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.

                          

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.

                          

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.

                          

OK, so Bilefsky has his NYT account. (And what luck that he ran across one “Martin Kotas” – last name probably really spelled “Kotaš” – who provided so many pungent opinions about the Americans and enabled him to use the phrase “literally cried into his beer”! But I would counsel Bilefsky to avoid the cheap-but-tempting one-person anecdote in favor of consulting, say, the many polls available that can clearly show how attitudes in this country of 10 million people are against the installation of American radar on its soil, rather than regarding it – as Kotaš seems to – as some “essential bulwark against Russia.”) But the leading Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny already had a piece yesterday (Obama cuts consultations with Czechs to a minimum) about Obama’s Prague dilemma, which of course provides further details – like that the EU initially was fighting hard to stage this US-EU summit back in Brussels rather than in Prague. EU leaders don’t like President Klaus much and had no desire to reward him with this summit, but in the end it seems Prague’s sheer “picturesqueness” factor won out. (E.g. fantastic scenery – like Prague Castle, pictured above – in front of which to stage events like a major public speech. And remember that, until the events of this past week, there was no reason to regard Mirek Topolánek as the sort of “toxic” Czech leader that Obama would have to maneuver to avoid, as he always would have to do with regard to President Klaus.) And while there will be a busy schedule of bilateral meetings on Sunday for the American president, the one with Czech representatives will involve President Klaus, Premier Topolánek, and Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg all at the same time yet last only a few minutes. Much more time has been put into the schedule for talks with EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso and the leaders of Poland and Spain – as well as, at the end of Obama’s visit, with former Czech president Václav Havel, who nowadays fills no explicit official or political role and, indeed, has not been in the best of health.

“Undisclosed-Location Restaurant”? No Way

By the way, about that “secret location” for Barack and Obama’s romantic Prague dinner tonight? Remember that this is the Czech Republic and that Central Europe especially has always been a difficult region in which to keep secrets, from way back at the beginning of the Cold War and even before. The Czech daily Lidové noviny has all you might want to know about that romantic evening (Obamas’ dinner? No secret). The restaurant that won the prize of hosting the First Couple turns out to be Terasa U Zlaté Studně (“Terrace at the Golden Well”), rated by the English-language Prague city guide Prague.tv as an “Upscale restaurant, with excellent views” (indeed, see for yourself at their homepage), and located at the bottom of the massive Castle Hill where on Sunday morning Obama will deliver his speech to the gathered masses at the top. (Yes, a “Sermon on the Mount,” you could say.) As restaurant manager Michal Motyčka was glad to reveal to the inquiring LN reporter (and, no doubt, whomever else), “Yes, it’s confirmed. We have Obama and Michelle registered for dinner Saturday evening.” Interestingly, Motyčka went further: “The restaurant is not closed to the public. Obama will be there normally, with other people who come to eat with us that evening.” But don’t go rushing to make your own reservations: they’re already all booked-up. (This probably in itself provides a bit of further commentary on the “secrecy regime” in Prague.) Oh, and on the menu? It will be modern Czech cuisine, so such things as tenderloin and duck with sauerkraut.

* A better translation of Topolánek’s criticism of Obama is probably “highway to hell” – a remark apparently influenced by the Czech Prime Minister’s attendance at the AC/DC concert in Prague shortly before! I ran across this interesting tidbit while scrounging recently through the on-line Czech press, encountering it in someone’s editorial piece. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to go back and track it down to get the reference or the link, so for this I’ll just have to draw on whatever reserves of credibility I have on account with the honored readers of this site.

                          

Still, there are a handful of original joke-articles out there. But then the next problem arises, i.e. that the humor is too tied-in to the Danish cultural and/or political context to raise any laughs outside of the country. Anyway, let’s go looking for these jokes-articles and you can decide this for yourself. This exercise will also be valuable as a means to “innoculate” you against these tongue-in-cheek news-tales in case you later run across them within a context elsewhere that presents them to you as real.

The best articles that I have found offering April-Fools article compendia are, unsurprisingly, original articles (i.e. not Ritzau) from Berlingske Tidende (Aaaaaaaapril Foooooool! – yes, I stole that title – by Karoline A. Markholst) and from Jyllands Posten (April Fool – so JP keeps its enthusiasm more in-bounds, you see – by Henrik Skytte Nielsen). These two articles do have considerable – if not total – overlap; let me simply provide a list of the April Fools jokes that they report (together with the newspapers that are trying to pull each particular joke):

• First, from Berlingkse Tidende itself (presented in a separate article, of course, here, and with a separate forum-piece here asking readers to opine whether this is a good idea or not): Get married on Facebook! The Danish (Lutheran) State Church will soon allow people to get married on-line, via Facebook. “Will you take as your lawfully-wedded bride the woman who is noted on your profile as your fiancée? Click on ‘Yes’ or forever hold your peace!” This is an important step that State Church has undertaken to enhance its image as modern-minded and in-step with current social trends, you see.
• From Politiken: Good news for smokers! Denmark banned smoking in clubs and restaurants back on 15 August 2007, but now Health Minister Jakob Axel Nielsen has announced that that ban will soon be scrapped, as a gesture to aid the economic recovery of the restaurant/bar sector in these troubled times. As Nielsen himself allegedly put it, “We can’t just look on passively as an entire hospitality-culture goes under due to the crisis. And to skeptics I only want to say that this change will not create more smokers. [Nowadays] they just slip outside to freeze there. When they are inside they create turnover, and that’s what we want for our business sector during the crisis.”
• From the down-market/tabloid paper B.T.: Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen, before heading out to the upcoming NATO summit in Strasbourg on Friday, will first attend Friday prayers at a mosque in the northwest part of Copenhagen. Rasmussen is a leading candidate to become the new NATO General-Secretary, you see, but feels that he needs to burnish his Muslim-friendly credentials in order to attract the additional votes he needs to put himself over the top. (Actually, the only Muslim land within the NATO alliance is Turkey.)
• From Ekstra Bladet, also a Danish tabloid: Naser Khader has announced his candidacy for the position of Copenhagen’s mayor! You see, Khader, born in Damascus, Syria, but a naturalized Danish citizen, not long ago tried to start a new political party called New Alliance, and then Liberal Alliance . . . you’re right, this one’s hopeless when it comes to appealing to anyone outside of Denmark.
  
• From MetroXpress, a free newspaper: The Great Belt Bridge is to be torn down in 2015! That’s the enormous (18 km total) bridge-complex, the largest construction project in Danish history, that connects the two major Danish islands of Sjælland (that’s the one Copenhagen is on) and Fyn (the one that the third-largest Danish city, Odense, is on). But it has to come down, as the Danish government has come up with a much better ecologically-friendly substitute, namely a tunnel to be dug under that same span, designed to be able to capture the greenhouse-gas emissions of the vehicles that use it and keep them stored underground so that they don’t escape into the atmosphere. Quoth that government’s energy and environment spokeswomen, Anne Grete Holmsgaard, “This sends a good and very clear signal to the rest of the world in connection with the climate-summit in Copenhagen in December. With this initiative we show the world that we are ready to lead the way in the fight against climate-change.”

• Here’s a pretty good one, and it comes short and sweet and appropriately from the Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad: Taking a page from what seems to have become standard banking practice, Danish bishops have decided to award themselves additional bonuses of 1.5 million Danish kroner (= €200,000) out of Church funds.
• This one’s also pretty good, and it’s actually on the Danish job-hunter’s website Jobindex.dk (you can see it there at the top of the homepage, if you move fast!): Copenhagen’s Tourist Council is searching for someone (female preferred) to fill in for a while for the famous “Little Mermaid” statue there in Copenhagen harbor, while the mermaid herself (realize: it’s only a statue, people – but it’s topless!) goes to China to fulfill a commitment made in her name to appear in an exhibition in Shanghai. The full, extensive job-listing is a pretty good piece of humorous work – maybe I’ll translate it for you in full sometime in a separate blog-entry – with neat little jokes like “Looking for a good sit-down job?”, “What do you have to be able to do? The most important things are that you are good at sitting still and have really good body-control,” and “You will get the opportunity to work with the best body-painters, who will ensure that you resemble as closely as possible the Little Mermaid.”

OK, so I admit it’s a mixed bag; again, at least that bogus job-announcement for the Little Mermaid stand-in was pretty good. But there is another wrinkle to this April Fools tale, going in the opposite direction – yes, an article that was not intended as an April Fools joke, yet was interpreted to be one! The paper involved here was Jyllands-Posten, and that is interesting because JP (the paper behind those infamous Danish cartoons back in late 2005/early 2006) likes to say that it is the only Danish paper that never has and never will publish any fake news article, whether for laughs or for any other reason. Yet, as the paper reports here, that is what Ritzau thought it had done today in the form of an article it published reporting that the government intended to start requiring young women of the right age, as well as the usual young men, to report to the Danish equivalent of draft-boards to be evaluated for suitability for military service. That bit of news was true, but Ritzau thought it was just a joke and included it in early versions of an article the news agency wrote (similar to this blog-entry) about how the Danish press was fooling around with its readers on this April Fools Day. What do you say, ladies? A bit of male chauvinism on display here from Ritzau, no? – basically expressing the notion that women aren’t really fit for military service – although the JP article about this goes on to cite a female editor at Ritzau, named Mette Josias, as apologizing for the error on the news agency’s behalf, admitting that “we should have checked [the report] out.”

(Oh, I might as well pass on a couple April Fools-type articles that I found today in the British press. This one, from the Economist, I think you’ll agree is pretty lame. But the Guardian’s effort is quite good – you should check it out.)

                          

Actually, developments on the Georgia story do keep on coming, especially if you take the unpleasantness there of last month (not at all unreasonably) as a proxy for the new Eurasian balance-of-power that conflict suddenly revealed to the world. Today is when the EU heads of government are due in Paris to meet on a European response (if any) to Russia’s recent behavior. Looking ahead last Friday, the Berlin correspondent for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, Bartosz T. Wielinski, put forth a mostly pessimistic outlook on what could be accomplished (What the Union can do to Russia on Monday).

First to Wielinski’s title (although keep in mind that journalists are generally not responsible for their published pieces’ titles: an editor usually adds that). It struck me at first rather strangely: “do to Russia”? Maybe a bit aggressive, even childish? But no, keep in mind that Poland actually has had the recent pleasure of being threatened militarily by the Russians (I’m referring to remarks from high-ranking military leaders about targeting Polish territory after the US-Polish agreement to establish the anti-missile base there was signed last month), and so would earnestly like to “do to” back to them, and that along with the Baltic states and Great Britain, who collectively will be submitting a proposal to cut off a wide range of EU-Russian cooperation. But that is likely to go exactly nowhere among the rest of the assembled EU leaders, Wielinski reports, mainly because of the great reluctance to do anything shown by that old supposed “motor” of the European Union, the Franco-German alliance (Germany as the Union’s most populous and richest member, France as another big power and also the current holder of the EU presidency and therefore chair of this meeting). He quotes the snide riposte of one anonymous German diplomat – “Will the Poles stop buying Russian gas?” – and then the Russian daily Kommersant about how the Kremlin is threatening to review its system of economic preferences with certain EU states as well as its policy of cooperating to pressure Iran, if the Europeans get too uppity at their Paris meeting. Oh, and there’s also the embargo that can be re-imposed on the sale of foodstuffs out of Poland, for good measure.

“Getting Away” – to Paris!

If all that is not enough to discourage anyone hoping for a principled European stand against aggression to issue from this European summit, there is the additional consideration – brought up recently by The Economist’s “Certain ideas of Europe” blog – that many of those assembling today in Paris will be in a grumpy mood from having their cherished summer vacations cut short by this EU business. Yes – on 1 September! For as the Economist’s anonymous writer notes, the EU response machinery and most other government functions pretty much shut down for the summer break. Hey, isn’t today the 69th anniversary of the German attack into Poland that started the Second World War in Europe? Maybe Hitler was consciously exploiting that (in)famous and age-old European yearning for some summertime getting-away-from-it-all! So that Vladimir Putin in the first week of August was just following in this hallowed tradition of aggression.

Ah, but I know my audience out there is sharp, and I can already hear you all objecting “But wait, MAO! It was Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia, who on 7 August ordered Georgian armed forces into South Ossetia and so precipitated the latest chapter in Russian-Georgian tension actually involving, for a while, intense armed combat.” You’re right about that – but who then in turn was behind Saakashvili? Vladimir Putin himself has posed some interesting questions on that score, as reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Putin suspects McCain conspiracy; no by-line). In an interview he gave to CNN, Putin let slip mention of his “suspicion that someone in the United States brought about this conflict with the express goal of worsening the situation and providing an advantage to one of the candidates in the struggle for the office of US president.” He didn’t name any specific names, but as the article points out, he didn’t have to: the dynamic points entirely to McCain. (Note that I am just passing this along, i.e. I offer no endorsement of this purported conspiracy. However, one name that I see omitted entirely in this article by both Putin and the Süddeutsche Zeitung itself – to my great surprise – is Randy Scheuneman, a leading foreign policy advisor to the McCain campaign who was also a well-paid lobbyist for the Georgian government until rather late in the game.) And here’s another thing that came up in that interview (did the US press cover this at all?): Putin brought up an allegation that Russian forces had detected American personnel – presumably military personnel, there to train the Georgian army – present in the combat zone during the fighting last month. “If this is confirmed,” he said, “that is very bad – it is very dangerous” and added that any such American personnel could only have been there “by direct order of their leadership.” (For the record, the US State Department called Putin’s accusations in the interview “crazy.”)

Electric in the Crimea

In the meantime, tension continues to simmer within those countries at Russia’s periphery who have new cause to worry after the Red Army’s incursion into Georgia, supposedly as protection to Russian passport-holders under threat within South Ossetia. We’ve already dealt with this theme with a treatment of Moldova, but that was largely for laughs, in keeping with this weblog’s official attitude of politically-incorrect irreverence. (I mean: Moldova – who dey? To be sure, the threat from Russia to Moldova certainly does seem to be bona fide and serious; I know it’s serious to the Moldovans.) But these days the big game is clearly the Ukraine, where the tension is ratcheted up even more by the basing in the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet – itself recently directly involved, by the way, in the Georgian conflict. The French newspaper Libération has an enlightening recent article about that situation by Mathilde Goanec entitled Sevastopol, Russian position and with the lede “Conflict. In the Crimea the Georgian crisis sharpens tensions between Russian-speakers and Ukrainians.”

One problem is that, by agreement, the Russians can be assured of having Sevastopol available for their Fleet only until 2017, and the Ukrainian authorities seem distinctly unenthusiastic about any prolongation of that arrangement. Its presence there annoys the rabid local Ukrainian nationalists, who turn out to protest in front of Fleet headquarters at the port, located on a square featuring a still-intact statue of Vladimir Lenin, his arm outstretched and pointing out at the sea. Yet the prospect of the Fleet’s having to leave equally ticks off the many Russian nationalists around (who like to wear t-shirts proclaiming “The Ukraine is not dead yet . . . but it’s just a question of time”), perhaps understandably annoyed at the prospect of the Fleet’s 225-year presence there coming to an end. And according to Goanec’s article, in Sevastopol the latter (i.e. the Russian nationalists) considerably outnumber the former. You would think that the Cossacks, those famous mounted warriors from the steppes, would be on Ukraine’s side in this stand-off, but she locates one paramilitary group (the “Kourin Cossacks”) that sets as its mission “to guarantee peace in the Crimea” – until Russia finally does the right thing and moves in to take the country back. The Georgia crisis has had the effect of forcing moderates to take sides, to declare themselves either pro-Russian or pro-Ukraine, with the result that, as Goanec writes, “in the city, the ambiance is electric.”

Sochi Olympics in Doubt

Moving clockwise along the Black Sea, we come, once again, to Sochi, the resort very close to the Georgian (actually, the Abkhazian) border that is supposed to be the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics. But now that is in doubt, as we see once again in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (“Put the Olympics in Sochi in question”). Here we actually come full clockwise circle back to our first discussion of today’s EU summit in Paris, for the gist of this Sochi article is that taking those Winter Olympics away from Moscow is about the only measure to punish the Russians that is available now. As Uwe Halbach, Russian and Caucasian expert at Berlin’s Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Foundation for Science and Politics) points out, we can’t threaten Russia financially as we once could: “This is not the Russia of the 90s anymore.” And a trade embargo would do little more than drive Russia back into defiant isolation. Well, the consensus is that that is precisely what is in prospect coming out of today’s summit, i.e. no financial or trade sanctions. I suppose a move against the 2014 Olympics is possible, although probably unlikely at least in the short term, because such a measure has not been extensively discussed publicly yet.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan cites an article in The Guardian discussing the Crimea’s potential role in heightening Russian-Ukrainian tensions – but Mathilde Goanec, Libération and we of the EuroSavant community were already on top of all that weeks ago!

                          

In all, it’s an enormous ball of fluff, the groupie-tone of which you can appreciate by just taking a look at the accompanying video: maybe you won’t be able to understand the German, but that doesn’t matter so much, as you can rest assured that what is being expressed is the usual stuff of “He was an amazing man to meet!” and “I still think it was only a dream!” It’s obvious that the Economist’s linguistic and analytical talents would better have been employed addressing reaction to Obama’s Berlin visit and his speech coming from an actual representative of the serious German press – could it be that the Bild story was irresistible because it allowed a follow-on mention (check it out, it’s also right there in the Certain Ideas of Europe piece) of Obama’s picture right there on the Bild’s front cover above the topless-girl-of-the-day? Obama smiling and waving just above the fold; topless Claudia on her knees and looking towards the camera seductively just below the fold; the New Republic’s weblog The Plank thoughtfully reproduces that front page shot here. (To be fair, this is of course hardly the only piece the Bild Zeitung delivers about Obama’s visit. Then again: it’s only the Bild Zeitung, whose very name means “Picture Newspaper,” thereby making clear where its editorial priorities lie.)

Obama groupie-love, topless model: how very . . . remarkable! (*Sniff*) But never mind, beloved EuroSavant audience, let’s go make that ramble through (some of) the serious German press that, for whatever reason, our MSM colleagues at the Economist eschewed.

Stuck in Berlin’s “Front-Line Myth”

At the Siegessäule

At the peak of the serious German press – actually a weekly newspaper with a higher degree of commentary in its pieces than sheer reporting, along the lines of the Economist itself – is Die Zeit, so let’s start with Yes, we can hope! (title in English), by Christoph Seils. “The party is over, the Superstar has left,” he begins. Now it is the time for a level-headed assessment of what this was really all about. Yes, he is an impressive speaker, who calmly delivered a quite capable speech in front of more than 200,000 cheering onlookers. Then again, in that speech he clung to what Seils calls “the front-line myth” that Americans seem to continue to hold about Berlin, but which is not true anymore at all. Berlin is not anymore any focal-point of ideological confrontation and by no means recognizes itself as such; rather, it’s the city of the Love Parade, for Heaven’s sake, which used to wind its crazy, techno-dancing way past the very Siegessäule before which Obama spoke! (Granted, the Love Parade now has started to be held elsewhere, after Berlin started to tire of dealing with the yearly hordes of people and their trash: for 2008 it just occurred last Saturday, 19 July, in the western German city of Dortmund.)

As you would expect, Seils does get past the hype to treat the unavoidable fact that, for all the greater cooperation and listening that an Obama administration will offer Europe, it also will demand more of its European allies and will be, with its wide smile, its seeming reasonableness, and thus its marked contrast to the widely-detested Bush regime, much harder to refuse. From the very structure of and statements eminating from this overseas trip, it is crystal-clear that at the top of that list of demands from our NATO allies will be a greater devotion of men and resources to Afghanistan to match what President Obama will be ready to commit. Seils’ article excels in that it depicts the problem that will cause rather starkly: involvement in Afghanistan – any involvement in all, much less the troops and money that are already going there – is widely unpopular in Germany. The meme of “why are we there in the first place?” is ever-present in public discussion. Still, again, that smiling President Obama will want even more. If only those predominantly youngsters clapping and cheering in front of the Senator’s speaker’s podium yesterday evening could realize that – they might change their tune!

He also reminds them – reminds all his readers – that, for all their rapture, it is not they or any Germans who will decide whether Barack Obama becomes the next US president, but rather American voters. And that race still seems very close.

Not to Gerhard Spörl of Der Spiegel, it seems, whose contribution to the post-Berlin analysis is No. 44 Has Spoken. Yeah, this one is pretty hagiographic – somewhat better than the “I met him in the gym!” Bild Zeitung piece, but not by much. Anyway, you can read it for yourself since Der Spiegel “put it on their English-language website (which, you’ll see there, has it’s own version of the George W. Bush’s-remaining-time-in-office countdown!).

Here, Have Some Bitter Truth

Columnist Thomas Hanke of the business newspaper Handelsblatt seemingly witnessed nothing but hard reality in Obama’s words, as he makes clear in his piece Cold Fervor. The references to the Berlin blockader were not just there to make everyone feel good; the decades-long confrontation in the city with the Soviets was brought up as an analogy to the severe tests which the West again faces today, especially in Afghanistan. In Hanke’s eyes, Obama in his speech was simply serving up the “bitter truth” that hard work and sacrifice lie ahead of America and its allies, and the replacement of Bush in the White House with another president is not going to change any of that. There can be no more illusions; Europeans will have to join the US in stepping up and taking responsibility for addressing the world’s problems as well.

Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Yes He Can), Reymer Klüver both marvels at and dismisses Obama’s Berlin speech and his conduct on this overseas trip in general. On the one hand, the tour has been tremendously valuable to him in that it has demonstrated that he is definitely presidential material. The increasing influence of policy steps he has long advocated – both diplomatic discussions with Iran and a timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq – has showcased his judgment.

Then again, the appearance in Berlin might have come at considerable ultimate cost to Germany – “Obama will be expensive for Germany,” Klüver writes. This is naturally because of the “shared sacrifices” that he made clear in his speech that he will be demanding of America’s allies. Still, one can still doubt how much of this will actually translate into concrete action when/if he becomes president. One must remember that 1) The real audience for the speech was American voters, not those who gathered in the Tiergarten to actually hear it, and 2) Obama has already displayed a capacity for abandoning positions he once held in the past (e.g. opposition to free trade/NAFTA), so that should be kept in mind.

Obama to Shove More Burdens Onto Allies?

Also on the Süddeutsche Zeitung site there is currently an interview, conducted by Thomas Denkler, with an “America-expert” from the German Society for External Politics, one Josef Braml (“Obama will not walk on water”). He makes some good points, such as linking Obama’s call for shared sacrifice with the orientation of his speech to the American electorate: what with the economic troubles in which the US now finds itself, interest has grown (especially among Democratic Party constituents) in cutting back on some of the money the country spends for its overseas engagements, by transferring some of that burden onto the allies, in order to have more financial resources to devote to problems at home. Also, even if he is elected president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama can still not expect easy going because of the ideological divisions that persist even within his own party – over free trade, for example, and questions of Homeland Security.

The Frankfurther Rundschau is also a serious German paper, from the country’s fifth-largest city and financial capital. In his analysis The World Becomes Young), FR columnist Harry Nutt has a curious take on Obama’s Berlin visit. He estimates that half of the 200,000 who gathered to hear the Senator live were under the age of 20. What is more, whether the Obama campaign cottoned on to this or not when they were persuaded to accept the Siegessäule as an alternate venue for the speech they wanted to schedule, that monument and the enormous circular square in which it is located (the Großer Stern) does not really anymore symbolize to Germans anything out of their history, presumably because anything it might have once symbolized was entirely discredited in the wake of the Second World War. Rather, (and as above), if you hit a German with Siegessäule! in a word-association test his response will probably be “Love Parade!”, and/or the “fan-miles” that were set up there on the boulevards between that monument and the Reichstag/Brandenburg Gate for swarms of football fans from all over the world during the World Cup in 2006, which Germany hosted, as well as the recent European Championship.

So the audience and the venue itself was all about young people, young culture; Nutt chides Obama that the numerous references he made to the Berlin Airlift were entirely without effect – that is just something out of some history book the members of the audience have been required to study. Still, quite an impressive mass of them showed up to hear the speech, and they proved loud and enthusiastic during it; what were they doing there, then? Firstly, they were looking for something as unlike as they could get to George W. Bush, something that could make them believe in politics again. But they were therefore also looking for an effective new politics, that can get results: “It is the hope for a Realpolitik, that nonetheless can be paired with Passion,” as Nutt puts it.

Amero-Centric

On the other hand, FR contributor Marcia Pally didn’t know about young-vs.-old, but all that she saw filling the square in front of Obama – presumably being present there herself – was Americans (Ich bin eine Berlinerin – Berlinerin merely meaning “female Berliner”). But that was somehow appropriate, anyway: after all, the speech was really meant for the American electorate back home, one big laundry-list of what Obama’s “change” is supposed to mean: putting in order the Iraq problem, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, AIDS, climate change, the spread of nuclear weapons, the gulf between rich and poor, and the democratic deficit.

That’s quite a list. And Obama has also come to Europe to let the Europeans know that, if he is president, they will be listened to again. But why does Europe need the US for that? Most people, if they find that absolutely no one is listening to them, simply hire a psychiatrist. And why can’t Europe develop its own approaches to all those problems Obama is promising to bring “change” to? Those are good points, but especially surprising given their source, for Pally’s article itself had to be translated for publication in the FR, from English, for she is a professor who regularly teaches at NYU and a permanent Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, who has just been recently in Berlin as an academic fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Finally to the Financial Times Deutschland, and to a non-bylined editorial (thus representing the views of the editorial board collectively) that also looks ahead to the cold reality that is sure to come after the smiles, cheers and handshakes are long in the past: Hangover After the Intoxication. For what a President Obama has in mind for the world can be seen by the very itinerary of this overseas trip: first to Afghanistan and the Middle East, to take stock of the problems, and then to Europe, to seek help in their solutions. But it didn’t take this trip to enlighten German politicians about what President Obama would ask of them: it has been clear for some time that he would be after both a greater troop and financial commitment to Afghanistan (including changing their rules of engagement so that they are allowed to venture where things are actually dangerous, namely the South of the country), even as they seem to want to treat the American as some “cuddly stuffed animal,” that “says conciliatory phrases when you shake his hand.” But its the German voters, who don’t find it in their job-description to keep track of such things so closely, who could find themselves disappointed in the end, when “Obama’s new America strives after the old objectives” but turns out to be that much harder to say “no” to, precisely because of his great contrast with George W. Bush.

One interesting point the editors bring up: just as a notional Obama administration will be getting up and running in 2009, so will Germany enter its own campaign ahead of national elections in that year. Especially when Germans are running for re-election, they become very reluctant to being depicted as mere American “poodles,” so to say. (The word belongs to the British, not the Germans: it’s the idea I’m after here.) Those so eager to partake of the Obama-aura yeterday could well find themselves in the end rooting for John McCain – a figure much easier to say “no” to.

                          

But delving into the news and commentary on both sides of the Belgian divide (i.e. Flemish/Dutch vs.Walloon/French) provides a more nuanced picture of the situation, as you would expect. For one thing, the Economist’s concern, “Time to dissolve Belgium?”, seems not to be the question at the forefront of Belgian political minds right now; rather, it is “What do we do now?” As the authoritative Flemish newspaper De Standaard reports (King sets confederate steps), that is a question that it is the immediate task of King Albert to decide – and he is expected to take until the end of this week, at least, to do that, in the meantime holding consultations like crazy with the country’s various political and societal actors. (One of the main assertions of the front-page De Standaard article is that the pattern of whom the king has consulted with so far suggests he is leaning towards finding a solution that would make Belgium a somewhat looser-knit confederation.)

Leterme @ Wit’s End

Theoretically, the king could simply decide to refuse Leterme’s resignation, but that’s really not the sort of thing you do except in a grave emergency, one that usually involves war in some way. The text of his resignation statement makes his position clear that he does not know what else it is that he could do: “It turns out that the opposing visions between the communities over the needed new balance in our state institutions cannot be bridged today. This indicates that the model for consultations at the federal level has reached its limits.” It’s also not clear that much of the country would welcome his staying on as Prime Minister, in any case. Commentators in the French-language papers are not pleased with him at all. In his editorial in Le Soir (A Country on the Edge of the Abyss), Luc Delfosse dismisses Leterme as “the little man from Ypres [a city in West Flanders]” and accuses him of selling out to his Flemish coalition partner, the N-VA (Nieuw Vlaams Alliantie, to gain power at the cost of giving full rein to the N-VA’s more stubborn Flemish-nationalistic political stance. (The Dutch-language financial newspaper De Tijd concurs in its lead article on the crisis, concluding from its analysis that Leterme indeed chose maintaining his party’s coalition with the N-VA over maintaining the government.) And in La Libre Belgique Michel Konen writes (Yves Leterme Leaves Without Glory) that “it is the nerves of Yves Leterme that ended up cracking.” There is no reason to make such a big deal of failing to meet the 15 July deadline, but, then again, maybe it’s good to finally see the back of the Prime Minister anyway: for the last 13 months of his time in office he has accomplished precious little, and has certainly shown absolutely none of the political courage that he breezily asserted he would bring to the job when he was originally approved for it.

Big Deal Deadline

Indeed, there does seem to be something to the point that, pace that Economist article, 15 July did not need to have such a cataclysmic significance. Yes, a new plan for federal power-sharing was supposed to be presented by then and, yes, it was nowhere close when the time came. But there was no crying need to make such a big deal out of it – that deadline was essentially of Leterme’s own making (and I don’t think I’m going way overboard if I speculate that missing deadlines for completed action like this is pretty much par for the course in Belgian politics). De Standaard has an excellent analysis piece on this (What Brought Yves Leterme Down?), which even terms the resignation “surprising,” as if no one really expected that Leterme would plunge the country again into crisis over a mere missed deadline. After all, the article points out, it had been pretty obvious for a long time that it was not going to be met, but there had been no real sign that Leterme was going to react like this – people probably just complacently assumed that he would not go so far as to resign. So why did he? Well, again, it was Leterme’s own deadline, and it turned out that he was serious about it, mainly (one can speculate) as a prod to get the other side (i.e. French-speaking/Walloon) to finally make some concessions to move talks forward toward “re-balancing” the Belgian federal government (code for “tipping the balance of power a bit more towards Flanders”). But it wasn’t working; the De Standaard article reports that the Walloon side seemed resigned to the stalled talks and looking forward to the next federal-level elections in 2009 in hopes of coming up with a new political alignment that would enable forward progress. This attitude was unacceptable to Leterme – either to him and/or to his coalition partner, the N-VA, which indeed has a more militant attitude about gaining power concessions for Flanders and gaining them soon. So you could say that Leterme did indeed choose maintaining his CD&V party’s coalition relationship with the N-VA over maintaining the government; or you could say that he had tried “brinksmanship” tactics – setting a scary deadline – to finally get some progress, the other side had called his bluff, and so he felt obliged to take the country over the brink.

In any event, whether 15 July really is supposed to mean anything or not, 21 July definitely does: that is the Belgian National Holiday (think the American 4th of July, or the French Bastille Day). How embarrassing to be in the middle of a government crisis that threatens to split your country apart on your National Day! Could that prospect move King Albert to quicken his deliberations and find some solution? More to the point, what will the streets of Brussels look like next Monday? The last couple of years the Belgian National Day has been marked by impressive solidarity demonstrations, especially in Brussels, of citizens marching to show their determination to keep the Belgian state whole. Will any more of those materialize next Monday in the shadow of this latest crisis?

Hitting Belgian Pocketbooks

De Tijd being the good business newspaper that it is, it also devotes an article to analyzing what the paralysis in the government means in practical terms for the Belgian electorate (What does the crisis mean for your pocketbook?). Quite a lot, it seems, mainly because all this hullaballoo is unfortunately occurring just when, in an ideal world, the government would instead presumably be devoting its energies to shielding Belgians from an oncoming storm of economic pain (including recent 5,8% inflation which the newspaper terms a “record” – but that can’t be right). Yes, the Belgian authorities have managed within the thirteen-month life of the latest government to divert themselves from inter-communal bickering enough to move forward on a number of economic measures, including raising pensions and even agreeing on a whole “social-economic program” for the period 2009-2011. The problem is that many of these still need to go through the final step of being formally approved by the legislature. Now that the government is once more in danger of falling – the PM has submitted his resignation, after all, even if that has not (yet) been accepted by the King – there is the real danger that these measures will have to start all over again with the legislative process.

Finally, indulge me for a moment as I bring into the record a perspective on this whole affair from outside Belgium, if only from its neighbor to the North, the Netherlands. Naturally, the Dutch are following Belgian developments with close attention, and the leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad even devotes an in-house blog to the situation there, whose latest entry is Navel-Staring in Belgium.

Unfortunately, the blog is not by-lined; but whoever is writing it does hope that Belgium could come up with some way to keep itself together as one country: “Seen from the North, Belgium is an interesting, prosperous, diverse and cosmopolitan land. As a cultural-economic twin-state it has more dimensions and options than the homogeneous Netherlands.” A split would simply result in two more islands of homogeneity, Dutch and French. More practically, as much as the Flemings and Walloons may want to claim they don’t need each other, in actual fact they are quite deeply intertwined economically, and wrenching that apart will inevitably carry high costs. And these precisely at a time when the winds of economic distress are rising! It is hardly a formula for the sort of peaceful “velvet divorce” (on the pattern of the split at the beginning of 1993 between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, of course) that some in the country may think is achievable. Any split could turn out to be more violent than people may expect.

                          

Prospects for a “Yes” vote on the proposed EU Constitutional Treaty are under pressure these days not only in France but also here in the Netherlands. Well, at least “Yes” is currently ahead of “No” by only about ten percentage points in the polls, which is taken to be a worrying sign. So cabinet ministers are swinging into action to tout the Constitution, including Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner who, as reported in the newspaper Trouw (registration required) has warned against the danger of war if the Constitution is not adopted.

War? Yes, war: Because without the more authoritative and more effective EU institutions that the Constitution will supposedly bring into being, Europe’s inherent “irritation, suspicion, and distrust” threatens to escalate out of control. Just like happened in the mid-1990s in the Balkans: “Yugoslavia was more integrated than the [European] Union is now, but bad will and the inability to stifle hidden irritations and rivalry led in a short time to war.”

As the Trouw article points out (no specific by-line), former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl used to say something similar, namely that war threatened to return to the European continent if it failed to “unite.” Crucially, though, what did he mean by “unite”? Kohl obviously did not mean adopting the Constitution, since that was a project that mostly went forward after he was out of office. Would he have in fact meant by “unite” adopting the Constitution? He’s still around and mentally alert, but I have heard no such commentary from him yet. In any event, somehow apocalyptic talk of “war” in relation to Europe seems more appropriate coming from a leading politician of the country that started so many 20th-century European wars – and suffered so much from them – than from a Dutchman.

“WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?” BESIDE THE POINT!

Going back to Donner, it should be no surprise that he also dismissed as unimportant any considerations as to whether adopting the proposed Constitutional Treaty will actually be good for the Netherlands. “That is entirely beside the point that we in Europe live very closely with one another. In order to be able to live together in peace, we need authorities who can settle disputes, set rules and operate in the general interest.” He also opined that the process whereby governmental competences steadily migrate from the national to the European level is basically unavoidable. That will be surprising news to many, but probably a confirmation of the worst fears of many more others.

In an accompanying editorial (Donner Kicks off European Campaign Too Heavily with a Frightening Scenario – registration required), the Trouw editors express regret over Donner’s sensationalist approach and dismiss his Yugoslavia analogy. The history of European unity has been much less abrupt than the sudden creation in 1918 of what was then called the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,” and indeed features notable periods of stagnation and even crisis as well as strides forwards. I suppose this experience is supposed to have given that European process a sort of doggedness and durability, in contrast to Yugoslav brittleness. “In the light of that it is not acceptable that we will descend to barbarity if the Union is not immediately successful in providing itself with a more solid constitutional basis,” the Trouw editors pronounce.

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But let’s now take this occasion to remind ourselves that the Netherlands is a relatively pissant (a perfectly-acceptable word for common use in polite society) influence within the EU, a “middle-sized” power at best. The truly big players are of course headed by Germany and France, which is why a far more significant tale (if not necessarily more interesting) would be that of the TV “debate” French president Chirac appeared in last Thursday in order to push the Constitutional Treaty among his countrymen, which is in big trouble there with “No” running in polls at greater than 50%. I add those quotation marks to “debate” because in actuality Chirac chose to appear on TV and make his pro-Constitution case before a group of mostly young people.

(“Young” but most assuredly adult; you can at least rest easy that Chirac didn’t simply ship in children from the local Paris kindergarten to be his audience, although – apart from the usual shrieks, tantrums, and calls for one’s bottle that that would have entailed – it’s hard to see how it made any difference. Because, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine a bunch of twenty-somethings getting up the gumption to really challenge the in-his-seventies President of the Republique with any tough questions. The latest Economist (free article!) points out that at least former French president Francois Mitterand had the guts to debate on TV a real-life intelligent opponent, namely Philippe Seguin, prior to the 1992 French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, in which “Yes” barely squeaked out on top. Oh well, at least this is better than the Bush Administration’s “rent-an-audience” method for the President’s current Social Security privatization “whirlwind” tour, with pre-screened spectators and security goons standing by to eject whoever might have slipped between the cracks, all of this paid for by federal public funds – i.e. your American tax dollars, whether they’ll let you in to attend or not – by the way. As we saw on three occasions last fall, one-on-one debate is not the President’s strong suit by far.)

Anyway, so Chirac showed up on TV in front of this young audience, all presidentially magisterial, but by doing so he seemed to have done the French “Yes” cause little good, and indeed might have done it harm. You can read the review of this event in the Guardian (reference thanks to the New York Times), but naturally there was comment all up-and-down the French press as well. I know; I gathered quite a few links. But I haven’t had time to use them to put together for you the usual sort of EuroSavant compilation and commentary that you’re all used to. And, I’m afraid, I won’t have time, not before that Chirac TV “debate” becomes “old news” indeed. (Actually, as usual, writing this post has taken more time than I expected. These days I often approach my computer keyboard with the resolution “This will be a brief post,” but it doesn’t turn out that way.) All of this is a rather bad sign for the health of this weblog, and I’m sorry about it.

                          

In the Danish case, the villain is poker, and the Danish press has recently sounded the alarm. Now, “poker” and “Denmark” are two concepts most people would not freely-associate right off the top of their heads. As reads coverage from Jan Bjarke Nielsen in Berlingske Tidende, “Once there was a time when poker was played by John Wayne and belonged in a dusty saloon with a couple of bottles of whiskey on the table.” But now poker, particularly the on-line variety, is a Danish national mania – and fast becoming a national pathology. The Danish Poker Federation (their website is only in Danish, as you might expect) was founded only in August of last year, yet now finds itself struggling to preserve the pastime’s good name (such as it is) in the face of its technically-boosted national expansion. This goes as far as urging people not to play, if their only means to do so is high-tech; says Frederik Hostrup-Pedersen, a spokesman for the Federation, in an accompanying BT piece (also written by Nielsen), “That’s dangerous, because it goes so fast and there is the possibility to lose and to win money very rapidly. If people are tempted to play and dream of fast money, poker on the Net and by mobile telephone is very dangerous.”

What makes this such a worrying phenomenon particularly now is in fact the recent first unveiling of money-poker for Danish players available via mobile telephone. Strangely, this isn’t a matter of succumbing to the wiles of some slippery off-shore gambling impresarios hiding away in Trinidad or Pago-Pago. No, the enticement comes from next-door Sweden, from a company called PokerRoom (yeah *sigh* I’m giving you the link), although you don’t really get any true Swedish flavor unless you first click at the bottom on “About Us” and then go investigate “Ongame,” the company that makes their software and which is based in Uppsala. But PokerRoom will surely not be alone in the field for long, report Peder Bjerge and Christian Hüttemeier in Politiken (More Mobile Money-Poker On The Way). Ladbrokes.com, out of London, is fast on its way, for one – anyway, as the authors point out, Danes can already bet with Ladbrokes via their mobile telephones on the results of games in the Danish soccer league (presumably these are inside-the-country mobile calls). And that is just the one follow-on to pioneer PokerRoom that Bjerge and Hüttemeier mention in the article; there will surely be more.

STATE’S PIECE OF THE ACTION

Oh, there is another follow-on they write about there, at the bottom: Dansk Tipstjeneste A/S (“Tips”), the Danish national gambling monopoly. “Until this point our management has said that we will wait on the situation regarding games over mobile telephones,” declares Tips spokesman Thomas Rørsig. “But it could be that a clear political wish will arise for us to enter the market in a way that will be acceptable to those who are worried about compulsive gambling [ludomani].” There is also mention in one of the BT articles referenced above of Danish politicians seeking to modify the law so as to strengthen what is supposed to be Tips’ monopoly on gambling within Denmark – “in an attempt,” BT journalist Nielsen writes, “to dam up the foreign gambling concerns.”

Consider that attitude for a moment, though: This poker-gambling is taking off like wildfire, more and more people are being seduced into betting – and losing – money that they can’t afford to lose; well, let’s make sure that the State gets its share of this action! But maybe that’s not as nonsensical – or cynical – as it may at first seem, as this state monopoly is at least a very common template employed by many European governments to try to control humanity’s often-uncontrollable urges. For instance, lotteries are everywhere national monopolies, as is usually also the case for more run-of-the-mill gambling. (The only legal casinos in the Netherlands, for example, are owned by HollandCasino – the state-run monopoly.) Another famous Scandinavian example is the State’s monopoly on the sale of alcohol in Norway and Sweden. On the other hand, the fatal flaw when it comes to the poker situation in Denmark is clearly that technological advance has really made any sort of state monopoly here untenable. And for all the emphasis on personal liberty and the autonomy of the individual, for all the high-tech progress (in IT and in financial transactions ) that such gaming is evidence of, high Danish officials increasingly are looking into how to bring it to a stop – including the Social Minister in the current Danish cabinet, Eva Kjer Hansen. But how is that possible anymore?

THE AMERICAN RESTRICTIVE APPROACH DEFENDED

That same question must now be puzzling at least every developed country – that is, countries whose citizens have enough disposable income left at the end of most months to potentially be tempted to throw away. In particular, a recently-resolved dispute over Internet gambling under the World Trade Organization (WTO), involving the United States and Antigua – the off-shore home of many Internet gambling sites – brought out the point how relatively restricted American law is in its attempts to keep US citizens away from such gambling. (Curiously, it seems that federal anti-gambling legislation from before the rise of the Internet – such as the “1961 Wire Communications Act” – has mostly been a sufficient basis for proscribing even most of the more-recent high-tech games.) In an analysis of the WTO decision recently published in that case (unfortunately only available to on-line subscribers), the Economist advances the view that, although the US in this case preserved its right to ban on-line gaming to its citizens in most cases, such a position is not sustainable for the long-term out in the practical world. After all, it’s well known that many Americans manage to satisfy their gambling urges through making use of the many on-line facilities made available to them on sites hosted outside the United States, and even find ways to finance these habits despite credit card companies and PayPal refusing to process gambling-debt transactions; “regulating, taxing and letting American firms compete against offshore rivals makes far more sense,” the article opines (actually, in a paraphrase from an academic from the University of Nevada – but a professor from the home state of Las Vegas would say such things, wouldn’t he?).

Denmark has so far taken the opposite approach to the American one, namely allowing its citizens exposure to the siren-call of on-line (and, now, mobile telephone) gaming. But now that the concomitant problems of addiction and financial loss seem to be running out of control, and no less in a country which you would at least be glad to call “sober” (apart from their weekend-night drinking-binges), you can wonder whether that “hands off” stance really “makes far more sense” after all.

NEED HELP YOURSELF? READ DANISH?

But let’s finish here where we began – ludomani. Naturally, there is help available on-line to Danish compulsive gamblers, at the website for the Center for Ludomani. (All in Danish, again; but it’s not like there are not similar resources in English, like this webpage on the MayoClinic website.) For those of you who need it – and have the necessary Danish language skills – there’s even a new book out from the Center, which it touts heavily, on its homepage and also here: Ludomani: No More Ante-ing Up, Thanks!, by Michael Bay Jørsel, who is in fact the Center’s chief. Available from the renowned Danish publishing house Gyldendal.

P.S.: While googling to provide a suitable English-language compulsive gambling help-site above to those who might have been frustrated had I offered only the Danish entry, the first likely-sounding candidate was the site for the National Center for Problem Gambling, with the URL http://www.800lostbet.com. Try it, though: All you get is a splash-screen reading “Website Disabled Due To NON-PAYMENT.” Could someone at the National Center have gotten too tied-up in some side activities – 1961 Wire Communications Act or no 1961 Wire Communications Act?