FOLLOWING THE EUROPEAN UNION

Corruption in Focus of Croatia Vote

BIRN Balkan Insight
07 11 2007

Croatia's parties are competing in making pre-election promises to root out corruption, but when it comes to action, the results are less impressive. [..]

The campaign comes in the wake of independent Croatia's biggest-ever investigation into corruption, involving senior figures at the Croatian Privatisation Fund HFP; and it coincides with the publication on November 6 of the European Commission's annual report on Croatia's progress towards accession in which the issue of corruption features prominently. [..]

"For voters corruption has turned into one of the biggest issues, along with economic development and unemployment", Josip Kregar, dean of Zagreb's University's law faculty, told Balkan Insight. [..]

Yet political analysts remain wary of the campaign slogans and promises. [..] Even when it comes to the measures actually taken, doubts remain. Sceptics have been wondering if Operation Maestro, in which three vice-presidents of HFP were arrested in June, was a sign that the authorities are genuinely prepared to tackle corruption or part of the pre-election strategy of the governing centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ.

The three HFP vice-presidents, Ivan Gotovac, Josip Matanovic and Robert Pesa, are among seven individuals arrested. They have been charged with accepting bribes and selling state- owned companies without proper legal bids. [..]

State Prosecutor Mladen Bajic alleged that each of the HFP vice-presidents had his own separate network of associates. Undercover agents testified that they had to pay €50,000 just to have coffee with one of the accused - to gain the opportunity to discuss potentially illegal activities.

Shortly before the start of the election campaign Zagreb county court decided to expand the scope of the "Maestro" investigation. It may now go as far back as the early 1990s, when HFP was established, as some of the persons charged have been working there for almost two decades.

Zorislav Petrovic, from Transparency International Croatia, TIH, sees the "Maestro" case as evidence that USKOK [the Office for the Prevention of Corruption and Organised Crime], established in 2001 by the previous centre-left government, has finally started to function properly. As far as he is concerned, the delay has already been too long.

"I think that privatization in Croatia was the biggest criminal", Petrovic told Balkan Insight. [..]

Petrovic is among experts who argue that the high-profile cases involving HFP and others are only part of the story. Small-scale, all-pervasive corruption at the local level - at the "ticket-office" - is more of a problem for Croatian society than bribery in the higher echelons of the state. [..]

Failure to address this low-level corruption, which means so much to ordinary voters, is one area where the government's strategy has come in for criticism from the opposition - including its main force, the Social Democrats, SDP.

Professor Ivo Josipovic, the SDP's chief strategist on this issue, has promised "a war against corruption" [..]. "The SDP's program is different from others because it recognizes corruption as an endemic disease in society [..]."

Among the smaller opposition parties, the Social Liberals, HSLS, [..] said [it] would insist on banning senior state officials and parliamentary deputies from sitting on the supervisory and management boards of companies. [..]

Assessing the various parties' anti-corruption strategies, political analyst Davor Genero argues that they "don't look particularly serious".

However, he expects the next government to be more active because it will come under increasing pressure from Brussels as Croatia approaches the date of its EU accession.

Croatia's parties will also need to put their own house in order because currently there are no regulations in place about party funding. Genero believes that if TIH succeeds in persuading parties to reveal how they collect funds for the election campaign, "that is going to be a step forward". [..] "They all have their fingers in the jam jar [..]", Genero says. [..]

Even when there is some visible progress in the coordination of police and prosecution activities, there is still, in [Professor] Kregar's view, a missing link in the accountability of the top leaders.

"The public expects that the measures taken should not end at the level of the deputies to the bosses, as in the ?'Maestro' case," Kregar says, but he believes that the most prominent figures still remain out of reach of the investigations.

Moreover, Kregar argues, there is no tradition of senior officials accepting political responsibility for various scandals: ministers do not resign when their subordinates are detected as having committed some criminal offences. [..]

A pre-publication version of the European Commission's annual progress report, obtained by Balkan Insight, confirms that Brussels is seeing signs of moderate improvement. However, the report notes that no high-level official has been put on trial for, let alone convicted of, corruption. [..]

Back in Croatia, whatever the contestants may promise in the election campaign, few of their electorate expect a break-through in the fight against corruption any time soon.

Romania: Who Cares About Politics?

BIRN Balkan Insight
27 11 2007

A low turnout of 28% marred Romania's first European elections. It also invalidated the outcome of a referendum on changing the electoral system. The oppositional Democrats, who are close to President Basescu, won 29%; the Social Democrats, seen as the successors to the one-time communists, gained 23.1%; and Prime Minister Tariceanu's National Liberals received only 13.4%. They paid the price for bribery scandals and the government's record on reform since EU accession.

The Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) won 5.5%. But Bishop Laszlo Tokes, who broke with the UDMR because thought it was not assertive enough, was successful as independent. Romania's nationalists fared poorly, with neither the Greater Romania Party nor the New Generation Party securing seats in the European Parliament.

Czech teachers to strike against poor conditions in education sector

Radio Prague
03-12-2007

Czech acting Education Minister Martin Bursik and the candidate for the post, Ondrej Liska, tried to stave off a teachers' strike on December 4th by pledging to improve conditions in the education sector, but it was judged too little, too late. It has been estimated that at least half of the country's schools will remain closed.

The unions are protesting a cut in expenditures and fear a lack of funds next year for kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools. Continued low pay for teachers is not the only problem they want addressed: many teachers would like to see changes in the sector to better reward teachers for individual effort. That means school principals would be able to raise salaries to properly mirror output and performance. Currently teachers are paid according to a pay scale that recognises professional qualification and seniority, but does little to reward initiative: innovative projects or extra work.

But, speaking of swindles - how is the progress of the revised EU constitution/treaty going??

Interesting to note that Brown stealthily crept in late for a very quick and quiet signing.

[Actually the headline/text is a bit wrong: we never needed a passport before Schengen to cross most borders but just our national ID-card. Paasports are/were only used for countries with visa.]

On eve of International Migrants Day, PACE committee head slams EU proposals for irregular migrants

Council of Europe
17/12/2007

An EU proposal to fix the maximum period of detention for irregular migrants at 18 months "flies in the face of humanity", said the Chair of the Migration Committee of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE). Mevlüt Çavusoglu said the EU's Returns Directive was equivalent to "locking up irregular migrants and throwing away the key".

Europe should regularise and integrate irregular migrants sooner rather than later, he said. PACE members recently urged governments to consider regularisation programmes and praised Spain's recent use of one.

It is estimated that there are 5.5 million irregular migrants in the EU and a further 8 million in the Russian Federation alone.

2010 to be the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion

European Commission
12/12/2007

The European Commission has designated 2010 as the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion. The 17 million euro campaign should reaffirm the EU's commitment to making "a decisive impact on the eradication of poverty" by 2010.

16% of the EU population currently live at risk of poverty, and Eurobarometer data show that Europeans see poverty as a widespread problem. Over the period 2007-2013 some 75 billion Euro will be distributed from the European Social Fund to Member States and regions to promote social protection and inclusion.

The empire strikes back

February 2, 2008
The Guardian

Kiev, Tbilisi and Baku neither look nor feel like the grand European capitals of London, Paris and Rome. Littered with the hulking architectural and mental debris of the Soviet Union, these cities - and the countries of which they are the capitals - are in serious need of an overhaul. The trouble is that this requires political stability, economic investment, and most of all a counterweight to Russia, which is still manipulating borders, pipelines and markets to pull them back into its orbit.

It's fairly simple: We hate Russia," said an Estonian diplomat in Tallinn, bluntly capturing a problem that is at once emotional and strategic. Of course, this is not a new challenge for Europe's east, where western Christendom, Slavic Orthodoxy and Turkic Islam have clashed for more than a thousand years. But the European empire is a new solution.
These days it is not fashionable to speak of empires. Empires are aggressive, mercantilist relics supposedly consigned to the dustbin of history with Britain, France and Portugal's post-1945 retrenchment from the African and Asian colonies and the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather than empires, many predicted that ethnic self-determination would drag the world into a new era of political fragmentation, with every minority getting its own state, currency, and seat in the United Nations.

But for thousands of years, empires have been the world's most powerful political entities, their imperial yoke restraining subjugated nations from fighting each other and thereby filling people's eternal desire for order. Empires may not be the most desirable form of governance, given the recurrence of hugely destructive wars between them, but humankind's psychological limitations still prevent it from doing better. Big is back. It is inter-imperial relations that shape the world. Empires, not civilisations, give geography its meaning.

...
For over half a century, European nations have been pooling their power, eventually giving small and shattered post-second world war countries a new lease on life. Though EU members remain distinct nations, their greater meaning now comes from being part of the world's only superstate. War between any two countries within the EU's dense institutional nexus has become impossible, and the promise of greater security and wealth has largely succeeded in aligning the foreign policies of its members. "Our biggest logistical exercise since the second world war was not military," an official in one of the EU's shiny, postmodern edifices boasted, "but the circulation of the euro currency in 2002."

Europe has its own vision of what world order should look like, which it increasingly pursues whether America likes it or not. The EU is now the most confident economic power in the world, regularly punishing the United States in trade disputes, while its superior commercial and environmental standards have assumed global leadership. Many Europeans view America's way of life as deeply corrupt, built on borrowed money, risky and heartless in its lack of social protections, and ecologically catastrophic. The EU is a far larger humanitarian aid donor than the US, while South America, east Asia and other regions prefer to emulate the "European Dream" than the American variant.

The US and the EU increasingly differ about both the means and ends of power as well. For many Europeans, the US-led war in Iraq validated their view that war is not an instrument of policy but a sign of its failure. The al-Qaida attacks on European soil served to heighten this disdain. It is often said that America and Europe make a strong team because America breaks and Europe fixes, but this cliche has long begun to grate on Europeans, who would rather spread their version of stability before America destabilises countries on its periphery, particularly in the Arab world.

As the most highly evolved form of interstate governance, the EU aggregates countries in a manner more resembling a corporate merger than a political conquest, with net gains in both trade and territory from north Africa to the Caucasus. In Europe's capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European parliament, calls it "European patriotism". The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely.

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury - carrying a big wallet. The EU's market is the world's largest, and European technologies more and more set the global standard. If America and China fight, the world's money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Arabian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that Opec no longer price its oil in "worthless" dollars. With London taking over (again) as the world's financial capital for stock listing, it's no surprise that China's new state investment fund is to locate its main western offices there instead of New York. Model Gisele Bundchen demands to be paid in euros, while rapper Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

Condoleezza Rice has said America has no "permanent enemies," but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America's armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and "asymmetric" weapons like suicide bombers. America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.