Monthly Archives: January 2009

Macedonian quarrels make Alexander the Great turn in his grave

January 29, 2009 1:01 pm by Tony Barber

In his recent inaugural address in Washington, President Barack Obama said “the time has come to set aside childish things”. Evidently the leaders of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia weren’t listening.

They have just done an unbelievably childish thing and named their section of a major north-south trans-European highway – known in Eurospeak as “Corridor 10″ – after Alexander the Great. In 2007, they renamed Skopje airport after him.

Now, as we know, Alexander certainly had a taste for travel. He extended his empire as far as India. But these persistent efforts to attach his name to modern European transport systems are, I’d say, beginning to stretch the point.

The Macedonians in Skopje think their state has a rightful claim on Alexander’s memory because of his connections to their territory in ancient times. But the authorities in Athens regard Alexander as an exclusively Greek warrior-hero.

The result: Greece has made clear it won’t pay one euro towards the cost of the Macedonian part of Corridor 10. And relations between Athens and Skopje are in yet another mess.

In Brussels, European Union officials are beside themselves with frustration as they watch this dispute jeopardise their carefully laid plans for the EU’s slow but steady enlargement into the Balkans. The argument over what former Yugoslav Macedonia should call itself has dragged on for almost 20 years, and a solution seems no closer now than when it first broke out.

Of course, the dispute arouses great passions on both sides - as shown in the posts to this story on BalkanInsight.com. But the way it’s being handled would be enough to make the great Alexander turn in his grave.

Greece argues that Skopje’s claim to the name Macedonia is an assault on Greece’s ancient Hellenic heritage, its identity and even its territory, since there is a northern Greek province also called Macedonia. For the former Yugoslav republic, however, it is vital to have a name that strengthens the identity of its people. Skopje perceives subtle threats not only from Greece but from Bulgaria, which questions whether there really is such a thing as a Macedonian nation and language, and Serbia, which denies the autonomy of the Macedonian church.

Last year, a widespread view in Brussels was that Greece had overplayed its hand when it blocked ex-Yugoslav Macedonia’s progress towards EU and Nato membership because of the name dispute. Now, however, it’s Skopje that’s in the EU’s black book, because of its dumb decision on renaming its bit of Corridor 10.

In an excellent new report, the International Crisis Group think-tank recommends that Skopje should state its readiness to accept a UN mediator’s proposal and use the name “Republic of Northern Macedonia” for international purposes. In return, Greece should drop its veto threats at Nato and the EU.

Common sense, really. But this is a commodity in short supply in some parts of the Balkans.

We have ways, or rather don’t have ways, of making you vote!

January 28, 2009 1:34 pm by Tony Barber

I was talking this week with Graham Watson, leader of the liberal group in the European Parliament, about the forthcoming elections to the legislature, and I was struck by two points he made.

“The European Parliament is now the most powerful institution in the European Union, but hasn’t recognised it,” he said. And later on: ”The big question about the elections is, is the turnout going to slip further? I think not, and it may even start climbing again.”

There’s an important and disturbing connection between the parliament’s increasing powers and the falling voter turnout. It seems, paradoxically, that the more powerful the legislature becomes, the less people can be bothered to elect its members. Turnout has dropped at all five European elections since the first such ballot in 1979 (63 per cent then, 45.7 per cent in 2004).

Legislators understand the problem, which explains why the parliament’s website has a section for voters setting out ”10 good reasons to vote” in next June’s elections. Good Reason No. 6 spells out the reality of lawmaking in today’s EU: “Many, probably most, laws enacted in your country are a transposition of European acts voted by MEPs.”

So why are fewer people voting? Some research by Anna Olsson, of the Department of Government at American University in Washington, throws light on the subject. A country with high turnouts in national elections will have relatively high turnouts in European Parliament elections. Turnouts will be higher in countries where the European elections are held on Sundays rather than weekdays. And surprise, surprise, countries where voting is mandatory – such as Belgium – will have high turnouts.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. Olsson cautions that one must not jump to the conclusion that more pro-EU attitudes among citizens are associated with higher turnouts. It is true, she says, but statistically not very important: it takes a 6 percentage point increase in the EU’s popularity to produce a 1 percentage point increase in turnout.

A better indicator, she suggests, is whether or not a country has held the EU’s rotating presidency in the 12 months before the election. Holding the presidency generates positive publicity and can raise turnout by about 6.5 percentage points, she says.

Well, we shall see. Slovenia, which held the presidency last year, and the Czech Republic, the present holder, both recorded miserable turnouts of 28.3 per cent in the 2004 election – though not as low as Slovakia, holder of the all-time national low of 17 per cent.

To conclude, I leave you with the European Parliament website’s Good Reason No. 1 to vote: “Get the Europe you want! If you don’t vote, don’t complain.”

Complain about the European Parliament? Perish the thought.

Tags: Elections 2009
Posted in EU Parliament | Permalink

Cheeseburgery hamburgers and the problem of computerised translations

January 26, 2009 1:49 pm by Tony Barber

This morning I found myself on a public platform in a Brussels hotel for my first ever European bloggers’ conference. As a representative of an “establishment” news organisation, I was half-expecting to be roasted alive. But in the end both Mark Mardell of the BBC, my friend and fellow-guest, and I got through it safely enough.

The most perceptive contribution, I thought, came from a Romanian blogger who made the point that the global blogosphere remains to a large extent divided by language. For example, you can blog all you like in Romanian, but most of the world won’t have a clue what you’re saying.

A moderator responded to this by saying, “Try using computer-generated translation.” As I drifted back to my office, I recalled that the last time I’d experimented with computers striving to change Italian into English or Dutch into Spanish, the results had been pretty hopeless. Perhaps things had improved over the last couple of years?

Well, below are three examples of computerised translation – courtesy of Google Language Tools – from French, German and Polish into English. I am republishing the translations exactly as they came out, punctuation mistakes and all, after I hit the button.

1) This is from a news story in Le Monde about US and European policy in the Middle East. “Believing that the war in Gaza has imposed new priorities and the administration of the new American president, Barack Obama, might break with the unconditional support to Israel, French diplomacy is trying to print in Europe, a change of tone against the Hamas.”

As you can see, this translation starts off promisingly. In fact, it scarcely puts a foot wrong until it loses control and talks, weirdly, about printing changes of tone against the Hamas. Still, we sort of know what’s going on here. 7 out of 10 for Monsieur L’Ordinateur.

2) Now here’s a sentence from a story in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung about the US prison centre at Guantánamo and what Europe can do to help close it down. “The fate Released Guantanamo prisoners ensures fierce debates: Union politicians criticized the foreign ministers of Vorpreschen Stein Meier – and refer the responsibility for the inmates to the U.S.”

This is a pretty poor effort, Herr Computer. Particularly disappointing is the omission of the preposition “of” between “fate” and “released” (which also shouldn’t have a capital R), and the baffling three words “Vorpreschen Stein Meier”. But let’s be fair, there’s a modest degree of sense here. 5.5 out of 10.

3) Lastly, here’s a sentence from the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on French leisure habits during the recession. “Economic crisis and changing lifestyles, the French seriously affect the profits of French cafes and restaurants. A sign of the collapse of the French culture of the restaurant is visible on the streets of Paris rash of quick-service bar, offering generally pogardzane a few years ago and cheeseburgery hamburgers.”

No, dear readers, you have not gone potty. That’s what it says. And I am afraid, Pan Komputer, that it’s utter gibberish. You get 2 out of 10 – and an hour’s detention in the language lab.

Posted in EU | Permalink

Arctic challenges may prompt US to ratify UN Convention on Law of Sea

January 22, 2009 2:47 pm by Tony Barber

Excuse the pun, but the Arctic is a hot topic in Brussels these days. So hot that I and many others struggled through wintry rain and darkness this morning to hear Elisabeth Walaas, Norway’s state secretary for foreign affairs, give a talk on the challenges facing the High North.

By now, the facts are well-known. The Arctic region is thought to contain huge energy resources, perhaps as much as 20 per cent of the world’s undiscovered, technically recoverable reserves. In an age of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, the temptation to exploit these resources is irresistible.

But the Arctic environment is exceptionally fragile. Global warming is already taking a severe toll. The ice and permafrost are melting. Ocean levels are rising. New shipping routes will open up. Fish stocks will move among different national jurisdictions, raising questions about how to stop uncontrolled harvesting. To cap it all, the US government declared last May that polar bears were an endangered species.

Meanwhile, territorial disputes hang over the Arctic. Canada and the US, for example, disagree about whether the Northwest Passage is an internal Canadian waterway or an international strait. This is no small matter. Once the passage is fully open, shipping companies will be able to knock thousands of nautical miles off their vessels’ journeys between Asia and Europe. Regulating the inevitable surge in maritime traffic will be a heavy responsibility.

The case for a strong international legal framework to govern the Arctic seems unanswerable. But here’s what Walaas said: “As we [in Norway] see it, there are no legal gaps in the Arctic that need to be filled, and no need for a new comprehensive international regime to govern the Arctic. What’s needed is effective implementation of what we’ve got.”

By this, she meant above all the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but also several lesser codes and forums such as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the 1995 Fish Stocks Agreement, the Arctic Council (to which the European Union has applied for observer status) and the International Maritime Organisation.

All other Arctic states agree with Norway that the existing agreements are sufficient. For the US, former president George W. Bush made that plain in a national security directive adopted only one week before he left office. The main argument is that, unlike the Antarctic, where a treaty system dating to 1961 governs international conduct, the Arctic is an ocean under ice and falls under the scope of the Law of the Sea.

It’s interesting that the odd man out in this debate is the European Parliament. By a big majority, it passed a resolution last October calling for an international treaty for the protection of the Arctic. Legislators were fearful that Russia, in whose territory large amounts of the untapped energy reserves lie, wouldn’t extract the oil and gas without damaging the Arctic environment.

But if Walaas and others are right, then it would help if the US government were finally to ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea. George W. Bush’s administration wanted to, but Senate conservatives thwarted him. Now John Kerry, the incoming Senate foreign relations committee chairman, says he will push for ratification because the Arctic is “a strategic priority for our nation”.

Will this be another area where Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House will make a difference?

Posted in Environment, EU Parliament | Permalink

Big job, tiny electorate: Barroso set fair for a second term

January 21, 2009 2:03 pm by Tony Barber

José Manuel Barroso’s campaign for a second term as European Commission president is coming along nicely. Last week he secured a public endorsement for the first time from Gordon Brown, the UK premier.

Of course, it’s hardly a campaign in the normal democratic sense. European voters aren’t directly involved. The vast majority probably has no idea what’s going on. The selection of the Commission president, one of Europe’s most powerful jobs, rests with the 27 leaders of the European Union’s member-states.

This is an electorate so small that it rivals those obscure English university clubs whose members are said to launch ritual attacks on foxes with champagne bottles. Even the body that chooses the pope, which is drawn from the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals, is at present more than four times bigger, with almost 120 cardinals aged under 80 and eligible to vote.

Still, this is the way Europe operates, it’s written into the EU’s rules, and very few leaders seem inclined to change it. You can’t blame Barroso for working the system as he finds it.

And there can be no doubt that he is working it very cleverly. Brown likes Barroso not only for his liberal economic instincts, but because he thinks the centre-right former Portuguese prime minister would strike up a good relationship with President Barack Obama – an important consideration for Europe in the early months of the new US administration.

With Brown in the bag, you may ask, how can Barroso fail to get a second five-year term? For Barroso already has the public backing of centre-right heavyweights such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Other centre-right leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s long-serving prime minister, have also signalled their support, as has Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European Parliament.

On the left, meanwhile, Portugal’s José Sócrates and Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are behind Barroso. So, too, is Matti Vanhanen, Finland’s centrist prime minister.

Doubtless this explains why Martin Schultz, the German leader of the European Parliament’s socialist group, says of Barroso: “In terms of his politics, he is a very vague person. One day he is left-wing, the other he is liberal, the next he is conservative. We want a socialist at the head of the Commission, but unfortunately it is the European Council [of national leaders] that nominates.”

But perhaps European public opinion may exert some influence on the process, after all. The European Parliament is up for re-election in June, and if centre-left and liberal parties across Europe were to inflict a heavy defeat on the centre-right – at present, the largest group in the legislature – then it is conceivable that pressure would grow to replace Barroso with a nominee from the political family that had triumphed at the polls.

After all, the man or woman picked by EU national leaders as Commission president must still win approval from the European Parliament in a vote of confidence. And EU leaders are anxious to settle the matter of who should run the Commission as quickly as possible – in other words, at a summit scheduled for June 18-19. If the left had just scored a big election victory, the legislature might not be in the mood to offer a tame endorsement of Barroso’s re-nomination.

Knowing how the EU works, however, one can imagine a more likely scenario: a compromise under which Barroso is re-appointed, but he agrees, when putting together his new Commission, to give it a political balance that reflects the European Parliament election results.

It’s not exactly democracy as practised in the recent US presidential election campaign, primaries and all. But it’s very, very European.

Tags: Barroso, Sarkozy
Posted in EU Commission, EU Parliament | Permalink

The Top Ten American Moments of Your Life

January 19, 2009 2:22 pm by Tony Barber

For millions around the world, Barack Obama’s inauguration as US president on Tuesday is surely going to be one of those moments that stays in the memory forever. But if you were to compile a list of the Top Ten American Moments of your life – limited strictly to events that you can remember – where would it rank?

Here, in chronological order, are my Top Ten (I include popular culture as well as politics, and I exclude everything unless I have a personal memory of it):

1. Playing with a full set of American Civil War bubblegum cards (1967)

2. Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on TV (1968)

3. Watching Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot” on TV (1971)

4. Going to the cinema to see Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in “The Front Page” (1974)

5. Watching President Richard Nixon’s televised resignation speech (1974)

6. Going to see Lou Reed in concert in London (1976)

7. Reading Franklin D. Roosevelt’s public papers, especially transcripts of his presidential press conferences, at university (1981)

8. Seeing the Manhattan skyline for the first time (1982)

9. Following the early days of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky story (1998)

10. Seeing the Twin Towers attacked (2001)

I can recall each of these events as if they happened yesterday. And let me tell you, those Civil War bubblegum cards were just fantastic.

Posted in Foreign policy | Permalink

Hoaxes multiply in the Age of the Great Rip-Off

January 15, 2009 11:09 am by Tony Barber

Am I imagining it, or are we seeing more and more public hoaxes? During last year’s US election campaign, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was fooled by a French-Canadian talk show host into thinking she was having a conversation with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Let’s go hunting some time, she suggested brightly.

During the 2007 French presidential campaign, Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal fell for a similar trick and told an interviewer masquerading as the premier of Quebec that most French people would support independence for Corsica. Royal lost the election.

And now there is the Entropa affair. This ‘work of art’, put on display at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels and designed to celebrate the Czech Republic’s EU presidency, portrays Bulgaria as a toilet, France as a country on strike, Germany as an Autobahn network resembling a swastika, the Netherlands as a land of floods and minarets, Romania as a Dracula theme park, Sweden as an Ikea kit and the UK, in an allusion to British euroscepticism, as nothing at all.

Entropa was supposed to be a collaborative effort by artists from all 27 EU member-states, and that’s certainly what the Czech government thought it was – not to mention the various news media that published stories about it. Now we know it was created by David Cerny, the enfant terrible of the Czech art world, and two associates. The Czech government is crestfallen. Cerny has apologised, but says: “We wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.”

Well, the jury is still out on that. But in any case, those news media which fell into Cerny’s trap can hardly complain. There is a rich tradition of news organisations conducting light-hearted tricks on the public, starting with a 1957 April Fool’s Day report on the BBC – at the time, probably the world’s most respected broadcaster – about “spaghetti trees“. Dish it out, and it will one day be dished out to you.

Meanwhile, a little common sense in a newsroom can work wonders. Otherwise Germany’s Stern magazine might never have published extracts in 1983 from what it thought were Adolf Hitler’s diaries.

Still, this is the age of Jérôme Kerviel, Bernard Madoff and B. Ramalinga Raju, as well as economic recession and rising unemployment. I may be deliberately misleading you, but it seems to me that, after death and taxes, the third certainty of our times is the Great Rip-Off.

Posted in EU | Permalink

Europe weighs the risks of debt against the misery of recession

January 13, 2009 10:05 am by Tony Barber

Credit ratings agencies are in the doghouse in Brussels, both for their supposed role in making the financial market crisis worse than it need have been, and for their alleged failure thereafter to put their houses quickly enough in order.

But that isn’t deterring the agencies from taking a hard look at the way Europe’s recession is straining the public finances of certain governments in and out of the euro area.

Last week, Standard & Poor’s, one of the world’s three main agencies, warned that it might cut the sovereign debt ratings of Greece and Ireland. In truth, that wasn’t really a surprise. The crash of the Irish “Celtic tiger” economy is no secret. As for Greece, a study by the Citigroup economist Jürgen Michels last month contained the alarming prediction that Greece’s public debt would soar to 108.5 per cent of gross domestic product in 2010 from 94.8 per cent in 2007.

S&P delivered a bigger shock on Monday when it said it might also cut the sovereign debt ratings of Spain, the eurozone’s fourth largest economy. The reaction in the markets said it all. The spread between Spain’s 10-year government bond yields and those of Germany rose to its highest level since 1999, when the euro was launched. The same fate befell government bonds in Portugal, which investors seem to think is next on the list for a possible downgrade.

Of course, threatening a downgrade is not the same as putting the threat into effect, and it’s possible S&P won’t take the second step. Moreover, Moody’s, another big agency, tends to be more cautious before contemplating a change to a government’s credit standing.

But the message from the agencies, and from financial markets more generally, is clear. A spending spree to get out of Europe’s recession will carry penalties, even if it is accompanied by promises of a rapid return to fiscal rectitude once the worst of the crisis is over.

Spain is, in fact, better placed than many other EU countries to run up higher budget deficits and take on more debt. During its long spell of strong economic growth, Spain took care to maintain a budget surplus, and its public debt at the end of 2007 was only 36.2 per cent of GDP, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency.

But for other countries – Greece and Italy come to mind – it’s a different story. And that explains why there is a lot more nervousness in EU capitals than is commonly appreciated about the wisdom of large-scale deficit spending to end the recession.

Posted in EU | Permalink

Putin to Europe: Stop dithering, quibbling and sipping horilka

January 12, 2009 10:41 am by Tony Barber

Negotiating with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former president, is hard enough even when Europe’s relations with the Kremlin are going well – which they haven’t been for some while. For an insight into Putin’s brutal, hard as nails character, have a look at the official Russian government transcript of a conversation he had with some Moscow-based western reporters last week.

The discussion, which centres on the shut-off of Russian gas deliveries to the European Union via Ukraine, turns at one point to the possible deployment of EU monitors along the pipeline route through Ukrainian territory. “We hope that the issue will be resolved expeditiously. We don’t want a group of men and women to come to Kiev and just sit in a hotel and sip horilka [Ukrainian vodka],” Putin says.

Expressing impatience with what he sees as the European Commission’s slow, bureaucratic procedures, he warns: “You should get cracking. In such conditions, two hours would be enough. Instead, they are quibbling over details. They have no mandate? Let them get it.”

He directs even heavier fire at Ukraine’s leaders: “We are witnessing a political collapse inside Ukraine. I regret to say that it indicates a high level of corruption in Ukrainian government structures, which today are fighting not over the gas price but for the possibility to keep certain mediators in the game, in order to use the dividends for personal enrichment and to raise the necessary funds for future political campaigns.”

Answering a question on how anyone can know who is telling the truth about the gas crisis, Putin once again uses Ukrainian food imagery. “If you are not sure, send your own observers to the border between Russia and Ukraine, and to the border between Ukraine and western Europe. Go ahead. Sit there and watch from morning to night, eat salo [pig fat] and chase it down with horilka. They have excellent pig fat in Ukraine. My friends send it to me from Ukraine.”

Only at one point is there a hint of Putin’s KGB background, and of the personal world view that such a background helps to shape. He admonishes the reporters: “I don’t know what you’re going to write and what directions you will get from your bosses. Everything points to the fact that there are some directions, because the picture being presented is absolutely biased…”

Whew. Time for some horilka, I think.

Posted in Energy | Permalink

In spite of 1968, Czechs don’t hate or despise Russia

January 9, 2009 9:46 am by Tony Barber

It’s been a turbulent start to the Czech Republic’s European Union presidency – and nowhere more so than in foreign policy and energy policy, both of which are intimately linked to the EU’s relations with Russia. Some European pundits are worried that the Czechs – with their Soviet bloc past, present-day anti-communism, strong emphasis on human rights, and plans to host part of a US anti-missile shield on Czech soil – are simply the wrong people to represent the EU in its dealings with Russia over the next six months.

So what does Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg think of that argument? “It comes from the erroneous perception that the Czech Republic has special prejudices or even hatreds towards Russia,” he told me and some other Brussels-based reporters in Prague this week.

“Czechs as a rule don’t have special prejudices against the Russians, even though in the period from 1968 to the 1990s the Russians had occupation forces in Czechoslovakia. Czech citizens saw that the Russian soldiers were worse off than themselves. They saw these poor boys marching towards some town and they felt a kind of compassion. There was an eruption [of anti-Soviet sentiment] in 1968, but many Czech travellers went to the Soviet Union and saw conditions for themselves…”

In my opinion, Schwarzenberg is right. There was some violence after the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, one famous incident being the attack on the Aeroflot office on Prague’s Wenceslas Square after Czechoslovakia’s defeat of the Soviet Union in the 1969 world ice hockey championships. But I remember following the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on a walkabout in Prague in 1987.

It was a powerful experience to see how the citizens applauded Gorbachev as he strolled through the streets, the grim-faced Czechoslovak communist party leader Gustav Husak trailing in his wake. For Czechoslovaks at that time, their fellow-countryman Husak, not the Russian Gorbachev, was the problem.

True, the US anti-missile shield deployment is a thorn in Czech-Russian relations. But as Schwarzenberg says, that’s mostly because Russia still can’t get used to the idea that a former Warsaw Pact state that it used to boss about is deciding its foreign and security policies for itself.

In any case, who knows? Barack Obama may drop the entire plan – or at least suggest to the Russians that he won’t deploy the shield if the Kremlin helps persuade Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.

Posted in Foreign policy | Permalink