Nosemonkey's EUtopia

In search of a European identity

January 9, 2009
by Nosemonkey
11 Comments

A letter to Private Eye

(I’ll copy the offending article below the fold, for those who are interested. And for non-UK readers who don’t know what Private Eye is, it’s the UK’s best satirical political magazine – and also one of the few publications to still bother with proper investigative journalism. I’ve been reading it pretty much every issue since the early 90s, and can safely say that it’s far and away my favourite magazine, and probably the prime thing that inspired me to start blogging.)

Come on, Strobes – your EU coverage is becoming laughably bad. In Brussels Sprouts in Eye 1227 you quote the “director” of “The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre” (later just “the EU Research Centre”), who has supposedly “exposed” yet more devious details of the Lisbon Treaty as Ireland looks set to vote again on the damned thing.

Aside from the fact that what is supposedly “exposed” is actually just re-hashed, unproven speculative analysis that did the rounds of the Euroblogs well over a year ago, what’s most shocking is that had you bothered to look it up on Google you’d find that the impressive-sounding National Platform EU Research and Information Centre is actually nothing more than one man and his blog, most of the content of which consists of cut and pasted newspaper reports. Not only that, but judging by blog search engine Technorati, it’s a singularly unknown blog (only six inbound links) – probably why I’d never heard of it.

I’ve been running a well-regarded blog on EU affairs for nearly six years now (shortlisted for Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards and given the Jury’s Commendation in the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Awards 2008, among various other accolades). But now I see where I’m going wrong – I should start referring to myself as the director of some grandiose-sounding institute and start spamming people with “press releases” to make people assume that I’m from a thinktank.

Seriously – if you need a fact-checker for your EU stuff, let me know. Brussels Sprouts has always had a tendency to believe the worst of the eurosceptic conspiracy theories, but now it’s getting silly.

As for the rest, keep up the (mostly) good work!

Yours,

J Clive Matthews (aka Nosemonkey)
Nosemonkey’s EUtopia
(henceforward to be known as The European Institute for EU Insight and Objectivity – E.I.E.I.O.)
www.jcm.org.uk/blog

—- Continue Reading →

January 5, 2009
by Nosemonkey
24 Comments

Vote for me (if you like, that is…)

The 2008 Weblog Awards

Update: Actually, scrap that. Vote for Created in Birmingham instead. Never heard of them before, but they seem to have the best chance of preventing mad borderline racist Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips from winning. Last year the Best UK category was taken by the barking Stalinist Commie Neil Clark (him of “Iraqis who work for the British deserve to be raped and tortured to death and so do their families”* fame) – let’s not have a repeat of the most idiotic maniacs ruling the roost. There’s enough of that on this here internet already, thanks very much.

While you’re there, check out the Best European Blog poll – where this place is arguably a better fit, and consider chucking a vote to Kosmopolito or Siberian Light. And then lend your support to uber-Euroblog A Fistful of Euros, inexplicably shortlisted in the Business Blog category.

Update 2: At the request of Mr Clark, this post has been amended. He claims not to be a Stalinist and asks me to provide evidence that he has ever said nice things about Uncle Joe. Not being of a McCarthyite mindset – and not having the inclination to read any more of his dross than is necessary – I’ll take him at his word, having merely referred to him as one having seen him described as such on numerous other blogs whose opinions I respect rather more than I do his.

* Mr Clark also seems incapable of grasping the concept of the satirical paraphrase, so to be clear, he has never written the statement “Iraqis who work for the British deserve to be raped and tortured to death and so do their families”. That was instead my own short summary of this horrifically callous and smug article that he wrote in August 2007, in which he strongly hinted that he felt that reprisals against Iraqi “quislings” (that is a direct quote) were justified, and stated explicitly that “The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country” (another direct quote), thereby explicitly giving his support to bomb-throwing murderers of women and children along with those Iraqi nationalists who have used more traditional and less abhorrent methods of armed resistance to the occupying Coalition (and subsequently UN) forces.

It is perhaps worth noting that Mr Clark did not take exception to me calling him barking or referring to him as an idiotic maniac. I think we can now see why…

January 1, 2009
by Nosemonkey
3 Comments

Welcome to 2009

Nothing changes, it seems. Just like 2008, 2009 promises to bring yet more Russian sabre-rattling and European fears about the continent’s long-term energy security.

Also time to welcome in the Czech EU presidency. With the Czech Republic currently being run by the neoliberal, eurosceptic Civic Democratic Party of President Václav Klaus and Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek – a party that’s already begun to align itself with Declan Ganley’s new anti-Lisbon Treaty Libertas movement – it could prove an interesting six months.

With the EU still stuck in a deadlock until the Irish question is sorted, will Klaus – increasingly a hero of the eurosceptic right EU-wide thanks to his repeated anti-EU pronouncements (even calling for the EU to be scrapped altogether back in 2005) – be able to use his elevated position over the next six months to advance the eurosceptic cause?

Substantive posts soon, honest. I’ve got a real-world deadline for the 5th, though, so need to prioritise.

December 30, 2008
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

I’m a 2008 Weblog Awards finalist

How exciting. Last time was 2005, when I did singularly poorly in the face of tough competition.

This time I’m up against the usual suspects of Dale and Guido (each with a daily readership that this blog would struggle to get in half a year, by their own accounts), mentalist lefty Neil Clark (who won last year by getting out the Socialist Workers/Respect/We hate Chimpy Bushitler vote), barking right-wing Islamophobic harridan Melanie Phillips, and a bunch of others I’m not familiar with, and which aren’t linked, making checking them out tricky.

In the Best European Blog (non UK) category, good to see Kosmopolito and Siberian Light get nods (though how is a Russia-focussed blog European, and how is it non-UK when the guy who runs it is London-based, like me?).

More details, no doubt, when the proper voting pages are up. And more posts from me at some point soon – it’s been a rather busy couple of weeks…

December 19, 2008
by Nosemonkey
9 Comments

The Economist, the EU and online media strategies

The EconomistI’ve been rather busy this week, so have only just realised that The Economist’s superb EU-focussed blog Certain Ideas of Europe is – for reasons unknown – being cancelled.

Public Affairs 2.0 asks a few questions. Has the writer left? I doubt it – I’m pretty certain it was produced by more than one staffer. Has The Economist given up on blogs? Well, it doesn’t seem to be cancelling its other blogs – Free Exchange, Democracy in America, Gulliver or The World in 2009.

So, is it that The Economist has run out of ideas on Europe, as Public Affairs 2.0 asks, or is it something else? With the Summer’s European Parliamentary elections fast approaching, with Ireland likely to hold another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, with the European Commission soon to change over, surely interest in EU affairs is likely to rise? Surely now, more than ever, is the time that regular daily analysis of EU affairs is vital?

Well, yes. But The Economist is a business, not a public service organisation. I for one would be astounded if Certain Ideas of Europe ever got anywhere near the traffic of the other Economist blogs – not due to any lack of quality (I often used to cite it as one of the best), but purely thanks to the subject-matter. Producing any kind of commercial publication – even a blog – about the EU simply will not make you much cash. Unless, that is, you target the obsessives. And that, generally speaking, means targeting the eurosceptics. Certain Ideas of Europe, aiming for balanced and restrained coverage, simply wasn’t angry or sensational enough to draw in the crowds.

EU affairs remain a specialist interest. Providing free information is not worthwhile, because there are so few people who care. This is why The Economist’s EU-focussed spin-off European Voice keeps so much of its content locked behind a subscription wall. By my calculations, I get a similar monthly readership to the print version of the European Voice (based on their paid-for sales – more likely to be read than the vast number of comp copies they put out). And that’s in a month when I’ve not been posting much.

Of course, the way European Voice survives is the complimentary copies that make up a good 89% of its 18,500 print run. Because as these are sent to so many EU bigwigs, free of charge, it enables the European Voice sales team to claim that 7,398 individuals in the European Commission, 505 in the European Parliament and 433 in the Council of Ministers are subscribers. “Ooooh!”, think the advertisers, “that means we can get our message in front of people who really matter!” It’s the same loss-leading advertising strategy used by fellow EU news weekly The Parliament Magazine, as well as UK-centred ones like The House Magazine and Total Politics, among others.

It’s a perfectly valid ad sales technique, and been going on for years. As long as you’ve got a decent sales team, you can pull it off. It doesn’t matter whether every single one of those complimentary copies is put in the recycling bin by some beleaguered secretary as soon as they arrive without even entering the same room as the political bigwig whose name is on the subscriber list – the fact that it *might* be read by them is usually enough for the advertisers.

Not so online. Online, statistics can be padded (using visitors rather than unique visitors, page loads rather than visitors, hits rather than page loads, etc.), but they are much harder to bluff completely. If an advertiser asks outright how many people visit your website and you give them low number, why would they bother advertising with you? You can’t possibly get away with “well, we may only get 200 visitors a day, but every single one of them is really important, honest” in the same way that you can with print.

What does this all mean? Well, by the European Voice’s own media pack’s figures (warning – PDF), fewer than 2,000 people a week are willing to pay money for that publication. That’s significantly less than most paid-for local newspapers in the UK. It could never survive on subscriptions alone – there simply isn’t enough interest.

Likewise, the lack of interest in EU matters means that online readership would be similarly dire even if they did put all of their content up for free, and this would not be enough to attract any advertising whatsoever. (Case in point – I’ve recently started a BlogActiv mirror for some of the content on this site. Even on days when I’ve been featured as Editor’s Choice on their front page and in the daily EurActiv email bulletins, it’s got less traffic than this place. Both BlogActiv and EurActiv survive off grants and sponsorship, not traditional advertising.)

So the European Voice survives purely through the advertising attracted by all those comp copies to the bigwigs – something almost impossible to pull off with an online-only publication. (Well, I could pull the same trick with this place if I wanted – I’d just have to enter the email addresses of everyone who works in the Commission and EP into my email subscriber list. 99% of them would mark all my emails as spam, but, by the same logic as works with complimentary print publications, who cares? They’re on the list – that’s what matters.)

Certain Ideas of Europe, of course, was online only. Without a print presence, it had no advertising potential – just as most individual blogs have no advertising potential (hence the plethora of blog advertising networks like BlogAds and its imitators that use strength in numbers approaches, grouping dozens of blogs together to offer a combined readership that might be of interest to advertisers).

As a commercial publisher trying to make money, for The Economist to continue publishing a blog about EU affairs evidently does not make any business sense. Because it is all but impossible to make money out of writing about the EU. No one is interested. No one cares. This place is one of the longest-running and better-known English-language EU-centred blogs, and it’s not even in the top 100 UK political blogs by inbound links or readership. And of those top 100 UK political blogs, only about five or six have enough traffic, capital and business know-how behind them to even approach being viable commercial concerns.

Last week media blogger Gary Andrews asked whether the current credit crisis might see local newspapers shift to online only publishing. As I noted in the comments, I can’t see it. Local newspapers may fold as the web removes traditional sources of advertising revenue (largely by offering alternatives to local newspaper small ads for free on sites like Craigslist and its clones) – but without a print presence to give the potential of at least some big buck adverts, I can’t see how special-interest websites (be they local newspapers or EU-centred) will ever be able to generate enough money to survive.

Online ads are still pretty much restricted to banner, skyscraper, MPU and text-based (either links or advertorials), with only a few other options for sound- and video- based sites. None of these have any hope of having as much impact as a full-page newspaper advert, even if they can be seen by many times more people. And for all of them, advertisers are canny enough to demand exact viewing/readership figures – something that will always be impossible for print. And all of this means that online adverts will always be restricted in the amount of revenue they can generate – because most advertising rates are based on little more than what the ad salesperson can get away with. Online, they can get away with far less.

All this, of course, means not just the slow death of proper scrutiny of borough and county councillors as local newspapers begin to die out, but also the continued lack of serious scrutiny of EU-level politics, and the continued lack of that kind of European public sphere or demos we’re always told is a precondition for genuine democracy.

Because if you can’t make money out of publishing something, no commercial publisher with any sense is going to try. This applies to the EU just as it applies to local newspapers or magazines specialising in knitting scarves out of human hair.*

And so it is that we are losing one of the best EU blogs just as we approach a crunch year for EU affairs. Unless you’re like the BBC, and forced to cover events that are deemed “in the public interest” (even though the public remains singularly uninterested), writing about the EU is never going to make you any money. Not until it becomes more interesting to the public at large, at any rate – and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

* There are (almost) always business models that will work for special-interest publications – but they will rarely involve much expenditure on either editorial content or publicity, being produced at minimal cost and very, very carefully targeted. There are several magazines devoted solely to alpaca farming, for instance – but when was the last time you saw a copy at a newsagent?

With a minimal editorial team and a skilled couple of ad sales people, it would be possible to turn a decent profit from a magazine devoted to EU affairs – if anyone’s interested in launching one, get in touch. But in the present climate it’d only be possible in one language – two at a push. Try to do a genuinely EU-wide magazine published in several languages? Not a hope in hell that there’d be enough interest to justify the expense of all the translators and language-specific subs. Just as it wouldn’t be worthwhile producing a magazine on alpaca farming with a 20-strong editorial team.

December 17, 2008
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

Looking back on the French EU presidency

My full answers to some questions from a French newspaper for an article due to appear tomorrow, as France’s time at the EU helm draws to a close.

(And no, I never heard another word about the “bloggers panel” that the French Ambassador’s press office approached me about back in the summer, in case you were wondering. Such a panel would, however, be a very good idea for the EU – its web presence and PR strategy remains truly dire… They could learn a thing or two from the likes of us. My consultancy rate is a very reasonable £50 an hour.)

What is your general feeling towards the French presidency of the EU?

To be honest, bar Sarkozy making a big deal about trying (and pretty much failing) to sort out the Georgia crisis back in the summer, I’ve hardly noticed it. Whatever plans France may have had before taking over the presidency (and those were never exactly clear), Georgia and the credit crisis seem to have fairly effectively knocked them off the agenda. As we come to its close, the EU seems no nearer to finding any solutions to the problems we had before the French presidency, and with the ongoing fall-out from the Georgia crisis and the credit crunch now has even more things to worry about than it did before. Not France’s fault, necessarily, but this has been another six months of stagnation.

Still, that’s better than the UK managed during its presidency back in 2005, when Tony Blair seemed to vanish into thin air for six months. At least Sarkozy seemed keen to adopt the EU mantle and has been fairly visible in the European media. But that may just be thanks to his wife…

Do you think Nicolas Sarkozy coped with the crises that struck Europe (Irish refusal to the Lisbon treaty, economical crisis, Georgian crisis)?

He did as well as could be expected – which is not very.

I put a fair bit of blame on Bernard Kouchner for the Irish No in the first place – his comments about how the Irish owed the EU a Yes after all the EU help Ireland has received were widely reported, widely ridiculed (even if he may have had a point), and caused a lot of anger. Now that it looks like Ireland is going to be made to vote again – with a few meaningless concessions and guarantees that are unlikely to do anything to change anyone’s mind – it could well be this French Presidency that ends up getting the blame for Lisbon’s failure, having not really done much to convince anyone that the treaty is a genuinely good thing for Ireland or for Europe as a whole. But then again, the Irish referendum result is something that should be left to Ireland to work out – for Sarkozy or other EU bigwigs to meddle too much is likely to do more harm to the Yes camp’s cause than good.

On Georgia, Sarkozy tried his best, and was fairly high-profile in his various attempts to get an agreement over a ceasefire. But in the end Russia pulled out in her own time having utterly ignored EU concerns, and Sarkozy also failed to get the US behind EU efforts at peacemaking. Hell, not even the whole of the EU was behind Sarkozy on this one, with various national politicians using the crisis as an excuse to prove their international status (such as the UK’s still fairly inexperienced Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron, both of whom flew out (independently) to be photographed playing at international statesman), while others were undermining Sarkozy thanks to either their dependence on Russian energy (Germany backing Moscow and talking down Georgia’s NATO chances) or old Cold War animosities (Poland in particular making a bid thing of standing up to Russia by signing up to the controversial US missile defence shield a few days after the invasion). As an example of a united EU foreign policy, the Georgia crisis was yet another failure.

On the credit crisis, as far as I can tell the EU seems to have been following Gordon Brown’s lead more than Sarkozy’s. And it’s still far too early to tell if the measures taken are going to have the desired effect in any case.

Which decision satisfied you the most ? Which disappointed you the most?

The attempt to play mediator over Georgia was good, even if the end result was a failure. Nice to see someone try to use the EU presidency in an external context for a change – too often EU presidencies are inward-looking.

As for disappointment, it’s a definite shame that no attempts at genuine reform were even hinted at. No efforts to increase the transparency of the Council, no moves towards the long-overdue reform of the CAP or CFP. And then there’s the unsurprising disappointment that the efforts to ratify the Lisbon Treaty are ongoing despite the Irish No, and that no real effort has been made to understand just why the electorates of three very different EU member states have all seen fit to reject the contitution/Lisbon. Where are the attempts to find out what the people of Europe think about the direction in which the EU seems to be heading? Until we get some sign that the views of the people are valued, the stalemate that the EU’s been stuck in since the failed Treaty of Nice way back in 2000 is only going to continue.

December 11, 2008
by Nosemonkey
20 Comments

Libertas launches

So, hot on the heels of its success getting a “No” in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum, Libertas has today relaunched as a pan-European political party. Look – it’s got a shiny new website and Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts and everything!

“If people want a strong and healthy Europe that is democratic and answerable to them, they should vote for a Libertas candidate”

All very well and good. Democracy, eh? Yep – I could go for that. Strength? Health? All sounds good. Because they’re platitudinous truisms. The same rubbish could be spouted by any and all parties.

So, what about the details of the new party’s policies and attitudes? What sort of people will be standing as candidates?

“A detailed policy document will be published in the coming months, and candidates’ names will be unveiled over a similar time frame.”

Ah… So, erm… This is a party with no policies and no candidates. Now seems a good time to repeat my comments about Libertas to a wider audience:

1) We don’t yet know how many candidates (if any) Libertas will be running, or where
2) We don’t know what their campaign is going to focus on
3) We don’t know what impact (if any) the shift from Republican to Democrat will have on them considering the allegations of their close ties to the current US administration

A genuinely pan-European pro-reform (but not anti-EU) political party could be exactly what’s needed. But there remain far too many unknowns about both Ganley and his organisation to be able to make any sensible judgements about it just yet. What is known of Ganley and his business dealings hardly makes me overly optimistic that his motives are entirely altruistic.

Having said that, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Libertas’ pro-democracy, pro-reform, pro-integration rhetoric is actually belief (the rumoured involvement of Jens-Peter Bonde is a promising sign, for example) – though I remain sceptical about the group’s motives, largely due to a combination of the secrecy that still surrounds its funding, the fact that its arguments against the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum campaign largely consisted of nationalistic ones about Ireland losing influence, and thanks to most other “pro-reform” organisations in the past having turned out instead to be anti-EU. A reformist party I could get behind. Another anti-EU one in disguise? No thanks.

The clincher will be where Libertas decides to run. If it avoids putting candidates up against existing anti-EU/eurosceptic parties like UKIP or Denmark’s June Movement, that’ll be a good indication that the “reform” rhetoric is just fluff. If it DOES run against anti-EU parties, expect their share of the vote to go down. Which could, short-term, reduce the number of eurosceptics in the European Parliament – but which would, longer-term, simply lead to the current resentment continuing to grow, so that by the NEXT EP elections we might be ready for some serious changes.

I may be being unfair. The new party’s Facts page does, after all, tick most of my boxes:

“Libertas is not a Eurosceptic organisation… Our vision is of a united Europe, which recognises and respects the right of citizens and nations to choose their own destinies, but which encourages all Europeans to reach across the borders of nationality, language, and culture to participate in and invigorate a Union which equips us to meet the challenges of this next phase of European History.”

I hope I’m being unfair in doubting them. If Libertas is what it professes to be, it could be just the medicine that the EU needs to fix the ongoing stagnation and rot. But when it comes to EU reform organisations, far too many have turned out to be little more than anti-EU talking shops in disguise for me to accept this as face value just yet.

December 10, 2008
by Nosemonkey
7 Comments

Euro elections 09: “Bring it on”?

Really? Are you really sure, when talking about anti-EU mobilisation for next year’s elections, that you want to borrow the words of President Bush, speaking about Iraqi militants attacking US troops way back in 2003? You don’t think that might be, erm… tempting fate just a little? Just a tad unfortunate, perhaps?

And so my hopes for these elections continue to diminish. I’ve yet to hear any senior UK party figures (bar the single-issue UKIP and racist maniacs in the BNP) make any mention of the things. And the likelihood of these being the first elections in which I have been entitled to vote in which I decide not to bother rises by the day.

Then again, a surge in the anti-EU / eurosceptic vote could actually be a good thing. It may just – if it is sufficiently EU-wide, and not just among the usual suspects of the UK, Denmark, and so on – finally make these idiots we’ve got running things realise that, erm… the EU needs something rather more than half-hearted publicity drives to boost turnout and more shoddy compromise treaties. It might just, if we’re lucky, make them realise that the organisation’s in the midst of a serious identity crisis – one that will take some genuinely radical changes in attitude and approach to sort out.

I doubt it, but live in hope, eh?

December 9, 2008
by Nosemonkey
24 Comments

The EU vs the national interest

The Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent Bruno Waterfield has made an interesting contribution to a pamphlet by the Manifesto Club, No Means No! Essays on the Eve of the European Council Meeting.

Ignore the populist eurosceptic rhetoric of the title, there’s actually a lot of interest here. (Seriously, sensible eurosceptic chaps – I know you’ve got to try and attract attention and so some sensationalism is necessary to liven up what is a very dull subject, but if you’re going to win over undecideds rather than just preach to the converted, a little more subtlety is necessary. If it wasn’t for the fact that Waterfield asked nicely and sometimes joins in the comment-box discussions here, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading past the title, and would have missed a lot of good stuff.)

The basic argument is as follows:

The EU has evolved, not as a federal super-state that crushes nations underfoot, but as an expanding set of structures and practices that have allowed Europe’s political elites to conduct increasing areas of policy without reference to the public…

The EU has never been about abolishing national interests, but always about managing them in a manner convenient for Europe’s political classes, in a public-free zone, with consensus arrived at through bureaucratic procedures derived from the secretive world of diplomacy…

The lack of accountability and the expediency of EU politics means that in many areas, including foreign policy, the EU’s inter-elite bureaucratic requirements have overridden principles of internationalism, democratic rights or justice. EU decision-making is essentially value free. Consensus comes first, meaning that principles can be traded off against the expediency of making deals, or ‘effectiveness’.

…the EU is not a system of representation or a public authority. It is a set of institutions and relationships organised for the convenience for national state bureaucracies

As such, Waterfield’s essay goes to the heart of this ongoing dispute about both the “democratic deficit” and future direction of the EU that’s a perennial favourite among those of us who like to blather on about the thing, and ends up effectively a short overview of the more secretive aspects of EU decision-making – and a very useful one at that. I do urge you to go have a look, while below the fold I’ll blather on at length.

Continue Reading →

December 8, 2008
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

Intriguing European history initiative

Sounds promising, from Russian human rights organisation (yes, there are such things) Memorial – recently raided by armed police. These guys are still on the frontline of history, while those of use sitting comfortably in Western Europe can, bar the odd credit crisis, often feel as if Fukuyama may have had a point.

In any case, at its most basic the fun of history was always – for me – the competing accounts of what happened, and the sheer inability of pretty much any source to be free of bias. It’s invaluable journalistic training, history – if more journalists did history at university, the quality of the press would be vastly improved. You come, Rashomon-like, to distrust every account, and so hunt for as many different primary sources as possible to get the full picture. Accept one version of history, and you risk ending up like the blind men and the elephant. (Which is why, of course, Holocaust deniers shouldn’t be outlawed. Theirs is an alternate take on history, and can – despite being just about as categorically, demonstrably wrong as it is possible for an historical theory to be – merely by existing prompt new research and new approaches that may be able to cast light on one of the murkiest episodes of human history. Flawed hypotheses need to be disproved, not banned.)

So the new Memorial European history initiative reported by Eurozine strikes me as well worth supporting:

The twentieth century left deep and unhealed wounds in the memory of almost all nations in eastern and central Europe. Often, the memory of one nation contradicts that of another. If these disparities are recognised and understood, the historical awareness of each society is enriched. If not, they can be exploited for political ends.

Some of the specifics given in the article raise some vital issues about the ongoing post-WWII, post-Soviet recovery of Central and Eastern Europe that it’s all too easy to forget in the West – with many more older Eurozine articles well worth another look in the boxout on the right, such as Isolde Charim’s Historical Myths Old and New (very good on the EU’s “foundation myth” and failure to reconcile East and West).

Europe needs to confront its bloody past openly and honestly if it is ever going to move forward as one. Yet so much of our history we fail to understand – or even learn about. Too many historical myths continue largely unchallenged in the national consciousness of every country, from the old one of Magna Carta in the UK to the newer one of the Resistance in France. Yet without an honest, open understanding of our pasts – both individual and collective – how can we possibly hope to build a better future?

December 5, 2008
by Nosemonkey
29 Comments

The failures of EU democracy

So, will the European Citizens’ Consultation forum, launched yesterday in a variety of EU languages, actually prove a success?

Based on past attempts, I don’t hold out much hope – these things are usually either ignored (remember Timothy Garton-Ash’s European Story initiative? No? Precisely…), or quickly swamped by foaming-at-the-mouth British eurosceptics making “witty” comments and generally making their fellow countrymen look like a bunch of rude idiots (read the comments at Margot Wallstrom’s blog or on the Debate Europe forum recently?)

So, which is it going to be – ignored or hijacked by the anti-EU brigade?

Pessimist? Moi? Well, after five years of vague attempts to encourage constructive online discussion of the EU (albeit with precisely zero resources), and having witnessed the EU-focussed blogosphere expand by only a tiny fraction during that time despite several concerted efforts, I have good reason to be.

The EU, you see, is very, very dull and very, very complicated. Dull and complicated things are not the most attractive at the best of times. (And yes, I have indeed noted this before. Many, many times.)

How to make people want to discuss the EU more? Simple: give them some indication that their input is valuable. At the moment, there is none: “Come vote for an MEP (usually on a party list system) of whom you’ve never heard to go to Brussels and Strasbourg to vote on things over which they have little control (being proposed by the Commission and easily vetoed by the Council) and about which you’ll never hear (unless they make the tabloids)!” – Hardly the most rousing call to increased democratic engagement, is it? Yet that’s all the peoples of Europe have currently got.

Little wonder that European elections – and referendums – always end up so parochial. And little wonder that the EU itself continues to inspire so little interest among the people it supposedly exists to benefit.

December 4, 2008
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

Looking to the future

In a sign that everyone’s begun to realise that we’ve already hit the limit of economically-viable countries (if there is such a thing in the current climate) to join the EU, and following the lead of Sarkozy with his Mediterranean Union, it looks like Brussels is finally taking a more realistic attitude towards the old Soviet sphere.

Because, let’s face it, Armenia, Azerbaijan, (especially) Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have very little of benefit to offer the EU in economic terms bar their strategic importance for the transportation energy supplies. They need to be kept sweet, certainly – but it seems that lessons have finally been learned: if you make promises you have no intention of honouring, resentment will build (cf. the growing euroscepticism of Turkey, repeatedly rebuffed since the carrot of membership was first dangled). Worst case scenario, you may end up having to make good with the promises and hand membership to countries – like Romania and Bulgaria – that simply aren’t ready for it.

This newly revamped Eastern Partnership is an overdue heir to the old Phare scheme, which did so much to prepare the 2004 Central and Eastern European accession countries for membership. If done right, it could bolster goodwill towards the EU among these near neighbours. It may, if we’re lucky, help bolster their flagging economies and strengthen their nascent democracies (or even help make democracy more likely in the dictatorship of Belarus). If done badly, it will breed only resentment – not just among the countries themselves (annoyed at being denied the chance for full membership), nor even in Russia (irritated at her old sphere of influence being infiltrated once again), but also among current EU member states (thanks to fears of a sudden influx of migrants from these regions).

It’s hard not to think that Bulgaria and Romania got rather lucky. They’ve only been in the club for a couple of years, and arguably fail to live up to a number of the Copenhagen criteria for membership. If this apparent new tendency to look to “partnership” arrangements as an alternative to full membership had been devised back when Romania and Bulgaria were first being considered as applicants, a lot of fuss could have been saved.

We’re also, perhaps, beginning to see signs of future EU ambition. The EU’s already expanded its partnerships beyond the scope of Roman Empire. These new models of relationships – the Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership – could yet spread further: to Central Asia, further south in Africa, perhaps to South America via the EU enclave of French Guyana, possibly even to the Middle East and South East Asia.

For those who dream of a future of global free trade agreements, these moves – with their suggestions of trade partnerships and opening up of markets – are surely a promising sign that the EU is beginning to head in the right direction? Such partnerships could never have been negotiated (arguably imposed) by just one nation acting alone – but the collective bargaining power that the EU’s vast market has brought has given the organisation a genuinely powerful ability to broker such deals that should, in the long term, benefit everybody concerned.

I’ve never bought in to the idea that the ultimate goal of the EU is that mythical superstate. Instead, if you believe that global free(ish) trade is desirable – and if you’re going to go really utopian and over the top – it’s surely aiming for something along the lines of Star Trek’s Federation? Why, after all, aim for a common market on just one continent? If a common market is a good thing, surely it should be expanded globally?

Overly ambitious? Probably. But this sort of partnership agreement formed (or forced through?) by a pre-existing coalition is certainly a rather more realistic route to such an end goal than individual nations all bickering among themselves. If you want to see just how effective that sort of system can be, just have a gander at the increasingly ineffective United Nations or its League of Nations predecessor.

December 1, 2008
by Nosemonkey
17 Comments

Barroso: Shut the hell up

European Commission President Jose Manuel BarrosoIf there’s one thing absolutely guaranteed to put back the European Union cause in the UK, it’s having some unelected Brussels bureaucrat mouth off about how the country is “closer than ever before” to joining the single currency. Especially when you use ill-considered phrases like:

“I know that the majority in Britain are still opposed, but there is a period of consideration under way and the people who matter in Britain are currently thinking about it”

You couldn’t get a more prefect example of the kind of language that the eurosceptics can leap on to show the EU as being anti-democratic. The majority are opposed? Never mind! The mysterious “people who matter” will force it through anyway! It’s a conspiracy!

Christ… When is the Commission finally going to learn to conduct itself in a manner more likely to produce some positive reactions? It’s like French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s idiotic comments ahead of the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum all over again.

Do they even have any PR people? Do they have any concept how to communicate a positive message? Hell, even the recent launch of a new communications campaign (see the current Parliament Magazine, p.6 – PDF) failed to attract any attention, Communications Commissioner Margot Wallstrom herself reporting that the event went “almost unnoticed”.*

And even ignoring all that, it’s still far, far too early to say whether Britain would be better able to weather the current economic storm if it were part of the Eurozone. Hell, it’s not as if the Eurozone’s managed to stay clear of recession, is it? It’s not as if there are rising fears of deflation in the Eurozone, coupled with a 7.7% unemployment rate in the region (official UK rate? 5.5%).

Until we see how the Euro and Eurozone copes with this, its first big economic crisis – and especially until we see how it does compared to the pound and other old European currencies – any claims about its stability (or otherwise) are just so much hogwash. Because, let’s face it, if the case for the Euro was already proven then it wouldn’t remain quite so controversial, would it?

So here’s an idea – instead of spouting speculative, cryptic nonsense that’s only going to hurt the cause of European integration by raising yet more suspicions in an already suspicious British public, why doesn’t Barroso just shut the hell up?

Yet another reason to support the Anyone But Barroso campaign.

* I actually think Wallstrom’s done a relatively good job as Communications Commissioner, considering. She’s certainly been making all the right noises on getting the people of Europe involved, was the first Commissioner to launch a blog (and convincing others to do the same), spearheaded the launch of the Debate Europe forum, experimented with EU Tube and has toyed around with all kinds of attempts to raise interest and awareness as part of her post-Constitution Plan D (“for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate”) initiative. That she hasn’t had a huge amount of impact outside the Brussels beltway is, I reckon, more due to entrenched opposition from within the Commission than lack of will on her part. And I’m not just saying that because she says nice things about me, honest.