There was a time when the Eurovision Song Contest was a major event that had European households glued to their TV-sets. It was also the time when the Dutch and Israeli judges would give each other the maximum allowable number of points irrespective of the quality of the song in question which usually was quite poor.

No longer, although it can still create some controversy today. Despite its quality problems, there were definite gems and the best Eurovision song in my mind was France's entry in 1977: Marie Myriam with "L'oiseau et l'enfant" or for the non-French speaking contingent, "The Bird and the Child". A vintage French chanson:

Thirty years ago Marie Myriam was the winner, the last time France won.

A record turn-out in France today and the possibility of dramatic change. Interestingly, the mechanics of Fortuyn's political impact resemble that of Sarkozy's who is also viewed as an anti-establishment outsider:

Throughout his life, Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, has fit awkwardly into the comfortable club of French leadership, like a brassy character actor dropping one-liners in the midst of a regal drama. In photos taken a decade ago, he stands out from the crowd like an awkward interloper: Surrounded by fellow ministers, he has always looked and acted like an outsider.

[...]

Mr. Sarkozy has sold himself and his policies as a violent break from French traditions — “ le rupteur,” he called it at first, then softening it to a “ tranquil rupteur” this year after advisers said it would upset voters.

[ ... ]

What has shocked France the most, driving half the country away from Mr. Sarkozy in fear and the other half cautiously into his arms, is that he is talking about things that have not been part of French politics since the Second World War: ethnicity, religion, morality, and, above all else, the importance of order and discipline.

France too has been served with a wake up call from a maverick. The Dutch example has shown that the larger parties after Fortuyn's death acquired parts of his agenda and gently tried to push the country back to the way things were before. Let's see if the French are able to effect lasting change.

UPDATE: Sarkozy is the projected winner according to The Times:

Polling does not end in France until 8pm (7pm UK time), until which time it is illegal to publish exit polls in France, but two Belgian media organisations ran unofficial estimates from the French Interior Ministry’s political intelligence service showed Sarkozy grabbing 53-54 per cent of the vote in today's second round.

Lots more here.

And Fausta: Sarko-O-O!

The latest poll numbers are in and Christopher Caldwell explains how Royal has been able to come this close, thanks to the Bayrou vote:

" ... the election will be decided by who gets the votes of Bayrou's 18 percent. Bayrou said he would not endorse anyone. But, having said that "Nicolas Sarkozy, through his closeness to the business world and media powers, through his taste for intimidation and threats, will concentrate powers like never before," he didn't have to.

One week to go.

Charles Krauthammer eulogizes Boris Yeltsin and makes the exact point I made earlier this week about Gorbachev:

Credit for the fall of communism usually is given to two sets of actors. On the one side, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II, whose relentless pressure caused a hollowed-out system to collapse. On the other side, conventional mythology credits Mikhail Gorbachev.

This is quite wrong. True, Gorbachev inadvertently caused the collapse of communism. But his intention was always to save it. To the very end, Gorbachev believed in it. His mission was to reform communism in order to make it work. To do that, the Soviet system had to become more human -- i.e., more in tune with real human nature -- and thus more humane. Gorbachev's problem was that humane communism is an oxymoron.

Read the entire piece and the apt conclusion that Putin's ascendancy is a belated attempt to follow Deng's successful approach to reform China.

It may look like a far-fetched notion, but in this fascinating article from Nicholas Eberstadt and Hans Groth it becomes clear that there is indeed a silver lining to Europe's demographic problems:

Another economic benefit of healthy aging is that longer and healthier lifespans mean more vigorous senior citizens. The payoff would come not from putting great-grandparents to work but mainly from greater productive activity among people in their 50s and 60s. The generation of western Europeans currently 50 to 74 years old is more physically robust, and better educated and trained, than any before in that age group in the continent's history. The health and education of similarly aged cohorts in the future can be expected to increase further over the next quarter century--even as ordinary working conditions in Western Europe's knowledge-based and service-driven economy continue to become less arduous. All of this could make for an upsurge in economic activity among older western Europeans.

I have long argued that it is ridiculous to forcibly retire perfectly healthy and productive citizens only because they have reached the arbitrary mark of '60' or '65'. That in particular is an issue when the cost of that is passed on to society at large. Some nations are catching on to this, the Germans for instance have bravely set the first steps on the road to retirement age reform a little while ago. The benefits would translate into such tangibles as increased purchasing power and enlarging the scope for savings which in turn would benefit investment and growth. As obvious as the fix is, the harder it will be to implement as it requires a significant change in social and cultural attitudes, note where Europeans stand today:

Yet, over the last generation, western Europeans have translated all of their increased life expectancy--and then some--into leisure time. As life expectancy has risen steadily, the average age of retirement has fallen.

[ ... ]

Contrast these developments with patterns in other affluent OECD societies. Although in the United States, Japan, and South Korea labor-force participation at older ages has also declined as prosperity has increased, a major gap now separates these countries from prosperous western European ones.

The nature of European retirement will therefore have to change for the old continent to maintain its living standards or allow them to keep growing at roughly the same pace as North America and emerging economies. The beauty of it all is that these changes should be within reach even when we take into account that uniquely European obsession with leisure. Wealth can be built at a far earlier age allowing not so much the option to eventually retire, but the flexibility to work part-time later in life. Or better still, pursue career interests that are less driven by the need to pay the bills but by finding work that addresses self-fulfillment while matching the needs for “downtime” that come with advanced age.

I for one can not see myself retire fully, but I do look forward to shifting around some of my current activities so that they match my interests better. If I can continue to get paid for that, all the better. Sure, there will always be a mandatory component to setting retirement terms, but we should be able to move away from today’s often expensive and highly arbitrary model to something which actually generates wealth for a society. Europe, take note.

I have no particular feelings over Boris Yeltsin's death, but do rememember with fondness and excitement that late summer of 1991 when he stood atop a tank to defy the last attempt to preserve hardline Communist rule. For that, and for his generous treatment of the early stage investors in the new Russia he has definitely deserved his spot in history. It is odd though to note how much of the blame he gets for the chaos that ensued and which has now set the stage for another round of corrupt dictators occupying the Kremlin. Despite the neverending stream of hagiographies about the king of perestroika, very little has so far been said about Michail Gorbachev's conspicuous role in the descent and chaos of what once was a world power.

A good round-up with some great photos from the Yeltsin years can be found here.

RANDOM RECOLLECTION: In Hong Kong in the 1990s there was a fairly popular bar named after the man, Yelt's Inn. Not sure if it still exists.

As expected. Live reports and commentary here.

Based on the numbers, Royal's task to beat Sarkozy in the final round will be quite daunting.

The Times has the numbers:

Five hundred Britons are leaving the UK every day to live in the sun or find work abroad, according to the Office of National Statistics. A record 380,000 people left the country in 2005. More than half were British citizens leaving for more than a year. The top destinations are Australia, Spain, France and New Zealand.

It's an interesting article that also has some comprehensive numbers about who is replacing all these emigrants. There is no clear geographical pattern here, with the largest influx into the UK coming from India, Poland and Australia. I think we can only establish some real trends once more data over a period of time are gathered. What is clear though is that people are on the move and that will translate into signficant social and cultural change.

UPDATE: More here.

"But I’m not sure that they want to join the real world. Most of the old political crowd—they know nothing about globalization, about the economy. Not even the businessmen do. They are political, but they are not tied to politics. If they want the illusion of their nice French shelter, Sarkozy will lose.”

According to Christine Ockrent, France's top TV-journalist in a lenghthy and excellent essay about the French elections from the hand of Jane Kramer. Once you've read it you may want to reconsider putting your money on a Sarko win. The wishes of the pro-market Anglo-Saxon commentariat are miles away from the deep French attachment to the status quo. But as Ockrent correctly argues, no one is sure at this point, the float is simply too large to make any sensible prediction.

Hitchens finds it in France and explains:

And that reason, uncomfortable as it may be, is that most of the Communist electorate defected straight to the National Front.

To which I would add they they are equally happy to turn back to the left if the right fails to deliver on the grievances of the former 'Communists'. That is what I would term the Dutch lesson: dissatisfied voters looking for a new and decisive direction, irrespective of ideology. And yes, that is the hallmark of uncertainty:

Add to this the rather peculiar fact that a huge tranche of voters—most recently as large as 40 percent—simply refuse to tell the opinion polls (who last time got everything calamitously wrong) how they intend to cast their ballots. Again, the best intuitive explanation of this reticence is that many people are embarrassed to declare a Le Pen allegiance in advance.

Not sure if Hitchens is correct here as it would seem that a high level of uncertainty is an increasing characteristic of voting trends in Western Europe. And, the number of 40% that is apparently undecided again is in sync with Dutch trends where a similarly large floating vote was measured shortly before election day.

UPDATE: And like the Dutch, the French are increasingly likely to pack up and go:

According to a 2005 TNS Sofres poll, 2.2 million French people live in foreign countries — mainly in Europe. Half of those leaving are under the age of 35 years old, believing they will have more chance in other countries. Those departing, and above 35 years old, either say they are leaving for tax reasons or either for professionnal reasons. Even more striking; more than 90% of emigrants are pleased with their new life-styles, and 40% are planning on either never come back to live in France, or come back once they retire.

Interesting parallel.

Made by the Economist. Key excerpt:

Which leaves Mr Sarkozy as the best of the bunch. Unlike the others, and despite his long service as a minister under Mr Chirac, he makes no bones of admitting that France needs radical change. He is an outsider, born to an aristocratic Hungarian émigré father; he openly admires America; he is enthusiastic about the economic renaissance of Britain. He plans an early legislative blitz to take on hitherto untouchable issues such as labour-market liberalisation, cutting corporate and income taxes and trimming public-sector pensions.

So, it is not a 'EU Constitution Lite' from the hands of Merkel with input from Sarkozy, but a revised treaty that would obviate the need for a constitution altogether. The pragmatic Dutch have teamed up with the man in a rush to cementing his legacy:

The European Union should ditch plans for a constitution, Prime Minister Tony Blair has said.

Instead, reforms to make the expanded Europe of 27 nations more effective should be included in a conventional treaty, of the kind that has been seen many times in the Union's 50-year history.
Speaking at 10 Downing Street, following talks with Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende, Mr Blair gave his backing to a Dutch proposal for an "amending treaty".

Mr Balkenende said the change might free some EU governments from the commitment they have made to hold referendums on the constitutional treaty, which was given a resounding thumbs-down by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005.

But Mr Blair insisted that it was not simply a question of removing the word "constitution" from the document's title. An amending treaty should contain only those elements needed to make the EU work better and not measures which led to fears of a Brussels-run superstate. "It is important we go back to the idea of a conventional treaty where the idea is to make Europe more effective, work more effectively, because we now have a Europe of 27 countries rather than 15," said Mr Blair.

This is a positive development as it recognizes that the EU is essentially an alliance of independent nation states that seek to achieve efficiencies, not create bureaucracies.

In the wake of my column on Dutch emigration some suggested that it could be a unique case, not necessarily applicable to other European nations. Well, Iain Murray picks up on a very similar trend, in Britain.

UPDATE: And French emigration too:

The simple fact is that, in the past few years, young people have been leaving France in unprecedented numbers. More worrying still is that although depopulation was a worry in the French countryside in the Sixties, it now has become a specifically urban phenomenon. Nor is it confined to Paris: Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux and Marseille can all report an exodus of young people towards les pays Anglo-Saxons (the United States and the UK). This fact was acknowledged by politician Nicolas Sarkozy when he made his flying visit to London last month to visit the French community there - at 400,000 people this is (as the newspaper Le Parisien helpfully pointed out) equivalent to one of the largest French cities.

The French Presidential election campaign got underway today with the first vote scheduled for April 22, and a run-off between the top two of round one on May 6. Michael Stickings has a good primer.

I have not been paying an awful lot of attention to this so I consulted with one of my French friends over the weekend. While not being able to give me some tangible guidance he pointed out that he had a hard time seeing Ségolène Royal making it to the Élysée. The reason? "She doesn't like people" and that confirmed my suspicion that the Socialist Party's candidate is too frosty and career-driven to connect with the French electorate. Sarkozy is far better positioned to capitalize on populist sentiments that currently exist across the political spectrum. For now my money is on a Sarkozy-Royal final, with the former the clear favorite to win.

The worst passenger air disaster ever, today thirty years ago gets its monument.

The Pope weighs in on Europe's dark future:

Europe seems to be losing faith in its future, Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday, citing the continent's population trends, which include generally low birth rates.

"One must unfortunately note that Europe seems to be going down a road which could lead it to take its leave from history," the pontiff told a gathering of the continent's bishops.

What we should note of course is that low birth rates can not simply be attributed to Europe abandoning its Christian roots. The pursuit of economic success enabled by individual freedom and a level of pessimism that affects future expectations has created a total focus on the here and now, and thus, less breeding. The Pope cleverly ventures beyond his social and spiritual terrain to note that these developments in the end will also affect Europe's economic growth prospects:

Benedict said Europe's population trends, "besides putting economic growth at risk, can also cause enormous difficulties for social cohesion, and, above all, favor dangerous individualism, careless about the consequences for the future."

Considered highly controversial by some, Benedict XVI has an unusual ability to get a debate going about some of the most fundmental issues facing the West today.

Yes, I have noted that the EU is celebrating this week and so has the Independent which has kindly listed not less than 50 reasons to love the European Union. Donal Blaney at 18 Doughty Street examines them and comments as only a Brit can, here are some of my favourites:

# 13 Small EU bureaucracy (24,000 employees, fewer than the BBC) – that’s like saying I am a better person because I only beat my wife once a week as opposed to someone who beats his wife every day. The EU bureaucracy is growing, not shrinking.

# 15 Minority languages, such as Irish, Welsh and Catalan recognised and protected – they were protected anyway! They managed to survive centuries without the help of the EU!

# 18 Europe-wide travel bans on tyrants such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe – which he is ignoring and he remains in power terrorizing his fellow Zimbabweans.

# 36 Britons now feel a lot less insular – yes, the nation that conquered a quarter of the globe and which trades with every corner of the earth is such an insular little country, isn’t it?

#47 British restaurants now much more cosmopolitan – with smaller portions, menu items no one can pronounce and waiters with attitude problems.

Read the other 45 here.

Are Europeans overtaxed? Depends on where you live. Eurostat has put together a very useful summary of the percentage of GDP that Europeans fork out to the taxman. The differences are quite revealing, but it won't surprise anyone that with 52.1% the Swedes are carrying a heavy burden. And while the Dutch are thumping their chest over their 39.2% Tax/GDP ratio, you get to keep more of your hard earned cash in Ireland where the ratio stands at a decent 32.2%. The new and emerging economies of Eastern Europe score lowest, but that translates into far lower welfare handouts and a sub-standard infrastructure if we consider that Romania with 28.8% is at the bottom (or top) of the list.

By abandoning 65 as the retirment age, and lifting it to 67:

German lawmakers voted to lift the retirement age to 67 from 65, shrugging off union protests over the government's record on cutting unemployment for the over-50s.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition pushed the provision through the lower house of parliament in Berlin today, meaning anyone born after 1964 -- just under half Germany's 82 million population -- will have to wait up to two years more before they qualify for the national pension. The changes come in from 2012, raising the retirement age in stages.

``We have to act,'' Labor Minister Franz Muentefering, the architect of the plan, told lawmakers today before the vote, saying that Germany had to counter the impact of an ageing population on the compulsory pension. ``We have to secure the financial viability of the plan.''

This increase will be phased in over time between 2012 and 2029.

In a way it is not surprising that Germany has been able to tackle this controversial issue: Merkel heads a broad coalition government that includes both Germany's right and left. Without a broad consensus such material changes to the social-economic framework are very hard to accomplish. Their political toxicity has ensured that most mainstream parties in Europe have so far not dared to touch them, despite the necessity to address them. Good for Germany, good for Merkel.

The EU constitution has momentum again:

The early conclusion from behind-closed-doors talks on the future of the European Union's proposed constitution is that referendums on the subject are to be avoided at all costs.

Senior diplomats from member states have begun negotiations to try to find a way forward after French and Dutch referendum rejections wrecked the EU constitution in 2005.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is hoping to set out a "road map" towards a new European treaty in June and some early ideas will be discussed in the wings of the EU's 50th anniversary celebrations in Berlin on March 25.

"Constitution Lite" as it is now called is not just a top-down Barroso move, it can equally be seen as Angela Merkel's swift entry into the existing Euro-void, although it appears she is working behind the scenes with French presidential frontrunner Nicholas Sarkozy to put this controversial issue to bed. It remains unclear what the new draft will look like, but a compromise version may not be all that 'lite' after all.

The other thing that raises a few alarm bells is the assumption that the resounding 'no' from both France and The Netherlands two years ago is interpreted as a 'no' to content rather than a rejection of the constitution in principle, and that a backroom compromise can somehow negate the will of the voters without engaging them again. This not only highlights the problems with these plebiscites in general, but also the lack of consistency in Euro-decisionmaking as well as how a revised document can make its way back to the ratifcation table without any further popular input from member states. That said, most 'no' voters have never been all that bothered by trying to debate a credible alternative so the lack of democratic input can not be blamed on the ambitious Euro-elites alone.

Yet in an odd way the French and Dutch rejections did their work and bought the critics some time: we can take comfort from the fact that we may end up with a piece of paper vetted by Europe's new conservatives. A Merkel-Sarkozy constitution is no doubt preferable to a Schroeder-Chirac version drafted by Giscard d'Estaing.

Related Post
Reanimating the Constitution

Another thought provoking piece from 2006 Nobel Laureate Edmund S. Phelps in the WSJ, arguing that differences in economic dynamism are not just instititutional, but to a large extent cultural:

The values that might impact dynamism are of special interest here. Relatively few in the Big Three report that they want jobs offering opportunities for achievement (42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S.); chances for initiative in the job (38% in France and 47% in Italy, as against an average of 53% in Canada and the U.S.), and even interesting work (59% in France and Italy, versus an average of 71.5% in Canada and the U.K). Relatively few are keen on taking responsibility, or freedom (57% in Germany and 58% in France as against 61% in the U.S. and 65% in Canada), and relatively few are happy about taking orders (Italy 1.03, of a possible 3.0, and Germany 1.13, as against 1.34 in Canada and 1.47 in the U.S.).

Phelps should dig further and may care to bring in religion and history as Italy, France and to some extent Germany are all Catholic and all came late to empire building as opposed to the nations that rejected papal primacy and set out to conquer the world. Max Weber was one of the first sociologists to pioneer this theme. Of course, these factors have been overcome by time and dynamic capitalism as Phelps describes it has now made successful inroads in Catholic underperformers such as Ireland and for instance Poland.

The Dutch, together with the Brits and Nordic countries are very different from their big continental brothers, but I would still suspect that their entrepreneurialism comes in below the levels measured in North America. That however is probably more a function of institutions rather than values.

There is a saying that every people deserve the government they get and I think that principle would equally apply to constitutions. The Dutch firmly rejected the Euro-constitution, but failed to debate the next steps or come up with a credible alternative. Both the politcal parties and the voters decided to further ignore the issue and did so at their peril. That inherent weakness was not lost on the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso who visited The Hague last week and made it very clear what the next steps should be:

"The Dutch government signed the constitutional treaty and must also do everything it can to have it ratified by parliament," Mr Barroso told journalists on the eve of his visit.

[ … ]

Mr Barroso believes it would be unwise to resubmit an amended agreement to voters in a referendum, as this would probably lead to a second rejection … ”

Barroso’s arrogance in this matter is stunning as it manages to go well beyond the usual EU-attitude that argues that you should run enough referenda until you get the result you want. According to the EU chief the Dutch can do without any further direct consultations with the electorate and ratify the document without further ado.

The new center-left coalition which will be inaugurated in the next week or so has also avoided a clear stance and decided to refer the entire constitutional matter to the Council of State, a governmental advisory body. Barroso’s performance is an indication from which direction the wind is currently blowing and it would not be all that surprising to see the Dutch cave in, step by step. A mix of inaction and a need to re-establish some of their lost status and influence in Brussels may yet do the trick.

The draft EU Constitution is gradually making its way back into the headlines now that a number of efforts are underway to revive the dead document following the decisive French and Dutch rejections in 2005. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by Professor Alfred Pijpers, senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, who had an insider's perspective on the European constitutional debate.

Pijpers began to outline what in his opinion had contributed to the failure of European political integration. An interesting start as it presupposed that such failure needed to be rectified; it established political integration as a worthy goal. National diversity was the obvious one, but the success of economic integration among EU members has actually strengthened the nation state (think of wealthier nations), and thus paradoxically weakened European political integration. Other factors continued to be the expectation that NATO remains the vehicle of choice for European defense matters rather than an EU force, while the current institutional set-up was according to Pijpers not exactly designed for ‘collective strength’.

All these points, negatives in the eyes of some, serve to underline the original intent and purposes with which the European project was designed, and which in Lady Thatcher found one of its last strong promoters: a free-trading Europe of independent nation states. The draft constitution is therefore exactly the key vehicle for those who want to undo this loosely arranged integration, take it to a political level and satisfy the needs of this new and stronger Europe. How is this justified?

First and foremost there is a need for a unifying instrument that aggregates all the various pieces of Euro-legislation into one comprehensive document, which in and by itself is not an altogether unworthy objective. More contentious however is the attempt to restructure the presidency and unify foreign policy and create two powerful positions that would take care of these rather than continue the current arrangements that rotate power among nations on a semi-annual basis. In order to justify this Pijpers went as far as arguing that a presidency by Slovenia, a nation of some two million souls, could hardly be representative for a union representing some five hundred million inhabitants. One can argue in response that many Euroskeptics would feel much more at ease if European relations with for instance Washington would be conducted from Ljubljana rather than from Paris or Madrid. Lastly, there was the issue of ‘separation of competence’ which required a clear definition of where national jurisdictions ended and European ones started.

All in all these arguments make it abundantly clear that an EU constitution in whatever format is designed precisely to weaken the nation states and strengthen an ever centralizing union. Judging from the reasons as to why political integration has so far failed it would seem that this forced effort to let it succeed could potentially sow the seeds of its own destruction.

It was all strong stuff for the free trading Fraser Institute crowd who judging from some of the questions were not all that confident about this process in a world where regions are increasingly pulling away from political centers rather than veering towards them. I asked the question why there is hardly any debate during general elections about Europe, since the collective vents of anger in France and The Netherlands ended as soon as the ‘no’ ballot was cast. It would have graced these nations if they would have engaged in a constructive debate about what they would want Europe to look like, rather than reject it and let the matter be handled by the very elites that had brought European integration so perilously close in the first place. The answer from Pijpers was that voters could not get all that excited about European issues in national contests and that other pressing issues – pensions, mortgage rate deductibility, crime, you name it – were far more compelling for parties to campaign on and get voter attention.

Somehow that answer left me unsatisfied as it begs another question. Why could the French and Dutch - and the Brits who would surely vote ‘no’ – remain so disengaged about something that they do when directly asked, care about? Are the political parties indeed representative of certain elitist attitudes that prefer not to engage their constituents into a real hard debate about sovereignty? Or are Europeans themselves to self-absorbed to prefer short-term economic questions over long-term political ones? Most likely both and although my question wasn’t answered Pijpers’ lecture made it very clear that the forces that want to see a ratified EU constitution have a very good chance at prevailing, with or without voter input.

While Bruce Bawer is impressed with Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 he has some reasonable doubts about the objectivity in the work of New York University's well-known historian. There is much to be learned from Bawer's critique written for the Hudson Review and you would have to read it all to fully appreciate it, this quote is one of my favorites:

Judt expresses the hope that the European public will develop a “patriotism for Europe”; but given how the EU works, with key decisions made not by the European Parliament but by unelected technocrats, the “patriotism” he longs for would have to be founded not (like American patriotism) on a devotion to liberty but on a deference not unlike that of a serf toward his feudal lord. Judt even goes so far as to say that the disorganized, unpremeditated way in which the EU took form was a good thing because

very few lawyers or legislators in even the most pro-European states of the European “core” would have been willing to relinquish local legal supremacy had they been asked to do so at the outset. Similarly, if a clearly articulated “European project,” describing the goals and institutions of the Union as they later evolved, had ever been put to the separate voters of the states of western Europe it would surely have been rejected.

In other words, the undemocratic way in which Western Europeans’ democratic rights were gradually siphoned away from them is something to celebrate.

And there are more gems to be had in this lengthy review, so I recommend that you read the whole thing.

"Harriet the cow had 22 officers out to kill her". So what triggered the hunt for Harriet? The threat of EU court action.

Johann Hari reviews the recent avalanche of books on Europe and Islam and is able to muster some optimism:

It is a long, slow process, but it has already begun. Amidst the sound of suicide-murders and screaming on European streets, it is possible to hear the slow creaking of those gates – and the low rumble of the Islamic Enlightenment.

While I do not as yet share Hari's confidence about Europe being the cradle of true Muslim reform, I have noted the signs of progress that he refers to in the past: here and here. Not so much a 'cracking of the gates' but rather some sparks of hope. And note that these examples revolve around progress effected by Muslim women who have grasped the opportunities that are on offer in the free west. Any Islamic enlightenment will start with a redefinition of the role of the sexes and in that Europe is probably one of the better places to get this process started.

Here's another great example of balancing moral clarity and political expediency:

France’s interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, overwhelmingly captured the governing party’s nomination for president on Sunday, pledging to enforce laws, respect tradition, restore morality to public life and make the French work longer and harder.

In an 80-minute acceptance speech in a conference hall packed with 80,000 cheering supporters, Mr. Sarkozy also struggled to shake his reputation as the country’s unforgiving and divisive enforcer of law and order, portraying himself as a man of compassion.

“I have understood that humanity is a strength, not a weakness,” Mr. Sarkozy said from a vast stage bearing the colors of the nation’s tricolor flag. “I have changed.”

Remember, 2007 will be a crucial year for Europe. In France we can expect a lively battle between Blairite socialist Ségolène Royal and the McCainesque Sarkozy, both of whom appear to be determined to break with the political traditions of their respective parties. It has already earned Sarkozy the non-support of incumbent Jacques Chirac. Around the same time - we're talking May here - we will likely see Gordon Brown moving into Downing Street 10, replacing the man whose tenure is already being described as tragic.

At the same time Germany - not exactly under firm political control either - will hold the rotating chair of the EU presidency and try and reinvigorate the dead EU constitution. Interesting times and possibly a defining year for Europe's future.

This year was - without a doubt - the year of the books about Europe and Islam. Berlinski, Bawer, Buruma, Phillips, they have all become must-reads in order to get a better understanding of what ails the old continent. Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution has brought these writers together to illustrate how their common topic is now channelling the west's penchant for scapegoating America. Eberstadt argues that:

In sum, given the information now assembling about just what is going on in Europe, about how accomodationist European politicians already are, and about how much more they are being called upon to do to appease restive Muslims both Islamist and otherwise, a new, unorthodox answer to the puzzle of anti-Americanism suggests itself. Perhaps these days, on the Continent, the widespread, all-explaining urge to lay everything at the door of the U.S. has little to do with America proper. Perhaps it does not have much to do either with the post-Cold War unipolar world. Perhaps it is not even really about Iraq.

No, perhaps the anti-Americanism of today is best understood instead as a way of being furious in public with somebody for the insecurities and anxieties wrought by Islamist terrorism in this world, including in increasingly Muslim Europe -- an option made even more attractive by the safe bet that Americans, unlike some other people, are unlikely to respond to this rhetoric, let alone to editorial cartoons, by burning cars, slitting throats, or issuing death threats in places like Paris and Amsterdam and Regensburg and London.

It is a bit of a roundabout way to explain anti-Americanism i think, but the piece has so many worthwhile passages that I would still recommend it. Especially since it also looks at the US and how the West in general in characterized by "the refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings".

Amid tight security and an ongoing debate, the opera Idomeneo finally took the stage in Berlin last night. Still, a bitter taste lingers:

Director Hans Neuenfels did not attend Monday's performance and publicly ridiculed the Deutsche Oper's performance.

Although Neuenfels complained that the rehearsals hadn't gone well, he also said he was still sore over the Oper's original decision to cancel the show.

In this case the absurd act of self-censorship sparked a debate and an eventual reversal, but Neuenfels is right in pointing to the stain of stifling free speech which will forever be associated with this opera.

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Merkel, Mozart & Muslims

Here's an interesting podcast over at PJM by the Sanity Squad, discussing Europe and the latest from Iraq. There is quite a bit that needs to be added to the discussion I think, but for now suffice it to say that there are limits to explain the continent's future from a perspective of 'demographic dogmatism'. There is for instance also a trend reported by Dutch statistics that immigrants over time adapt to European birth rates as economic pressures force women to start working – after all we’re debating burqa bans not because Muslim women are all confined to their homes.

What I do believe is that Europeans will disengage and adapt rather than fight. Most of my family and friends are right-of-center in ideology, but they don’t hesitate to vote for parties on the left as a way of preserving the status quo. Many did so in last week’s Dutch general election. Peace and stability above all.

The Peters-model of radical ethnic cleansing is more likely in Eastern Europe where the population has a materially different economic and social history, but also less immigrants – at least at the moment – to contend with. Again, this also brings home the point to start making the clear distinction between the three tiers of Europe (Old/EU, New/Eastern and Russia) and bring in economics as one of the key drivers for social and cultural change.

The debate gets more complicated, but it is getting better too.

You have read most of them before here on these pages, but it is still worthwhile to see the Times listing the factors that have an impact on present day politics in a number of European countries:

First, the extreme Left and Right are on the rise across most of the Continent.

Secondly, the weak centre is losing authority.

Thirdly, the social democratic Left is splintering.

As The Times correctly notes, these trends are all contributing to a vacuum in which few if any decisions will be made. And at a time when most European nations desperately need a clearly defined direction that will become a phenomenal hindrance. Next up is the presidential election in France and the last instalment of the Tony and Gordon show and neither event is expected to bring either clarity or stability.

Europe Looks Inward, Tilts to the Right, according to Sylvia Poggioli at NPR. It seems Poggioli is struggling to understand what exactly is going on in Europe while at the same time not quite getting that the European Left - albeit in a state of some confusion - is still doing surprisingly well.

In The Netherlands, the case study par excellence for foreign media studying the 'Weimarization of Europe', the left is in reasonable good shape. Although a grand-left coalition is unlikely to materialize, a new center-left government is according to the latest polls the most likely outcome. The Dutch right has not been able to live up to Poggioli's simplified version of Europe, proving how fickle European electorates are in their current behaviour.

Weimarization? Possibly yes. More on that in the days ahead and when the final Dutch numbers are in on Wednesday.

As I mentioned yesterday, this old-new analogy will be part of the Rumsfeld lexicon and stay with us for a long time. It was one of the things he was absolutely right about. There is a distinction between the tired, careful, economically moribund and static part of Europe personified by especially Chirac’s France and Schroeder’s Germany and the dynamic and pragmatic youngsters that are building something new on the rubble of the former Soviet Empire. Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states: they know exactly what they missed out on for some fifty years and are in a serious hurry to reclaim it, unhindered by strife-inducing immigration, regulation and deep complacency.

And that is also a reason to be not all that negative about Europe, although personally I would not like to be sandwiched in between Old Europe and Putin’s Russia. But some readers see the opportunity and here is an e-mail I got from a Dane last week after linking to quotes from Steyn’s new book:

Since I am planning to follow your example and leave Western Europe, we probably have a similar outlook, although I plan to move to Estonia.

Mark Steyn's idea of "Europe" seems to come from the British and American intelligentsia. He ignores the fact that there is a New Europe which is fast-growing (economically), pro-American, and almost Muslim-free.

In addition, there are vast distinctions among various Old European and New European countries. There is no easy analysis, but the Rumsfeld distinction is quite helpful in understanding a very underreported phenomenon.

Glenn Reynolds provides a few interesting links today. It seems Europe-in-decline watch is turning into a nice little industry all by itself and there is lots to be found here on this site. Two qualifications though: (a) there are regional differences within Europe, so the 'decline-template' should be used carefully and (b) whatever comes to Europe will reach North America's shores, eventually.

Dan Gardner from the Ottawa Citizen traveled to Europe to see whether all the alarmist rhetoric about Europe had a basis in reality. He visited Denmark for a lengthy assessment of the roots of the cartoon crisis and to Holland where he came away with a relatively positive feeling.

Gardner is right in pointing out that things aren’t as bad as they are sometimes made out to be, something which I have pointed out before. Yet, there are too many variables at play to settle on either a positive or negative outcome. Blindly banking on the repeat of historic accomplishments - like the 19th century integration of Jews into Dutch society – is probably not the best approach to guarantee future success in a situation that is materially different. It requires clearly defined policies and action from visionary politicians, something that is in short supply at the moment.

Gardner gives us a time estimate for integration success:

The usual theory on immigration holds that three generations are necessary for full integration into the larger society. There aren't many third-generation immigrants in countries like the Netherlands and they are mainly to be found in playgrounds and primary schools. It's simply too early to declare Europe's experience with immigration a failure.

And that's if the generations are measured from the arrival of the first guest workers. Arguably, it should not be. The better baseline is the moment when both newcomers and governments realized and accepted that immigration is a reality. And that wasn't until the 1990s.

So, that is somewhere between three or four generations depending on when you start counting. A projection not that different from Ahmed Marcouch, a Moroccan who did manage to integrate successfully and who as a politician has first hand experience in managing the process in some of Amsterdam's most notorious neighborhoods.

UPDATE: This Dutch media personality argues that negative attitudes of the native Dutch about themselves, have contibuted to the current malaise in the lowlands. He's written a book about it, Long Live the Netherlands:

Coming back after 10 years in America, I discovered that there's a terrible lot amount of grumbling and moaning in the Netherlands. We even talk a lot about our 'growling' culture, and this leads to a negative self-image. At the same time, I noticed that there are so terribly many Dutch people who are trying things a different way and are saying, "Enough of that moaning, enough of the grumbling. Let's deal with the problems'."

Long Live the Netherlands contains a number of elements which might best be described as 'right wing'. For example, the author describes the Netherlands' regulations on sacking employees for having a 'stifling effect' on enterprise; he says that some people who live below the poverty line only have themselves to blame, and he believes more Dutch women should be working a full week instead of part time.

This is the sort of language that is hardly new to longtime Peaktalk readers and Groenhuijsen's instincts are generally correct. The fact that he has kept his primary residence in Washington, DC however is not exactly a vote of confidence for a new Dutch miracle.

Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club makes an excellent observation about the French riots:

Some may deride Chirac or de Villepin as appeasers. However the probable truth is that no one has yet figured out how to stop a vigorous ideology in its tracks. The West's own experience with Nazism and Communism shows that both accommodation and confrontation can fuel, rather than retard their growth. There is no magic formula; and perhaps there is no formula.

And that explains why politicians from both sides of the aisle struggle to find the right message, especially when it is election time. The intractability of violence fueled by cultural disconnects and social breakdown – a void nicely filled by religion – calls for a pragmatic diversion to ‘easier’ topics. And that is not just a European phenomenon:

With his party facing a difficult midterm election, President Bush is focusing on the positive this week: a growing economy he is using to try to persuade voters to keep Republicans in power in Congress.

White House advisers say Bush is not trying to change the subject from a deteriorating situation in Iraq, and that he will continue to talk about Iraq and the war on terrorism as the Nov. 7 election nears. But Bush advisers said they think the president should get more credit for recent positive economic news.

It all depends on how you look at it. But I see some eerie parallels in the ways in which both American and European politicians steer away from the hard issues and try to lull the electorate back into a sense of oblivious complacency. In the meantime we have a fully fledged civil war in Iraq and a nascent one in the streets of Paris.

Meet Sweden's new immigration minister: Nyamko Sabuni. It appears she is off to an interesting start:

" ... has caused a storm as Sweden’s new integration and equality minister by arguing that all girls should be checked for evidence of female circumcision; arranged marriages should be criminalised; religious schools should receive no state funding; and immigrants should learn Swedish and find a job.

Supporters of the centre-right government that came to power last month believe that her bold rejection of cultural diversity may make her a force for change across Europe. Her critics are calling her a hardliner and even an Islamophobe.

“I am neither,” she said in an interview. “My aim is to integrate immigrants. One is to ensure they grow up just as any other child in Sweden would.”

Again it is very often immigrants from outside Europe (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Afshin Ellian) who are able to identify much better than native Europeans what is wrong and that drastic measures are needed to benefit both immigrants and their host nations. And somehow I am also beginning to sense that women are far better in delivering these blunt messages (witness Dutch immigration czar Rita Verdonk) than men. Let's see how Nyamko fares, it would be good if she succeeds and is not prematurely shipped off to a US-based think tank, fearful of her life knowing that there is a limited market for her ideas in Europe.

The Sunday Times investigates how the debate over the separation between church and state on the European side of the ocean is back in full force. Expect that discussion to grow more intense with time, so do take note of this useful primer.

Twelve months have passed since the now infamous French riots erupted. As some of you may recall there was a bit of debate at the time about qualifying the violence as an ‘intifada', but it is a term now routinely used by French police unions, some even going as far as describing the deteriorating situation in the banlieues as 'war'. And various mainstream media have now picked up on a story the gravity of which was signaled on this and many other blogs well over a year ago. Here is the Globe and Mail which has a longer piece on the phenomenon and its political implications:

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

“Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of ‘Allah Akbar' (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned,” he said in an interview.

Larger, more mainstream police unions sharply disagree that the suburban unrest has any religious basis. However, they do say that some youth gangs no longer seem content to throw stones or torch cars and instead appear determined to hurt police officers — or worse.

“First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they're leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us,” said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. “These are acts of war.”

The fact that police unions are the key voices on this deeply worrying trend tells us that the situation has reached a stage where policemen would in actual fact prefer to withdraw from these areas. And no one can reasonably blame them for this position. The safety and well-being of French police forces can no longer be guaranteed for the very simple fact that its mandate never included carrying out paramilitary operations in these dreaded suburbs. That most likely, requires a different skill and tool set.

The Globe and Mail points out that this will no doubt influence next year’s presidential election, but that remains to be seen. The current Dutch election campaign tells us that parties from both sides of the political spectrum have opted to emphasize the positive and ignore potentially explosive and controversial situations. Not only are these problems too complicated to solve, hard talk on immigration and law and order can only be applied in limited amounts in order keep an electorate prone to tilt leftwards on side. And, equally important, the escalating violence is confined to areas where the average Frenchman never ventures. So, it can be ignored for now, but whoever gets into the Elysée next year will be have the ultimate responsibility to ensure that the lawlessness will not spill into France proper. Given the current dynamics we can be assured however that it will.

Timothy Garton Ash weighs in on the Armenian Genocide bill which passed in France last week, and pleased he is not:

No one can legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts, testing and disputing each other's claims without fear of prosecution or persecution.

In the tense ideological politics of our time, this proposed bill is a step in exactly the wrong direction. How can we credibly criticise Turkey, Egypt or other states for curbing free speech, through the legislated protection of historical, national or religious shibboleths, if we are doing ever more of it ourselves?

It is a clear message to those that argue that criticizing religion, culture and denying tragic events of the past tend to inflame, offend and polarize. They argue that we need certain laws to control our ‘malign’ impulses that trigger the need to say or write things that are beyond conventional truths or that are not ‘socially acceptable’. That approach not only neutralizes debate, it rejects mechanisms such as research, analysis, rationality, and whatever other tools we have at our disposal to find some sort of balance or agreement on what is right or wrong. Garton Ash is right that we lose our credibility if we pass laws that chip away at the basic freedoms that our societies have been built on. What is more, we will lose ourselves.

The notion of Europe’s demographic bust is questioned once more. France's policies to avoid one are apparently paying off through some clever social engineering:

But the propensity of women here to have more babies has little to do with notions of French romance or the population's formerly strong religious ties to the Roman Catholic Church.

France heavily subsidizes children and families from pregnancy to young adulthood with liberal maternity leaves and part-time work laws for women. The government also covers some child-care costs of toddlers up to 3 years old and offers free child-care centers from age 3 to kindergarten, in addition to tax breaks and discounts on transportation, cultural events and shopping.

Very few countries so far have been able to get childcare, inextricably linked to birthrates, right. A prime example are the Dutch where women have been urged by relentless government campaigning to join the workforce, but where any solid childcare plans to support these policies have been sorely lacking. It is not that different here in Canada where the current conservative government has been trying to encourage moms or dads to stay at home, but the monetary reward for that so far has been paltry to say the least. And that is where the essence of encouraging birth rates and extended childcare is: to what extent can the state interfere and fund it all?

For the statist French that has been a relatively easy question to answer and that is why they are getting results. Now the issue is whether all these babies will eventually find a job in France’s moribund economy.

Here is an area where the EU is clearly failing to promote competition: taxes.

Contrary to expectations, the French courts have ruled against Philippe Karsenty. More details from Richard Landes and PJM.

UPDATE: Richard Landes fisks commentary form French weekly L'Express about the ruling. Key excerpt:

Note that L’Express didn’t cover this trial in September, hasn’t whispered a word of the issues in previous issues, but now shows it’s fully aware of the press coverage. Karsenty said to me that if he loses it will be all over the papers; if he wins it will be a paragraph on page 18.

In November’s edition of Prospect Eric Kaufmann puts forward the idea that Europe may follow America in terms of demographics and in turn become a more conservative and religious entity, leaving its liberal-secular peak behind in the past. So, instead of the popular immigration and economics induced demise, he suggests this alternative:

Even so, religiosity—as belief rather than attendance—significantly predicts a more conservative ideological orientation. Though we are unlikely to see the rise of evangelical Christian politics in Europe, we may find a long-term drift towards more conservative social values. Europeans will become more "traditional" on moral issues like abortion, family values, religious education and gay marriage. Inter-faith co-operation between Christians and Muslims on these issues is quite possible since ecumenical structures are already in place in most countries to facilitate it. The ease with which conservative Protestants and traditionalist Catholics and Jews have co-operated in the US may be taken as evidence. Much will depend on how these ideological synergies are channelled by parties and electoral systems in different countries, but by the mid-21st century, the peak of secular European politics will be long past. As in America, politicians will need to stay on the right side of religious sentiment to ensure they are not outflanked by their opponents.

It’s an interesting theory and you should read the whole article to appreciate the complexity of projecting demographic and social trends. Stanley Kurtz at The Corner is on the mark in arguing that Kaufmann‘s prediction may not be all that reliable, but that we equally can not afford to take any other scenario for granted all that easily.

I’ve long argued that pessimism of the ‘Sharia 2050’ nature relies on overly simplistic assumptions. However promoting such scenarios can help today in trying to alter tomorrow’s outcomes. Kaufmann has just given us a few more tools to predict and influence that future.

Richard Landes is preparing himself for another trip to Paris where he will testify at one of the Al Durah trials. He has written a very useful primer for TNR about how French TV fudged Al Durah's death. It is a must-read as it not only summarizes the entire affair, it more importantly spells out how such media manipluation is hardly innocent and can have deadly consequences. And yes, the stage is Europe:

Three court trials, then--in which France2 seeks to bury any serious assessment of their coverage--are also trials of France's ability to defend her republican values against an Islamist onslaught that it seems ill-equipped to resist. And, as France goes, so goes Europe. (Would France have it any other way?)

Of course, I will link to the various updates that Richard will no doubt provide in the weeks ahead.

RELATED: A Reuters cameraman was arrested in Israel for inciting rock attacks.

French leader Jacques Chirac has told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan he is sorry French lawmakers approved a bill making it a crime to deny Armenians were victims of genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks.

Last week I highlighted the absurd nature of trying to legislate history and its various interpretations, however faulty they may be. So this bill gets a thumbs down here, but for Chirac to apologize for it is possibly even worse. Apart from the usual appeasement argument he is arguably helping the law achieve the exact opposite of what it intended: renew a debate in which Turkey gets a prominent place at the table. It would have been better if Chirac had stayed quiet about it altogether.

The Armenian Genocide is now a full-fledged news story. Last week in The Netherlands, this week in France and now Turkey itself gets its nose rubbed into its own dark past with the award of the2006 Nobel Price for Literature to Orhan Pamuk. History, free speech and European politics all condensed into one.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Is this the Nobel committee's way of atoning for some of the more controversial and politically motivated prizes it has handed out in the recent past? A balancing act perhaps?

Lots of interesting stuff over at Bruce Bawer's blog, particularly a closer look at Norwegian MSM's selective reporting in the wake of a triple honor killing. Now Bruce, get your permalinks working!

Sweden marginally shifted to the right, the Dutch are stuck in the middle for now, Germany has a grand coalition and the Austrians yesterday tipped the balance in favor of the left, albeit marginally:

Austria's Social Democrats last night celebrated an unexpected, if narrow, general election victory, evicting the Christian Democrat chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, from office after six years in power.

While Alfred Gusenbauer, the Social Democratic leader, primed himself to be chancellor - an outcome that confounded all the opinion polls - he was likely to reach out to Mr Schüssel's party to form a "grand coalition" of the two big parties.

No longer an entrenched left, nor very clear rightward shifts in Europe, but an electorate that is not confident enough to give either group a clear mandate. An interesting pattern.

One of the reasons that the phenomenon of self-censorship is spreading so rapidly is that Western leaders have chosen to remain quiet on the subject. Yet, there are signs that this is changing, the Danish prime minister remained steadfast in his support of those that exercised their right to publish the cartoons depicting Mohammed, now German Chancellor Angela Merkel has publicly questioned the cancellation of Mozart’s "Idomeneo":

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans on Wednesday not to bow to fears of Islamic violence after a Berlin opera house cancelled a Mozart work over concerns some scenes could enrage Muslims and pose a security risk.

"I think the cancellation was a mistake. I think self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practise violence in the name of Islam," she told reporters. "It makes no sense to retreat."

Artists, theaters, publishers and writers have the primary responsibility to see to it that their works of art are made public, unhindered. If certain media outlets, in this case the theater in Berlin, obstructs this very basic right to free speech political leaders need to speak out and come to their defense. Merkel has met a crucial test, one that her predecessor probably would have failed.

UPDATE: The Danes weigh in with a timely "I told you so":

"Here we go again. It's like deja vu...This is exactly the kind of self-censorship I and my newspaper have been warning against," said Flemming Rose, culture editor of Denmark's Jyllands-Posten paper, which met a storm of Muslim protest after publishing satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad last year.

He said bowing to fears of a violent Muslim reaction would only worsen the problem: "You play into the hands of the radicals. You are telling them: your tactics are working. This is a victory for the radicals. It's weakening the moderate Muslims who are our allies in this battle of ideas."

Michael Barone looks at how the US is changing and how no one was able to accurately project the current trends. Therein lies a sliver of hope for Europe: there is potential for the various doomsday scenarios to be debunked. Immigration patterns may change and yes, the joy of having sex without contraceptives may eventually be rediscovered.

Not sure if this falls into the category of 'better late than never', but it does indicate a willingness to take a clear stance and relegate cultural relativism to the sidelines:

The president of the European Commission expressed disappointment that European leaders failed to defend Pope Benedict XVI over his recent remarks about Islam, in comments published Sunday.

Jose Manuel Barroso said that while Europe must take the threat of Islamic extremists "very seriously," it must not confuse tolerance with "a form of political correctness" that puts others' values above its own.

"I was disappointed that there weren't more European leaders who said, 'Of course the pope has the right to express his point of view,'" Barroso told Germany's Welt am Sonntag weekly. "We must defend our values."

Barroso also urged Europeans to encourage moderate Islamic leaders to take a stronger stance against the extremists.

"The problem is not the comments of the pope, but the reaction of the extremists," Barroso said.

Encouraging.

Europeans actually prefer to work longer than most governments and unions think is good for them, according to this TCS column. It surprises me, but maybe the average European worker is more astute than those that claim to represent them. The choice between working longer hours and not working at all is increasingly an obvious one. Again, global competitive pressures and the influx of more than just plumbers from Poland will materially change the way Europeans work. Let’s see if the regulators in Brussels are able to keep up with that reality.

A difficult relationship continues, and continues to amaze:

European countries have been refusing to allow planes carrying IDF supplies to refuel at their airports, according to the El Al Pilots Union.

Italy, Britain, Portugal, Spain and Germany refuse to allow El Al cargo planes transporting US military equipment to Israel to land and refuel, El Al Pilots Union chairman Itai Regev wrote in a letter sent Sunday to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

He said El Al's 747 cargo planes frequently carry crucial military supplies to Israel, but European policy forces the planes to carry barely half of their 90-ton capacity because of the inability to refuel en route

Not sure if there is such a thing as a European policy on this, in fact I really doubt it, but it is odd to note that the aforementioned nations are apparently on the same page when it comes to hindering Israel. The Dutch have confirmed that they do not apply any restrictions on El Al cargo flights.

Remember Rumsfeld’s Old Europe vs. New Europe? Well, today in Brussels the new and old parts of the continent met when Polish Prime-Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski came calling on EU President Manuel Barroso, apparently to mend some fences as the new Europeans are not exactly on the same page as the older Europeans:

Poland’s European credentials have been damaged by talk of restoring the death penalty, attacks on the independence of the central bank, arguments with its former foe Germany, and bans by some cities on gay pride parades.

EU officials are concerned over Warsaw’s perceived lack of engagement in European affairs, and protection of state industries such as banking and shipbuilding.

Mr Kaczynski’s pro-European overture will not go as far as supporting the revival of the moribund constitutional treaty. He said reviving it would be a blow to the sovereignty of France and the Netherlands, which rejected the document in referendums last year.

So Kaczynski is carving out a role for Poland that is not exactly aligned with conventional thinking in Brussels, providing a useful check on centralist tendencies in the capital of Europe.

Also, it would appear from the above that some of the former Soviet satellites are leapfrogging the various stages Western Europe went through after World War II to emerge as socially conservative, free trading nations that are not adverse to let the state meddle in the economy while playing to the differences between the US and Europe. Sounds familiar? It reminds me of another emerging nation.

NOTE: Of course, there is one other similarity: family ties. Poland is run by twin brothers, one is PM, the other president.

Without much effort I could give you a fairly long list of the great benefits of living in the small kingdom nestled between France and The Netherlands, having grown up about an hour driving from its northern border. Great food, low taxes and unrestricted pub hours come to mind, working from memory.

Those of you have followed the free speech constraints encountered by the well-read Brussels Journal may be familiar with what WSJ’s Bret Stephens calls Belgium’s lesser charms. In case you haven’t read his OpinionJournal piece, it’s a crash course about Belgium’s political and social challenges.

Will be the theme of a three-day conference in Amsterdam organized by Reason Magazine in late August. The program looks very interesting with Peaktalk friends Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan making appearances. If you're in the area - which I unfortunately won't be - it is highly recommended.

In his TCS-column Lee Harris finds an answer to a question which has bothered me for quite a while and that is Why Isn't Socialism Dead? Key excerpt:

Thus, in the coming century, those who are advocates of capitalism may well find themselves confronted with "a myth gap." Those who, like Chavez, Morales, and Castro, are preaching the old time religion of socialism may well be able to tap into something deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument, while those who advocate the more rational path of capitalism may find that they have few listeners among those they most need to reach -- namely, the People. Worse, in a populist democracy, the People have historically demonstrated a knack of picking as their leaders those know the best and most efficient way to by-pass their reason -- demagogues who can reach deep down to their primordial and, alas, often utterly irrational instincts. This, after all, has been the genius of every great populist leader of the past, as it is proving to be the genius of those populist leaders who are now springing up around the world, from Bolivia to Iran.

From socialism to jihadism - perish the thought that they join forces - the hard battle is again the one of reason against the one of irrational myths. Sorry for wrecking your Sunday, but it seems to me that this century may be as bloody as the last one.

In this month's edition of Zeek, which is a Jewish journal of thought and culture, there is an interesting piece on the embattled position of France's Jewish intellectuals. It looks at Albert Memmi and the now well-known Alain Finkielkraut in detail and makes the following important observations:

First, it is clear that Finkielkraut's racism, if it can be called that, is obviously not that of the blood and soil nativist, but that of the Enlightenment universalist troubled by another’s perceived particularism. In a sense, this view places him firmly in a troubling French tradition that traces back to Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs.

Second, Finkielkraut, notwithstanding these ties to an older French tradition, was clearly running against the current of the liberal consensus that, in sharp contrast to that of the United States, has a hegemonic hold over public debate. Except for Finkielkraut and his few (and almost entirely Jewish) defenders, no one seriously doubted any of the clichés regarded by most as self-evident: specifically, that the rioters are “poorly socialized” and “marginalized” victims of racism and “arabo-phobia,” all of which make the violence understandable and excusable.

Third, in this departure from the prevailing consensus, Memmi and Finkielkraut are, paradoxically, upholding the tradition of France’s Jewish intellectuals, who as a group distinguish themselves by taking stands that are contrary to the French consensus. Today, that means being to the Right of center, all the while reinforcing their commitment to certain essential Enlightenment and French Republican values.

Most of these observations can in some form be extrapolated to other European countries, and to some extent, to the US and Canada as well. Politically incorrect thinkers who are deeply committed to core liberal values are very often marginalized and forced to live on the fringes of whatever passes for an intellectual debate. It is small wonder then that France has entered such a troubling era where progress through creative discussion and provocative thinking has essentially been stifled.

Over at GayPatriot. Key excerpts:

One crucial difference between the US and Europe is this: in the US, the question of whether “Christianism” represents a threat to American secular democracy has long been the subject of brutally frank and passionate public debate; in most of Europe, by contrast, an equally honest, no-holds-barred debate about the threat of European Islam remains unimaginable. And Europe is paying the price for it.

And:

Many leftists, including some gay “leaders,” actually admire Islam for the same reason they once admired Soviet Communism – because it’s the only big-time ideology that won’t knuckle under to American capitalism, which, in their eyes, is the world’s great evil.

Read the whole thing.

Not that they have a solution other than closing the doors and adopting some questionable integration approaches, but Europe's political mainstream has now accepted anti-immigration as an issue, according to Time. The latest to embrace it is French presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy who has tabled a new immigration bill which will be debated this week. Of course, the usual suspects have taken to the streets to protest the Sarkozy proposals:

More than 5,000 protesters took the streets on Saturday against a draft immigration law that imposes tougher conditions on foreigners seeking to work in France.

The protests come ahead of a parliamentary debate on Tuesday on the bill by French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and which church leaders, immigrant support groups and the left-wing opposition have criticised as discriminating against the poor.

The law would make it harder for immigrants to bring relatives to France, force newcomers to take French and civics lessons and end their automatic right to a long-term residence permit after 10 years in France.

It’s hard to see how these sort of proposals can ever be wholesale rejected, as there is absolutely no political capital in standing up for immigration from outside fortress Europe. Although there is a definite need to import human capital, there is a knee-jerk reaction from traditional left-of-center voters out of a deep fear that especially Eastern European immigrants will be a little bit too competitive on Europe’s well protected and generous job markets. It’s called the Polish Plumber syndrome. On the right, safety and security tend to be the articles that help move the electorate, but following Europe’s initial encounters with jihadist violence and intolerant Muslims the appetite to import labor from the Middle East and North Africa is running thin across the entire political spectrum.

Sarkozy’s legislation will follow the European trend and will most likely be adopted without much controversy.

Support for the European project has always been split across party lines in Britain and I remember from my days there that the business sector was usually in favor of British integration into the EU. No longer, and some eminent businessmen have come together to find alternative ways for a more flexible and open Europe rather than pursuing the heavily institutionalized and deep integrationist approach that has been followed so far. They have set up a think tank and a very informative website to support the effort: Open Europe.

For those with a more than a casual interest in British politics – and with Tony Blair’s imminent demise we should probably all spent more time on it – do visit Iain Dale’s Diary who has great UK-based political commentary.

In Italy, subject to some recounts demanded by Berlusconi. Below my take on the political paralysis in Europe.

So there you have it:

• In Spain the right was booted out of office by a last minute electoral swing as a result of the terrorist attacks on Madrid’s commuter trains;

• In Germany Chancellor Merkel could not get a majority to govern and was forced to cobble together a somewhat weak coalition with her direct opponents, the Social-Democrats,

• In The Netherlands the left swept local elections, despite a solid economic recovery and firm anti-immigration policies which its citizens had voted for during the 2002 and 2003 election cycles;

• In France even relatively minor surgical attempts to bring its labor code in line with freer markets produced a degree of political unrest and instability not seen since 1968;

• And in Italy, equally economically challenged, the vote yesterday split almost in such a way as to make it almost impossible for either the left or the right to govern with a meaningful mandate.

It is of course nothing unusual to see political zigzagging in the face of economic adversity, I can’t think of a different picture looking back to the 70s or 80s when I grew up in Europe. However, it is beginning to look like that Europe’s electorate is far more outspoken than it used to be, that positions are more polarized than ever and that consequently it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a workable consensus. The quest to build decisive policies that attack deep problems with broad public support is not yielding any results, instead it is a left-to-right zigzag or an unproductive stalemate in the middle.

On the economic front just take a look at what has transpired in France. Last year the inhabitants of Europe’s greatest champion – and its imagined leader – rejected the draft EU constitution, largely out of fear. It was a vote driven by its left-of-center base that was desperate to keep the competitive and free trading world at bay, and as such it was a precursor to the chaos that the labor reform (CPE) legislation brought about this spring. In between the vote and the ill-fated labor law France by the way had to work its way through a veritable intifada. In all three cases it were radical positions that were driving the issue, and in all three cases a resolution or a possible consensus proved to be elusive. Nothing has been addressed or resolved.

Of course all of this pales when it comes to the much harder to tackle immigration mess, especially the worsening relations between mainstream Europe and its Muslim population. While the problems and politically correct motivated inaction built themselves up to an untenable situation round the turn of the century, a rightward shift (notably in The Netherlands and Denmark) seemed to enable the bare minimum: a framework for open an unhindered discussion. Now some five years later, the old concepts are staging a forceful comeback as we saw last week when the reinvigorated Dutch left presented some ‘new ideas’. And the EU has weighed in on the issue too, with a surprising focus on the inadequacy of fresh integration proposals and a focus on the alienation that Muslims in Europe are currently experiencing. Forgive me, but isn’t that just an attempt to sweep all the misery back under the carpet and propose to have another go at it with yesterday’s approaches?

It seems that the various positions are becoming increasingly polarized and Europe’s electorate is swinging indecisively from left to right like a pendulum, taking cues from a clueless political leadership. So at a time when stability and focus are more than ever required to progressively move Europe forward, all we see on the old continent’s political landscape is a terrible paralysis.

It is a cliffhanger in Italy’s elections where left-of-center Romano Prodi commands a lead of 49.8% to 49.7% for parliamentary seats and where right-of-center incumbent Silvio Berlusconi has a marginal lead of 155 over 154 seats in the senate. Expect many recounts.

Whatever the outcome it is clear that Berlusconi was not able to obtain a strong endorsement at the ballot box and this is another setback for Europe’s right, ironically on the day that pro-market forces in France were dealt a humiliating defeat. Interestingly, labor reform played its part in Italy too:

Among other measures that centre-left leaders regarded as priorities were a plan to reduce incentives for companies to hire temporary staff and the abolition of a Berlusconi government reform that raises the minimum retirement age to 60 from 57 in 2008.

These proposals did not please advocates of more flexible labour markets and more drastic reforms of the state pension system, but they were intended to satisfy the communist and radical parties that form the left flank of Mr Prodi's coalition.

Given the shape and interests of Mr. Prodi’s coalition it seems that even under the best of circumstances he would have faced an uphill struggle in bringing some necessary economic reform to Italy. With the wafer thin mandate he now has it is unlikely we will see any meaningful action coming out of Rome. My prediction: back to the polls sooner rather than later.

Indeed, an alarming number of Western Europeans don't seem to grasp that freedom and prosperity aren't the default condition of the human species - and that when these things come under threat, a sanguine passivity isn't the best repsonse.

Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept, page 133

Take the entirety of human history and you will note that the rare combination of freedom and prosperity is an aberration. It's great to have it, but we'll have to fight to preserve it.

Not unexpectedly, the controversial labor reform law (CPE) has been taken off the table by French president Jacques Chirac. The immediate political fall-out will be very negative for the already bruised and battered president who has only about a year left in office. And for his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, the man who attached his whole political weight to a piece of legislation crucial in reducing long-term youth unemployment in a struggling economy, the damage appears to be irreparable. And that opens up the route to claim the leadership of France’s right to Nicholas Sarkozy which in the long run may be a very good thing. In the short run however this is bad news all way around, not just for France, but for Europe too.

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UPDATE: A comprehensive round-up with photos over at Gateway Pundit (via Glenn).

ONE MORE UPDATE: Do read EU Referendum's analysis (via Memeorandum).

According to Nidra Poller who sums up the high stakes game for power which is now playing itself out in France. It's a point I've made before and it is distressing to note that there now are some real victims of the union and student inspired violence:

One officer, Lt Christophe Rougeot, lies in hospital after 10 hours of surgery on a face badly smashed when a weightlifting bar was thrown at him 10 days ago.

A spokesman for Synergie Officiers, which represents 14,000 French officers, said yesterday that Lt Rougeot, a married man attached to the elite CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Securité), suffered seven fractures.

But hey, if you can no longer count on job security when you are 26 or younger, then it is probably worth it to ruin a policeman's life.

UPDATE: There will be more news on this tomorrow when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin will announce a possible redraft of the proposed labor reform law.

The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing earlier this week - chaired by Senator George Allen - with a focus on Islamist Extremism in Europe. If you have time, you may want to read through the six testimonials in detail, but let me give you a few interesting excerpts. First, Daniel Benjamin, a CSIS Fellow and former NSC member under Clinton:

A Europe distracted by intercommunal tensions and violence will make a poor partner for America in many areas, not least dealing with the global threat of radical Islam. As we all know, pressing broad reform agenda in the Muslim world will, over the long term, be a vital part of a strategy for rolling back the jihadist threat. Yet if European countries become absorbed by strife within their borders, their willingness to work with the United States on a more global approach could well decline.

Secondly, Mary Habeck, Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University in particular paints a very bleak future and confidently projects more attacks on the scale of the London and Madrid bombings. What was instructive in her statement was her explanation about how moderate Mulsims in Europe are initimidated by their more fundamentalist brethren:

Jihadis in Europe—as around the world—have not been backward about declaring other Muslims non-believers, an act known as “takfir.” Takfir is not just a theoretical or religious declaration, as excommunication has now become within Christianity. It has specific legal stipulations, which include the declaring of the blood of the apostate “halal” (i.e. it can be shed by anyone without fear of punishment), his divorce from his spouse, the loss of rights to any property, which can be looted by anyone who wishes, and his loss of the right to inherit or pass on goods by inheritance. To declare “takfir” on a fellow Muslim means, in fact, that anyone can kill that Muslim and take all his goods without penalty or sin. Some jihadis in Europe have declared most of the world’s Muslims unbelievers, which explains why they never condemn the deaths of innocent Muslims during jihadist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia or the United States.

Another CSIS expert, Robin Niblett, concludes:

The level of frustration and alienation among many members of Europe’s Muslim communities has not abated. At the same time, the risk of another terrorist attack perpetrated by Islamic extremists in Europe remains high. All European governments are potential targets, not only those explicitly supportive of the United States in its foreign policies in the Middle East. If there is another attack, the popular backlash against Muslims in Europe will be severe. Even without another attack, the integration of Muslim communities in Europe will be a difficult and protracted process. The many internal obstacles to integration will continue to be exacerbated by external forces over which national European governments have little if no control. Europeans are awake to these dangers and are doing their best to respond, but we are at the beginning of the process.

Let's be careful about using the 'awake' qualification here, Bruce Bawer's book While Europe Slept got its title not without reason and while many in Europe may have woken up, quite a few have conveniently decided to go back to sleep again. The notion that an anti-Western jihad can solely be attributed to American foreign policy is still alive and well.

Daniel Fried, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs noted how current approaches in Europe are not working:

Many European governments hesitate to take action against extremist preaching in the name of defending religious tolerance and free speech. They often fear that crackdowns will only drive radical elements underground. Extremists take advantage of European freedoms to proselytize and recruit from radical mosques and they have taken over several major mosques.

[ ... ]

The European debate can fall into a trap of seeking a defensive solution, such as formulas to define and ban hate speech. These kinds of legal bans may well be a dead end. A better solution is to develop norms that challenge and expose extremist thought as with other forms of anti-democratic ideology.

Henry Crumpton, the State Department's Counterterrorism expert noted that there is another issue that may prevent an effective European response to terror:

But despite this shared perception of the threat, there is disagreement over the most effective means to counter the threat. Some Europeans continue to argue that terrorism is merely – or mainly – a criminal problem. In the last year, there has been a raging controversy in Europe about specific counterterrorism practices allegedly used by the United States. This is a serious issue deserving serious consideration lest it undermine the trust that is essential to our effort. To succeed in applying our vast power against the enemy, we must calibrate and focus that power, so that our actions are legitimate and, importantly, perceived as legitimate.

A dire picture for sure but the various testimonials also point to ways to improve things through closer co-operation and by forging a bond between American and European muslims. The latter was exemplified by Tom Korologos, the US Ambassador to Belgium who reported on a project designed to accomplish such cross-atlantic Muslim understanding.

Again, these are some random excerpts but they once more echo the core themes that have often been discussed here and by many other blogs and media outlets. What they also do is underline the complexity of the matter and the potential inability of European governments to come up with effective solutions, and if they do, they make well take a generation or more to implement and yield any tangible results.

Claire Berlinski talks to FrontPage Magazine and while she is given given to some hyperbole - but that sells these days - her general argument about Europe and its dim future is accurate.

In the interview there is a link to Mark Steyn who has reviewed the recent spate of books on Europe's decline. Favorite quote:

However, if, like Clive Davis, you find Bawer and Berlinski too shrill, try Charles Murray's new book, In Our Hands. This is a fairly technical economic plan to replace the U.S. welfare system, but, in the course of it, he observes that in the rush to the waterfall the European canoe is well ahead of America's. Murray stops crunching the numbers and makes the point that, even if it were affordable, the European social democratic state would still be fatal. "Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," he writes. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant." If Bawer's book is a wake-up call, Murray reminds us that western Europe long ago threw away the alarm clock and decided to sleep in.

... are in fact the real conservatives says Michael Stickings in a post arguing that any change is better than the current status quo. He's absolutely right and it is a conclusion that applies to more countries. Ideas for progress and renewal are no longer coming from the left establishment, but more often from a reinvigorated right. It would appear that in France the right's renewer is Nicholas Sarkozy who might face the socialist Ségolène Royal as a possible opponent in the presidential run-off next year. And Royal, by all accounts, may be a real progressive:

Nobody on the French left dares to challenge the prevailing paleo-socialist wisdom, and Ségolène Royal, the most popular of the would-be presidential candidates, was roundly derided for confessing faint admiration for Britain's Tony Blair.

Say what you will about Tony Blair, he has given his name to a template for socialist renewal. On Europe's continent however, few of yesterday's progressives so far have been willing to implement it.

In the meantime, the unions have now issued a deadline for the law to be repealed by April 15. That doesn't sound like the negotiations have been very productive. Stay tuned.

Protests and riots continued unabated yesterday with unions and students taking to the street in large numbers all over France to demonstrate the labor reform law (CPE). And it seems they have some traction, with many observers arguing that resistance to the CPE is winning.

The compromise offer by Chirac on Friday wasn’t even taken seriously by the law’s opponents. In an amazing turn of events it is now up to Sarkozy to negotiate with the unions starting today. And that may have some far reaching consequences:

Pundits claim that Mr Sarkozy has pulled off a “coup d’etat”, replacing the role traditionally reserved for the prime minister, by taking charge of talks between his UMP party and the unions to come up with a modified labour law.

However, Dominique Reynié, professor at l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, says Mr Sarkozy is risking a backlash from his own rightwing voters, who may not appreciate concessions to leftwing unions. “It could be a trap for Sarkozy. It is a risk to go against your own support,” he said.

Yes, it may be a trap, but the journey to become Chirac’s successor will lead through the political center and in France, especially in the current atmosphere, that is located very far from the right hand corner. Chirac's days are essentially over and his once designated-successor will have very little chance to build up any political capital that he can use to position himself to become France’s next president. In fact, one could argue that De Villepin has been set up to push through the dreaded labor reform laws, while Chirac and Sarkozy carefully crafted an escape route for themselves.

More likely however is that none of the three men foresaw the size, duration and intensity of the protests and are now scrambling to find a political way out. None of them will come out as a winner, but Sarkozy is the only one with a slim chance of scoring a few important points.

In any case, the likelihood of the reform measures to take effect become slimmer by the day. The origins of the deep resistance to them received an incredibly lucent and devastating treatment in the Economist this week. While reading it yesterday I thought it would be worthwhile to give you the three key quotes, although you can read the whole thing of course. Call it France in a nutshell, here we go:

Indeed, according to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean “a job for life”.

[ … ]

In another startling poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies.

It will require phenomenal will power to try and begin changing these deep rooted attitudes. To be frank, even I wasn’t aware that things were this desperate. Nicholas Sarkozy has proved that he is one of the few French leaders to have the guts to make a beginning, even going as far as taking on Chirac:

It is a measure of how wasted his presidency has been that one of his own ministers, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a 2007 presidential hopeful, can today make speeches that deplore “two decades of immobility” and call for a “rupture” with the status quo.

France has failed on the international front: alienating its transatlantic partner and squandering its role as a leading nation in the EU. On the domestic side we know where things stand. It will take rare political talent to take on this humongous task. If resistance to change is as deep as the Economist says it is, the French may well opt for a leader who conveniently ignores that task and prefers to take Chirac’s road to oblivion.

If you're wondering why anti-Nazi laws, while laudable in intent, can have far reaching consequences and fairly damaging consequences, look no further than today's Europe. Hate speech legislation is now used to curb mainstream voices, a process with dire consequences according to this excellent and comprehensive essay from AEI's Gerard Alexander. It's a fairly long excerpt but it's a long essay:

But the anti-incitement laws now regularly target people who are well within the political mainstream. This is political correctness backed up with prison time. Britain's then-home secretary Jack Straw remarked in 1999 on criminal activity by people many of whom posed as gypsies or "travelers"--hardly a slur on all gypsies even without that qualifier. But a Travelers' group filed a complaint of inciting racial hatred, prompting a formal investigation and extensive media coverage asking whether Straw was racist. In 2002, the prominent French novelist Michel Houellebecq was charged with inciting racial hatred in a novel and interview in which he referred to Islam as "the stupidest religion." Veteran Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was motivated by 9/11 to criticize Islam as violent and subversive of traditional European mores. As a result she faced a French attempt in 2002 to ban her book as racist, and she is scheduled to stand trial in Italy in June for statements "offensive to Islam." One of her accusers, in turn, faces charges for calling the Catholic Church a "criminal organization."

In May 2005, Le Monde, France's premier center-left newspaper, was found guilty of defaming Jews in a 2002 editorial that criticized Israeli policies while referring to Israel as "a nation of refugees." The appeals court found such juxtapositions made Israelis synonymous with Jews, so criticism of the former constituted incitement of hatred against the latter. After it published a series of controversial cartoons of Muhammad, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was formally investigated to determine whether the cartoons constituted prohibited racist or blasphemous speech.

This swirl of speech-law charges, lawsuits, and investigations is now sustained by an "antiracism" industry. Dozens of antiracism groups and self-appointed representatives of religious and other communities, like France's Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples (MRAP) and the Muslim Union of Italy, readily file complaints and suits and sometimes are the direct beneficiaries when fines are imposed. Their complaints provoke investigations by an alphabet soup of government agencies, like Belgium's Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and Britain's Commission for Racial Equality. These in turn feed into the court system. If America had practices like these, the debate over, say, the Dubai ports deal would almost certainly have sparked a shower of civil suits and criminal investigations against elected officials and columnists charged with "anti-Arab . . . anti-Muslim" bigotry (to quote the Council on American-Islamic Relations).

[ ... ]

So the real danger posed by Europe's speech laws is not so much guilty verdicts as an insidious chilling of political debate, as people censor themselves in order to avoid legal charges and the stigma and expense they bring. And the most serious chill is not of fringe racists but of mainstream moderates and conservatives.

Alexander also touches on the case of Alain Finkielkraut whose genuine attempt to analyze the background to last year's French riots ended with a hasty apology in the face of legal action.

Read it all and be afraid. And silent.

Well, Jacques Chirac has spoken and while he has delivered a clever piece of political navigation the outcome of it all remains very unclear. The contentious labor reforms will proceed, but Chirac announced two major amendments: one that will reduce the law’s trial period for workers aged under 26 from two years to one year; and one that introduces a requirement for companies to justify a worker’s dismissal.

So in essence the law will proceed, but De Villepin has been given a few chips to soothe public sentiment and salvage his own image going forward. And while it may settle the immediate issue of Chirac’s credibility, it is not clear if this move is sufficient to silence the opposition and avert deepening social unrest. The students and unions are, of course, unhappy.

The other question is if this will do enough for De Villepin to neutralize his direct opponent Sarkozy. The latter welcomed the move as a “wise decision” and may well be adopting a far more moderate tone than we’ve been used to hearing from him. The president and his two potential successors are all moving to the center for personal political gain, but it remains to be seen how this will do France’s competitiveness any good.

One reader pointed to an opinion poll yesterday and asked if it was not wiser – given the poll’s results – to pull the proposed legislation:

"a poll by the Ipsos agency for LCI television said 62 percent of the French agreed with the movement against Mr. de Villepin's law, and that a full 92 percent want it rescinded or modified. The poll Wednesday of 804 people aged 18 and over gave no margin of error."

In general I don’t think that nations should be governed by opinion polls, no matter how compelling their numbers appear to be. De Villepin & Co. have a mandate from the voter to do what is in the best interest of the French Republic, not to please them by making easy choices. Yet having said that there is an argument to be made that if politicians believe that they are acting in the best interest of the nation they can and should sometimes make some strategic moves to ensure that they will remain in power to carry out their agenda. And that is what happened tonight, the final outcome of it all however will remain far from certain.

The French Constitutional Council has approved the proposed labor reforms which means the ball is now in Chirac's court to either sign them into law or send them back to De Villepin for reconsideration. Tomorrow night he will address the nation and my guess is that he will proceed. Any sign of watering down or hint of negotiation will be a formidable blot on Chirac's already tainted domestic record and play right into the hands of presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy. This is as much about salvaging France's economic propsects as it is about ensuring that De Villepin inherits the Chirac mantle.

In the meantime protests continue leading Andrew Sullivan to conclude that:

It's important to remember that excessive welfare states do not only impede economic growth and freedom, they also change people's minds and souls - from independence to dependency, from self-help to resentment, from pride in work to rioting to perpetuate unemployment.

Yes. In France and beyond.

The terminolgoy keeps getting better. The latest buzzword finds its origins in the epicenter of Western decline, France.

Social turmoil in Europe is not exclusively restricted to France which today experienced a national strike, disrupting public life. Britain was hit by a major shutdown too today:

Teaching assistants, clerks, trash collectors and other government workers throughout Britain shut down thousands of schools and disrupted transportation and businesses in what may be the nation's biggest strike in 80 years.

More than a million workers downed tools today to protest Prime Minister Tony Blair's plan to raise their retirement age to 65 from 60, the Unison union said. Last year, Blair pulled back from similar plans for central government employees.

We are entering a new phase in British politics with Gordon Brown waiting in the wings, ready to take over and some believe that he is far less of a centrist than Tony Blair is. And a succession battle in France is shaping up as well where rivals De Villepin and Sarkozy are activley positioning themselves to take over the reigns from Chirac next year. Whoever wins wil have to face a resurgent left and may be forced to take the hard edges of any reform package.

So, against the backdrop of intense social unrest there is an increased likelihood for both France and Britain to take a more measured approach to necessary pension and labor reforms, something we already witnessed earlier in Germany. Whatever reform Europe may need, it may be an extraordinary hard sell and therefore take much longer to implement.

The European birth deficits are compensated for almost exclusively by immigrants who in turn have more babies than the average European family, according to EU Business. It's not an entirely surprising conclusion, but it's nice to have some firm numbers in place supporting it.

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Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept was reviewed in the Washington Post Book World. Bruce himself was not overly pleased with what he described as "a perfect expression of political-establishment orthodoxy" so he decided to 'fisk' it. To give you a flavor, here's an excerpt:

Bawer preaches here mostly to the converted.

A patently misleading statement -- this book consists not of "preaching" but of facts -- and a patent attempt to keep "the non-converted," as Simon would have it, from reading the book. It's not "the converted" who need to read While Europe Slept, but the others -- those who don't know about Europe's problems or don't realize how drastic they are. That's whom this book is addressed to.

The presence of imperfectly integrated communities of highly traditional Middle Eastern and North African Muslims in Europe, as well as the chasm that separates many European Muslims from the cultural norms of their adopted countries, were familiar well before Bawer arrived,

"Familiar" to whom? Not to most Americans, certainly. It was all but impossible to find mention of the situation in the European or American media.

even if Christian Europeans had no idea how to cope with them.

Indeed, Bawer's complaint was vividly and conspicuously personified by the populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. A proud homosexual, he was assassinated by an animal-rights activist in 2002.

An "animal-rights activist," that is, who was infuriated by Fortuyn's stance on Islam, and who killed him after having been brainwashed by Dutch media and politicians into viewing Fortuyn as a dangerous, racist extremist.

His right-wing, anti-immigration stance rested on the insistence that Islam was too socially retrograde to be integrated into liberal Dutch culture.

For the millionth time, Fortuyn was not "right-wing." His concern about the influx of Muslims into the Netherlands was based on the fact that many of them were incorrigibly right-wing -- and not just right-wing, but reactionary to a degree beyond the imagination of most Westerners.

So there's not much new here,

"Preaching to the converted," "not much new here" -- move along, folks. Don't worry. Be happy.

No, not much new. Funny, then, how I keep getting emails -from extremely intelligent people who read newspapers like the Washington Post every day and consider themselves well-informed -- and yet have been stunned by what they've learned from this book.

There's lots more. Enjoy it. And buy the book.

The Dutch NRC Handelsblad ran a fairly devastating editorial on France on Saturday. I thought it might be a good idea to translate the core elements of it in order to demonstrate that pointing the finger at Chirac’s ailing state is not just a favorite pastime of the Anglo-Saxon right: a center-left European newspaper is equally capable of it. And it contains some interesting facts as well:

And even though member states have recently become seduced by protectionist behavior, it must be said that France has put itself in a particular negative light. The service directive, intended to facilitate market entry of companies in each other’s market, was diluted because of French resistance. “The Polish Plumber”, the symbol of the foreign worker who will put pressure on wages, already played a part in the (French) rejection of the European Constitution last year. France subsequently announced that eleven industry sectors would be protected against foreign corporate takeovers. That was put into practice last month by pre-empting the Italian interest for gas and water conglomerate Suez, by rapidly merging Suez with Gaz de France. And there is government resistance against a bid by Mittal Steel for the largely French Arcelor. French companies, among them Electricité de France and Arcelor itself, are unhindered in their quest for hostile takeovers abroad.

[ … ]

The French government resists globalization, yet tries to take advantage of it, but also tries at the same time to introduce domestic reforms which are nullified by its electorate. In the meantime French president Chirac chose to leave an EU-meeting last Thursday when a French employers federation leader talked in English. It may be a worthwhile effort to find a masterplan behind all this, but the right conclusion is probably that every attempt to effect change in France is blocked, by citizens and politicians – first and foremost by Chirac.

Both citizens and politicians, indeed. The paper concludes by arguing how European unity becomes a difficult proposition when one of its key members is in such a desperate and un-cooperative state. That assessment is right, especially in light of the fact that the speed train to European unity has always been driven by the now severely handicapped French-German tandem.

It also begs the question what is needed to turn France back into a viable and open economy, willing to play its part on the world stage as a reliable and equal partner. All bets are off until Chirac is gone next year, but even then it will take some formidable talent to bring about reform and ensure a buy-in from a majority of the French public. If such a leader fails to get elected to the Elysée then all bets are off too.

It appears that the resistance to the proposed labor legislation in France will result in a general strike this coming Tuesday:

In a joint statement, the students said they planned to block train stations and main roads on March 30 and called on the government to resign.

"The government's deafness does not weaken our determination," they said after two months of protests which have led to sporadic riots and rising fears the demonstrations could be hijacked by hooligans.

France risks chaos on Tuesday as students, school children and their parents march in many cities, while the trade unions have called for a general strike which is expected to disrupt public transport with many trains and flights cancelled and only one in two Paris metro trains expected to run.

The pro-market measures can of course not be seen in isolation, they come not long after a series of devastating riots by immigrant groups among whose ranks unemployment is disproportionally high. The NYT picked up on this theme yesterday and pointed to the concurrent surge of anti-Semitism in France. The toxic mix of unemployment and manipulating race relations brings back memories of Europe's less than glorious recent past as Richard Landes' notes in the introduction to the collection of his essays on France:

And yet, over the last five years, a stunning transformation has taken place in Europe, made all the more rapid by the radical denial that has marked mainstream European attitudes until this day. If civic Europe survives — which I passionately hope it does — these opening years of the 21st century will be remembered as a period, much like the 30s, when well intentioned people made consistently foolish choices, deepening their danger.

It seems that the French time for choosing has somehow passed; the street is increasingly making future choices and another instalment of that destabizing process will unfold itself this week.

Jacques Chirac walked out of a European summit meeting yesterday:

Mr Chirac interrupted and asked why he was speaking in English. "I'm going to speak in English because that is the language of business," replied the former chief of the French employers' group, which has been at odds with Paris.

The president stalked out of the conference room. The French delegation then followed, forcing Philippe Douste-Blazy, the foreign minister, and Thierry Breton, the finance minister, to leave with as much dignity as they could muster.

[ ... ]

The incident highlighted French sensitivities to the unstoppable rise of English in the EU, which welcomed millions of new citizens from the ex-Communist bloc in 2004 with little or no interest in speaking French but years of English lessons under their belts.

The only hope one can have for the French is that a sense of pragmatism will prevail following the presidential elections next year. A mix of misguided national pride and deep frustration over failed policies have turned the current French president into yesterday's man.

UPDATE: There's a French-American merger in the works, any guess what the language of choice will be for the new entity once the deal is complete?

If you haven't done so already, I would really encourage you to buy Bruce Bawer's excellent While Europe Slept.

Bawer, an American who lived in Amsterdam and who currently resides in Oslo, Norway, has written extensively about Europe's troubles which is of course one of the core Peaktalk themes. I've always argued that outsiders with direct exposure to the continent - and having left the place sixteen years ago I consider myself to be one too - to be best positioned to write about Europe. Deep enough knowledge and a sufficient amount of distance to enable a measure of objectivity.

Bruce's essays and other work can be found on his rich in content website which also has a useful geographical link page.

There has been another round of riots in France, however this time a very different group has taken to streets. George Adair has the details.

"People laugh that we can't find bin Laden in some remote part of the Pakistan border, but European NATO cannot find the two most wanted war criminals right on its own soil" - Christopher Hitchens, talking to Hugh Hewitt.

An OECD-report suggests that Europe is falling behind in terms of skills and education when compared to Asia. Although this is not a surprising revelation, it is interesting to note that the report defines "class" as one of the more serious barriers to climbing the social ladder, particularly in France and Germany.

Failed integration policies and an ingrained but false sense of entitlement will generate a bill of incompetence, presented by Asia's eager and entrepreneurial masses. And, I suspect, some dynamic Eastern Europeans will form part of the new competition as well.

An excellent and succinct obituary by Christopher Hitchens. Read it all.

As a child and teenager I spent a number of holidays in Yugoslavia which used to have a justified reputation for being one of the friendliest places on the planet, seriously. As such I advertised it to Irene when we embarked on our first holiday together in 1988 which took us by train through most of the Yugoslav nation on our way to Greece. What both of us remember from this part of our trip was the decidedly aggressive atmosphere, ranging from an increased military presence to testosterone-high aggressive youngsters on the trains to appalling scenes of poverty in the Kosovo region. The reason I bring this up is that Hitchens’ piece points to 1987 as the year of Milosevic’s ascendancy and the moment in time in which the train of gruesome hatred and destruction was set in motion. What we witnessed a year later were its first expressions, the initial manifestations of something that had been successfully repressed during decades of communist rule but which Slobodan Milosevic had somehow managed to unleash. I’ve never visited any of the resulting republics again, but I would like to believe that the evil winds have not destroyed the spirit of hospitality by which I got to know the heart of the Balkans.

More than once do I get the question what has prompted my bleak outlook for Europe, and while it is easy to rattle off the standard list of issues and contrast them with North America, there is one that stands out above all the others. Not only because it symbolizes the powerlessness of the continent’s institutional arrangements, but also because it reveals the strong potential for ethnic strife and bloodshed that is residing somewhere deep in Europe’s wounded soul.

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the sheer incompetence of the European Union (and subsequently the UN) to do anything about it stand as the pivotal case study of why any crisis of magnitude simply can not be expected to be resolved by Europe itself. And, it was the first such test following the collapse of the Soviet Union at a time when the spirit of European co-operation and integration was at peak levels. The incompetence and inaction was covered up by ineffective interventions and some bizarre forms of symbolism, I distinctly remember former French President Francois Mitterand’s walk through the ravaged streets of Sarajevo, an empty gesture indeed:

After President Mitterand of France visited Sarajevo most Bosnians and Herzegovinians, including President of Bosnia & Herzegovina Alija Izetbegović, believed that the West would not allow this horror to continue. They were mistaken. Instead of any action designed to stop the slaughter of innocent civilians, the French President recommended that a large United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) be sent to Bosnia & Herzegovina. They were sent to “keep peace” with no peace to keep. Over, 7,000 people were eventually massacred at Srebrenica in 1995, under the “protection” of UN forces. In Omarska, Trnopolje, Manjača and other concentration camps in Serb-held territory, through which over a million civilians were processed as part of a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing, UNPROFOR simply never arrived.

Approximately 10,000 civilians, including 1,500 children, were killed in Sarajevo alone, while it was under UN protection.

Of course I bring this up to as the Balkan-crisis of the 1990s was accelerated by the man who died this weekend in a prison cell in The Hague, Slobodan Milosevic. The conditions of his relatively early departure are highly symbolic. The international body that wasn’t able to restrain him when he set out on his journey of hate, destruction and genocide proved to be as incompetent when they finally had him in their prison cell. Not only was the International Court of Justice the wrong venue to hold Milosevic to account – that should have been in Belgrade, in a Serb court – it had over a period of some four years accomplished very little with only an occasional pyrrhic victory by the weakened defendant reaching the international headlines. And the real butchers, especially Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, are still on the loose.

The other part of deeper significance is that he died on Dutch soil. As much as the EU and UN would like to forget their shameful role in the former Yugoslavia, it is especially the Dutch who are more than a little willing to forget the dreadful performance of its tarnished Dutchbat defending the "safe haven" of Srebrenica. To describe it as a botched defense would be too generous a treatment of history: not a single shot was fired to prevent the subsequent mass murder by Mladic’s thugs.

So in death, the erstwhile butcher of the Balkans has been able to serve up a few painful reminders to those who would be more than willing to forget. And to me and many others struggling with Europe’s difficult journey, another reminder of Europe’s inherent weaknesses.

A reader writes:

You were more than a little harsh on Claire Berlinski. Admittedly, her unscripted podcast for the Instas was less than brilliant, but her writing is generally first class. Some of it is online, and I'd encourage you to look through and maybe draw in your horns.

Point taken. I will read her book and return to the subject once that is done. In the meantime, here is an interview with Berlinski.

Glenn, Helen and Claire Berlinski, podcasting on Europe.

UPDATE: Well, if Berlinski's book is as good as the interview I would certainly not buy it. To recommend that the State Department start preparing 'contingency plans' without even hinting for what eventuality - other than the broad-based term ‘going to hell’ - and what these plans should consist of, is being gratuitously alarmist. And to totally stumble on the significance of the Van Gogh murder is for an expert on Europe’s dark future an almost capital offense. Berlinski came across as clueless, serving up some simple over-generalizations that lacked any depth. If America is starting to make plans based on her commentary, there is reason for worry indeed. It was Helen’s grace and Glenn's unique sense of humor that made it a palatable experience, but next time if Glenn and Helen want to talk about Europe they should give me call.

Newsweek has weighed in on the European integration challenge with an article called The End of Tolerance?

It starts of with the usual and flawed idea that Europeans, and in particular the Dutch, are tolerant by nature and that recent incidents such as the cartoon controversy have put an end to all that. That is too much of an unresearched and back-of-the-envelope assessment as 'pragmatism' rather than 'tolerance' has been, in particular in the Dutch case, the virtue that helped shape policy.

Therefore I am also not too confident with Newsweek's assertion that Europe is taking a tougher stance with regards to Muslim immigrants. What has happened is that the debate has been opened up and consequently it is far easier these days to discuss harder and less-tolerant approaches than used to be the case. It remains to be seen however if all of that new openness about these issues will yield tangible results and sustained policies irrespective of which political parties happen to be in power. And that's where the real concerns are in my opinion.

The one thing that Newsweek gets exactly right is the requirement outlined in my post below about Fukuyama's take on integration:

It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious "Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness." But given the immigrant and demographic trajectories of Europe's future, there is little choice but to try.

Francis Fukuyama has taken a closer look at Europe’s struggle with radical Islam and considers the various options the continent has to proactively engage the problems it is facing. And Fukuyama gets it, offering a strategy that is very similar to the Peaktalk-approach:

Governments need to clamp down on extremists and jihadists in ways that do not risk further alienating minority communities; their aim must be to integrate moderate Muslims better while avoiding a right-wing populist backlash.

The toughest part however is to come up with a solid integration model as sending every Muslim back to his native grounds with an incentive payment to do so from the European taxpayer is simply not a viable option. Fukuyama notes that time is indeed running out for Europe and his suggestion of offering a positive Americanized version of integration would most likely offer the best road to success:

The problem that most Europeans face today is that they don't have a vision of the kinds of positive cultural values their societies stand for and should promote, other than endless tolerance and moral relativism. What each European society needs is to invent an open form of national identity similar to the American creed, an identity that is accessible to newcomers regardless of ethnicity or religion.

But in that we can already discern the difficulties: the absence of any positive cultural values and the inability to define a set at a point in time when Europe’s nation states are increasingly drifting towards abandoning their national values in favor of a bland Euro-label, designed in Brussels.

It once more highlights the need to let each European nation define its core cultural values, something which by itself will be a serious and lenghty process of soul searching. The long post-war journey build on secularism and relativism has bred a generation that is terribly ill-equipped to define these positive cultural values, let alone come up with a message that could attract or even integrate others. And should there be sufficient appetite to engage in such a fundamental debate, any positive outcome will be subject to the left and right sides of political spectrum finding some sort of consensus. This is a particularly tall order and even if it’s filled it will take time, something which according to Fukuyama, is in short supply.

On the other side of the integration divide however there is less ambiguity or cultural confusion, on the contrary. Call them positive, call them negative, the group that you seek to integrate has a very consistent set of values. Who can honestly blame it for so far being unwilling or unable to accept the loosely defined moral framework that seems to be sinking the European ship?

Earlier this week it seemed that we were not getting a very uniform and coherent statement from the European Union with regards to supporting its member-state Denmark. The European Parliament yesterday however appeared to be lining up behind the embattled Danes:

Freedom of expression and independence of the press are "universal rights" but ones which must be "exercised with responsibility", "within the limits of the law" and with "respect for religious feelings and beliefs". That was the message Parliament delivered in a joint resolution. In the wake of the furore which has surrounded the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in some European newspapers.

[ ... ]

MEPs also expressed their "full support and solidarity" with Denmark and recalled Article 11 of the Treaty of European Union, which establishes that Member States shall support the Union's external and security policy "actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity". Boycott against one Member State is in contradiction with trade agreements concluded with the EU as a whole, MEPs stressed.

[ ... ]

Parliament also "regrets the renewed and increased anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda in some Arab countries and Iran. The House points out that in these countries degrading and humiliating cartoons of Jews are regularly printed, thus showing they obviously do not apply the same standards to all religious communities".

It’s important to highlight that amid the gloom and doom about Europe – and you’re getting your almost daily dose of it here – there are indeed principles that Europeans will stand up for. And these sentiments were supported by Europe’s executive, with José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission voicing his strong support for both Denmark and the freedom of the press.

While all commendable and somewhat of a relief, it is telling that it took the EU around ten days to come up with what appears to be a unified message. And while on the face of it that may be seen as a negative, it may actually be evidence that the European leadership has taken a wait-and-see attitude to determine where both the general and in particular member state sentiment is headed before it takes a formal position. For those that are anxious about the potential for a central, top-down Euro-state, good news. And in this case, where the difference between right and wrong is so patently clear, an encouraging development. But, it prompts one to think about the many issues where Europeans are less vocal and where the EU can determine its direction without any real outside interference. Not because it is not hearing it, but because it is not getting it.

The only real dissonant was the EU’s foreign policy chief’s Middle East tour, where the focus appeared to have been on appeasing the Arab and Muslim world, rather than communicating the importance of the views of freethinking Europeans.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said that the Danish cartoon row should not be allowed to cause a rift between Europeans and Muslims, while visiting the Middle East in a bid to soothe tension over the drawings.

Well, at least Solana has adopted a wait-and-see approach for dealing with Hamas.

Former Hong Kong Governor and EU-Commissioner Chris Patten is back with a new book called Cousins and Strangers and it is getting mixed reviews. The book is a mixture of assessing the situation in the world today and where Patten believes the various key players, in particular Europe and America, should be moving:

In Cousins and Strangers, Chris Patten, one of Europe’s most distinguished statesmen, scrutinizes the final years of the twentieth century and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 fundamentally changed the nature of this Western alliance. Today, the threat of terrorism, economic competition from Asia, and a seemingly unbridgeable cultural divide have strained the alliance to a moment of reckoning. Patten argues that America’s status as the only superpower must be reined in, but he also warns Europe against too ardently challenging U.S. leadership. He questions whether Britain needs to choose between bolstering its “special relationship” with the United States and forging a greater role in a united Europe.

Patten’s ambiguous relationship with America has been most notable in his sharp rejection of Bush and the invasion of Iraq which he considered to be an aberration in America’s recent history as a benevolent superpower. And although that may put Patten on the wrong side of some of the neo-con right, he understands quite clearly where tomorrow’s threats are coming from. They will come from failed states rather than successful states, as he argued in a must-hear interview on CBC radio yesterday. As an example he cites the explosive situation in Pakistan as a key example of hazardous instability and he contrasts it with China, a more stable and successful state.

It is here that Patten provides some incisive views and he is at his best in my opinion when he discusses China, and to some extent India. Rather than branding the resurgent Middle Kingdom as the next global military threat – something which the Pentagon’s Quarterly Defense Review attempted to do last week – Patten sees the nation as a partner of the West in bringing peace and prosperity to the world. As discussed here before, I believe that is the only rational position to take, but that doesn’t mean that we should always kowtow to Beijing in order to have meeting of minds. On the contrary, and Patten himself can rightfully claim to be one of the few Western leaders to have stood up against the Chinese leadership, which he argues has always been quite respectful to him despite their past altercations. They have “much more sophistication than those who wish to curry favor with them”, and that is probably a sound piece of advice for anyone engaging the Chinese leadership.

Patten’s wish for Britain to play a bigger role in a more integrated Europe and for the US to revert to some sort of pre-9/11 magnanimous multilateral player may not be based in today’s political reality. Even a post-Bush era will be subject to the shifts that occurred during his tenure in the White House, something Patten conveniently discounts. His assessment of the origins of jihadist terror, well we can equally open them up to debate. But, if we want to map our way into the future and define our relationship with newly emerging economic superpowers such as China and India, then Patten’s superb ability to articulate the threats and opportunities is extremely useful. In that, he probably stands alone among his European contemporaries. But then, he is no longer bound by an electorate and can freely speak his mind.

Anne Applebaum has commented on Theodore Dalrymple’s piece on Europe’s doomed future by listing three aspects – political leadership, embracing the new Europe and stop being obsessed with the US – that she believes are currently holding Europe back. As Anne says, the list is of course much longer and without much difficulty we can throw in political apathy, demographics and unintegrated Muslims, but the overarching theme to me seems to be a deep rooted fear of change which in turn finds its origins in being a pampered and somewhat self-indulgent polity. So to take Applebaum’s points, there is not a lot of political capital going around to take on drastic reforms, immigration from the former Soviet world has sparked serious unease with unskilled yet highly motivated workers competing with Europe’s lethargic workforce, and finally: the opposite of blasting the US would be embracing it, which again, implies some drastic change.

There is a lot of Euro-doomsday commentary making the rounds at the moment and I for one was one of the earlier ones to take on and promote that topic, but we need to apply some caution. Over-simplification yields terrible analysis.

Firstly, there is not one monolith called Europe and any probe needs to make very clear the distinction between the various parts and groups that constitute today’s Europe. Secondly, and that is something that Jay Reding correctly notices, there is no place for American complacency. Americans do have some challenges with their current set of leaders, are not exactly clever or pro-active in embracing its immigration issues and are fairly unengaged when it comes to casting a ballot. But there’s one thing that Americans got right from day one and they still know how to deal with it far better than their ancestors: change.

Here an interesting piece by Christopher Shea that challenges the well-known theory that Europe is about to collapse. Its underlying notion is that welfare states can be made to work and that the Euro-choice to take less income and have more leisure time (as opposed to Americans) doesn't necessarily spell the continent's demise. I agree with this take as it is built on the assumption that there is not ‘one Europe’ but rather different groupings of European nations that each move at very different speeds. And thus economic and social outcomes are equally different, per group, and per nation. And it is possible, much as I disagree with some of them, to make certain choices about welfare and taxation so that even at a reduced level of prosperity societies can continue to thrive for a certain period of time.

The danger however is that - and it goes for North America too – none of the economic choices are taken within isolation. Globalization will put pressure on the sustainability of the European leisure model and over time adjustments will have to be made in order to stay competitive and fund that welfare state, wherever it is. And the French approach to that will be different from the Irish one which will different from the Italian one. But hard choices will have to be made in order to maintain the standard of living and it is there where I have often voiced my concern about the old continent’s versatility. Add to that the demographic and concurrent cultural challenges and it will tell you why opting for different approaches takes political courage, something which is not exactly omnipresent these days in Europe. That, more than anything else, will put a serious strain on the continent’s future. From Shea’s piece:

If Europeans didn't have the courage to cut their welfare spending and make their labor markets more flexible, the report said, an economic crisis would force such changes. And if politicians were crazy enough to ignore such a crisis, then collapse was possible. Not quite the end of Europe.

Maybe not, but we if we accept this interpretation then we are putting a lot of stock in the ability of Europeans to not ignore that impending crisis. And that is the zone of doubt we are in at the moment.

Here's a very instructive excerpt from an editorial from yesterday's NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper known to take a moderate stance on most issues:

Just like all other multinational organizations (the UN for instance) is the EU calling for calm and mutual respect. That is very good, but the Danish justifiably feel that they’re now somewhat left behind. The union isn’t able to do much politically, certainly not in a situation where members do not want Brussels to interfere. But when it comes to a trade boycott, things are different. The measures taken by Iran against one member country should be interpreted as a sanction against the EU as a whole. That requires a suitable response.

Absolutely, especially given the anti-European rhetoric coming out of Tehran these days. But as I reported earlier today, there appears to be some serious paralysis in Brussels when it comes to taking a definitive stance for Western values and outlining the parameters of a possible counter-boycott.

NOTE: EU Referendum has more on the EU's failure to formulate an adequate response to those nations that are activley threatening some of its member states.

It has been relatively quiet on the Dutch front – something regular readers have no doubt noticed – one of the reasons being that some sort of calm appeared to have settled itself over the nation’s streets. Silence before the storm? Most probably, according to Amsterdam Mayor Cohen who this week raised the alarm over a resurgence of violence in the city:

"There is an underlying feeling whereby it would only take minor incidents to cause an outburst," Cohen said.

Cohen said officials in all the city districts are poised to nip any unrest in the bud.

Moroccan-Dutch youth were involved in many of the incidents Cohen was referring to. A group of youths broke the windows of 39 cars in the southern part of the Pijp district around New Year.

Locals in the area have also complained about an increase in threatening behaviour by groups of young people. A Jewish resident was threatened and a firework was thrown through the window pane of his home. A gay couple have reported being the regular victims of harassment.

Again, it is deeply and doubly depressing to witness this sort of violence in the city which submitted one of the holocaust's darkest chapters, but somehow in the post-war years bounced back to reclaim its status as a center of tolerance and freedom.

As we are witnessing in Brussels and Paris, it is often the lethargic and expedient political culture that has somehow compounded the problems which are beginning to look like they are not going to be solved anytime soon, if ever. It’s tempting to start thinking of a Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam axis, all cities that are close geographically and ethnically, all with a similar immigrant problem, and each experiencing occasional flare ups of violence and a concurrent erosion of individual freedoms. The increasing intensity and the un-Cohenesque sounding of the alarm bells is ominous.

NOTE: Yes, London was the other place where car windows get smashed on a regular basis.

Consider this:

Descendants of slaves from France's Caribbean islands are suing a leading French philosopher for making allegedly offensive remarks about the islands' black populations, a lawyer said on Monday.

The Association of Sons and Daughters of African Deportees (COFFAD) accuse Alain Finkielkraut of making the "biased" comments during a Jewish community radio show last March.

Commenting on an ongoing debate about France's historical role in the slave trade, the Jewish philosopher is accused of referring derogatorily to "Caribbean victims of slavery who now live off French state hand-outs".

Now, without going into the merits of COFFAD's case, you just have to wonder why it is that the association has decided to go after Finkielkraut more than a year after he allegedly made certain comments. Could it be that in the intervening period the French media have targeted the philosopher for straying from politically correct orthodoxy? Once you greenlight a witch hunt, you'll find be able to find a lawsuit anywhere. Just keep digging.

I wasn't really aware that the award existed, but Reader's Digest made a commendable move in handing it to Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has won the Reader's Digest European of the Year Award 2006. "She is battling to raise awareness of the often-concealed plight of many Muslim women living in Europe," the magazine announced yesterday.

Hirsi Ali was selected by the European editors of Reader's Digest "as the person who best embodies the contemporary expression of Europe's values and traditions".

It may actually be better to describe her as someone who tries to resurrect whatever is left of European values and traditions. That in itself means navigating a complicated patchwork of laws and beliefs where even our new European of the Year is prone to make a few mistakes.

One of my readers wonders after reading this post if there’s such a thing as a Chirac legacy. It’s beyond the scope of my argument to define what that would look like, but my point was that the French president is likely to go extreme lengths to prevent the rise of a political star and successor who will radically change course and eventually invalidate his policies.

Via Tigerhawk, I found this excellent column by Norman Podhoretz who makes a similar point when talking about Iraq:

Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.

If you invested your career in a particular worldview and you live to see it become unstuck in a fairly drastic way, it can not be very pleasant. And what else can you do than defend your record relentlessly when, like Brzezinski, you are no longer in power? As it happens Chirac can still influence events and he is likely to go to extreme lengths to ensure that his worldview is perpetuated by De Villepin.

The Chirac legacy is the Chirac fear, the fear that one of his own, Sarkozy, will prove that he was ultimately wrong.

Earlier in the week I noted that the campaign for the French presidential elections got a major boost with Sarkozy weighing in on behalf of French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. Today, Tammy Bruce links to an interesting piece in the Guardian which notes that Sarkozy has managed to win an internal battle over the presidential nomination process within France’s ruling centre-right UMP party.

Again, every move by both De Villepin and Sarkozy from now until early 2007 will have to be seen in terms of how the French right will position itself for the presidential contest in that year. In the end it will all depend on how strong a candidate the rival Socialists can field and how hard Chirac will fight to preserve his legacy by positioning a moderate like De Villepin for the race. More importantly, the outcome of this internal struggle will determine how the French are going to deal with the highly explosive dark underbelly of its society. With Sarkozy they will at least have someone who can and will define the problem in a very blunt manner. And that is a very basic requirement to even begin finding a solution.

A collection of everything that has been written about the Finkielkraut affair over the past few weeks, compiled by Fausta at her renamed blog. As the issue goes right to the heart of what is going on in Europe I am surpised it is not getting more coverage, both in the blogosphere and the MSM.

And supports Finkielkraut:

The storm aroused by French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut refuses to subside. On Sunday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy threw his full weight behind the beleaguered philosopher, who has been forced to remain cloistered at home following the sharp reactions to an interview he gave to Haaretz.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Sarkozy said: "Monsieur Finkielkraut is an intellectual who brings honor and pride to French wisdom ... If there is so much criticism of him, it might be because he says things that are correct."

Read the whole article and you will note that Sarkozy’s comments are seen as a full frontal assault on France’s left-wing elites. This certainly helps to set the stage for a very interesting battle over Chirac’s legacy in 2007, where De Villepin for now appears to be the frontrunner. But Sarkozy has seized upon the discontent in France and has it seems already launched his campaign on a platform of common sense, abandoning the outdated concepts of politically correct thinking. As we've seen elsewhere in Europe - Blair, Fortuyn - that requires a certain amount of political guts and Sarkozy has it in spades.

So, the struggle for the heart of France is not dissimilar to what is playing out in other European nations. An unprecendented and deep rift is opening up between the traditional political elites and a new daring train of thought found on the right and in a very few remote spots on the left. And as Finkielkraut is finding out, the vested interests are not going to give up their ownership of what they consider their truth very quickly, they will hang on to it at any cost.

NOTE: If your French is up to it, here’s the article from Le Nouvel Observateur, “Sarkozy: Finkielkraut un honneur pour la France”

Related Posts
L'Affaire Finkielkraut
De Villepin Talks
Finkielkraut Recants

To Christiane Amanpour at CNN. Key excerpts from the interview:

I am not sure you can call them riots. It's very different from the situation you have known in 1992 in L.A. for example. You had at that time 54 people that died, and you had 2,000 people wounded. In France during the 2 weeks period of unrest, nobody died in France. So, I think you can't compare this social unrest with any kind of riots.

[ ... ]

We have to say that, and it is important to also understand the real nature of these movements, there is no ethnic or religious basis of this movement, as we can see in some other parts of the world.

[ ... ]

They don't want to be recognized as Muslims, or as blacks, or as people coming from North Africa. They want to be recognized, as French and they want to have equal opportunity during their lives.

De Villepin here shows a rare political ability to recast recent events and make them palatable for his electorate. He has redifined the recent riots, turned them into a uniquely French and social issue that can easily be solved with time-tested approaches, while pointing the finger at the US as the place where one would find real riots.

With that - and Chirac's blessing - he's now positioned himself as a solid front-runner for the French presidential elections in 2007.

Ralf Goergens over at Chicagoboyz has reached a limit in entertaining the thought of a European demographic collapse and the consequent Eurabia theories that sort of go hand in hand with that. The problem with all of this is that there are indeed very few solid numbers to support the various claims, and it is Tigerhawk who rightly points in the Chicagoboyz comments that long term demographic trends almost never bear out. All very true.

The fact however remains that affluent Europeans produce less babies and less affluent immigrants produce more, for now. That causes a change in the ethnic composition of Europe and without making the full stretch to any doomsday scenario for 2050, things are definitely changing. At Goergens’ blog one of his colleagues points out that it is not so much a future majority, but rather a sizeable group that has the potential to destabilize a nation, or organize itself politically.

The latter is probably the area where we need to look. It’s only a few weeks back that I highlighted the political turmoil in the city of Rotterdam. One of the leading city politicians got into trouble about making certain statements about Muslim immigrants and he pointed out that if even a small and radical portion of that group organized politically, it could help tip the electoral balance in some of the city’s districts. A big enough threat to worry about, or too small to lose any sleep over?

The risk of an organized radical Muslim political group getting electoral traction may be minimal for now; it is the way other political parties adapt to the emergence of such a force. It isn’t to hard to see the traditional left pandering to some of these groups out of a sense of political correctness and expediency, while at the same time some unsavory characters from the hard right may resort to strategies with equally troubling results. Remember in continental Europe’s predominant system of proportional representation, even 10% of the vote can get you - depending on the overall distribution of votes – some serious political influence. In short, a large enough unintegrated and unassimilated group of immigrants has the potential for political instability, or as we have seen in France, political paralysis.

It’s a theme that keeps coming back, and as I’ve discussed before the inability of the average European to make decisive choices without veering too far left or right will be as crucial as any demographic development. And some visionary political leadership would help too ...

Today Angela Merkel was inaugurated as Germany’s new chancellor and my regular readers will now that I am less than enthusiastic about the prospects of her grand coalition. The Economist takes a similarly dim view, highlighting the difficulty of aligning two very different political cultures under one umbrella:

As soon as one of the parties senses that fresh elections might be to its advantage, it will be tempted to pull out of the government. The risk is not only that Ms Merkel’s coalition will follow wrong-headed economic policies; it may also turn out to be unstable as well. Poor Germany.

Give it two years, but not more than that.

UPDATE I: Leon de Winter and Tammy Bruce are more optimistic.

UPDATE II: The FT sees room for improvement in Germany's foreign policy, but in the same breadt gives us four reasons why on the international stage, Merkel will be restrained too.

Related Posts:
The Merkel Coalition
Chancellor Merkel
Oh Germany
Multi-Tiered Europe
Vote Again
Scheming Schroeder
Reluctant to Change
No Mandate for Merkel
Closer Than Ever
German Polls: Still Close
German Election Primer

From the Weekly Standard, a comprehensive and depressing summary of the uprising that has now been going for seventeen nights by Olivier Guitta.

Time Magazine runs a few comparisons about the fate of immigrants in Germany, The Netherlands and Britain in an article entitled Outside Looking In. The problem with these assessments is that no national situation is alike. There is a vast difference between for instance a Turkish immigrant hailing from an urban center like Istanbul who has made Berlin his home and a Moroccan from the Rif mountains whose journey in a time machine ended in Amsterdam. And in the case of France, its colonial past in the Maghreb plays an important factor in evaluating the suburban war that is currently raging. Different ethnic backgrounds, and thus different outcomes.

Media and bloggers from both the left and the right have over the past few weeks been unable to define Europe’s troubles in terms that go beyond “governments have failed” or “it’s a well-organized jihad”, and if they’re in between, they’re scrambling for an answer. Consequently the list of suggestions to find a way out of this mess is very limited. And belated security measures combined with opening up the checkbook for help – like the EU just did for France – are symptomatic of the naïve approach taken to date. Why don’t we start to look at ways so that “markets can work better” because if they don’t “a well-organized jihad may soon be a fact of life”?

One way to do this may be for the media to start differentiating between the success stories – like this blogger of Moroccan origin who at one point was part of the Amsterdam police force – and the unintegrated undercurrent that has failed to connect with mainstream society. It’s time to understand and report successful immigration better and to engage accomplished Muslims and ask them to contribute to a process of integration and finding market-driven solutions. Individual countries should be able to find such ways to solve problems while at the same time stepping up security and implement hard-line approaches to deviant elements. My fear is that the solutions offered up so far center around “government can probably fix it” and “in doing that we’ll probably avoid a potential jihad”. That are two assumptions too many. Time to start thinking outside the box.

Gloom and doom in France? The Independent Sources blog disagrees. Strongly.

It's been awfully quiet on the German front where Angela Merkel is still struggling to cobble together a coalition government. It seems however that a few obstacles were removed this week:

The breakthrough came after five weeks of haggling in which Merkel had given ground to the Social Democrats on several issues she had pledged to tackle in her election campaign.

The pledges included reducing income taxes - from 15 percent to 12 percent for the lowest rates and from 42 percent to 39 percent for the highest - scrapping dozens of tax exemptions, cutting subsidies and keeping open Germany's nuclear power stations beyond 2012. So far, most of those proposals have been rejected by the Social Democrats.

On Wednesday, however, the conservatives managed to score some victories. Under the agreement for more labor flexibility, employers will be able to lay off staff members after two years of employment instead of the current six months. Once implemented, it would address one of the major complaints from Germany's small and medium-sized enterprises. They have repeatedly said the current law made it too expensive to lay off employees once the six months had expired and created too many obstacles for hiring new ones.

The coalition negotiators also agreed to reduce the bill for unemployment benefits by 4 billion, or $4.7 billion.

The Social Democrats have also come around to accepting an increase in the value added, or sales, tax, but it is still not decided whether it will be increased to 18 percent or even 20 percent.

The panel of advisers also said that by slashing subsidies by 6 billion, the government could bring the deficit below the European Union limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product as early as next year. "The implementation of urgent lasting reforms would be blocked by taking the supposedly easy route of increasing the main sales tax rate to reduce the budget deficit," said the advisers.

Both sides have tried to put the best spin on the coalition talks, but there has been open criticism from within Merkel's party over the way the conservatives have ceded too much ground to the Social Democrats.

This is precisely the outcome that many pundits - including this blog - had projected. Some reform will be implemented, but it will lack teeth and it will fail to deliver what Merkel originally had in mind when she started campaigning this summer. It's the nature of coalition building, but the lingering question will be why she wasn't able to stand firm on the tax cuts.

Once a final agreement is reached both parties will have to ratify it, upon which Merkel can formally be installed as Germany' new chancellor. There still a lot that can go wrong between now and then.

I've got a busy day ahead, so little time for posts until later tonight. In the meantime, the latest from France:

French Cabinet has approved emergency measures giving police more powers and allowing local officials to impose curfews in communities at risk of rioting after the nation endured a 12th night of unrest.

President Jacques Chirac said the new powers were "necessary to accelerate the return to calm."

The government decree authorizing curfews will take effect at midnight Tuesday, The Associated Press reported. Other measures include allowing police to carry out raids for suspected stockpiling of weapons.

I will refrain from stating the obvious here, but one would hope that at some point in time we'll get an account of the decisionmaking process at work here.

There was some debate about whether the “Paris Riots” qualified as an intifada, and today Andrew Sullivan has a few posts up that depart from his more cautious approach yesterday. Good, as I think it’s important that we get terminology right here.

Listening to CBC radio last night I was perplexed to hear the riots being described as “protests”, but give the source of the comment not that surprising. On the other end of the spectrum is "war" and if that war has a religious overtone then the term “jihad” comes into play. In between these two extremes are descriptions such as “revolt”, “unrest” or “uprising”, which translates into Arab as “intifada”. Given the fact that the French rioters are pre-dominantly of Arab descent, there is no reason why the term “intifada” should be far-fetched. Even if there weren’t any religious aspects to it, it would still be acceptable term given the similarities with the Palestinian uprisings. Some believed that using it was overstating the events, and the WaPo takes a cautionary approach today, although they come pretty close to arguing that very little is needed for the mayhem to be hijacked by extremists at which point I assume they can start using the word “intifada”. Well, we're using it here and if you're looking for something lighter, try French Toast.

EU Referendum notes something that has been at the core of this blog's reporting and analysis since its inception: few people in Europe have any idea of what the future should look like.

Theodore Dalrymple's piece on the riots in France I think is spot on, although it over-emphasizes the unemployment argument. However it makes a very compelling argument as to why both the French left and right have colluded in creating the predicament the country is currently in.

It's interesting to note that France's rejection of the EU constitution - which was a vote from the left - essentially seeks to perpetuate an economic situation that would make positive reform aimed at economic integration impossible. Does that mean the French right has the solution at hand? Doubtful, as Interior Minister Sarkozy, who has become a darling of the Anglo-Saxon conservative commentariat, is not synonymous with the French right. He's a visible force but hasn't won the battle as yet.

Apparently there were very clear early warnings that pointed to well-organized terror groups fomenting the riots in France. Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, the nation's top expert on terrorism had made comments to that effect in early October. Details here.

Also, Ed Morrissey reports on other early signs that things were about to turn violent. Keep digging, I suspect there's lots more that we don't know about yet.

Posted by Pieter Dorsman at 12:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBack (0)