Citizens of what was then known as the “Free World” have by-and-large been spared such abuses. Indeed, here in the Eurozone we have the common European currency, a medium of exchange not subject to the whims of any one national government. What’s more, it was adopted on 1 January by yet another EU member-state, Estonia. Yet that was recognized by most observers as somewhat of a bittersweet occasion; taking up the euro does say important things about the extent of that country’s European integration, yet the sovereign debt financial crisis with which the EU has struggled for a little over a year has revealed several cogent reasons for a country to regret ever giving up its own national currency.

But I’m not out to talk about any of those here. Rather, let’s get back to the “currency reform” scam: it’s the damndest thing how prices seem to rise whenever a country adopts the euro! You see, all prices, wages, etc. have to be converted then by a fixed conversion-ratio – for example, it was 2.20371 for the Dutch guilder – and usually the new price that results is not a very round number. No, much better to make it so – and do you think that merchants then round it upwards or downwards?

Any of you out there over the age of twelve knows the answer quite well – strange, isn’t it, how wages and bank-account totals don’t benefit from a similar rounding? – and so the result inevitably is an otherwise uncalled-for bit of inflation. That’s what made the Germans nickname their new currency the Teuro (teuer is “expensive” in German); on a local note, I can remember how Amsterdam bars, in particular, raised their prices under the quite shameful assumption that their customers were not capable of doing elementary division with a calculator.*

Naturally, then, the same thing has come to Estonia, as we see in a pieces from the Polish national daily Gazeta Wyborcza: Inflation in Estonia highest for two years. Specifically, December’s inflation rate was 5.7% higher than it was in December, 2009. (And how much was that? Annoyingly, the article prefers to use differential rather than absolute inflation rates.) We do know that inflation was high there throughout the last part of the year, as last month’s rate was also only 0.5% higher than last November’s. The main commodities driving this are listed as mainly foodstuffs and non-alcoholic beverages. (Can we hope, then, that the owners of Estonian drinking establishments actually restrained themselves?)

Anyway: Welcome to the club!

*Interestingly, grocery-store prices were mainly converted in a straightforward manner – mainly because Dutch consumer-rights organizations promised to watch them like a hawk!

                          

Suppose there were relevant indications that the leader of an Islamic terror-group, responsible for the murder of several thousand people, were hiding himself in a high-rise apartment in a European capital. How long would it take before a multinational army of secret services and investigators would come swarming to observe every garbage-dumpster, illuminate every floor, and if necessary evacuate half the building? Two months? Three weeks? Ten days?

But what is really at issue is not Islamic terrorists at all, it’s rather the high Serbian government officials responsible for war crimes in the Yugoslav Wars of some 15 years ago, in particular General Ratko Mladic. According to Ms. Böhm, he’s clearly somewhere in Belgrade and it shouldn’t be too difficult to find out exactly where. Yet not only is no one going after him (nor after the other wanted Serbian official, one Goran Hadzic, former leader of Serbs in Croatia – him I did not know about), but there has just been alarming signs of weakening in what had been the EU’s insistence that Serbia would be allowed no further progress along the road to becoming an EU member-state until these two fugitives were delivered up to the UN Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague.

Granted, the Serbs are still far from EU membership, just as they seem equally far from agreeing to do anything to deliver up Mladic and Hadzic. Nonetheless, EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg last Monday did agree to at least open Serbia’s formal application process. And that is the “humiliation” Ms. Böhm speaks of in her piece’s title – Europe once again exposing itself as a softy on the world stage by unilaterally climbing down from what had been it’s ironclad insistence on seeing the two fugitives in jail at The Hague (actually, at Scheveningen, if you want to be technical about it) before the Serb government would even be allowed inside the door. What happened to the Dutch? she wonders – they were the ones single-handedly (well, with occasional Belgian support) holding out on this insistence. She speculates that it all began to seem too much like some sort of Dutch “obsession” – an irrational thirst for revenge against the Serbs for the humiliation suffered by the “Dutchbat” troops who had been assigned to protect the civilians who were massacred at Srebrenica in 1995, so that the Netherlands government finally became self-conscious and too embarrassed to insist anymore.

In point of fact, the situation seems quite a bit more subtle than all that, as explained in a recent entry on the Economist’s “Charlemagne” weblog (in English, of course). Why did the EU foreign ministers budge in the first place? Because they wanted to reward the Serbian government for recently agreeing to meet with leaders of Kosovo, which ordinarily Serbia regards as a renegade break-away province (much as the People’s Republic of China views Taiwan). More to the point, it seems that they made that concession yet at the same time they didn’t: at least according to the Economist analysis, unanimity among governments (meaning the renewed potential for a Dutch veto) will be necessary again soon for Serbia to make any further forward progress.

EU officials are skillful at this sort of sleigh-of-hand, whereby they seem to give something away while in reality doing nothing of the sort (while still retaining the option of giving it away again sometime in the future, should that be viewed as necessary). But all this is hardly to Ms. Böhm’s taste. The EU needs to remember, she writes, that it bears a share of the blame for the horrors of the Yugoslav War; it happened in its own backyard, it was Europe’s big geopolitical test – and, of course, it failed it, having to rely in the end on American diplomacy and military power to rein in both Serb depredations in Bosnia and Croatia and the Milosevic government’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Kosovo. So fancy procedural games for her won’t cut it – much better a full-court military/police press, as if tracking down some Islamic terrorist-leader were what was at issue.

                          

Cardinal Ratzinger’s interview, by Le Figaro’s Sophie de Ravinel, actually touches on a subject closer-to-home than the question of Turkey, namely the controversy over whether Kerry can advocate permitting abortion and still be a good Catholic. One wonders why the New York Times worthies didn’t focus more on this part, in which Mme. de Ravinel asks point-blank whether the recent document Cardinal Ratzinger published on the responsibilities of Catholic politicians was not “an intrusion by the Church and the Vatican into a country’s political life?”

Naturally it was nothing of the sort, according to the Cardinal; the Catholic Church certainly believes in pluralism and does not seek to impose its religion on others through politics. On the other hand, a Catholic politician should be expected to reflect and transmit the “light of reason” of his faith in his politics. After all, the State should be obliged to protect life from its first instant to its last – that’s not a matter of faith but simply stands to reason, the Cardinal maintains. Standing in opposition to this nonetheless necessarily means standing in opposition to “a fundamental element of the Christian conscience.” Not only politicians, but all Catholics need to keep this in mind during that “examination of one’s conscience” that is supposed to take place before one participates in Holy Communion. In any case, Cardinal Ratzinger sees no conflict between the Vatican and the American bishops on this issue: “if the modes of presentation are different, the principles, in contrast, are the same and clearly set out.”

But to the question of Turkey and the EU; or, rather, still not yet to the question of Turkey and the EU. Reading the interview, one has to say that the good Cardinal certainly didn’t bring up this subject on his own, but rather had it directly posed to him in a question. But it was a relatively late question – the penultimate – and one that did naturally flow from topics discussed just before. It had been in fact the question just before the one touching on John Kerry that had afforded Cardinal Ratzinger the chance to decry the high degree of secularization in present-day society (generally, but particularly in France), and so to insist that “the Christian faith [still] has something to say to the common morals and the composition of society” – “it’s a great spiritual force that should touch and illuminate public life.” Then things really got going when Mme. de Ravinel raised the issue of the failed attempts to get some mention of Europe’s Christian heritage written into the preamble of the European Constitution. That was definitely an error, Cardinal Ratzinger maintained, because “Europe is a continent that is cultural, not geographical. It’s her culture that gives her a common identity.” That Christianity formed this continent is “a simple fact of history.” And there’s no need necessarily to have to strain one’s brain going back thousands of years about this; Europe also faced a challenging “forming” process out of the destruction of the Second World War, and you’ll find that the politicians who led this – Schuman, Adenauer, de Gaulle, De Gasperi, etc. – were all personalities with strong religious components. The Cardinal can’t understand why people don’t realize all this; he even suspects a hidden European self-hate and/or hate of Europeans’ own history.

All of this, then, lays the groundwork for what at that point is the inevitable segue to discussing the Turkish candidacy. Naturally admitting Turkey would be another error: “Turkey has always represented another continent in the course of history, in permanent contrast to Europe.” Just think of the wars – the fall of Constantinople, the struggles to keep Turkish forces out of Central Europe (in particular, the two sieges of Vienna) after they had already overrun the Balkans and Hungary. Turkey may consider itself a lay or secular state, but it is founded upon a base of Islam – and so let Turkey pursue tight political integration with its own (i.e. Muslim) kind. Of course, cultural and commercial ties with Europe short of actual EU membership are always possible – but ultimately, making Turkey an EU member-state would mean “the disappearance of the cultural to the profit of the economic.”

CHRISTIANITY FORMED EUROPE

Yes – exactly! Thank you, your Holiness! Diligent readers of this weblog will already be aware of my stand that, if American authorities want to urge the European Union to add to its polity a huge, economically-backward nation of mostly agricultural peasants, with a culture very different from its own (very different even after allowing for the wide cultural variation found within current EU-”Europe” itself), then let the USA go first to show what fun an exercise like that can be and make Mexico the 51st state. Perhaps the teaching of history in European secondary schools has regressed as much as it seems to have in the States – although it can’t really be as bad as that: there’s nothing like the school football and basketball teams over here to divert monies that should be going to teachers and textbooks – but it should be clear that Cardinal Ratzinger does have his historical facts right. What defined “Europe” as this continent was taking shape in the first millenium, or in the roughly six hundred years after the fall of Rome? It was precisely the spread of Christianity, the dispatch of missionaries from the Church’s home base in Italy – first to France (yes, France originally had to be won for Christianity, too), to England, to western Germany, then beyond the Oder to eastern Germany and Poland, to Scandinavia, etc. It was only when those wild tribes on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea – e.g. the Latvians and Lithuanians – were finally Christianized that the job was considered done, and Europe was formed – and defined. (Remember the Teutonic Knights? They contributed their rather “tough-love” missionary techniques to that latter proselytizing effort.)

While this was going on, and afterwards, what were the threats to this “Europe”? The Vikings and Magyars were certainly threats, but ultimately they could be converted to Christ and so join Europe. On the other hand, the invasion of the Arabs through Spain – and, briefly, into France – was something that Europe could only beat back, since the strong Islamic faith of these invaders precluded any similar sort of assimilation. And the same was true with the Turkish invasions from the fourteenth century onwards. Today we clearly recognize Arab civilization as not of “Europe” and so not eligible for membership; why don’t we see the clear analogy that should be having us view the Turks in the same way? How many statements from Cardinals and similar authority figures will it take to drum this reality into the European consciousness?

(Of course, perhaps it already is there in the European consciousness, i.e. among the electorate in the various current EU member-states; it’s just apparently not there in the minds of most of the politicians who purport to represent these electorates, since the taking-up of serious negotiations towards Turkish accession seems inevitable later this year. Indeed, it’s clear we can’t expect clear-cut statements on this issue like we’ve had from Cardinal Ratzinger from these politicians – do they really all think that admitting Turkey is such a good idea, or are they instead perhaps afraid of Turkish anger if/when the door is finally closed on Turkish accession? For it is also true that the issue has so far been handled rather irresponsibly, with Turkey being given by the EU one hoop after another to jump through in pursuit of EU membership (the latest one being an engineering of the reunion of the Turkish and Greek halves of the island of Cyprus) when the responsible political thing to do would have been not to play around with this country but instead simply say, at as early a point as possible, “No, sorry, it’s impossible as you are not of Europe.”

Be that as it may, if it is true that the fundamental realities of Turkey as non-European are indeed already grasped by European voters, or will be soon enough, that means that Turkish EU accession can anyway be defeated by one or more negative results in ratification referenda shooting this project down. Then the politicians can turn to Turkey and blame their own constituents for the failure – although Turkey will still be disappointed and angry after having been led on for far too long.)

WHO’S MEDDLING?

Finally, I don’t get the New York Times editors’ point that Vatican officials have no rite to “meddle” in this issue by offering their opinions. In the big picture, because of the respect accorded to their respective institutions (however different they may be) both high Vatican officials and high officials of respected media institutions like the New York Times do have the right to comment on leading issues of the day such as this. If anything, the New York Times’ opinion should be afforded rather less attention due to the lack of the direct stake which that newspaper has in which way the Turkey-in-the-EU question ultimately is resolved, compared to the bona fide European-resident Vatican. Still, while I know that those Times editorials get allocated only a certain minimum space, I would love to know what those editors thought they were saying by “it would be refreshing if the cardinal had chosen to emphasize the positive potential in combining the best Christian tradition of charity and the best Muslim tradition of social justice.” Christianity has some sort of advantage in “charity”? Islam in “social justice”? Unclarified and unextended as it remains, that just sounds like a worthless throw-away line to me, which wilts in the face of the solid historic and European-identity truths that Cardinal Ratzinger eloquently brings up (if in French) in the Figaro interview. But again, there is a simple solution to all this: let the Times editors (and for that matter let George W. Bush) gaze across the Rio Grande at their Mexican amigos before they resume advocating Turkish membership in the EU.

                          

Ireland was the exception, imposing no such restrictions. And well it would not, since Ireland has continued to be the “Celtic Tiger” high-growth economy – at least relative to other pre-May, 2004, EU members – that attracted so much attention from international observers in the late 1990s. Today unemployment is still under 4% there, meaning that labor is in short supply, and foreigners are flocking to supply it – particularly foreigners from Ireland’s new fraternal EU member-states, and particularly Poles. This phenomenon is described in the article Promised Green Island by Jedrzej Bielecki in the mainstream Polish daily Rzeczpospolita.

“Poles are storming into Ireland,” reads the first sentence of the lead-in to Bielecki’s article, and Irish government numbers seem to back this assertion up. In the first three months after accession (i.e. this May- July), 11,000 Poles have gained an Irish work-permit, compared to the 4,000 Poles who were working there before accession (that the Irish government knows about, at least). This figure represents nearly half of the full 23,000 permits issued to citizens of new member-states during that three-month period. (Bielecki says that Latvians and Lithuanians made up a big chunk of the rest.) But no surprise there, according to Cezary Lusinski of the Polish embassy in Dublin: Ireland currently needs tens of thousands of new workers, particularly in the hotel, restaurant, tourist, and agricultural sectors. Oh yes, the country also needs more doctors and engineers, although there are still not so many of those arriving.

“STORM”? OR QUICK FLURRY?

Is this truly a “storm”? Here’s a little context to help you decide: the Irish number 4 million (and we’re talking here of course of the Republic, so not the eight northern counties that are part of the UK), and a total of 64,000 foreigners of all descriptions gained work-permits there during that May-to-July period of this year. Conleth Brady, secretary of the Irish embassy in Warsaw, expects his country to continue to get 4,000 legal Polish immigrants per month – at least until (if?) the Polish economy recovers and grows enough to start to offer enough economic opportunity to all its citizens, and/or when those restrictions imposed by other older EU states expire in a few year’s time and Poles start to go there in greater numbers. (The fuss over imposing barriers to UK social benefits gave the misleading impression that that was the Poles’ preferred destination, but in fact one-third more Poles gained work permits during this period in Ireland.)

Still, along with its racing economy Ireland also boasts Europe’s highest inflation rate, so that the Polish embassy there is getting tired of being petitioned for help to return home from stranded Poles. If you don’t already have a job arranged for you before you arrive, don’t bother to come, says Brady.

                          

But that’s not the case, as a pair of articles by Petr Holub in today’s Hospodárské noviny reveals. As Holub points out at the beginning of one (The More the Union Approaches, the More Czechs Are Afraid), “Half of the people think that they will have it worse [in the coming year], and the cause is what they themselves approved in a referendum – May’s accession into the European Union.”

Let’s first turn our attention, though, to his companion article on the subject of Czech consumer confidence (Fears of the EU Are Such That They Threaten the Economy – click on “Obavy z EU”). Recent surveys by the polling bureau STEM/MARK in fact show a disturbing fall in Czech consumer confidence, down over the last months of 2003 to a level last seen four years ago. Of course, that consumer confidence has taken hits in recent years – such as 9-11, and also after the floods that devastated Prague and the Vltava river-valley generally in August, 2002 – but it has always regained previous levels shortly thereafter. But now it has dropped again, this time not as a result of any fresh misfortune, but rather seemingly from uncertainty over what accession into the EU will mean. (Although admittedly, as the article adds, additional domestic concerns also are contributing, such as uncertainty over the Czech state’s ability to continue to pay for the health-care and educational systems, and, in the short term, because of the first true across-the-board increase in prices Czechs are facing with this new year, mainly the result of changes to the tax system.) Fewer Czechs indicate to the pollsters that they will be in the market for a new car in 2003, and fewer also plan to spend on their place of residence, whether house or apartment.

It is Holub’s companion article that zeroes in on what Czechs fear specifically about EU accession (this time gleaned from a poll by the CVVM public opinion organization). The greatest worries are over further price-rises, this time the result of a convergence process bringing Czech prices (which now average half of EU prices) more into line, while wages and pensions lag behind. Businesses also are worried about the increased competition full entry into the EU market will bring – from foreign firms “which have better access to appropriations from Brussels and so will have the advantage.”

Later in that article, though, Holub cites a researcher from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, one Josef Pöschl (and I like the way he sets a good example by economizing on vowels in his surname), to the effect that such price-rises are not much to worry about. For example, Portugal has been a member of the EU since 1986 and prices there are still three-quarters of the EU average. The lesson actually is that, yes, there will be convergence, but it doesn’t have to be rapid.

QUIT YER WHININ’!

To all of this HN editor Martin Denemark (Pretty, Irrelevant Fear – click on “Poznámka”) has a simple response: Buck up, straighten up, and enter the EU in May with your chin up! “Even if Czechs had nothing to fear, they would quickly come up with some terrifying straw-man, for they like to be afraid of something” – that, rather than prepare logically and methodically for the challenges ahead. “It’s gotten to the point,” Denemark complains, “that Czechs now fear price-rises and EU accession more than any threat to their lives or health.” It’s a shame how much uncertainty and lack-of-confidence prevails among Czechs as to their capabilities to survive, and indeed thrive, as new EU members.

Remember, Denemark says, we really had no choice but to go into the EU: EU policy would greatly influence us whether we were members or not, given our strong economic ties with current EU members (particularly Germany). So let’s just remember that those who succeed go in proud, with their heads held up high.

                          

This Athens summit treaty-signing was supposed to be a joyful and historic occasion, marking the formal approval of the largest addition of member-states in the EU’s history. Yet plenty remained in the not-so-distant background – namely differences within the EU on the War in Iraq – to cast shadows over the event. “Europe is hardly in the mood anymore to celebrate,” the Viennese Paul Lendvai reports in Die Welt, in an extraordinary article which comprehensively presents the pessimist’s view of the current state of the EU. Lendvai cites the many divisions remaining within the EU: big states versus small, those in favor of closer integration versus those against, and lately those in favor of military action in Iraq versus those against. Rather than viewing expansion as a historic opportunity, many western European politicians are said to consider the incorporation of these new states as potentially a further drag to Europe’s commercial competitiveness. He cites recent comments by Gunter Verheugen (EU Commissioner for Enlargement) about how he increasingly he runs across politicians in the “old” EU who regard enlargement as simply a mistake; “the thrill is gone” (der Schwung ist raus) he is said to have remarked about the entire process. Furthermore, the “Yes” votes in the three referenda on European accession that have been held so far were not exactly ringing endorsements of membership, given the low levels of voter turnout. Strangely, in each case turnout was far below what public opinion pollsters had predicted – so that it’s possible that similar unpleasant surprises could await future referenda in other candidate countries, maybe not only with regard to turnout but even to the result.

Meanwhile, Andreas Middel in the Berliner Morgenpost brings up the old objection to enlargement, which everyone seems to have forgotten about: When the present fifteen EU states find it so difficult so often to even get to the lowest common denominator when there are important decisions to be made, how can we expect that an EU of twenty-five members will ever manage? There was supposed to be a parallel process to enlargement which would reform the present EU to in fact make it easier to get things done and get decisions made, precisely to ease such worries. Plainly, this has gotten nowhere. The agonizing dispute over the future of the Common Agricultural Policy already demonstrated that (as did the means used to temporarily solve it – namely, an exclusive Franco-German summit to work out a deal); then the rancorous divisions in Europe over Iraq laid any further doubt to rest. If enlargement ever is to work, it will have to be through the establishment of a “multi-speed Europe,” what German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has termed a “Europe of concentric circles,” in which member-states are free to form sub-groups to pursue sub-interests (such as the Euro, which still has not been adopted by all current EU members and will not be immediately adopted by any of the new members) without being hindered by fellow EU states through any silly insistence on unanimous approval. Perhaps it is this reality, invisible behind the celebration and talk of “reuniting Europe” that dominate the news coverage, which is the enduring meaning of this EU summit.

Back in Athens, in the manner of a couple trying extra-hard to be nice to one another after a particularly nasty quarrel, the assembled fifteen-plus-ten countries are working diligently to arrive at a truly common position on post-war Iraq. Once again, though, the methodology used to arrive at it is revealing: here, it starts with the select group of member-states currently with seats on the UN Security Council (namely the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Spain). The Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung reports (from Reuters) that these four, via informal negotiations among themselves at the summit, have come up with a declaration calling for an important role for both the UN and the EU in the reconstruction of Iraq, to be submitted for approval to the remaining current and future member states. Perhaps this will be approved without dissent, since after all 1) The content of the declaration is unobjectionable to almost everyone; where it could run into trouble is if it advocated less involvement in post-war Iraq by the Americans, to make room for the more involvement by the EU and the UN, but these four countries will presumably be smart enough not to get into that; and 2) There’s no need to worry about implementing or enforcing it – the Americans will ultimately decide anyway. Still, to some this process of coming up with a solution within an exclusive circle of four, before presenting it to the rest of the EU on an implied “take it or leave it” basis, is only marginally superior to the French-German solution cited above as four is to two. Is this the sort of participation in “decision-making” that joining the EU is supposed to mean? The former Communist states of Central Europe, in particular, are all-too-familiar with this method of operation from their days in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON; that does not mean that they particularly like it, or would find it acceptable as a “reward” for the wrenching changes they have had to institute in their economies and systems of government in order to accept the EU’s acquis communitaire and be allowed in as members.