Yesterday’s posting (the one about Poland, not the one about Luxembourg) had something interesting in connection with that opinion article by George Soros, Victims as Perpetrators. You’ll recall that I first became aware of it from its publication rather outside the regular English-language precincts of the Internet, namely in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita. Once discovered there, though, it only took Google to track down the even more obscurely-published original English version. Maybe this phenomenon is brand new for €S; I can’t recall anything similar happening, although I can’t be absolutely sure that it has not (and, sorry, I’m not inclined to search through my archives to find out).

In any case – what do you know? – it’s about to happen again. I was checking out the Czech press (since today, the last Monday in May, is no sort of holiday there – no Memorial Day, no bank holiday, no Pentecost or anything else) and ran across a very interesting opinion piece in Hospodarske noviny entitled (there) Europe in the Eyes of America, by Hans Bergstrom, lecturer in political science at the University of Goteborg (Sweden). Again, don’t bother brushing up on your Czech unless you were looking for an excuse: I pretty easily found what must be the original article in English (unless Bergstrom wrote the original in Swedish) here in (of all places) the Taipei Times. Or if you prefer “Your right to know: A new voice for Pakistan,” check out the same in the Pakistan Daily Times(!). (more…)

Yes! Finally! The country-treatment (within the “Europa XL” series of cultural portraits of EU member-states commissioned by the Danish newspaper Politiken, etc., etc.) you’ve all been waiting for: Luxembourg!

Well, it’s at least the portrait I’ve been looking forward to doing. Check it out: The Luxembourgois poet Jean Portante actually lists as his choice for “Object” the local language, Lëtzebuergesch. A very good choice, as you’ll see if you care to read on further, although apparently everyone there (or who is really from there at least) speaks French and German as well.

I’ve also noticed that Politiken recently added Malta to their Europa XL master-index page. I might give that one a pass, unless I get any fervent reader requests to the contrary. I do know a very attractive, vivacious Maltese living here in Amsterdam (I don’t think she reads €S, though), but Roberta B. on her own ordinarily would hardly be enough of a justification to inflict a 10-point cultural review of Malta on you, or for that matter on myself. I would, however, like to inflict Roberta on myself (not you.) On the other hand, I don’t in fact know anyone from Luxembourg, and so that should convince you of my incorruptible and highly-objective standards when it comes to choosing material to cover on these pages.

Back to the grand duchy, then: our resident expert on Luxembourg is the poet Jean Portante, son of Italian immigrants to that country. (more…)

The current crisis concerning the situation in Iraq (e.g. continuing open rebellion, uncertain transitional government to which to “transfer sovereignty” on 30 June, just to name a few of the headline things) is hardly going unnoticed in Poland. This is another country which has significant numbers of troops on the ground there, in fact right at the main hot spots, i.e. in the Shiite-dominated south. Back in the early days of the occupation – back when sectors were being chosen for Coalition allies – that area was considered a safe bet to stay “cold.” After all, the country’s Shiite majority had long been oppressed particularly egregiously by Saddam, no?, and so should be particularly grateful and cooperative in the aftermath of his toppling. But that’s just another aspect that has gone wrong with the “plan” – and while we’re on that topic, check out this.

I thought about making this entry the latest in €S’ “Poles in Iraq” series (it would be entry number X – yes, we number them here like the NFL numbers the Super Bowls), but that’s not quite going to fit. (more…)

Check out this EuropaQuiz page! (But first disable your pop-up blockers; the reference is thanks to the Daily Czech.) It’s a fun game, it’s free, the questions are indeed challenging – and you can win the prize of having the travel and stay of yourself and a friend to Strasbourg, from 19 – 21 July to attend the inaugural sitting of the new European Parliament, paid for! The whole contest is of course sponsored by that same European Parliament (motto, in the 20 various EU languages: “We’re the one and only!”)

Back now today to the cultural survey series of the EU member-states published serially in the Danish newspaper Politiken. As you would expect, by now they’ve started to treat some of the ten new member-states – I see Slovenia and Cyprus on the list already. So we can ultimately expect a total of twenty-five such portraits, as the Politiken editors finish rounding up the cultural figures from each country to give their selections of representative paintings, photographs, persons, etc.

Goodness, which to choose? Luxembourg is available! – a cultural portrait assembled by one Jean Portante, a Luxembourgeois poet. Yes, we’ll definitely cover that one, eventually. There’s also Ireland, which should be interesting; Germany – but that one is sure to be so heavy that I think I’ll cover it around the 6 June D-Day celebrations; and Austria: just how is it different from Germany, anyway? And Italy.

I’ll play it safe this time and go for France and its representative cultural selection chosen by Jean d’Ormesson – or to give a more precise name, Jean Lefévre, comte d’Ormesson. (The Politiken editor notes that his full name is twice as long as that.) He is a director at the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro, and at the same time a prominent fiction-writer, especially of historical fiction – particularly, it seems, of tales of the decline and fall of aristocratic families. We’ll find that his cultural choices range from the predictable to the surprising – and to the surprising chosen so as to avoid the predictable. (more…)

And now to the latest Iraq-related scandal. No, really: this one centers around the person of Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, long the Pentagon’s favorite anti-Saddam Iraqi exile, recipient of a monthly $335,000 payment from the (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, and, in return, the source of juicy intelligence from within the Hussein regime, most notably about its stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The recent raid on Chalabi’s Baghdad house to seize computer records and documents, performed by Iraqi policemen under the protection of US soldiers, was a signal that perhaps this relationship is not so cozy anymore, something understandable given the record so far of those WMD actually turning up in practice. Now there is talk that Chalabi might have been an agent in the pay of Iran all along, feeding the Bush administration with the false information on Iraq that it wanted to hear as a justification to depose Hussein, while at the same time feeding his Iranian paymasters with truly exclusive top secret American intelligence information.

Yes, the suspicion is dawning that the United States might essentially have been hoodwinked into going to war against Iraq – and that officials at this administration’s highest levels might eventually have to answer charges of the unauthorized passing-on of choice information to their good comrade Chalabi, only to see it transferred right along to officials in Tehran. The broad outline of all this, at least, should be familiar by now to anyone who peruses the major American papers (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) on a regular basis; I myself rather like the extensive account given here on the Parapundit weblog (and updated here). One interesting side-question that Parapundit’s Randall Parker raises is: How long before the rest of the world wakes up to the fact that, when it comes to international intrigue, we (i.e. the Americans) are nothing but “a bunch of country hick rubes”?

Well, the Danes probably are already aware of this, for one. (more…)

President Bush kicked off on Monday night his five-speech offensive to demonstrate to American voters (primarily) and also to the rest of the world that he has a plan for effectively handing off “sovereignty” to some native Iraqi administration at the end of June. That same day Britain and the US had tabled a proposed UN Security Council resolution which, if adopted in the proposed form, would leave occupation troops able to remain in Iraq indefinitely even as that native administration would supposedly be granted the “responsibility and authority to lead a sovereign Iraq.”

Coverage of the President’s speech in the German press generally found it less than fully convincing. (more…)

The big news for many over the past weekend was Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911” being awarded the Golden Palm as best film at the Cannes Film Festival – the same movie, you’ll recall, that Disney does not want to distribute, despite the White House press statement issued in response to the award maintaining that it demonstrated that the US was a country of freedom of expression. (For others, with perhaps a more myopic view of the world, the big news was that President Bush fell off of his mountain bike. But we’ll be getting to that incident, too.) With his victory, Moore became the first documentary-maker since Jacques Cousteau in 1956 to win the Festival’s top prize, and at the same time he scored some big political points against the his arch-nemesis, the Bush administration.

As you would expect, the French press just lapped this all up. Surprisingly, though, the vehemence of the French fourth estate’s reaction seemed to vary inversely with the degree of the paper-in-question’s known partisan slant. (more…)

Today’s Gazet van Antwerpen has a brief report about a newcomer to that noted beer-land Belgium, namely the flagship brew of that other noted beer-land, the Czech Republic, whose citizens year after year stand at the top of international tables of per-capita beer consumption.

Of course, Pilsner Urquell has been for some years now under new, more-aggressive management from SAB Miller (formerly South African Breweries), which among other things has put it on the American market. But hitting the States, with that country’s generally watered-down, mass-consumption pseudo-beers (shunned by anyone in the know over on this side of the Atlantic), hardly compares to taking on the various noteworthy Belgian beers on their own turf. The GvA article speaks of Pilsner Urquel first seeking to gain ground in the Belgian café and restaurant sector, although it also says it expects to be assisted there by the Delhaize supermarket chain – originally Belgian itself, but also operating in the Czech Republic. The preliminary goal is selling 10,000 hectoliters in Belgium yearly within ten years.

Regular readers know that I am often in the Czech Republic, having lived there a number of years in the past, and I never recall ever seeing a Belgian beer for sale. In Hungary and in Poland, yes: there was often Stella Artois, and even Hoegaarden. But in the Czech Republic, to many Stella would simply have been superfluous. (Now, there’s plenty of Guinness, and even Kilkenny, in all those countries, but that’s mainly at the Irish pubs, and besides, everybody knows they are dark beers, and so in another league.) Will Pilsner Urquell seem equally superfluous within Belgium? The next time I’m in Antwerp I’ll try to see if I can find some and ask how it is selling.

EuroSavant will be away doing missionary work on behalf of the Segway in Copenhagen this weekend. You can read about what this is all about, and previous city-visits, here. Back on Monday, 24 May.

We go today to the Czech press, and specifically to the commentary weekly Respekt, for news about a shocking development there that I somehow missed. Apparently, the Czech national football league (that’s “soccer” to some of you) has been revealed as deeply corrupt. Of the sixteen teams that make up the Czech first division, fourteen were implicated, in investigative articles published late last week, in the practice of bribing referees to influence the results of games. As Respekt’s article (Czech Football: End of the Illusion) details, these payments didn’t even feature the twisted elegance of being made to secret accounts in Switzerland or the Caribbean; they were made in cash, “from hand to hand behind the gas pump or in underground garages.” As a result, in that paper’s opinion, “after May, 2004, no one can believe anymore in the cleanness [cistota] of Czech football.” (more…)

Raise a cheer for freedom of expression in Germany! – or perhaps rather to that country’s notoriously-rigid labor laws. It now seems that Defense Minister Peter Struck will not be able to relieve Michael Wolffsohn, history professor at the German armed forces university in Munich, of his post.

With this we’re back to the topics of torture and prisoner abuse that continue to dominate the news. For Wolffsohn got into trouble last week for remarks he made during an appearance on the German N-TV television channel, according to this report from the FT Deutschland, where he termed “legitimate” the use of torture or the threat of torture in the fight against terrorism, “because Terror has absolutely nothing to do with the normal basis, that is the normal value-basis, of our civilized order.” (more…)

While we’re still on the subject of song contests – and, actually, while we’re still apparently on the subject of the evening of May 15 – the very first presentation of the Arabic Music Awards also took place then. But whereas the Eurovision Song Contest mainly bogged down in the usual morass of camp and hype that we long ago came to expect, the Arabic version encountered rather more serious technical difficulties, as reporting both in Flanders’ De Standaard and the Netherlands’ own De Telegraaf attests. (more…)

The yearly Eurovision Song Contest really should be, and deserves to be, ignored. A creation of the mid-1950s, when schmaltzy pop songs were still the thing, the Contest’s continued existence now into the 21st century makes no more meaningful cultural contribution than would an instruction manual on the proper wearing of the pantaloon.

So why is EuroSavant, now into its second year of existence, remarking on this yearly event for the second time? Could it be the well-known “car wreck” phenomenon: the campy songs, garish costumes, and ridiculous accessory acrobatics are uniformly awful, but you just can’t turn your eyes away? Or, given my own TV-less state, could it have something to do with the pretext the Contest provides each May for the lavish party thrown in Amsterdam by the leading Dutch recruitment/employment agency for international personnel, a party inevitably dominated by the huge TV screen broadcasting the proceedings? (This distraction, and the sheer volume of the sound, it must be said, pose considerable obstacles to the usual getting-to-know-you function of such a party, at least until on past midnight when the Contest is finally over.)

I prefer to try to excuse my coverage of something that I would rather never have to confess to even knowing about, much less seeing, by pointing to the political aspects that have crept into what is fundamentally supposed to be, if nothing else, a Eurofest of brotherhood and song. (more…)

War, torture, deception, decapitation: Let’s leave Iraq behind for once, and return to the matter of love. Or at least what some call love, while others prefer not to recognize it as such, calling it other things. Remember not so long ago when a flurry of homosexual marriages were being performed at the San Francisco City Hall, among other places in the US, to which President Bush countered with his proposal for an amendment to the US Constitution defining marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman? Well, once more people are planning homosexual marriages, and the administration is promising to block them while inveighing loudly against the very principle. This time, though, the opposition is preparing a law for debate in the legislature to formally enshrine that principle into law.

Ah, the “opposition”; the “legislature.” Do I mean the Democrats and Congress? No, and that’s your clue (plus this entry’s title, plus the innocent fact that this weblog is entitled “EuroSavant,” after all). If you haven’t heard of all this, you probably have a good excuse since it is happening not in the US but in France, and reports on these developments are by-and-large only available in French. (more…)

Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen is scheduled to visit President Bush at the White House on May 28. Indications are mounting that the meeting might be a bit less friendly than usual, given the Iraqi prisoner treatment scandal that erupted last week. Of course, this top-level visit was planned months ago, so that latest unpleasantness is by no means the meeting’s motivation. But prisoner treatment is not the only burr under the Danish saddle, by far. To a great extent (although with less visibility, since there’s less world interest), the Danes are in the same boat as the British: having unreservedly backed the Americans in the approach to and conduct of the War in Iraq, they are now reaping that whirlwind, particularly in view of the failure to turn up of the weapons of mass destruction that were to many the war’s main justification. In April Danish defense minister Svend Aage Jensby resigned as pressure mounted within the Danish parliament, the Folketing, over the present government’s allegedly misleading behavior that led Denmark to support and participate in the war – although admittedly only to the extent of the dispatch one non-combatant ship. (Still: an example of the enforcement of public official accountability that other countries would be wise to follow? You make the call.) (more…)

It has finally happened, but you knew it was only a matter of time: the first Dutch soldier has fallen in Iraq, just yesterday (Monday). And the timing was significant, if only as a reflection of the breakdown of what public order there was in much of that country over the past few weeks. It might be even more significant when you consider that a decision is coming due as to whether to extend the deployment of Dutch troops in Iraq after the 17 July end of their current mandate there. Doubts about doing that were starting to surface in the Dutch legislature, even before this latest, fatal incident. (more…)

EuroSavant is back now, from an extended period of travel to Segway in cities located elsewhere in Europe. Fortunately, the scandal that erupted last week over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American (and seemingly also British) military personnel in Iraq shows no signs of dying down soon. I write “fortunately” not only from the immediate consideration that there is still plenty of coverage and commentary in the European press, but also because indeed this matter should not “die down” until all has been investigated, all has been revealed, and all those guilty have been relieved of their positions and punished. Some say that that would mean no such “closure” until Election Day next November.

As I make my way back into the €S groove, I have to shoot first at the big, obvious targets and leave subtlety (e.g. finding that telling commentary in some otherwise-obscure journal appearing in a more-obscure country) for later. What more obvious source to go to for non-English-language comment than France’s leading newspaper Le Monde? With its editorial from Sunday entitled Responsible Ones, Le Monde certainly does not disappoint. (more…)