I should have mentioned this earlier, Margot Wallstrom, Vice-President of the European Commission, has started a blog. She really needs to start categorising, and posting a little more regularly if she wants to build a readership.
Category: European Politics
Le Pen WWII remark triggers probe
The French investigate something Le Pen said.
Do we want the Turkish peasantry here?
Kevin Myers, this time spouting his outlandish views in the Telegraph:
Within the EU, Sweden and Germany have received most Turkish immigrants – and most of them are not the cosmopolitan sophisticates of Istanbul, but are from the relatively backward communities of Anatolia.
Young Swedes and Germans of Turkish extraction usually marry back into their ancestral homelands, bringing their brides home to Europe to reinforce the creation of an Anatolia in exile. In both countries, new dialects are emerging: Turko-Swedish and Turko-German, linguistic reflections of the changes of identity that are taking permanent root there.
A bien-pensant arrogance has transformed cities in almost every country in Europe. Immigration was held to be a good thing: to question it was racist. Provided that the host society was tolerant enough, it was assumed that the incomers would inevitably become integrated, adopting indigenous values. But the opposite happened: many European children are being raised to embrace loyalties wholly antithetical to the values of the states they live in.
They are not cuckoos in the nest, for cuckoos ultimately leave: the millions of Muslim immigrants who have poured into Europe are staying.
Moreover, with a religious culture that generally disdains contraception, abortion and women’s “rights”, the Muslim population will almost certainly grow disproportionately. Bernard Lewis, the pre-eminent British scholar of Islam, predicts that by the end of this century, Europe will be predominantly Muslim.
Even saying this would cause me to be shunned at a dinner party in Islington. For one of the symptoms of the chronic immigration syndrome is that the intelligentsia of the host-country refuses to discuss, or even permit discussion, of its long-term consequences. Instead there is much witless, liberal maundering about the unassailable virtues of a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-ethos society.
He sounds terribly scared…
Embraceable E.U.
Robert Kagan has this interesting article in the WP last week. He is worth quoting at length here:
But the crisis in Ukraine shows what an enormous and vital role Europe can play, and is playing, in shaping the politics and economies of nations and peoples along its ever-expanding border. This is no small matter. On the contrary, it is a task of monumental strategic importance for the United States as well as for Europeans. By accident of history and geography, the European paradise is surrounded on three sides by an unruly tangle of potentially catastrophic problems, from North Africa to Turkey and the Balkans to the increasingly contested borders of the former Soviet Union. This is an arc of crisis if ever there was one, and especially now with Putin’s play for a restoration of the old Russian empire. In confronting these dangers, Europe brings a unique kind of power, not coercive military power but the power of attraction. The European Union has become a gigantic political and economic magnet whose greatest strength is the attractive pull it exerts on its neighbors. Europe’s foreign policy today is enlargement; its most potent foreign policy tool is what the E.U.’s Robert Cooper calls “the lure of membership.”
Cooper describes the E.U. as a liberal, democratic, voluntary empire expanding continuously outward as others seek to join it. This expanding Europe absorbs problems and conflicts rather than directly confronting them in the American style. The lure of membership, he notes, has helped stabilize the Balkans and influenced the political course of Turkey. The Turkish people’s desire to join the European Union has led them to modify Turkey’s legal code and expand rights to conform to European standards. The expansive and attractive force of the European Union has also played its part in the Ukraine crisis. Had Europe not expanded to include Poland and other Eastern European countries, it would have neither the interest nor the influence in Ukraine’s domestic affairs that it does.
Cooper, unlike many Europeans, acknowledges the vital role of U.S. power in providing the strategic environment within which Europe’s soft expansionism can proceed. Employing America’s “military muscle” to “clear the way for a political solution involving a kind of imperial penumbra around the European Union,” he suggests, may be the way to deal with “the area of the greatest threat in the Middle East.” In the Balkans, Europe’s magnetic attraction would have been feeble had Slobodan Milosevic not been defeated militarily. And undoubtedly American power provides a useful backdrop in the current diplomatic confrontation over Ukraine.
Cooper is not alone in his expansive European vision. Among leading European policymakers, Germany’s Joschka Fischer seems the most dedicated to using enlargement and the E.U.’s attractive power for strategic purposes. Before Sept. 11, 2001, Fischer was suspicious of bringing Turkey into the European Union and inheriting such nightmarish neighbors as Iraq and Syria. But now he regards Turkey’s membership as a strategic necessity. “To modernize an Islamic country based on the shared values of Europe would be almost a D-Day for Europe in the war against terror,” he argues, because it “would provide real proof that Islam and modernity, Islam and the rule of law . . . [and] this great cultural tradition and human rights are after all compatible.” This “would be the greatest positive challenge for these totalitarian and terrorist ideas.”
Americans could hardly disagree. Unfortunately, Cooper’s and Fischer’s vision of an expanding E.U. empire is not shared across Europe. It finds most support in Tony Blair’s Britain, as well as in Poland and other Eastern European countries, and among the current German leadership (though not among the German population). It has least support in France, where even the recent inclusion of Poland and other nations to the east is regarded as something of a disaster for French foreign policy and where the admission of Turkey is considered anathema. Modern, secular, forward-looking France still insists that Europe must remain, in the words of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a Christian civilization. In this and other respects, France is part of what one might call “red-state Europe,” a pre-modern bastion on a postmodern continent.
Americans are generally skeptical of or indifferent to the European Union. They shouldn’t be. The United States has an important interest in the direction the E.U. takes in coming years. It may actually matter, for instance, whether Britain votes to support the E.U. constitution, as Blair wants. A Britain with real influence inside the E.U. is more likely to steer it in the liberal imperial direction that the E.U.’s Cooper, a former Blair adviser, proposes. That could prove a far more important strategic boon to the United States than a few thousand European troops in Iraq.
Is Turkey the next Argentina?
Could Turkey be plunged into a fiscal nightmare? Erinc Yeldan, professor in the department of economics at Bilkent University in Ankara and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington seem to think so. Will this threaten future Turkey accession to the EU?
They note:
But beneath these numbers, a crisis looms. The expansion has been driven by a huge inflow of capital from abroad, $10.9 billion in 2003 (4.6 percent of the economy) and $12.5 billion in just the first eight months of 2004. These are overwhelmingly speculative, short-term inflows – not direct investment, for example, which would expand the country’s productive capacity and create jobs. Foreign direct investment has in fact fallen since 2000. The country is very vulnerable to a serious economic downturn when the inflow of foreign money goes dry.
These kinds of massive speculative capital inflows have a habit of reversing themselves, as they did in Asia in 1997, setting off the Asian financial crisis and a regional depression. In such situations, investors eventually begin to worry about the sustainability of such borrowing and debt. Any number of external events could trigger such an exodus from Turkey: For example, if U.S. and world interest rates rise, as they undoubtedly will from their current historic lows, safe assets like U.S. Treasury securities will become much more attractive.
The influx of speculative money from abroad has also pushed the Turkish currency, the lira, to an overvalued level. This, too, is a bubble waiting to burst. In the meantime it has devastated traditional Turkish industries that are typically labor-intensive by making imports artificially cheap, thus aggravating the unemployment problem. The lira had risen 139 percent against the dollar between 2000-2003.
The country’s public debt is unsustainable at 70 percent of the economy. In order to sustain it presently, the IMF has the government running a primary (excluding interest) budget surplus of 6.5 percent. This is extremely high (compare it with 3.0 percent for Argentina and 4.25 percent for Brazil), and prevents the government from making necessary investments in human capital and infrastructure.
Another devastating part of the IMF program is high interest rates: The Treasury’s debt instruments that are the leading assets in the Turkish financial markets carry an interest rate of 26 percent, still very high at 15 percent in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Compare this with 2 percent in the United States – it is easy to understand why businesses in Turkey are reluctant to borrow and invest in productive capacity.
In short, the policy makers have created an economy that runs on a speculative bubble. It would be nice if a majority of the Turkish people at least got some of the benefits of bubble-driven growth for as long as it lasts. But unfortunately, this has not been the case. Since 2000, the unemployment rate has risen by almost 4 percentage points to 10.5 percent, and real wages have actually fallen.
As Turkey and the European Union continue talks on the possibility of EU accession, the Turkish government should re-examine its unsustainable economic policies of the last five years. Continuing these IMF-supported policies in hopes of garnering credibility with the EU may be dangerous. Ironically, such policies could lead to an economic failure that would actually doom Turkey’s chances for membership.
Europe: Al Qaeda's next target?
Will Europe see more Madrid and Istanbul style attacks? Many analysts are saying that Europe is at greater risk than the US.
Ursula Mueller, a German diplomat with terror expertise, said that European-based terrorists were under pressure; terror operations have been averted in London, Paris and Madrid. “But they continue to focus on catastrophic attacks,” she said.
“There are indications,” Mueller said, “that Europe is at greater risk for terrorist attack than is the U.S.” – particularly U.S. allies with troops in Iraq, but also Germany, which has 2,200 troops in Afghanistan.
“The situation may become much more precarious,” said Greg Mascolo, Der Spiegel’s Washington bureau chief and author of “Inside 9-11.”
“Europe’s threat is growing from the inside,” Mascolo said.
Poland chases after Ireland's pot of gold
Kevin Cullen in the IHT writes about Poland, and their aspirations to copy Ireland’s success. Among some of the similarities between Poland and Ireland:
Patrycjusz Sliwinski, 23, who proudly explained that he was named after Ireland’s patron saint, is writing his University of Wroclaw master’s thesis on Oscar Wilde. He became an Hibernophile by reading Irish history. “Basically, the Irish got screwed, like us, by a bigger neighbor,” he said.
Ouch.
Nato is a threat to Europe and must be disbanded
Jonathan Steele argues for the disbandment of NATO:
We must go all the way, up to the termination of Nato. An alliance which should have wound up when the Soviet Union collapsed now serves almost entirely as a device for giving the US an unfair and unreciprocated droit de regard over European foreign policy.
As long as we are officially embedded as America’s allies, the default option is that we have to support America and respect its “leadership”. This makes it harder for European governments to break ranks, for fear of being attacked as disloyal. The default option should be that we, like they, have our interests. Sometimes they will coincide. Sometimes they will differ. But that is normal.
But is this kind of disengagement from the US a positive thing? Will not European and US interests collide, leading to further fragmentation of relations?
Is Europe ready for Turkey?
Dominique Moisi questions whether the EU is ready for Turkey, and cites three likely factors involved.
Polls show that at least in France, 75 percent of the population is not ready to accept Turkey – it is a refusal based on ignorance, stereotypes and prejudices disguised as common sense. And without the support of France, it is unlikely that Turkey can enter the union. It is therefore essential to understand the emotional roots of public rejection, some of which apply beyond France.
And the three:
First, globalization. The more interdependent the world becomes, the more people look for marginal differences. The more they fear the unknown, the more they desire familiarity. In an increasingly secular Europe, the sound of church bells takes on a reassuring cultural – as opposed to religious – quality. There is a widespread notion that 70 million Muslims are disturbing, if not invading, our select club.
Second, 9/11 makes Turkey’s integration at once more necessary and more frightening. If the threat comes from within Islam, the reasoning goes, why on earth should we marry our mortal enemy?
And unlike Bosnia, which will one day apply for candidacy, Turkey is both Muslim and very large. Of course this is precisely why we need Turkey, if our aging continent wants to recover its demographic dynamism and fulfill its ambition to truly play a world diplomatic role, in particular in the Middle East.
Third, the process of enlargement itself is playing against Turkey, since Europe is already adjusting to its passage from 15 to 25 members.
What is this 'European Union'?
Anne-Marie Slaughter in the IHT, with a piece on the EU. She cites the number of times both George Bush and John Kerry have referred to the European Union – and it’s not often. This bit is good:
Suppose the citizens of Ohio or Oregon or Alabama understood that the EU has a larger population and gross domestic product than the United States. That English is widely and increasingly spoken as a second language. That most of the students who are either no longer applying to American schools or unable to enter the United States for a lack of a visa are choosing European universities instead. And that EU representatives are thick on the ground in many developing countries, both trolling for business and doling out aid and advice.
Suppose further that at a time when one of the most important issues in the U.S. election is which candidate is better placed to “win the peace” in Iraq and Afghanistan, American voters knew something about the EU model of building democracy – through assistance, admonition and accession negotiations. Americans would not likely believe that the prospect of EU membership, even if such a thing were possible, would have convinced the Taliban or Saddam Hussein to lay down their arms. But they might think that after the first flush of military victory the EU could teach America quite a lot about the exercise of civilian rather than military power.
EU citizens may be dubious about the EU’s effectiveness, particularly in political and military affairs. They may be unhappy about the democracy deficit. And they may be skeptical about their new constitution. But they know that the EU is an entity distinct from “Europe,” a rising entity of their own creation that is not simply an imitation of the United States. As a result, American voters are genuinely living in a different world from their European counterparts.
This trans-Atlantic divide results not from policies but from the most basic perceptions of relevant political actors in the international system. It should worry us all, well beyond the election.