Finally, can you read German? Then maybe Germany’s federal government has a job for you! Die Zeit now has a piece about it, called Those who glue together the Stasi files. The former East German State Secret Police (formally the “Ministry for State Security”) got really busy with their shredding-machines in October and November of 1989 as it became increasingly obvious that the regime was tottering and probably about to fall. They had a just incredible amount of incriminating documentation to worry about, miles & miles of files & files (the vast majority in traditional paper). After all, the former East Germany might have set some sort of record for percent of the population informing for the government – spouse spying on spouse was hardly unheard-of – and the Stasi were interested in almost everything.

Unfortunately, those shredders were given the time and lack of interruption to do a pretty good job, resulting in 16,000 sacks of . . . confetti, basically, the shredding machines’ output, each sack containing 50,000 to 80,000 little bits of document.

Nevertheless, the re-unified German government wants to recover as many of those as it can, and has already had people at work since 1995 trying to piece them together. Soon – thank Heavens! – they will be assisted by computer software developed by Germany’s renowned Fraunhofer Research Institute, designed first to scan all the little pieces electronically and then to use automatic algorithms to fit them together.

Until then – and, surely, afterwards as well – there will be a continuing need for human application. This Die Zeit piece is really not any sort of article but a brief photo-series. Yes, the first few are of some unexciting paper-shreds, but then there follow a couple shots showing the puzzle-workers on the job, contemplating the pieces before them, with yet more available in a seemingly-endless procession of sacks. They look stoic; what could be going through their heads? Anything more interesting than a yearning for that next cigarette/chocolate break?

                          

In fact, things have gone even further than that. Algeria has closed (or at least declared closed – with the obvious exceptions) its 1,000km-long desert border with Libya, has cut diplomatic relations, and of course shows no inclination to formally recognize the new regime there. It is hardly the only country to have bet the wrong way on the ultimate outcome of Qaddafi’s struggle with domestic rebels, but it might be the only one further doubling-down on that failed wager. Why? Several answers are offered in an excellent – though anonymous – analysis in Die Zeit (Algeria’s problem with the new Libya).

The best clue might lie in the little-reported bombing attack last Friday on Algeria’s military academy at Cherchell, a coastal town, which killed 18 cadets. Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (Maghreb=North Africa; that terrorist organization is conventionally abbreviated as AQIM) claimed responsibility, you see. The Algerian government hates AQIM, understandably, but also suspects that there have been elements involved in Qaddafi’s overthrow. While the entire rebel movement was hardly another Al-Qaeda project, as Qaddafi repeatedly tried to make the world believe, it is nevertheless by no means unlikely that the more-limited Algerian suspicions about some involvement are true. And it’s indisputable that this terrorist group was able to use the general chaos prevailing in Libya to pick up all sorts of new weapons and munitions.

While it may share its anti-AQIM stance with most of the rest of the world, Algerian diplomacy also has a strong anti-NATO stance, particularly when that organization is intervening on the African continent. This also sets it against the new Libyan regime, which of course relied heavily on NATO air and logistical support. Then again, the Zeit article also very intelligently describes the tacit “Stability Pact” which the Algerian regime has long held with the US and Western Europe: you leave us alone, we’ll not only sell you oil and gas but also work to prevent radical Islamists from taking over anywhere in the Maghreb, just like we were able to thwart them in our own country.

Now that mutual understanding looks a bit dated, that recent AQIM attack aside. What’s more, the Algerian government itself is a bit paralyzed when it comes to policy-making due to an internal power-struggle currently taking place. Meanwhile, though, the country is riding its losing Libyan bet to increasing diplomatic isolation.

                          

Als Präsident verloren, als Präsidentschaftskandidat gewonnen – Obama und die Einigung im Schuldenstreit http://j.mp/oHryqr (mh)

August 3, 2011 7:55 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@zeitonline_pol

ZEIT ONLINE Politik

That is, chalk up a loss for Obama as president, but a win for him as 2012 presidential candidate.

Why the defeat? Because “the compromise bore the signature of the Tea Party,” even as many among their Congressional representation voted against it out of a conviction that it did not cut spending enough. Still, in view of their intransigence this was the best that the responsible parties in the affair – the president, his Democratic Party, even a few moderate Republicans as might be left – could achieve to avoid the catastrophe of a debt default. (It’s unfortunate that the Die Zeit writer – as usual, unnamed here – either overlooked or just did not mention the 14th Amendment option, which would have defused the whole problem and prevented any future recurrence.)

But: “Whereas the President gave in, the polarized political climate creates new chances for presidential candidate Obama for 2012.” He has firmly captured the decisive middle-ground of American politics, including by the way he showed himself willing to defy his own party to get this compromise done, all of which should gain him votes even from moderate conservatives at the next election. And seizing that middle-ground also put him on top in the Gerechtigkeitsfrage, i.e. the justice/fairness question. The proper way to resolve America’s budget difficulties is both spending cuts and higher taxes, especially on the rich. Polls show voters overwhelmingly are of this opinion. Congress, apparently, is not, but Obama now has the opening to campaign in 2012 even as a sort of opposition politician to gain future opportunities to force this vision through.

                          

Mass-murderer as Superstar: Many in the German media are exploiting the private life of the Oslo-gunman – and thereby making him an icon.

To tell the truth, I’m also getting rather tired of hearing about this guy as well – speaking of course in the context of my own media circles, which include the German only to the extent of my daily trawl through all European media.

I actually wasn’t aware of the lengths to which some outlets there have gone in pursuit of this story. Yes, there’s been some questionable stuff from the Bild Zeitung – oooh, if you click there today you get to see the actual explosion-site of his Oslo car-bomb, with hole-in-concrete and debris all around! And Schlieben says that from the Bild readers have also been able to learn of Breivik’s acne when younger, his continual troubles finding a girlfriend, and even the herpes of his step-father(!). A surfeit of information there, we can all agree – but then that’s the Bild, which for decades has carried on News of the World-type reporting for the German reading public.

No, more disturbing is other papers getting into the act which one would think would know better. This blog and Twitter-feed often invokes Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, but that publication has seen fit to reproduce all the photos off of Breivik’s Facebook profile. And we all know Der Spiegel, which has displayed on its pages photographs of the mass-murderer in an array of uniforms. Other publications (unnamed) have gone into his tax returns, or plumbed his musical tastes, perhaps from his on-line playlists.

Now, it’s not like this guy should be ignored, and over in the US an interesting debate has touched off about the alleged affinity between his “manifesto” and the extreme views of some evangelicals. Still, the sort of mass-voyeurism that Schlieben describes is all that a mass-killer with an ideological agenda could ever want. Yes: “the terrorist has won.”

                          

Yes, it’s inevitably true that other people in similarly-mountainous areas of the world experience this problem as well, but they likely have other more serious challenges of an economic and/or political nature to contend with first. You could call this seasonal sun-deprivation an affliction of the affluent – but it’s an affliction nonetheless. After all, just imagine having to live for months at a time without any sun yourself! Not surprisingly, towns caught in this predicament invariably display a heightened number of mental health disturbances as well as the related problem of simply keeping people from moving away permanently.

As mentioned, the new solution comes in the form of giant mirrors, placed on the opposite hillsides to beam back some sunlight (when available and not, say, hidden behind clouds) to where the locals live. These devices are not as simple – and therefore not as cheap – as you might think: considering that they need to come with sophisticated machinery to actually track the sun’s course and keep the mirror oriented correctly, each such rig costs in the tens of thousands of euros. What’s more, the output cannot be any broad flood of sunlight, but rather a relatively narrow beam. Still, when put on a steady aim to hit one room in a house through the window, it does make that “sunroom” an enjoyable place to catch some rays. (The photo on the second webpage shows what that looks like.) No surprise that this “heliostat” technology is now offered by German firms, but the concept has spread down through the Alps, i.e. through Switzerland and into Northern Italy.

                          

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.

                          

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.

                          

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out.

Ironically, that restaurant’s name means “permanent representation,” but one has to assume it was originally inspired by the Big Power confrontations and negotiations that occurred in Berlin while the Cold War was raging rather than by any German politics. For as you might recall, it was that Cold War that made it quite impossible for Berlin to resume its role as the German capital until 1999 – which means that the lobbyists there are also a comparatively recent phenomenon. As the Die Zeit article notes – actually quoting the owner of Ständige Vertretung, who made the move himself to Berlin in 1999 – Bonn was a much more laid-back lobbying environment, mainly made up of trade associations (Verbände) happy mainly just to provide lawmakers with industry information.

That’s hardly the case any more in Berlin, of course. The city has lost whatever political innocence it may once have had; it is clearly “where it’s at” when it comes not only to German political power but – as we have seen played out with the Greek debt crisis – even European economic and financial power. And although there are reportedly only around 5,000 lobbyists actually at work there (as opposed to the 20,000 to be found in Brussels) Lobby Control assures us that plenty of business now takes place behind closed doors, out of sight of the German public. The associated scandals (or at least scandalous behavior) have already started coming to light, most especially lucrative “revolving door” arrangements whereby high political officials leave office to take up well-paid business or lobbying positions about which only the naive will wonder what they did to qualify for them. The prime example here is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s move to Chairman of the Board of the German-Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline consortium, but there was also one Matthias Wissman, former Traffic Minister who left government to become head of the auto industry association.

The Lobby Control guides are Lobby Control people first, so they remain up-to-date on all the latest scandals and can weave the new stories effortlessly into the tour’s itinerary and their stop-by-stop spiel. Yes, this is truly a tourist excursion of a very different sort: for one thing, actual lobbyists have themselves been known to take the tour to benefit from the knowledge gained thereby. For another, the special nature also derives from a combination of the facts that 1) Tour participants rarely if ever actually gain access to the offices that house the relevant firms they are visiting, of course, but usually just stare at them from the outside as if they were caged zoo animals, and 2) The denizens of those offices don’t much like even that, so that there are sometimes hostile receptions, with security functionaries showing up to try to get the group to move on immediately from the office-atrium they are transiting, for example. There have even reportedly been attempts by such security personnel to dictate what can and cannot be spoken about by the tourguide at a particular stop; one assumes these are former German Democratic Republic functionaries.

Anyway, sounds very interesting, although unfortunately the tour seems to be conducted only in German. Those who are interested anyway (here is the page, scroll to the bottom for details) should be aware that the tours are conducted on only a twice-a-month schedule, and they always sell out.

                          

I learn this from the preparatory blogpost to the summit provided by the Economist’s “Charlegmagne” correspondent, and I have to admit that, here, that source (in English, of course) is the best provider of information and analysis that I have been able to find. Among other things, his main insight (as embodied in his column’s title, “Why Greece is not suffering enough yet”) that Greece will only be bailed out after it has been forced to suffer considerable economic pain – namely to set an example to other potential fiscal miscreants – is spot-on. And he also reports (although indirectly, from FT sources) the very valuable information of what Germany is demanding to help Greece: 1) Greece must first exhaust all other sources of finance from the markets; 2) It must then get as much as it can from the IMF; and 3) Then Germany will help, but will at the same time demand “tough new rules on debts and deficits that will impose more budgetary discipline than before, even if that involves changing the treaties.”

Yes, Charlemagne’s piece is very good, and much more informative even than an interview with the point-man in this crisis himself, namely German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, which we get here in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But that’s logical: Finance Ministers the world over, especially those with responsibility for big economies and/or major currencies, always have to live with the realization that anything they utter has the potential to violently move markets within seconds of its utterance. Still, the interview’s title is quite apt – “First the punishment, then the Fund” – and, in his bureaucratic way, Schäuble does illustrate the current German position well, starting with his ridiculous assertion (the very first thing he says in the interview) that “Greece has not gone looking for help.” That may be true in the strictest sense, but it’s also clear that Greece is looking for some additional show of support from European leaders at this summit in order to reassure markets and lower the interest rate the country is being asked to pay. Commission President José Manuel Barroso has a proposal to do just that, and Schäuble is asked whether Chancellor Merkel will support it; he simply avoids the question. One thing it is now clear that Merkel will support is the involvement of the IMF, something Schäuble himself has previously been on record as being against, to the point of proposing plans to create a Monetary Fund within the EU (something €S previously covered here) to deal with such problems itself. But Schäuble is wily, he can square this circle: IMF involvement would be OK, he admits, in fact experts from that institution are already on the scene (as I reported here). But it would be better to solve the problem within the family, so to speak, within Europe, so that the IMF should only be used in exceptional cases.

No Decision Til May, Please

Die Zeit also has its own guide out on the Greek controversy prior to the EU summit, written by Alexandra Endres and entitled (inevitably) The Greek tragedy. Again, the analysis you’ll find in that aforementioned Charlemagne column is superior, but Ms. Endres still makes some good, frank points about the situation, among which:

• German officials basically want to avoid any decision for as long as possible in view of the serious unpopularity among their electorate of the idea of helping the Greeks out in any way. They’d at least like to avoid it through 9 May, which is when important regional elections take place in Nordrhein-Westfalen, the country’s most-populous state.
  
• A powerful argument the Germans use for their reluctance to help out Greece is the national accounting chicanery the Greeks are known for, which among other things secured them an undeserved place in the Eurozone back in 2001 and was ongoing until very recently, when the Greek government belatedly announced a much-greater deficit than had been reported. (Indeed, there’s little more reason to have much confidence in Greek government accounts today.) Yet Ms. Endres makes the argument that the leaders in the other Eurozone countries were not fools, nor were the officials of Eurostat, the official EU statistical agency. Everyone more-or-less knew that the Greeks were fudging their books, so that now, when that has led to so much trouble, it’s not just the Greeks who are responsible for that.

                          

And so since late last October we have had Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Free Democrats (FDP), as German Foreign Minister. Just four months – and he already is not having an easy time of it. Indeed, I’ve already had the occasion twice to write about him in this space, once just in passing as I explored the larger question of the new and awkward relation of top German officials with the English language, but also in a more focused way here where, during the time when the current ruling coalition was being formed after the last national election, I discussed an article in Die Welt that examined Westerwelle’s past and psychological formation to question whether he really had the right temperament to serve as his country’s top diplomat.

In that light, the latest Westerwelle flap is rather interesting: In the future Westerwelle wants to travel in peace. (The report is carried all over the German on-line press in the form of one ūber-article, compiled from new agencies’ reports, that I found in five different publications. That surprised and dismayed me: this one-press-report-for-all approach I normally only see in the Dutch and Danish newspapers! The link I provide back there happens to go to Die Zeit, as a mark of respect.) Why can’t Guido travel in peace now, as Foreign Minister? Because people don’t like his choice of traveling companions, and have publicly made that known, even as he was recently overseas for a whole week trying to represent his country in South America in meetings with heads-of-state and various other high officials. In fact, they don’t like them for at least two reasons:

1. They don’t like the businessmen that were in Westerwelle’s entourage. Apparently, there are too many suspicious connections between the particular businessmen he invited to travel along with him and either companies that are known to be too friendly to FDP interests in general, or else with Westerwelle’s relatives, specifically his brother. (German has an interesting word for this sort of schmoozing with your self-chosen in-crowd, Mauschelei, although I found that elsewhere than in this article.)
   
2. They don’t like that Westerwelle’s “life companion” (Lebensgefährte, i.e. his homosexual “significant other”) was also along on the trip. But no, it’s not what you may think: no one has any problem with the Foreign Minister traveling to visit foreign lands and cultures with his homosexual partner. (Even though they’re not even married! – but of course Germany does not have – yet – same-sex marriage.) Rather, the critics also suspect that that partner, Michael Mronz, also to be using the trip to advance his own interests, not those of Germany.

Thinking about this dispute, it’s easy to come down in Westerwelle’s side. Why can’t the man assume that he need not worry about figurative daggers such as these being stuck in his back by domestic critics when he is overseas trying to advance Germany’s political and commercial interests. Indeed, when it comes to his life-companion, it seems that not only did he strictly observe the prohibition about taking part in any political discussion, but Michael Mronz also paid for the travel and lodgings out of his own pocket. (The latter you also won’t find in the article: I heard it this morning on a Deutschlandfunk newscast.)

Pro-Guido/Anti-Guido

Then again, you could also conclude that such criticism is part of the deal of being a high-ranking, high-profile, political figure, that Westerwelle should learn either just to take it and/or to take pre-emptive steps to head it off – indeed, that once more Guido Westerwell is being rather more huffy (“That simply will not do”) than you would hope a German Foreign Minister would be. It was after all this “huffyness” that my first blogpost about him from last September (Guido Westerwelle: Small-Minded?) was all about.

But don’t take my word for it that impartial, judicious observers can reasonably come down on either the “Pro-Guido” or “Anti-Guido” side. Among its many other excellent services, the Financial Times Deutschland occasionally likes to compile press-review articles that survey opinion from various of Germany’s small newspapers about leading issues of the day. Here is its recent piece: Voices from the press: “What do we do with Westerwelle?”

• From the Landeszeitung in Lüneburg (just south of Hamburg, and a particularly important city these days, since it’s where a high-profile FDP conference just took place): the local FDP head Phlipp Rösler is “the better Westerwelle” since he doesn’t “polarize” people.
  
• From the Sächsische Zeitung in Dresden: There was never anything to the critics’ charges against Westerwelle, it was shameful how they aggressively attacked him while he was traveling for his country. (But remember that in Dresden they are only 20 years removed from the DDR, they probably are more inclined to respect existing authority there.)
  
• From the Badische Neueste Nachrichten in Baden: Westerwelle has crossed the line between what he is allowed to do because he is Foreign Minister and what he should prudently limit himself to doing as a matter of good official behavior.