The answer to that remains up in the air, as the summit continues into the weekend. What we do already know, however, is that an important split has occurred within the EU, resulting from the failure of German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy to have accepted by all 27 member-states their proposals for greater national budget control and coordination. Now the action on that front has shifted to the group of 17 member-states who actually use the euro.

The excellent “Charlemagne” commentator from the Economist has already termed this development Europe’s great divorce, in an article (in English, of course) featuring at its head a picture of the defiant-looking British PM David Cameron pointing an aggressive finger towards the camera. And indeed, this one and many other press reports from the summit would have their readers believe that the UK is isolated in its stand of resistance against those “Merkozy” proposals for greater EU power over national budgets. That is certainly also the message from the authoritative German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, where an analytical piece from Michael König is rather dramatically entitled Bulldog Cameron bites the British into isolation.

But such observers should be careful about rushing into any over-hasty conclusions. They should remember that a number of other member-states share an attitude towards the EU rather closer to that of the UK than Germany or France. The Czech Republic, for instance:

iDnes: Klaus a Telička schvalují rozvážnost v Bruselu, ČSSD varuje před izolací: Prezident Václav Klaus označil … http://t.co/Qh043Qmm

December 9, 2011 2:55 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

That link leads to an article from the leading Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes, with at its head a picture of Czech President Václav Klaus at the podium, with to the side a copy of the book he just had published, entitled European integration without illusions. Clearly, he is delighted to stand on the British side of the current Brussels developments. The article notes it is only the ČSSD – the main party now in opposition – that is worried about the Czech Republic isolating itself with this stance within the EU.

And there is also Denmark, with an even stronger history of setting definite limits to the sovereignty its government is willing to give up to the EU. As an article in the Kristeligt Dagblad notes, the new Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt needs to be careful to avoid a hostile homecoming from this summit by not giving much away. The unicameral parliament there – the Folketing – is very much divided about what is going on now in Brussels. Many of its constituent parties intend to demand a referendum if there is any significant change to Denmark’s position with the EU promised there.

Perhaps the best conclusion to draw is that Cameron – with his protuberant finger – simply was best-prepared (by temperament perhaps, but also by the very nature of the UK political system) to resist these German/French proposals which after all had been telegraphed well in advance. Several other countries might be alleging a need to return back to their countries to “consult” before they can really make up their mind, but the sort of decisions that will be made back there are in many cases already quite evident, and will ultimately not support any theme of British isolation.

UPDATE: What’d I say?

EU treaty problems? Cameron is not alone. http://t.co/JEjsgdAI

December 14, 2011 12:52 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@ftbrusselsblog

FT’s Brussels blog

Click through to access an excellent article from the FT’s Brussels Blog showing that the latest EU treaty agreed to “26-to-1″ at that last summit faces real problems not just in the UK, but in other EU member-states as well – Czech Republic and Denmark, yes, but also others.

                          

Wall Street putter 10 dollar i Christiania http://t.co/mHIuhLHb

November 5, 2011 12:10 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@borsendk

borsen.dk

“Christiania”? That’s the renegade area of Copenhagen which since its initial squat in 1971, on what had been an abandoned area of the city’s defenses, has styled itself the “Freetown” of Christiania, subject (by and large) to its own laws and maintenance of public order rather than those of the Danish state. (We’ve had occasion to cover this subject here before.)

The problem is, Christiania needs money. The area is still government land, strictly-speaking, and the new strategy of the Danish government for cracking down on it is to have the residents buy it, for 76 million Danish crowns (a little over €10.2 million), if they want to stay there. They’ve got until 1 April 2012 to come up with the first installment of DKK 46 million (a little over €6 million); so far they have been able to gather together a little over DKK 4 million into their Freestate Christiania Fund.

In the spirit of Willie Sutton, then (“because that’s where the money is!”), the fund has dispatched a representative to Wall Street, an “economics advisor” named Risenga Manghezi, to push Christiania folkeaktien (“people’s shares”) there. But the piece’s headline (and the tweet) reveals what “success” Manghezi has had so far: she has raised $10.

That probably should come as little surprise. For what are these “people’s shares” exactly? An earlier piece in Børsen on Christiania’s buy-out plan (actually, a “leader” or opinion article whose title is “Good for you, Christiania”) fills in details on what writer Christopher Arzrouni calls “a nice initiative, but also a paradox”:

You decide yourself how much you want to pay, and people will not worry about how much the people’s shares rise or fall in value. It is in fact not a proper share. People receive a symbolic co-ownership and support something that is not commercial.

Maybe that meager success – so far – in gaining money from Wall Street is not such a surprise after all. Still, in the original article referenced by the tweet Manghezi declares him(her?)self delighted at the “fantastic” way things have been going: “This has been a big challenge to get through to these men in suits, but the most important thing is that the shares have been in Wall Street’s hands. This is really important symbolically.” Manghezi next plans to cross the tracks to visit the Occupy Wall Street protestors to see if she might get some interest in her folkeaktien for Christiania there.

                          

• Here’s your connection between the two episodes: As Jyllands-Posten reports, the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who barely escaped injury in the capital, was scheduled today to be on Utøya to address the young people there at what was after all a summer camp run by the Labor Party, of which Stoltenberg is the head. (That article also has at the top a brief video giving a helicopter-view of the island itself – and of some swimmers desperately trying to get away from it.)
  
• Another Danish mainstream paper, Berlingske, wields the obvious parallel: A Norwegian Timothy McVeigh. It quotes a few experts who maintain that the likelihood for violent incidents of this kind should have been apparent from extreme-right literature, imagining future race-wars and the like, that has been circulating in Scandinavia for a while. And it examines the alleged shooter’s social media trail and unearths his self-description as a conservative Christian fed up with the Norwegian Church’s hyper-modernism, wanting it to get “back to basics.” Right, back to Jesus and his disciples, presumably – a notorious gang of killers . . .
  
• As for a Christian Danish paper, namely the Kristeligt Dagblad . . . well, they get it wrong. Very wrong. Their on-line article Here is why Norway became a target for terror, datelined today (Saturday, 23 June 2011), goes on and on about why Norway is logically a target for Muslim extremists, even as the caption to the picture up top mentions the arrest of “a 32-year-old strongly nationalistic man.” It’s hardly the only media outlet to fall into this trap – frankly, I was hearing a lot about “Muslim terror” on the BBC World Service during its initial coverage – but that’s no excuse. Don’t be surprised if the article is gone, or at least heavily modified, should you decide to click through to see it.
  

                          

This rather startling news comes from David Tarp of the mainstream Danish daily Berlingske Tidende. No worries, though, if you’re rubbing your head and wondering “What the . . .” for he admits to having taken the news from this article in the Huffington Post that will explain everything. What the legislature thought it was doing was outlawing bestiality, but depending on how you want to interpret the word “animal” it might very well be that they outlawed all sexual intercourse, even between human animals.

That Huffington Post piece now carries an update making the case that judges will surely interpret “animal” in such a way that excludes humans. But for David Tarp’s Danish audience that’s almost irrelevant. The real point, of course, is to poke fun at what is seen as priggish American moral attitudes. He underlines his point with his choice as the piece’s illustration of a photo of the Florida governor on a beach checking out a couple young women – an image rated PG, I suppose, in that the rear of their bikini bottoms, shall we say, are in the Brazilian style. (Too bad that’s Charlie Crist, whom Tarp doesn’t bother to identify as the state’s ex-governor.) He also mentions at the end that, after all, laws banning oral or anal sex were in effect “in many American states” {i.e. not necessarily in Florida) until a Supreme Court decision of 2003 finally abolished them

                          

But don’t immediately write off Herre Sareen as some sort of pornographic-minded fool. Rather, in his parallel role (to that of politician, not fool) as expert on the question of integrating foreigners into Danish society he has been called upon to react to a proposal from a much more prominent Danish politician, namely Peter Skaarup, who is vice-chairman of the powerful (and immigrant-hating) Danish People’s Party – who actually might be the buffoon here. At issue is the Danmarksfilm, the film shown in Danish embassies abroad to those applying to immigrate to Denmark, intended to give those foreigners an accurate picture of what Danish culture is all about. According to Skaarup, it’s time to spice it up a bit, add a little of the ol’ T&A – because, after all, Danish women do like to go topless on the beaches (heck, even occasionally in city parks) in the summer, and maybe the prospect of having to encounter this will so put off Islamic fundamentalists that they will tear up their immigration applications right then and there in their local Danish embassy!

(BTW I understand that there is already something similar in the video that immigrants wanting to live in the Netherlands have to see when they apply, except that in this case it includes not women’s breasts but men walking around holding hands and kissing, to make clear the much more tolerant attitude to homosexuality that prevails here. As far as I know, the logic behind this is purely along the lines of “Don’t say we didn’t warn you!” and not any misguided strategy to dissuade people from applying to come here in the first place.)

This Skaarup guy may be a much bigger political hotshot, but local counselor Sareen has got his number, in fact two of them, in this matter:

In the first place, they’ve seen enough bare breasts before. In the second, it’s completely foolish to believe that fundamentalists who are so extreme that they want to blow Denmark up can be frightened away by bare breasts.

Here at EuroSavant we’ll try to stay in front of further developments along this line, if any. As for Danish policy, maybe Skaarup’s suggestion is not such a bust after all: the result could turn out to be increased demand in much of the Western world for admittance to the film rooms of Danish embassies, and maybe even to Denmark itself!

                          

They summarize for Danish readers the fundamental numerical results: House lost for the Democrats, Senate retained (as Majority Leader Harry Reid “saves his political career”), and a Republican wave also taking over most state governors and legislatures. What this means for the future: “Over the slightly longer-term political chaos [awaits] in Washington, unless the parties can find a way to work together.” The authors also make mention of the “especially offensive” defiance directed at the president by “one of the election campaign’s absolute key figures,” Sarah Palin: (Translated back from the Danish) “We’re sending representatives to Washington to stop your fundamental transformation of America. Enough is enough.”

Over at the opinion newspaper Information, their long-time American affairs commentator Martin Burcharth takes a more philosophical tone (Varied outlook for cross-political cooperation). All things will pass, he assures the reader; sudden shifts in American political fortunes are really “quite common,” citing history back to Jimmy Carter (hero in 1976; goat in 1980) to prove his point. This latest heavy midterms defeat for the Democrats and President Obama need not be regarded as any real sort of tragedy.

Rather, anything is still possible for the 2012 elections, and Burcharth offers the president two possible strategies for success. He can tack to the political center (as former Clinton political advisor Paul Begala recommends) and push a new program of extensive public works, pushed as a “jobs plan,” which Republicans would not dare to oppose. Or he can stay on the left (the advice of Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) and launch a crusade against the Big Industry and Big Finance that got America into the economic mess it is in. That will also mean cutting taxes on the poor and middle-class, but not for the rich: the latter should be required to pay for their misdeeds!

Whichever he chooses, Burcharth recognizes that prospects for real cooperation between the president and the Republicans in Congress will probably last only until around the end of next year, when politicking for the 2012 elections begins in earnest. In fact, he offers the rather cynical recommendation that Democrats make full use of the “lame duck” period still open to them – i.e. when they still have majorities in both Houses, before the newly-elected representatives and Senators come to take their seats – to enact major legislation such as immigration reform and even new climate/energy legislation (always a leading Danish concern). No cooperation with political opponents even required!

It’s ingenious, in a way – except that Burcharth forgets that, even today, the Democrats’ Senate majority is only 59, which causes certain complications of its own in passing legislation, and in any event exploiting the “lame duck” session that way somewhat contravenes American ideas of political legitimacy.

UPDATE: What do you know, the Rude Pundit also sees great merit in that “use the lame duck session to pass some serious legislation” argument of Martin Burcharth’s, and develops it further. But beware: he’s rude! (Sample language: “No, you need to blow us, Boehner and McConnell.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

                          

The next project will be creating a link ultimately to connect Copenhagen with Hamburg, one that crosses that strait you see there at bottom labeled “Fehmarn Bælt” between the Danish Rødby Havn (North) and the German Puttgarden (South). Right now a couple of commercial ferries serve cars, trains, bicycles and pedestrians for crossing that distance of about 18.6km in about 45 minutes. But that is increasingly not good enough for the requirements of 2010, at least in the eyes of the Danish Transport Ministry which has taken over the project’s leadership – supervised, of course, by the Danish legislature, or Folketing.

Things have reached the stage where construction calculations have been made public and are now subject to Folketing discussion, as we read in a Ritzau news-agency piece (appearing, among other places, in Berlingske Tidende: S and DF [two Danish political parties]: A bridge would be coolest. (That’s the translation I’ve taken of the very flexible Danish adjective flot.) You see, just because they built bridges before, that doesn’t mean they’ll build a bridge again. They could also just make a tunnel. And indeed, as we learn from a parallel Ritzau article (let’s take the one published in Jyllands-Posten), a tunnel would be slightly cheaper to dig/install, namely DKK 37.9 billion (= €5.08 billion) as opposed to a bridge’s DKK 38.5 billion (= €5.16 billion). The point of the JP article is that authorities at first thought the bridge would be rather cheaper than the tunnel, until they factored in the extra reinforcement that would have to be added to its pillars to enable it to stay standing after the inevitable ship-collision happens. But the point of the Berlingske article is that key Folketing members don’t care, they view that monetary difference as minor in the face of how nice and pretty the finished 18.6km-long bridge will surely look. “I don’t have any pictures of tunnels at home in our [family] photo-album,” the Social Democratic Party (“S”) traffic policy spokesman Magnus Heunicke remarked, for example.

Uh . . . and The Germans?

The Germans! Did anyone remember to ask what they want? (I must confess here that I could not find any indication whether those 37.9/38.5 figures are total costs for the bridge/tunnel or only Denmark’s, nor what relative or absolute amount the German government has committed to pay for the project.) It turns out that at least the Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad (they would!) did inquire as to the opinion of the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU), the leading German ecology organization (sort of like the Sierra Club in the US): German nature-folks prefer Fehmarn tunnel.

Actually, they would rather have neither, but if they had to choose, they want the tunnel because of three serious disadvantages to the bridge:

1. As mentioned previously, ship-collisions: you just know that one will happen sooner or later, and in fact the Baltic will surely become a more busy waterway with increased Russian commercial traffic – and some of that traffic (NB!) includes oil-tankers!
   
2. Any huge new bridge (it is planned to be on average 724m above the water!) will severely inconvenience seabirds trying to migrate in that part of the Baltic.
   
3. Actually, a bridge would also disturb the water-currents there in ways that would displease the German naturalists! They’re even sore about how that previously-mentioned Great Belt Bridge of 1998 already does that. (No word of complaint about the Øresund Bridge, maybe that’s far enough away from Germany that they just don’t care.)

Again, they really don’t want a tunnel, either, since it probably be a “sunk tunnel” rather than “bored tunnel,” i.e. a big ditch would be dug in the ocean floor, and then the pre-fabricated tunnel would be laid inside and then covered up with earth. Very traumatic for the aquatic life living in the area, to be sure – and you thought you were inconvenienced when the city tears up the street where you live to lay new sewer lines!

But the Danish are rich enough to prefer pretty to cheap, and also to get their way. Expect to see a stylish – and very long – bridge after about a decade or so.

                          

Now he has further comments which he contributed to the Financial Times. Unfortunately, that paper has a rather restrictive readership policy – i.e. it likes to force you to pay – but luckily we can resort to Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen instead. There it’s a brief piece, and Roubini’s message is clear, simple, and expressed in the title: The catastrophe commences on Tuesday.

Tuesday? That’s election day in the USA, of course, and according to Roubini that will unleash a new economic crisis because the Republicans are expected to make significant gains, recapturing control of the House of Representatives and maybe the US Senate as well. This will inaugurate paralysis in Congress as Democrats and Republicans block everything the other side tries to do, even as the US economic situation remains dire and in need of fiscal initiatives of one sort or another.

True, this insight is hardly blindingly original, and it has also certainly been advanced recently by other commentators, and then even rather more eloquently. (“In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.”)

Then again, everyone knows that Paul Krugman is a liberal (Nobel Prize-bearing) attack-dog. But this is the FT, Børsen – Dr. Doom, no less!

                          

It’s all still very unclear, but the essence of the plot apparently involved setting off a massive truck bomb sometime today in the center of downtown Göteborg. “Several” suspects were arrested, this (Saturday) morning, but local police are not yet ready to say how many, who they are, or what lead to their being detained – only that a tip was received in time, from a trusted source, warning of the attack. That was enough to draw the Säpo – basically, the Swedish FBI – into the case as well, although it’s the local police who hold the suspects in custody and who are now beefing up their presence in town over the weekend.

                          

In Pakistan on the other hand, and particularly in that part of Pakistan affected by the floods which happens to border Afghanistan, you have the set of varying Muslim extremist elements loosely characterized by the label “Taliban” (and in some cases even “Al-Qaeda”). As an article in the German commentary newspaper Die Zeit now reveals, those Taliban are indeed moving to profit from the situation, offering $20 million worth of flood-relief assistance on the condition that the Pakistani government refuse all other aid coming from foreign countries, particularly America.

According to the article, US aid on offer already totals $35 million and that has also now been raised by another $20 million, with the prospect held out for even more if necessary. (And it will no doubt be necessary: Oxfam has termed these heavy floods a “mega-catastrophe,” while a UN spokesman called their collective impact worse even than the Asian tsunami of 2005 or this year’s Haiti earthquake.) Then again, there are good reasons for any impartial observer to favor the Taliban’s offer nonetheless: as the Zeit article details, the inundations make sheer access to the area very difficult, while many of the helicopters that are supposed to be available don’t work anyway. (The article does not explain why.)

For now, it’s a “donkey or on foot” situation for getting help to where it’s needed, and of course the Taliban are already there in the area and offering to assist with distribution as well – provided that authorities promise not to arrest their personnel! And then this other article on the subject from the Danish daily Politiken gives another good reason: you can be sure that much of any outside aid will ultimately go to the bank accounts of corrupt local officials rather than to the victims for whom it was intended, while that is less likely to be the case with the local Taliban.