that it does not specify whether the cost of overtime will increase: this will be fixed in a second bill next year. But unless overtime is made more expensive, many companies may prefer to pay existing staff four hours' overtime a week and continue as before instead of hiring new employees.
If this happens on a grand scale, no new jobs will be created and France's labour costs will soar in comparison with those of its neighbours.
Another key problem concerns the minimum wage, which is currently set by the government on an hourly basis. With the imposition of a shorter working week, the minimum wage per hour for a full-time employee will increase sharply, triggering an inevitable demand for higher per-hour wages all the way up the pay-scale.
Although the government hopes that workers will accept a pay freeze in return for the shorter week on the understanding that this will create more jobs for others less fortunate, there is no evidence that the average worker will buy this if he sees a sudden reduction in the differential between his pay and the minimum wage.
Equally worryingly, there is no evidence that workers will agree to more flexible working hours in return for the 35-hour week - an argument which some of the bill's civil service advocates hope will persuade business sceptics that it represents a long-awaited chance to reform France's labour constraints.
Yesterday, shopworkers who fear the 35-hour week will allow employers to introduce more flexible hours - late night and Sunday opening - took to the streets of Paris giving warning of further trouble if the pattern of their working week is changed.
from the Electronic Telegraph 1997-Oct-22, by Susannah Herbert in Paris, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000117596329453&rtmo=qMXeRXx9&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/97/10/22/wfre22.html:
Paris hides 7m jobless in statistics
THE French government was accused yesterday of badly underestimating the nation's jobs crisis in its official statistics.
Although the Employment Ministry maintains that 3.5 million people - one in eight of France's potential workforce - are unemployed, the Commissariat du Plan, a rival state-funded organisation, says in a report that the real number "affected by joblessness" is twice as high. "Almost seven million French are affected by difficulties in finding work," the commissariat's head, Henri Guaino, claimed.
The official figures, he insisted, are inadequate indicators of the problem because they do not include the "partially unemployed", those on early retirement, trainees or private-sector workers with state-subsidised jobs.
More than 1.5 million people in France are part-time workers who want full-time jobs, and a million more are in "precarious" subsidised employment. An extra 500,000 have been encouraged to retire early, and 240,000 have given up looking for work and do not figure in the official unemployment figures.
The report says a quarter of French households include at least one person who has been without work in the past two years and the continuing threat of unemployment has forced people to accept low salaries, part-time work and short-term contracts in the absence of "real" jobs.
In France, where workers are wedded to the idea of full job protection, complete with guarantees against sacking or redundancy, anything less than a full-time, long-term job is regarded as virtual destitution. The Left-wing newspaper Libération hailed the report as revealing "the true size of the French crisis".
The Socialist government, which won the election by promising to bring unemployment down by creating 700,000 new jobs and introducing the 35-hour week, seems reluctant to imitate the "Anglo-Saxon model" of increased job flexibility, reduced employer charges and lower wages.
Instead of removing the main obstacle to job-creation - employers' fears that they will not be able to shed staff in a downturn - the government proposes to make it harder for companies to sack workers. Its latest pledge, to introduce the 35-hour week without loss of pay by 2000, is founded on the belief that there is a limited "block" of work available which must be shared out more equally.
The Commissariat du Plan, founded in 1946 during France's post-war love affair with centralised economic control, is a 200-strong government body directly accountable to the prime minister. It is responsible for co-ordinating and directing three-year plans or grand economic strategies. There have recently been calls in parliament for its reform or abolition, on the grounds that its role is no longer clear or possible.
from the Washington Post, 1999-Mar-23 p.A1, by William Drozdiak, Post Foreign Service:
Crucial Hour Nears for German Economy
Business Leaders Press Schroeder for Sweeping ChangesBERLIN - A delegation of leading executives marched into Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's office early this month to deliver a message that underscores just how rapidly Germany, with the world's third-largest economy, is becoming the sick man of Europe.
The executives bluntly informed Schroeder that business confidence had plummeted to new lows in the five months since he came to power, according to several people present. Export orders were shrinking as markets in Asia, Russia and Latin America slid deeper into recession. Contraction of the German economy promised further layoffs at a time when 4.5 million people -- 11 percent of the labor force -- were already out of work.
Then Henning Schulte-Noelle, chief executive of the Allianz insurance group, jolted the new German leader by announcing that his company might soon be driven from Germany by excessive taxes and labor costs. His warning was backed by 20 other business leaders, including those of such firms as Siemens and Lufthansa, who declared their companies could not remain in Germany and survive the competitive pressures of globalization.
The confrontation led Schroeder to set in motion a series of decisions that culminated in the resignation 10 days ago of his left-leaning finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine. But having banished his arch-rival and promised more pro-business policies from his ruling coalition of Social Democrats and environmentalist Greens, Schroeder is still facing what some economists fear could become a steep slide into recession for Germany and the entire continent.
Sick Man of Europe
The German welfare state has become so elaborate and labor costs so expensive that enterprises say they can't afford new workers.
SOURCES: German Federal Statistics Office, U.S. State Department, news reports
JAPAN U.S. GERMANY GDP growth rate, 1998 -2.8% 3.9% 2.8%* Top personal tax rate 65.0% 39.6% 53.0% Top business tax rate 46.0% 35.0% 48.0% Per capita income $22,700 $30,200 $25,000 Average hourly wage $ 21 $ 17 $ 27 Unemployment rate 4.1% 4.5% 11.2% "This is really the moment of truth," said Thomas Mayer, managing director in Frankfurt for the investment bank Goldman Sachs & Co. "Globalization has brought one shock after another. Yet Germany has refused to adapt.
"Now it's no longer a matter of whether there will be change; it's a matter of whether it will be for the worse or for the better. A new generation of business leaders in Germany is demanding nothing short of a revolution, and the government will have to respond or companies will flee and the economy will gradually sink into the ground."
The economic challenge has compounded mounting social and political tensions in this nation of 80 million. With frustrations rising as the country's prosperity ebbs, the government's attempts to make it easier for many of Germany's 7.3 million foreign residents to become citizens has inflamed controversy over whether Germany should become a multicultural nation or maintain its traditional Teutonic identity.
The Greens argue that Germany -- with porous borders exposed to nine neighboring countries -- needs to adopt a more welcoming attitude toward immigrants to compensate for a population in which one out of five people will soon reach retirement age. But the opposition Christian Democrats, along with some Social Democrats such as Interior Minister Otto Schily, believe the risk of ethnic clashes has become too great to keep the doors open.
Germany's economic crisis also has magnified the difficulties of integrating the eastern and western parts of the nation. Nearly 10 years after reunification, many eastern Germans still resent their second-class status and disdain a capitalist society they believe has deprived them of the lifelong job security they enjoyed under communism. In the west, there is widespread scorn for easterners, who are considered lazy and unappreciative of the $100 billion they receive in annual revenue transfers from the federal government.
The German economy contracted by 1.6 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. This new era of limits has strained relations with the European Union. After taking office in October, Schroeder shocked France and other EU members by insisting that Germany could no longer afford to serve as their "milk cow" by paying $12 billion a year. Germany's demands to curtail payments that subsidize French and Spanish farmers are likely to provoke a major showdown at this week's Berlin summit of the 15 EU leaders.
During his election campaign, Schroeder enthralled voters by promising that he could create new jobs while preserving the nation's generous social welfare network. Now he is confronting the grim reality that he simply cannot deliver on both promises.
"Schroeder's real attraction was that he represented a pleasant new face without the prospect of a transition that would cause too much pain," said Horst Teltschik, a board member of the BMW automobile company who served for many years as national security adviser to Schroeder's predecessor, Helmut Kohl. "But the basic fact these days is that while Germans may hate change, they can no longer avoid it."
The German malaise is rooted in the fact that the trappings of the social welfare state have become so elaborate and expensive that enterprises say they can no longer afford to hire new workers. Average wage costs are now running close to $30 an hour, far outstripping those in the United States. As a result, German companies are voting with their feet. Since 1995, the country has lost nearly 1 million jobs as Siemens, DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen shifted more operations abroad. In Poland and Hungary, for example, wage levels are as little as one-fifth of those in Germany.
The steady erosion of jobs has only multiplied the burdens on Germany's welfare state: Tax revenue drops as joblessness spreads, yet tax rates must be raised to support the increasing cost of unemployment benefits. The drain on Germany's treasury has become so great that economists estimate the cost of unemployment payments at more than $100 billion a year.
Many of Germany's problems can be traced to the lopsided economic boom triggered when 18 million East Germans were absorbed into the Federal Republic and allowed to trade in their worthless currency on a one-to-one basis for western marks. "Kohl really blew it," said Margarita Mathiopolous, a German social historian and author of a book about Germany's resistance to globalization. "He should have restructured the entire German economy at the time of reunification, instead of wasting a lot of resources by keeping eastern Germany on life-support systems."
Kohl's decision greatly expanded Germany's welfare state; by 1996, the state sector had grown to represent nearly 50 percent of the $2.5 trillion economy. Even now, German taxpayers shell out nearly $60,000 a year in subsidies for each of the 85,000 jobs in the coal mining industry, while German coal costs nearly four times the world market price.
As a Social Democrat whose core constituencies still believe in a strong statist economy, Schroeder is facing an almost impossible task in trying to persuade them to slash wage demands and benefits to restore Germany's competitiveness.
The arrival of the European currency, the euro, has complicated Germany's difficulties. As the last barriers to capital flow have fallen with the euro's arrival, German firms have found it much easier to pack up and leave. They have led the latest invasion of North America by foreign investors, with Bertelsmann buying up Random House, Deutsche Bank hooking up with Bankers Trust and Daimler Benz marrying Chrysler. Executives from Daimler and other large enterprises now talk about moving their headquarters to New York, or to a cheaper base within the single currency zone of 11 EU countries.
Schroeder's initial plan to revive the economy called for cutting personal and corporate income taxes by $6.25 billion over four years, and raising family allowances to stimulate consumer demand. He hoped to compensate for the loss in revenue by closing more than 70 significant tax loopholes for corporations. But that only triggered a revolt by German corporations, which claimed the tax reform would cost business $20 billion.
Executives of leading energy firms, who were already reeling from plans by the Greens to shut down 19 nuclear plants that produce one-third of the country's electricity, warned they would have to trim investments to save money. In the case of canceling a coal mining plant that the energy giant RWE was planning near Cologne, it would mean the loss of 14,000 jobs, according to chief executive Dietmar Kuhnt.
Those hard facts made Schroeder recognize the urgency of changing the course of government policy. At a tense cabinet meeting on March 10, he signaled a rupture with Lafontaine by insisting, "I won't tolerate any anti-business policy with my name on it." After arguing in vain that higher wages would boost consumer spending and invigorate the economy more than tax relief for corporations, Lafontaine realized their views were no longer compatible. The next day he resigned.
"We are locked in a 'Vater Staat' [father state] mentality that is alien to the Anglo-Saxon world," said Kurt Biedenkopf, a transplanted westerner who is the regional governor of the eastern state of Saxony. "Germany has grown too spoiled with so many entitlements. Now we will find out if we still have enough courage to reduce our dependence on the state and take advantage of the freedom and the opportunities offered by this global economic challenge."
from Nature 412(6842):4 (2001-Jul-5), by Katja Henssel in Munich:
Quota offered as solution to gender imbalance
Germany is looking at a controversial answer to the perennial problem of gender inequality in the workplace. A law being considered by the German parliament would introduce a quota system for women in government-funded jobs, including those in science.
Currently, only about 5% of top positions at public research institutes and universities in Germany are held by women, compared with nearly 14% in France and 11% in Italy.
The government wants to change that fast. "By 2005, we want at least 20% of full professorships and other leading scientific positions to be filled with women," says Helga Ebeling, head of the federal science ministry's division for women in education and research.
The legislation, which would cover universities as well as government-funded research institutions, was drafted by the government in the spring and is scheduled to be considered by the parliament in the autumn. It already has the support of the ruling Social Democrat-Green coalition.
German research organizations and prominent scientists say that they welcome action on gender discrimination. But many doubt that a quota system is the best approach to fixing the problem.
"It would certainly cause a quick injection of women into the science system," Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, told a meeting on women in science last month at the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg."But the idea that you owe your job to a quota has an unpleasant taste," she said."It devalues your skills."
Klaus Landfried, president of the Association of Universities and Other Higher Education Institutions in Germany, says that a quota system would undermine the authority of women in top scientific positions." It is the least clever way to improve opportunities for women," he says.
Supporters of a quota system include Sybille Krummacher, a scientist at the national research centre in Jülich (FZJ), who helped to set up Germany's first women-only tenure-track programme. "The programme has encouraged many women to apply," says Krummacher, "and they are not employed just because they are female, but because they are highly qualified."
from TPDL 1999-Jan-18, from the Evening/Electronic Telegraph, by Polly Newton, Political Staff:
Germans refuse to pay for breaking nuclear deals
GERHARD SCHRÖDER, the German Chancellor, infuriated the Government yesterday by insisting that his country would not pay compensation to Britain after deciding to end the reprocessing of nuclear waste abroad.
Mr Schröder and his coalition partners, the Greens, made the decision as part of a programme to cut Germany's use of nuclear power.
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, owners of the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria, have contracts worth £1.2 billion with German utility companies.
Speaking before a meeting of his Social Democratic Party, Mr Schröder said: "I have read the contracts and I see no cause for damage claims from companies or governments."
A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry said last night: "It is clear that there are binding contracts between UK and German companies, and letters between the UK and German governments. These contain commitments which we expect to be honoured."
She suggested that the German government's decision to end nuclear reprocessing abroad would force the return of German waste stored in Britain. It is not the Government's policy to offer long-term storage for nuclear fuel if it's not being reprocessed." It was "too early" to talk about compensation.
A BNFL spokesman said it would require "significant compensation" if contracts with Germany were breached.
"Our view is that our contracts are very robust and contain clauses which mean that if customers do not fulfil those contracts, they will have to pay us compensation." Stephen Byers, the Trade and Industry Secretary, has asked for a meeting with the German environment minister, Juergen Tritten, to discuss the issue.
Mr Tritten, a Green, will be in London tomorrow for talks with his British counterpart, Michael Meacher. During a visit to Paris last week, Mr Tritten said there was no legal basis for the payment of compensation. He said the agreements included get-
out clauses covering acts of "higher force", which the German government argues includes changes to domestic law. The French state-owned nuclear processor has said that Germany's withdrawal from contracts which run until 2010 would cost the company about £3 billion.
from TPDL 1998-Oct-21, from the Times of London, by Roger Boyes:
First task is nuclear shutdown
THE key appointments to the Cabinet, apart from Oskar Lafontaine, the Finance Minister, and Joschka Fischer, the Foreign and Environment Minister, include the Green, Jörgen Trittin, as Environment Minister, and Werner Müller as Economics Minister.
Together they will have to work out the technical details of a nuclear shutdown and come up with alternative sources of power.
Otto Schily, the Interior Minister, will have to maintain a strict anti-
crime policy and fend off Green attempts to liberalise the penal system. Franz Möntefering, a Social Democrat, will have the transport and building portfolios - and will have to resist Green attempts to halt motorway construction and banish cars from all cities. Rudolf Scharping, the Defence Minister, will have to reassure Germany's Nato allies that the Red-Green republic is a reliable ally.
from TPDL 1998-Oct-23, from the Evening/Electronic Telegraph, by Toby Helm in Brussels and Andrew Gimson in Berlin:
Franco-German lurch to the Left isolates Blair
TONY Blair's chances of forming a "triple alliance" with France and Germany were receding last night as Paris, Bonn and Brussels hatched plans to revive Socialist economic policies reminiscent of the heyday of Jacques Delors.
Yesterday, the French Socialist finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, met his new German counterpart, the Left-winger Oskar Lafontaine, as support grew in mainland Europe for an economic lurch to the Left to boost job creation and growth, and counter the world economic downturn.
This "New Deal" for Europe - backed by Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister and Mr Lafontaine - will be high on the agenda at a heads of government summit in Austria this weekend. The 15 European Union leaders will discuss the health of Europe's economy and how to make the EU more relevant to its 370 million citizens. The summit will be the first attended by Gerhard Schröder, the new German Chancellor, and Massimo D'Alema, the even newer Prime Minister of Italy, who is a former Communist. It will be, therefore, Mr Blair's first opportunity to assess the new political power-game in Europe after Helmut Kohl.
Last night, EU diplomats predicted that Mr Blair would be appalled by the emphasis on neo-Keynsian remedies and pressure for more co-ordination at EU level of economic and employment polices. One official said: "It will look to him very much like 'Old Labour'. They are talking about policies that were the stuff of Jacques Delors in the 1980s."
The idea of a new European loan to boost trans-border transport projects in the EU has been floated in recent days by Mr Jospin. Similar ideas are supported by Mr Lafontaine, who believes in loosening the government and EU purse strings to give Europe's economy a Keynsian shot in the arm. Mr Lafontaine also supports reviving the concept of "social Europe", with more protection and rights for workers at EU level, another notion opposed by Mr Blair.
Yesterday, apparently sensing that Britain was not in harmony with Paris and Bonn, Mr Blair's official spokesman claimed that Britain was, anyway, not seeking to bolt itself on to the Franco-German axis, the traditional motor of EU integration. He said: "We have no desire to break into the Franco-German relationship, which we see as a very important relationship for the whole of the EU."
Another sign of the new mood in Europe came yesterday with news that Mario Monti, the commissioner for the single market in Brussels, had called for EU nations to renegotiate and loosen the German-inspired "stability pact" - the system for enforcing budget discipline in single currency countries.
Mr Monti said in a letter to Brussels colleagues that countries should be allowed to run deficits over three per cent of GDP (the Maastricht limit) without incurring fines under the "stability pact" so long as the purpose of the spending was to invest.
Since Mr Schröder came to power last month, the German government has abandoned Mr Kohl's staunch insistence that job- creation was an exclusively national task and intends to use the German EU presidency, starting in January, to press for action at European level. The coalition programme agreed this week between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens states: "The new government will place the fight against unemployment at the centre of European policy. Its aim is a European Employment Programme."
In an interview yesterday, Mr Lafontaine said he wanted a European social policy that "sets minimum standards. For example, in employment protection or other employee rights." Mr Lafontaine also wants more tax harmonisation, so that Germany, which will retain relatively high rates under the new government's tax reform proposals, cannot be undercut by neighbours.
Mr Schröder adopts a much more moderate tone than Mr Lafontaine. He said this week that European employment policy should be a "supplement" to national policy, not a replacement for it. But Mr Schröder has not contradicted Mr Lafontaine's line on Europe, and a large part of the SPD parliamentary party will back almost anything that can be sold to them as European.
from TPDL 1998-Nov-25, from the Electronic Telegraph, by Roland Gribben, Business Editor:
Rolls-Royce 'will move if Britain adopts EU labour law'
ROLLS-ROYCE would consider moving its operations to America if Britain adopted costly European Union labour laws, its chairman, Sir Ralph Robins, said yesterday.
His comments caused alarm in Whitehall and at the aero-engine group's Derby and Bristol plants, where most of Rolls-Royce's 30,000 British employees work.
Sir Ralph told an Australian business audience: "The last thing we want is some of the European labour laws appearing in the United Kingdom - and I'm not just saying that for Rolls-Royce, I'm saying that for every industrialist in the UK."
He said the EU labour laws adopted by the Blair administration were mild and did not currently present a problem for industry. Sir Ralph said he was confident that Britain would not introduce more of the contentious EU laws, but said: "We have an out if it happens, and the out is that we've got manufacturers around the world."
He pointed out that the joint aero-engine venture with BMW, the German motor vehicle manufacturer and Rover owner, had to be restructured to allow most of the manufacturing to be carried out in Britain because of high German labour costs.
He said: "The last thing we want is the on-costs associated with the social costs of Europe, but I don't see any sign of its happening and the current government is not going down that path. But we will progressively move work to the United States if we find ourselves disadvantaged by that sort of social costs."
His comments in Sydney reflect unease among industrialists about the prospect of Britain importing costly labour and social practices as Tony Blair's Government attempts to build bridges with Europe.
They are concerned that last week's pact between EU social democrat and socialist parties will open the way for significant policy shifts on employment legislation despite government assurances that the veto will be used to block unacceptable measures. Sir Ralph's comments were seized on by the Tories. John Redwood, trade and industry spokesman, said: "We should take the warning from Rolls-Royce very seriously indeed. We have seen all too many factories closing and businesses shifting abroad as this government makes it too dear to manufacture in Britain."
Rolls-Royce has considerable investment in America, where it owns the Allison aero-engine group, and Canada. But with its biggest customers on the other side of the Atlantic, a bigger American base would present a considerable attraction. Rolls- Royce employs more than 30,000 people in Britain, most concentrated at the civil aero-engine plant at Derby and the military complex at Bristol. Employment in North America is 8,000.
The warning comes just days after Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, signed Britain up to a Left-wing manifesto with eight other EU governments, which talked of tax harmonisation and more economic co-ordination. Sir Ralph's comments triggered a hasty damage limitation exercise.
A spokesman for Rolls-Royce said: "We don't have any plans to move our operations. Sir Ralph was stressing that the UK and US were both attractive investment environments. He also made it clear he did not believe the high-cost labour environment in the rest of the EU would be transferred to Britain."
