FOLLOWING THE EUROPEAN UNION

George, I most certainly hope you are right ... I do think it will just be a temporary setback ... but I'm not wholly confident, at all.

In an (otherwise rather bland) interview in the Taz with one Ulrike Guerot, she makes a point worth making. Let me try a translation from the German:


Now I dont care how many stars there are on the flag or even whether my MP knows. But the point that the electorate's rejection of the EU is also merely an echo of how politicians have used the EU as cop-out for their own failures or impopular measures is a fair one. National politicians have used the EU to push through a host of "harmonisations" and other more or less impopular measures, employing the Brussels polit-bureaucracy to think up and quietly push through all the policies that they themselves would never get away with in the partisan, media-saturated spotlight of national politics. And whenever voters got angry at them anyway, they pointed the finger. That being the case, what do you expect? It had to go wrong some time; they took too much out of the situation.

Now I blame the EC too, for all too willingly retreating into that bureaucratic policy-making fortress, far from the camera lights, slugging away without ever taking the trouble of presenting, explaining and persuading to the public, the citizens/voters. They let themselves be pushed into this role of anonymous machine that can always be scapegoated from afar; in part because in return they were left to work in anonymity, without worrying all too much about accountability. That was a mistake. And now these policy-makers find themselves the victim of the moment where, when it comes to this game the national politicians have been playing, the chickens have come home to roost.

I fully agree with your analysis Nimh, but don't think you should lose heart because of it.

Politicians everywhere are adept at taking personal credit for good things that happen, even though they had little to do with their origins (recall Clinton's boastful claims of job creation and budget balancing as a result of an economic expansion that started before he took office), and of blaming others for things that go wrong. While you may decry the actions of European politicians in these areas, ours are probably better and more practised at it than yours. Blaming the EU administrative apparatus is an easy cop out for national politicians there. Here we have the same game played between states and the Federal government.

I agree the EU needs increased electoral representation to overcome this aspect of the game, and that likely won't come until a new constitution is adopted. I'm afraid that an unpopular issue such as welfare reform will only make the matter more difficult, as each governmental body tries to have its way and blame the other for the cost. It may be that no progress will occur until there is public acknowledgement of the facts and what must somehow be done about them. Unfortunately this often doesn't occur until the politicians on both sides have run out of lies and evasions.

However Europe has achieved a great deal already - just raising the living standards of relatively poorly developed countries in Western Europe has been a great achievement. The German response to the assimilation of the former GDR was, in many aspects, heroic. Poland, the Czech & Slovak republics and Hungary are developing fast, but Bulgaria and Romania will be more difficult. The Serbs have been angry for five centuries and will likely stay that way for another one before they adapt. I am inclined to believe that the real pacing issue here is economic competitiveness, and not the union. Europe has already shown it can deal with the Union: it has yet come to grips with competition and the demise of the illusion of social democratic comfort.

We must look carefully at the real world before we try to solve this problem. It is no use upon this subject of all subjects to evade facts, amuse ourselves with theories, spin cobwebs. We are dealing with a plain rough matter of political business, and any misconception of our data, any misconception in our design, will be sure to lead us into grievous error. We must really face the question as it truly stands, or it is of no use facing it at all.
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http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/328/2415/frameset.html

Good articles MSNBC ...fact and opinion on what this slap down means.

This links one three page article--that seems informative and forward looking. Several additional pieces are clickable toward the bottom of the pages.

Lash, Good article. If they don't implode on it's own, the EU still has plenty of reasons to move forward. Developing slowly is the ticket.

Glad you liked it.

One of the clickable ones on that page was Fareed Zakaria's opinion piece about what he perceives to be "wrong with Europe"--he thinks they need to get over Turkey, and are basically xenophobic. I guess that's not far from what's being said here.

The other was on The Sick Man of Europe---Germany's current economic woes and the political fallout.

Germany is in for a rough future; their aging demographics will cause their social programs big problems. With unemployment at ten percent, and their economy stagnant, they're between a rock and a hard place. They would "kill" to have our 3.5 percent growth rate with a better balance of young workers to our total population.

What did someone say in a live tv discussion yesterday: "Austria is doing much better than Germany since we didn't buy Slovakia or Hungary".

Which is of course totally politically uncorrect.

Lash - Zakaria is an Indian-born Moslem who's never lived in Europe, knows no European language other than English and has no clue about the place. His article is wrong from start to finish.

Giscard (principal author of the constitution text) and Merkel (leader of the German opposition), on the other hand, know plenty about Europe: their view on Turkey's membership is the exact opposite of Zakaria's:
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"Some European politicians have started talking openly about offering a "privileged partnership" instead of full membership, something roundly rejected here. The idea, first suggested publicly three years ago by the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, has most recently been taken up by German's Christian Democrats, whose leader, Angela Merkel, is expected to run against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in September. Ms. Merkel's party has stated unequivocally that it will try to block Turkey's membership if it comes to power."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/international/europe/11turkey.html?pagewanted=1

I suspect that, of all the European countries, France will have the most difficult time adjusting illusion to the new realities that confront them. It is true that the French demographic problem is a bit less severe than that in Germany, Spain, Italy, and most of Eastern Europe, however the economic sclerosis in France is every bit as severe as that in Germany. Moreover there appear to be no political forces in France at all that are working towards a liberalization of labor markets or reduction of cost in the social welfare system, and the population appears to strongly resist any change. The contrast with Germany - where even a Social Democrat government is attempting (slowly) to introduce labor market liberalization and welfare reform, and even getting some grudging acceptance from the public - is very stark.

This suggests to me that France will require a few more shocks to wake up to reality. Perhaps a few more failures or bailouts of state run companies will do it. Watch Airbus - I'm buying more Boeing stock.

Which reminds me - next week is the Paris air show and Airbus will be showing its new jumbo. They've bet the farm on it; Boing doesn't have one, so it will all depend on air travel increases on the major long routes.

George - Giscard is convinced his constitution would have passed if he had included a clause against Turkish membership. The hypothesis is unprovable, but it does strongly suggest that sclerotic social structures in France and the Netherlands were less important than this one factor.

I think Boeing was very smart to let Airbus go it alone on the super jumbo aircraft. Airbus is now thoroughly committed to a relatively small corner of the replacement aircraft market and unable to make more investment in other, larger market segments, while Boeing is getting a range of new models ready for sales into these larger segments. Boeing will thus quickly erase the transient Airbus advantage in carbon filament structures and fly by wire control systems, and find itself a technical step or two ahead for the next decades.

Interesting speculation about the matter of Turkish entry and Giscard's (perhaps self-serving) view of the defeat. I don't have a close enough feel for the situation in France and the Netherlands to be confident of my judgement on the matter. I note the complexity of this issue though - rigid French labor laws have left large segments of French agriculture and industry dependent on workers from their former African Empire. This, in turn creates the social tensions that likely contribute to the dread of Turkish entry. Odd, isn't it that the country of Francis I, who so helped the Ottomans against the Hapsburgs, should be the chief antagonist to their entry to the EU.

Those intra-European squabbles pale into insignificance compared with the millenial struggle to keep Islam out of Europe.

Pope Benedict picked his name (for the patron saint of Europe) specifically to pursue this one subject; his ouvertures to the Orthodox churches (Serb, Greek, Russian etc) are part of the same plan. It's fortunate that Croatia and Ukraine are now in the same boat as Turkey (for vastly different reasons, of course, esp. as Ukraine hasn't even applied yet) so the previously oft-heard allegations of "racial and religious discrimination" no longer apply. Interestingly the Russians are encouraging this approach - suits them in their Chechnya troubles, for starters.

Just to clarify: AIRBUS S.A.S. is owned by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) [emerged 2001 from Airbus France (Aerospatiale Matra), Airbus Deutschland (DASA) and Airbus España (Casa)] with 80% shares and BAE SYSTEMS with 20%.

This will change soon (in October), when the conservatives (and liberals) form the new German government: they (the conservatives) like the Turkish EU entry like the devil likes the holy water.

Thank you Walter for finally agreeing with my view that conservatives in the EU opposed the text of the constitution for that reason - odd it took you so long to figure it out

Did I agree on THAT?

Thanks Walter. I am aware of the joint ownership of Airbus, its history in the aviation industries of the UK, France, and Germany, and the fact that it was cobbled together out of mostly government-controlled entities under mostly French leadership. The British and the Germans were the chief innovators in aircraft design prior to WWII. After that the U.S. & USSR dominated, but still with interesting lines of development coming from France and the UK. Airbus leapt ahead of Boeing by investing heavily in the application of then new military technologies for light weight structures and electronic flight controls. Now they are heavily invested in a narrow market segment and forced to coast in other areas - as a result Boeing will resume its leadership of the industry. (The SST/Concorde program is illustrative of this.)

Helen, You have previously cited Pope Benedict's intent to keep Turkey out of Europe as a way of protecting its supposed Christian character. I suspect you are closer to some aspects of this than I, and therefore may have a better understanding. However, I can't escape the belief that in Benedict's eyes the chief threat to the Christian Character of Europe comes not from a resurgent Islam, but rather from a complacent and dominating secularism among the elites of modern Europe. Despite attempts by some to get some explicit references to Christianity in the draft constitution, my understanding is that this was rejected out of hand by Giscard and the other drafters. My inclination is that Benedict would likely be far more concerned about secularism in Europe than in resurgent Islam in a Mideast that appears to be at war with itself.

It is true that parts of Europe have struggled for centuries to keep the Ottomans and Moslems of the Magreb out of Europe. However it is also true that other parts of Europe actively supported the Ottomans in some of these struggles, Venice and France most notably.

Since WWII the French, Germans, Spanish, and Italians have chosen to produce fewer and fewer new French, German, Spanish, & Italian babies; to ossify their labor markets with excessively protectionist legislation; and, as a direct result, have become heavily dependent on an influx of workers from Turkey, North Africa, and Albania. This does not appear to me to represent a long-standing determination to keep the wogs out of Europe.

Frankly I am quite mystified by the many contradictions I see in the domestic and foreign policy actions of the European powers on these questions.

That jumbo Airbus has a big drawback; the airports are not ready to use them.