Lavengro in Spain

Saudi Arabia and Switzerland – two intolerant countries

Among the many reasons why I loathed living in Saudi Arabia was the intolerance and hypocrisy that I experienced there. Although Christians and Jews are Peoples of the Book like Muslims, and although I taught one boy called Isa (the Arabic for Jesus), the fact is that non-Muslims are despised and not tolerated. At Christmas and Easter a very few of the (non-Saudi) Arab teachers in my school wished the English teachers appropriate greetings – having first made sure that there were no prying Muslim ears within range. There are no churches or synagogues allowed in all of the Kingdom, and it was an open secret that the big oil companies clandestinely employed priests and rabbis as executives.

Although Switzerland likes to present itself as cosmopolitan and international, home to several UN institutions, it has shown itself to be backward and intolerant in regard to Muslims. The claim that they have merely voted against minarets on architectural grounds will not stand up. A simple look at the posters shows that.

Islam, especially the form of it that I encountered in Saudi, is a particularly loathsome religion; like any totalitarian philosophy it excludes and discriminates against just about everyone. Unlike Christianity and Judaism Islam has never had to come to terms with the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, which in fact coincided with he decline of Islam from its artistic and intellectual heyday in the Middle Ages. One way of understanding the present world is not as a clash of civilisations but rather as an internal conflict within Islam between those who would modernise its outrageous tenets and who are willing to see it coexist with a secular state, and those who believe that the Koran is literally the word of God and thus cannot be changed or interpreted (except in the intolerant, theocratic, fascist way that they choose).

In this conflict it surely behoves those of us who believe in European values of tolerance and intellectualism (and I specifically reject a mention of Europe’s Judaeo-Christian origins) to encourage liberalising trends in Islam. The Swiss have gone in the other direction.

I have written about the nasty barminess of Saudi Arabia here, here, and especially here: I have not previously had any reason to write about Switzerland, regarding it as a place where five hundred years of brotherly love, democracy and peace had produced nothing more threatening than the cuckoo clock. It seems that I was wrong.

Catalonia, Spain and the Estatut

… two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: 'that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

So the really important question for Cataloonya is whether the airport should be painted with broad red and yellow stripes or narrow red and yellow stripes.

The canard quacks again

According to the BBC:

Sir Jeremy Greenstock was centre stage in UK-led efforts to negotiate a second UN resolution in early 2003, seen by many countries as necessary directly authorise military action. The move was vetoed by France and Russia, leading critics to claim the subsequent invasion was illegal.

The move was not vetoed. There was no need to veto it because the UK and USA came nowhere near achieving the majority that would have allowed it to be passed. They needed nine out of the 15 Security Council votes and, if memory serves, they only got Spain and one African country to support them. To say that it was vetoed gives the impression that France and Russia prevented something that would otherwise have been approved. That was not the case. The claims that the invasion of Iraq was illegal are based on the failure of the would-be invaders to get a majority; but they failed because there was no majority to be had, or anything near it, not because approval by a potential majority was vetoed by one or two countries.

President Jacques Chirac explained this very clearly in an interview on French television at the time. Here is an extract:

THE PRESIDENT – I’m telling you what I feel. I firmly believe, this evening, that there isn’t a majority of nine votes in favour of that resolution including an ultimatum and thus giving the international green light to war.

Q. – In other words, France wouldn’t need to use her veto?

THE PRESIDENT – In this scenario, that’s exactly right. In this scenario, France will, of course, take a stand. There will be nations who will vote “no”, including France. Some will abstain. But, in any case, there won’t, in this scenario, be a majority. So there won’t be a veto problem.

This quotation is taken from Brian Barder’s Ephems web site, where he has posted a large collection of information relevant to the invasion of Iraq. Notice that Chirac talks of ‘this evening’ and ‘this scenario’. He says nothing about how France would vote, or whether or not it might use its veto, in any future situation.

UK-US extradition

BBC:

 

The extradition to the US of computer hacker Gary McKinnon should be halted owing to his "precarious state of mental health", MPs say. The Home Affairs Committee also said there was a "serious lack of equality" in US-UK extradition arrangements.

How can such a state of affairs with its serious lack of equality possibly exist? One possible answer could be that the MPs who are now complaining about it actually voted to put it in place. But surely even thinking that is an exercise in unwarranted  cynicism

The Church in Spain

The Catholic Church is still influential in Spain; of that there is no doubt. But the announcement the other day that of 23,286 parishes only 10,615 have full-time priests, and that the average age of a priest in Spain is 63, must raise questions about how things will develop here. An average parish population of about 2,000 souls suggests that some are very small indeed, probably in declining rural areas, but even so there is a big problem.

Hangman

ERC is the Catalan separatist party, the Left Republicans. Its youth wing JERC has posted this charming and subtle picture of King Juan Carlos on its web site as one of the seven possible options for its Christmas card. El joc del penjat is the Catalan for the children's game called Hangman in English.

 

Why do left-wing atheist Republicans have Christmas cards – best not ask.

That awful moment when you realise that you have made a very big mistake

Last night 950 Spanish Guardia Civil and police arrested 34 members of Segi, ETA’s youth wing; one other was arrested in France. This young man is one of them. He will very possibly spend a good few years in jail. Perhaps he now wishes that he had chosen to do something else with his life.

The police also found bomb-making equipment, internal ETA documents, cash and notes on possible targets for killing.

BBC report

Denis McShane on St Tony

Yesterday I went to the dentist. As I sat in the waiting room I picked up a news magazine and found myself reading an article by Denis McShane. McShane is a British Labour MP, a hack who is trundled out every so often to write propaganda articles in newspapers that make the party look EU-friendly. That is a hard job for anyone of course. The article that I saw was a hagiography of Tony Blair; it had been reprinted and translated from Newsweek, where it was published on 2 November. I have found the original here. It contains some fascinating nuggets.

Like his mentor Bill Clinton, tony [sic] Blair is poised to become the comeback kid of his generation … Europe's 27 prime ministers, presidents, and chancellors will soon have to pick a person to speak in their name. And the odds favor Blair.

Well, we all make mistakes sometimes, but we don't all go overboard for lost causes quite so spectacularly.

Gordon Brown (privately) and Silvio Berlusconi (publicly) are vigorously pushing Blair forward,

With friends like that, how can he lose?

A Stop Blair Web site has already collected 38,000 signatures, and Britain's Tories are leading the charge to block him.

Does this mean that Britain's Tories are running the Stop Blair web site? If so, it is untrue. Does it mean that the Stop Blair web site is uninfluential? That is also untrue. What on earth does it mean?

This Conservative opposition is somewhat surprising, for when Blair's name was first floated this summer, party leader David Cameron let it be known he was comfortable with the prospect.

I can find no reference for this barefaced surprising statement. There is no doubt that after the summer Cameron was doing all he could to oppose Blair’s candidature. A further point: Blair's name was not first floated this summer; it was floated in the Guardian on 2 February 2008.

Like-minded European leaders, such as the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, also support him.

Merkel never allowed the slightest hint of her preference to be made public but it is hard to see any reason why she should have wanted Blair. Sarkozy seems to have changed his mind several times, but in the end he didn’t support Blair. (At the crucial meeting it seems he, and he alone, supported Juncker. A vote could have been forced leaving him isolated but they chose to agree unanimously on Van Rompuy. Here in French.)

Blair's right-wing, Europhobic opposition has found strange bedfellows on Europe's anti-American left, which cannot forgive him for being one of the architects of the Iraq War.

That is true, and not only of the anti-American left. Illegal warmonging is not widely approved of in Europe.

Europe’s socialists also resent him for winning three elections by explicitly rejecting Old Labour's socialist statist shibboleths—principles to which many other left-wing parties remain loyal.

In Spain and Germany there are separate Social Democrat (social market) and Socialist (statist) parties. (Confusingly, the Spanish socialist party PSOE is Social Democrat and the Portuguese Socialist Party is Conservative) The parties that make up the Socialist group in the European Parliament are the Social Democrats. The statist Socialists (IU in Spain, Die Linke in Germany) are different. In France the left is in a state of introspective chaos that makes Labour look like a happy band of brothers, and in Italy the left simply can’t get its act together despite Berlusconi.

Rounding out the anti-Tony coalition are old European grandees like former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who craves the post for himself

Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn’t, but I don’t believe it either way just because a British Labour MP tells me so.

and Romano Prodi, Italy's ex–prime minister and ex-president of the EU Commission.

and, by the way, the ex-leader of the Italian Social Democrats.

These two have begun huffing and puffing that Blair shouldn't be allowed to be president because Britain doesn't even use the euro or participate in the Schengen zone, which allows EU citizens to drive across frontiers without passport checks.

These two and a few hundred million others think it unacceptable that a man from a country that is semi-detached from the EU, a man who did nothing to advance the cause of the EU when he was PM, should become the President.

Blair also did the EU a favor by never holding a referendum on the euro in the United Kingdom, for, as in Sweden, that vote would have resulted in a resounding no, and such outcomes have set back the cause of European integration in the past.

Let me try to put the world right way up again! Blair came to Downing St as a pro-European prime minister. He could have made the case for joining the euro and engaging more closely with the EU. He did not do so because instead he chose to sell himself and his country to Rupert Murdoch and George Bush respectively. Yet according to McShane we are supposed to be grateful to him, for not having even made the attempt to advance the EU in the UK!

Britain does perform modest checks on EU citizens at its airports

Like anyone else entering the UK, passport details of EU citizens are scanned at airports and recorded in a data base. The atmosphere in which these ‘modest checks’ are performed is similar to that of the border crossing to East Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s. I know what I am saying and I mean it literally.

If he seemed to spurn the Union in trivial ways,

Such as trivially supporting Bush’s war in Iraq against the rest of the EU, and proposing enlargement with the sole aim of weakening the Union.

it's worth pointing out that Britain under him was the second-biggest net contributor to the EU budget—no small matter.

And did it moan and want to pay less! And did it do its best to stop any money going to finance the enlargement that it had proposed so fervently! It certainly didn't work out that through amicable engagement that budget contribution could have given it a huge amount of influence.

Other names are being kicked about, but those candidates all have drawbacks: they either also signed on to the Iraq invasion,

Who is that, Mr McShane? Aznar did but he is no longer in office. Berlusconi did but he is out of things. But what is meant by ‘signing on to the Iraq invasion’? Aznar certainly backed it personally but Spanish troops did not join the initial invasion; they only went after the UN had legitimised the occupation. Berlusconi backed out in the end too. Barroso, who hosted the Azores meeting, is now the President of the Commission.

or they're now on the Kremlin's payroll

Who is that, Mr McShane?

or they lack Blair's fluent French, which counts for a lot in Southern Europe.

Jean-Claude Juncker, a candidate from Luxembourg, also obviously speaks French. As does the man who eventually got the job. Van Rompuy also speaks Dutch, English and German. The usefulness of French in southern Europe is still valid, but it is rapidly giving way to English. German is useful in dealing with eastern Europe. The ability of the President to speak French counts for more in Paris than in southern Europe!

Blair offers a big advantage: he'll bring with him the vision thing that Europe often lacks. Limiting himself to just a few major interventions a year, Blair could speak for Europe at a global level.

A part-time President?

He could use the post as a bully pulpit

We don’t like bullies in the EU, however popular they may be in the UK. The English word bullying is used in Spanish to describe the phenomenon in schools.

and help the EU regain the enthusiasm that was generated 25 years ago when Jacques Delors worked with Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand to create the single market, launch the euro, and thus transform the old, cozy European Economic Community into something bigger and much more meaningful.

Blair did nothing about the euro. He did everything he could to stop the EU from working efficiently in 2005 (see here) – not to mention in 2003, and the best that can be said about the British presidency in 2006 is that it didn't do any actual harm.

The biggest question is probably for Blair himself: does he really want to quit the lecture circuit, where he can currently earn $100,000 for a single speech? Or his job trying to promote economic development for the Palestinians? The answer is likely yes. Blair has spent his whole life in public service, turning down more lucrative options as a young man to spend years in opposition before finally winning power.

What a choice! My heart bleeds for him.

Now openly a Catholic, he also seems impelled by a moral sense of duty, even if his particular choices sometimes outrage other moralists.

Such as the then Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope, who both opposed the invasion of Iraq.

His passion for Europe also informed his time in office, even if he never managed to sell the EU to the British public.

Of course he didn’t manage to do it. He didn’t try to do it!

Meanwhile, Blair has watched his friend Bill Clinton fade into policy irrelevance after stepping down.

A not unknown fate for American ex-presidents, I think.

Now Blair has a rare chance to avoid that fate, and he seems sure to take it—so long as European leaders cooperate by thinking big instead of acting small. To make the job work, Europe's elected leaders are also going to have to share the limelight. But if anyone can persuade them to, it's President Blair.

Angela, Nicolas, José-Luis, Donald, Gordon, Silvio. Come on there. Stop skulking and hiding backstage. Get out in the limelight!

EU appointments – the dust settles

Last year’s European Parliament elections were won by the Christian Democrats, the EPP becoming the largest group. It was also the case that most of the 27 EU countries had prime ministers from the right. It was thus obvious, clear and well-known to anyone who took the trouble to be informed about such things – by reading a European newspaper for example – that the first permanent President of the European Council would come from that group. This is not only power politics. If you have a committee of 27 people divided into different factions and not owing their positions to the chairman of that committee, it makes sense for the chairman to be from the dominant faction; it makes it easier for the committee to work. It was also expected that the Socialists would get the number two post of High Representative.

Such dealing is the stuff of European politics, at national level as well as in the EU. That this was not clear to people in Britain says a number of things: that the British people don’t know what is going on in Europe or how things are done there is, after 35 years of British membership, a terrible indictment of the country’s media and politicians, who have failed to explain this. Rather, it would be if those media themselves understood the situation. They don’t: ‘Barring unforeseen accidents or a last-minute stealth candidate, the spanking new job of “president of Europe” looks to be Tony Blair's for the asking.’ The Guardian 8-10-09. (Compare: ‘Blair will not become the President of Europe.’ This blog 12-3-2008). The Independent is no better. Twice today (here and here) it claims, apparently quite genuinely, that its campaign against Blair was ‘wot won it’. The Stop Blair petition, run by European Tribune for more than a year, got 45,000 signatures; but a European popular initiative counts as nought in comparison with a British newspaper. And what about the politicians? How on earth did the British Government get itself into the position of supporting the candidature of a man who never had the ghost of a chance? Did they act against the advice of their diplomatic advisors, or did those advisors themselves not understand the situation? The Conservatives too have a lesson to learn – though they won’t. It is that having left the EPP they lost the chance of making any input at all on the choice of the new President.

There is a significant cultural difference here. The UK has a confrontational political system in which two parties slug it out without quarter and leave the rest of the country’s political opinion nowhere. It is said that this leads to strong government, though people rarely ask whether the strength of a government is a measure of its goodness or its efficiency, let alone its democratic legitimacy. Things happen quickly: a new government has to be in place within hours of the election result being known and inter-party negotiations are a sign of delay and weakness. Worst of all, they represent a watering down of the ideological principles that drive the country’s endless class war.

In Europe it is different. The desire for consensus, to involve as much of the electorate as possible in government, means that the cake has to be divided and if you don’t get the lion’s share, or even any share, this time round, you can be sure your time will come in the end. This is a hugely important principle. It may be the antithesis of the British way of doing things but it is the European way: after 35 years the UK should have worked out how things are done and accepted the need to adapt accordingly. Why did they back Blair so strongly and so stubbornly when, apart from his coming from the wrong side politically, his record as the PM who did nothing pro-European and who participated in the Iraq war were further enormous factors against him? Heaven knows. They never had a chance of getting him in. It developed to the stage that they kept him in the running so as to force a concession by withdrawing him in favour of Miliband, and when that failed they had to change tack to Hoon or Ashton; but that can hardly have been the original strategy. What is abundantly clear is that people in Britain just don’t understand how the EU works. It is equally clear that they will have to learn if they wish to be taken seriously as anything more than nationalist bullies and blackmailers. The country is strong enough to get its own way when it wants, but every time it does so it demeans itself in the eyes of the other member states.

A French-German stitch-up, they say. In a sense it was (and Reinfeldt, who was nominally responsible for making the recommendation, thought that he was presented with a fait accompli), but it is a fact that the Franco-German alliance is still what drives the EU. Quite apart from the historical reasons for this alliance existing, a simple look at a map shows that these two countries dominate the European peninsula physically and in terms of population. As long as we have a Europe of nation states, which is what the Eurosceptics have forced on us, those two countries will be powerful. On the flanks Spain and Poland, which are smaller in size and population, also exert influence. The UK, which could be influential, rules itself out of everything serious except military affairs, but has the curious delusion that it is a country that is at the heart of Europe and should be taken seriously.

What about the resulting appointments and the way in which they were made? First of all it may be useful to look at the job description of the President of the Council:

The President of the European Council:

(a) shall chair it and drive forward its work;

(b) shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council in cooperation with the President of the Commission, and on the basis of the work of the General Affairs Council;

(c) shall endeavour to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the European Council;

(d) shall present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European Council.

The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

The President of the European Council shall not hold a national office.

The President has no executive powers. Countries in Europe do not elect their prime ministers so it is hard to see why the Chairman of this Council should be elected. Herman Van Rompuy seems to be a pretty good choice; he is a political fixer, who can keep the show on the road. That is what is required. It is said that Sarkozy, Merkel and Barroso didn’t want a strong figure who would overshadow them. There may be something in that, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the nature of the post militates against the appointment of a superstar.

The appointment of Cathy Ashton as High Representative is interesting. It was for the Socialists to make the appointment (the Liberals, by the way, get their cut of EU power by appointing commissioners). It was clear that there was a desire for a large number of women on the Commission, and the High Representative is also its Vice-President. So, after much British bellowing about the need for superstars to run the Union, the UK has given us someone that hardly anyone had heard of till Thursday. Her lack of recognition does not in itself count against her. I understand that she has done a good job as Trade Commissioner in the last year – a post that has a strong international aspect. It has been suggested that the UK has always been against the EU having its own foreign policy and now it has the chance to make sure that it doesn’t get one that works. On the other hand, it is said that with a Brit running the EU’s foreign policy the FCO will have to toe the line rather more. We will see.

I am not at all convinced, by the way, that traffic-stopping superstars are better than unknown people as political appointments. Most prominent politicians are controversial. That controversy gives the journalists and bloggers something to write about, which is why they want more of such people, but it is not to my mind any indication of competence or efficiency. And you don’t know how things will turn out. Here’s a story. At the beginning of January 2002 John Lichfield, the Independent’s man in Paris, wrote of how a bank machine in Paris failed to give him euro notes at 00.20 on 1 January, the day the new physical currency came into circulation. In fact the introduction of the notes and coins was a spectacular success, as the euro itself has proved to be. Today John Lichfield, the Independent’s man in Paris, writes, ‘Limp waves of polite puzzlement circled the globe yesterday as leaders adjusted to the news that the much ballyhooed EU President would be a mild-mannered, competent manager rather than a charismatic new “face” for Europe.’ Let’s wait and see what happens, shall we?

Finally, there is one aspect of all this that I have not seen mentioned anywhere. The last week has been for the European Council and the Commission. Soon, the Parliament will meet. So far it has said nothing because it has not had the chance to do so, but we can be certain that it will. It has to approve the Commissioners and can now sack them individually rather than sacking the whole Commission en bloc, as was the case under Nice. It also has greater power than ever before and we can expect to hear quite a lot from it. It is not like a national parliament – and the Eurosceptics who bleat and moan about the democratic deficit are the very people who have ensured that its powers are limited – but it will have power. We will hear a lot about the European Parliament in the future – much more than in the past. At least, those of us who read European newspapers will.

Brian Barder has an interesting piece on this theme on his Ephems blog.

Flags

The Royal Navy decided they really had to have some target practice near Gibraltar. They had the brilliant idea of using a buoy with the Spanish colours as a target. The British ambassador was summoned to the Spanish foreign ministry to explain. He admitted that the target was "similar" to the Spanish flag.

The BBC illustrates this story with something …

… that is similar to ….

 

… the Spanish flag.

What the BBC has got is, in fact, the pre-democratic Francoist flag. I suppose that it’s just an honest mistake and not an indication of how the UK intends to run Europe’s foreign policy.