“The Belgium of tomorrow will look entirely different” announced today Elio Di Rupo, the formateur who had labored for months at the assignment of King Albert II to try to form a new government. But the political differences were so deep between the Dutch- and French-speaking parts of the country, on a number of issues, that nothing less than this sort of thorough-going transformation of the functions of Belgian government at all levels – in finance, in division-of-powers, etc. – was necessary to break the impasse. For example, apparently the Belgian federal Senate will be transformed a body designed more to represent as three blocs the three “states” – Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels – that make up the country.

If you’re as excited about this as I am, and can read Dutch, then the full text of the new agreement is available for you on-line. Otherwise, I’ll see if there is anything further to report on this development – i.e. that isn’t boring and/or overly provincial; there may be nothing else – and bring it up here.

                          

Which weekend was that? The one back in May that ended with his arrest in New York City for allegedly sexually assaulting the Sofitel maid. (But I don’t think that she counts as one of the three – that incident is still “alleged.”) This information comes from a friend of Anne Sinclair, DSK’s current wife, to whom he is said to confessed it.

I now yield to M. Legge’s account:

It would seem that DSK had the idea of “profiting” from one last moment of pleasure before announcing his participation in the Socialist primaries [for next year's presidential election, which he was getting ready to fly back to France to do]. Two women were convened in the rented suite at the Sofitel. From surveillance-camera images, this information is confirmed. That same night the hotel’s receptionist supposedly refused the advances of the former IMF boss.

Wait, I’m keeping score here. If the receptionist was not concubine #3, nor the maid who went to the police, then who was? Well, at this rate that detail should turn up in public soon.

*Strangely, La Libre cites the French newsmagazine Le Point for all this information. I do prefer citing such an ultimate source above all, but in this case I could not find any mention on Le Point’s site. Maybe they’re reserving it for the (paying) print customers?

                          

No tweet here this time, sorry if you were expecting one, it seems La Dernière Heure is not on Twitter. You can follow Reporters Without Borders on Twitter, though, if that makes you feel any better, although they tweet – or is it pépier? – in French.

More to the point, though, they have their list of 2011′s 38 press-freedom “predators” on-line (and in English), although it’s in a one-webpage-per-predator format that enables a full treatment of each dictator but also makes it rather cumbersome to move from one to another. (At least the first one you encounter when you go to that webpage is Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, an excellent candidate for the head-of-the-class.)

Really, La Dernière Heure’s analysis is itself sufficient to gain an appreciation of what’s going on with this year’s list. What’s mainly been going on – haven’t you heard? – is the “Arab Spring,” which has added some new entrants to this list as their true repressive colors were revealed amid the unrest, such as King Hamad Al-Khalifa of Bahrain. That has also tightened up the anti-press behavior of some of the world press’ perennial predators, such as in the People’s Republic of China and Azerbaijan, where authorities have felt the need to get even more nasty to try to head off anything like an “Arab Spring” happening where they live.

Otherwise, you’ll find the usual suspects here: Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Belarus’ Lukashenko, and so on. But there are also some unusual suspects: the Israeli Defense Forces, say, or countries like Italy, Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines where it is not the government per se but rather violent groups operating within the country (respectively, the Mafia and other organized crime, ETA, drug cartels, and private militias) that serve to make reporters’ lives hell.

And then – EU enlargement officials take note! – there is Turkey. It is not actually on the list of 38 predators, but rather gets an honorable mention on Reporters Without Borders’ own analysis page:

In Turkey (which received a Reporters Without Borders country visit in April), the problem is not just repressive laws, especially the counter-terrorism and state security laws, but also and above all abusive practices by the courts and judges due to their lack of knowledge of investigative journalism.

Think of this in, say, Standard & Poor’s terms: The outlook on Turkey has been set to “negative,” presaging a possible “downgrade” next year onto the “predators list” proper.

                          

In any case, the article’s title is “The wind turns in Malawi,” but don’t get too impressed, Paquet is merely trying to be clever*. After a brief mention of that country’s intention to raise its official retirement age to 70 – that when life expectancy even for women is only 51 years – we get to the real subject: Get a load of this, he crows, the Malawi Assembly (i.e. parliament) is bringing back a law from British colonial times that makes it illegal to fart in public!

He then takes that theme and runs with it. I’ll leave most of its further ramifications to French-readers interested enough to click through to the original. But just to give you a trace . . . apparently one good thing about the dictatorship under Kamuzu Banda that ruled the country for thirty years after independence in 1964 was that people were much more discrete with their personal gas-emissions during that time. So does that mean that dictatorship always smells better? No, Paquet points out, look at China, where this particular aspect of personal behavior has been notoriously loose for centuries, under kings, presidents, and Communist dictators.

* Much as I also try to do all the time when crafting titles for the posts of this weblog, I have to admit!

                          

Yet another aspect of Brussels hitting the “big time” lies in the realm of security, intelligence, and spying. Yes, there are now important, vital secrets buried there which intelligence services from around the world would love to ferret out, as we are reminded by a brief yet fascinating recent piece in La Dernière Heure*: Belgium bungles a European listening affair. It seems that as far back as in 2003 signs were detected of bugging devices located no less than in the Justus Lipsius Building, which is the home of the European Council (i.e. the EU organization that directly represents the interests of the member-states). In particular, the “R Committee” – “R” for renseignement or “information,” as that is the body of the Belgian parliament that supervises the country’s intelligence services – concluded that it was likely that the French, German, Spanish, and UK delegations had been bugged – i.e. most of the big boys.

By whom? Well, the piece mentions the Mossad, the (in)famous Israeli intelligence service, but no one ever found out for sure. That was mainly because Brussels is still stuck back in the provincial capital age – or perhaps we could call it the “Inspector Clouseau stage” – when it comes to effective counter-intelligence. That same “R Committee” report noted how progress in following up the initial discovery of the espionage activities was very slow, while information supplied by the responsible officials to Justice officials was incomplete. The latter just recently decided simply to drop the entire matter, as they still didn’t have anyone they could indict!

*The Dernière Heure piece generously credits its Dutch-language counterpart De Tijd with initial reports over this affair. In such cases I like to go to that original source instead and use the material there – but this time I could not find it on the De Tijd site!

                          

Belgium is effectively on the way to political break-up. Will the political chaos lead to financial turmoil & banking/sovereign debt stress?

January 10, 2011 7:34 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nouriel

Nouriel Roubini

. . . wait a sec – look, I’m actually not ready to deal with such issues! Please allow me here instead to join so many Belgians, both French- and Dutch-speaking, in just letting my mind fly very, very far away from any thoughts of state bankruptcy, to the refuge of young feminine beauty. Yes, as so many national media outlets were there to report, Justine de Jonckheere (below, and more pictures here) was chosen last Sunday as Miss Belgium 2011.

Quite apart from the event’s intrinsic appeal, the Miss Belgium pageant is certainly a tonic in these times because of its sheer status as one Belgian national institution that has not been ripped into separate French- and Dutch-speaking halves. Indeed, as La Libre Belgique points out, Sunday evening’s event, broadcast out of the casino in the sea-side (and thus Flemish) town of Knokke, was a killer TV-event. It actually attracted more than 1 in 3 of French-speaking viewers, while the Flemish audience-share, at around 15%, was also double what other top shows usually attract on a Sunday evening.

That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no tension over the pageant’s results, considering so many native Belgians have such an interest in them. You can rest assured that, at any given time during the tournament, approximately half the country is encouraging – whether overtly or covertly – candidates from a French-Belgian (Walloon) background while the other half is rooting for the Dutch-speaking girls. It’s accepted that whoever wins needn’t necessarily know much about how to speak the country’s “other” language yet, but that one of her first duties (and those of the two runners-up) will be to start studying it to get up to a passable level of ability as soon as possible. Still, and as beautiful as she is, this year’s winner must have certainly induced a hard swallow among tournament officials, for her last name in particular – De Jonckheere – is almost at a slap-in-the-face level of Dutchness – most true French-speakers would have very little idea how to pronounce it! Nonetheless, year after year everyone is ready to accept any result – even that of 2008, when the winner was a Czech emigrée to Wallonia who could speak no Dutch at all – as long as the tournament process is, shall we say, free and fair.

The problem, dear readers, is that this year there are troubling signs that the Miss Belgium contest was anything other than that. For one thing, as La Dernière Heure reports, one contestant claims that the fix was in for Ms. De Jonckheere from nearly the beginning. Now, this whistle-blower is Maureen Lazard, a French-speaking contestant from Walloon Brabant, but she still alleges that Justine De Jonckheere had long been the favorite (in French: la chouchoute) of tournament director Darline Devos, for whatever reason, to the extent that everyone knew she was going to win and the selection process would be distorted to make that happen. (“Devos” is really a Dutch name – de vos, the fox, quite appropriate for a beauty-pageant director – so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Sour grapes from a loser – yes, that’s what all that sounds like. But there’s another, more serious allegation, this time reported in a Flemish newspaper, namely the “SHE” supplement to the Gazet van Antwerpen. Keep in mind that Ms. De Jonckheere is practiced in finding loopholes to rules – she’s a law student – and also that a certain weight in the decision about the winner is contributed by votes sent in from the general public as SMSs. SHE magazine cites evidence that the winner invested around €12,000 to buy telephone calling-cards to engineer a flood of incoming SMS votes in her favor. Again, the complaint has been lodged on behalf of – yes – another French-speaking contestant, a certain Lara Binet out of Liège, but the only answer tournament director Devos offers is that there could not have been any fraud, since she had monitoring personnel in place as votes were counted.

Sounds lame to me. And anyway: look at Justine’s picture again, at those shifty eyes! I have to conclude that the 2011 Miss Belgium Tournament has been tainted by scandal just when that sort of national institution that can truly draw the interests of the land’s Dutch- and French-speakers together was needed more than ever. There may still be the national football team; there may still be the national armed forces; but otherwise such institutions are falling by the wayside one-by-one, with grave implications for the country’s future and therefore for its solvency.

                          

They look human, of course (the one in the picture at the top of the article looks female; maybe they all do), but in human terms they are relatively small-sized (can’t intimidate the little ones) and dressed in bright colors. And their function does actually involve teaching, mainly that of languages where they perform interactive exercises like vocabulary drills.

As you would hope (or maybe as you would fear), they are programmed to be able to understand human emotions as well as language, and to respond appropriately. Or at least to those situations which their programmers were able to predict: journalist Kahine Benyacoub reports that they still occasionally are faced with some language, emotion, or general situation that just does not compute, in which case they boguer, meaning they act like their software has hit a bug. (Does someone from the principal’s office have to come in to reset them?)

And then there’s this quote that Benyacoub pulls out, from Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Science: “The computer scientists’ intentions are not to replace flesh-and-blood teachers, but to aid them with the development and instruction of the child.” Sure they are: as is indicated in the piece’s last paragraphy, however, battle-lines are already being drawn with the teachers’ unions over whether this new phenomenon is really such a good thing for all humans involved.

                          

The company’s progress within Europe is of particular amusement, especially Central Europe which, after all, originally introduced the café/coffeehouse and coffee culture in general to the world a little less than four centuries ago. It’s a bit as if GM were to establish a high-performance automotive division in Northern Italy, with the explicit mission of showing Ferrari, Lancia, etc. how the game should be played. Belgium, at least, has heretofore largely avoided this scourge, but apparently not for long, as we see from the recent article by Caroline Boeur in La Dernière Heure with the breathless title Soon a fifth Starbucks?

That’s right, right now all of Belgium boasts only four such establishments. (France, in contrast, has fifty). A full three of them are located together at Zaventem, the Brussels airport, while the fourth is at Antwerp’s central train station. As Boeur explains, in the first instance this has to do with Belgians’ preference for drinking their coffee at home, rather than in public: in contrast to the scant number of Starbucks, the Philips Senseo (a luxury coffee-maker) has 40% penetration among Belgian households, and apparently home expresso machines (which the Senseo is not; Boeur does not make that clear) have become “cult objects.”

Then again, the Antwerp Starbucks, in particular, has witnessed scenes usually only encountered at the opening of the first McDonalds at places like Moscow or Beijing: hundreds of people lined up before the doors hours before the official opening last 24 February, followed by profit figures that place it among the five-best within Europe. (Oh, and hundreds of fans on its very own Facebook fan page as well, although it’s safe to say that wasn’t true for McDonalds in Moscow or Beijing.)

Rest assured, then, that both Starbucks and its partner in Belgium, Autogrill (an Italian-headquartered firm specializing in restaurants at airports and auto rest-stops), are giving the task of further expansion top priority, although both are tight-lipped about when and where the next coffee shop will spring forth. And the fact that the DH can write on the subject with a tone that recalls movie star fan magazines shows that the media there continues to drink the purple Starbucks cool-aid – er, coffee.

                          

Not to worry, though: Belgium is on the case! Minister for Culture Fadila Laanan – that’s right, she’s of Moroccan extraction – has just unveiled a twenty-point plan for coming to the rescue, as the mysterious journalist “S.L.” discusses in La Libre Belgique. (You can get the 13-page PDF of Minister Laanan’s plan – in French, bien sûr – here. Yes, in the meantime the Belgium government has fallen, but it takes so long to put a new one together that you can be sure that Ms. Laanan will remain at least in a caretaker capacity for some time.)

Alright, now that we’re on the other side of the jump it’s probably time to abandon the snarky attitutde – although really, the thought of Belgium pioneering a public policy approach to much of anything save perhaps French fry quality or beer microbrewing still has to elicit a chuckle. However, what should be kept in mind is the limited scope of the ambition here: Ms. Laanan’s initiative is not even meant for the entire Belgian music industry, but only for that within the country’s French-speaking community. And it is still useful to examine what she has in mind, to see whether she “gets it” and how her proposal squares against other opinions about what ails the music industry,

For the music industry does ail in Belgium, too, even “vertiginously” so, as “S.L.” puts it: a 60% fall in sales over the last six years. What does Fadila Laanan see as the cause of this commercial catastrophe? Two things: 1) Lack of cultural (i.e. governmental) support, and, of course, 2) The explosion of illegal downloading and file-sharing.

Right there you could think that she is on the wrong track. We’re talking here about non-”classical” music, after all – since when did that stand in need of any support from the government in order to thrive? As for file-sharing, that’s the quick-and-easy cause to blame for the record companies’ problems, but in reality the cause-and-effect connection is not definitive; many studies have shown that the sort of finding and sampling functions such file-sharing enables actually serve to increase the music sales. Others would assert that those record companies are hurting mainly because they have ceased to offer much in the way of what customers really want to buy: whole CDs are mostly filled with mediocre songs, for instance, when people really just want to own and listen to the hits. Furthermore, with the increased influence of streaming services the entire notion of “buying” one’s music seems to be giving way to renting it instead, to even a “utilities” model under which (just like for electricity or water – or for Internet) a steady fee is paid for unlimited access – but not ownership – of songs via the Internet.

But there’s little sign of any of that in the specific measures outlined in this Ministry of Culture proposal. Rather, money is mainly to flow into efforts to boost both music’s visibility and professionalism. (Remember, we’re talking specifically here about French-language popular music within Belgium.) Those funds will go to support independent record labels and artistic agencies; to prompt the creation of more video clips as a means to better promote the music; to invest in resources and talent so that both concerts and artistic managers can have a higher degree of professionalism; and the like. At the same time, of course, the government’s legal resources are to be mobilized yet again to counter illegal downloads and file-sharing. Indeed, in her proposal Ms. Laanan specifically promises that Belgium will push hard for this when it takes up the EU Presidency, which it is scheduled to do at the beginning of July. (Of course, that is likely to turn into a farce, among other reasons because the country is sure to lack a working government at that point, but this is a subject for a later blogpost . . .)

Introducing: Larsen

And then the proposal brings up “Larsen.” That, believe it or not, is the name of the streaming music channel that the Ministry of Culture intends to put on-line sometime in June, a “true on-line catalogue of artists of the French[-speaking] Community, available free to all.” Quite apart from the choice of the name – “Larsen” might work as a music channel for Scandinavian lands, one imagines, but it’s hard to see what’s particularly Belgian about it – this seems to show that at least someone there in the Ministry of Culture has an idea of what is really going on in the music industry today. The thing is, “Larsen” also has the potential to work at cross-purposes with the other goals of this initiative – e.g. downloading is a no-no, but hearing a song for free on-line is OK? – depending on what precisely it turns out to be. Which is why, one suspects, it is left so undefined for now, both on the Ministry of Culture’s official announcement and in the Libre Belgique article.

Ever hear the story of King Canute of Merry Olde England? It’s said that he had his throne placed by the seashore, and then sat in it with all his kingly regalia and commanded the incoming tide to halt. It did him little good, and you really have to think that Fadila Laanan’s initiative will be just as successful in stifling current music industry developments, whether or not she confines the Belgian government’s efforts to French-language popular music within that country. Indeed, even the European Union as a whole would have a hard time having any effect. Any such effort would really have to be a global one – and that pretty much describes the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has been circulating among governments as of late. Perhaps I should have written about that instead – perhaps I still will – but until recently the ACTA has been kept behind closed governmental doors.

                          

Surely recovery will come about eventually, although with regard to Europe generally economists at the OECD are not optimistic about that happening until the second half of this year. One way for Germany to expedite that for itself, though (since the Germans earn so much from exports), is to get the euro to fall in value against the other major world-currencies – a process to which nothing has contributed more lately than the continuing confusion in the financial markets over Greece’s fiscal problems, which German obstinacy and tight-fistedness at the EU level has only prolonged. “A curious paradox,” Lambrechts calls this.

UPDATE: Strangely, the performance-vs.-confidence balance seems to be reversed in the US, as per this article from the New York Times.