“Sovereignty” was transferred to the new Iraqi provisional government last Monday, two days earlier than what had been announced, in what has been praised as a slick move to head off the crescendo of attacks insurgents surely were holding in store for what was supposed to be today’s ceremony. But that’s necessarily “sovereignty” in quotation marks, since it’s an open question what sort of “sovereignty” that new Iraqi government has really received, if for no other reason than the large number of foreign troops – mostly American – that remain in the country but outside of any sort of direct Iraqi control.

You know that you can expect views from the maximal-skepticism side to come from the French press. The early hand-over may have been a surprise, but both Libération, from the French Left, and Le Figaro, from the Right, were nonetheless quickly ready to provide the same. (more…)

At the NATO summit in Istanbul, wrapping up its second and final day today, relations between the United States and France have certainly not gotten any better. Bush did not help prepare things very well with an interview he had with RTE (Irish Radio and Television – official transcript here) as he made his way to Istanbul by way of Ireland (and a summit there with top EU officials over the weekend). In the interview he strongly suggested that it was really only France that opposed the Coalition attack on Iraq – “And, really, what you’re talking about is France, isn’t it?” – an assertion which seems to be in contradiction with widely-held facts. Then, once in Istanbul, Bush seemed to think he had the authority to advise the EU to admit Turkey as a member-state, which prompted French President Jacques Chirac to declare that Bush “not only [went] too far, but he went into territory that isn’t his. . . . It is not his purpose and his goal to give any advice to the EU, and in this area it was a bit as if I were to tell Americans how they should handle their relationship with Mexico.” Undaunted, Bush has since repeated this line today at a speech at an Istanbul university: “America believes that as a European power, Turkey belongs in the European Union.” (This CNN report has all the details of the spat in English.) (more…)

The BBC (no, I did not write Weekly World News) reports today that an Iranian woman has given birth to a frog.

That headline was the best I could do at short notice. Further suggestions from readers, in this entry’s “Comments” section or, if you want, just e-mailed to me privately, are most welcome. The contributor of the headline judged most witty – one that really just jumps out at me and leaves me green with envy – will win a free year’s subscription to the SegwayEuroTour e-newsletter.

For those of you who live outside the “Old World” and so who may fail to grasp the fact: Yes, the currently on-going “Euro2004” European football championship is a big deal over here, routinely re-directing daily life with its schedule of football broadcasts and calling forth floods of uniformly-colored crowds in central cities throughout the continent. So it should be no surprise when press coverage takes a step back from the “trees” of the action and results of individual games to contemplate the wider “forest” of what it all means. Often this stepping-back goes no further than attempts to find a secret formula to unlock football-championship success, which are interesting enough in themselves. But lately some analysts have gone even further than that. (more…)

Euro2004 Championships, sovereignty hand-over in Iraq, etc.: What many people are letting pass them by is the fact that, as of July 1, the EU’s rotating presidency goes to the Netherlands. Most of the on-line Dutch press has ignored this so far, too, but at least De Volkskrant is willing to devote an article to looking ahead at that: The Netherlands “Realistic, but Ambitious” as EU- Chairman. (Yes, it seems the Dutch also refer to the rotating “presidency” as the “chairmanship.”) This mainly reports the presentation Dutch foreign minister B.R. Bot and his state-secretary Atzo Nicolaï gave on Wednesday in Brussels which outlined the Netherlands’ plans for the upcoming six-month “chairmanship.” (more…)

Unprecedented! As is being reported today on Sport.cz, an on-line magazine owned by the Czech daily newspaper Právo, a group of Dutch firms operating in the Czech Republic are offering to pay the Czech national football team €4 million as a reward if they beat the German team tonight in the final qualifying round of the on-going Euro2004 football tournament in Portugal. Why would they want to do that? Well, the Dutch play the team from Latvia tonight, and must not only beat them to advance to the quarter-finals, but must also rely on the Czechs to win over the Germans to gain that result. But the Czechs themselves don’t have much motivation going into their game with the Germans; with two wins achieved, they are already assured of advancing, and in fact ordinarily could be expected to leave their key players out of the line-up tonight, to let them rest up for when the games start getting serious again. (more…)

This might not have been addressed directly in the Reader’s Digest-sponsored Euro-survey I reported yesterday – but when you’re asked to name a great partying nation, the Irish would be at least near the top of your list, am I right? But that would be before you remember that it was precisely Ireland where Europe’s first public-smoking ban was introduced at the end of last March, just barely three months ago. A successful public-smoking ban, too, at least successful so far, and that naturally starts people’s thoughts heading in the direction of whether such a measure can’t also succeed elsewhere. (Of course, Norway banned public smoking in turn just this very month.)

On the other hand, a recent report in the main Czech business newspaper Hospodárské noviny points to this anti-vice crusade spreading in another direction: still within Ireland, at least to begin with, but now with a view to throttling the consumption of alcoholic drinks (The Irish Go to War with Drink, Want ID-Checks, Higher Excise Taxes). (more…)

The main Czech Daily Mladá fronta dnes today reports the results of a recent pan-European survey undertaken on behalf of Reader’s Digest (and conducted in nineteen countries) on the attitudes of European peoples towards each other and towards each other’s countries and cities. Given its location and function, the paper is obliged constantly to remind its readers that the Czech Republic (and, indeed, all of Central Europe) generally finishes rather low in all results (except for Prague, in the list of favorite European cities). But enough of that, it’s the results that are interesting – naming whoever needs to be named, without fear or favor – and they’re as follows (in order from the first-place on down, and with percentage results when available from the article): (more…)

A couple of readers have recently reminded me of a long-ago promise, still unfulfilled, to read Peter Norman’s book on the European Constitutional Convention, The Accidental Constitution, and then review/comment upon it on these pages. Those are timely reminders, too, in view of last week’s Brussels summit that finally produced a modified draft Constitution that all the assembled governmental representations could agree on. (Within the next two years we’ll see about the very different question of whether the national legislatures and/or voters of each of the twenty-five member-states can agree on it too, a very different question.) The Constitution issue is alive and interesting again, and this book should indeed cast valuable light on the issues involved.

I blame Proxis, the Belgium-based Amazon-clone from whom I ordered this book back in the first week of December (that’s 2003). It wasn’t available right away, which I can understand, so they put the order on hold – and apparently they were able to keep that order on hold for over five months, as the book apparently continued to be unavailable. Put another way, via their website they advertised a book which it turned out they couldn’t actually deliver, within five months at least and who knows for how much longer? (I finally canceled this order a while ago.)

I’ll still be glad to continue to use Proxis, but this is still rather annoying; I was counting on the actual arrival of the book to function as the most excellent kind of reminder that now I needed to read it, for myself and for the benefit of all my €S fans. Now I’ll have to try again. I think I’ll order it this time via that EuroComment site which is the very link I give above to those of you needing more information about this book.

Failure in December – but success in June! At their just-concluded Brussels summit the European Union’s now twenty-five members finally accepted a draft to put forward to their constituent parliaments and/or voters as the new European Constitution. Perhaps this summit’s productive result can be ascribed to the rotating EU presidency being held now by Bertie Ahern and the diplomatically-astute Irish, whereas Italy and Silvio Berlusconi were in charge last December – the Council presidency will cease to rotate this way once the new Constitution is enacted, by the way – or maybe it was all due to the new governments in place in Spain and Poland, the two “medium-sized” EU states that were the principle obstacles to progress at the last summit in December. One thing is sure, though: France and Jacques Chirac were once again in the middle of the goings-on, and so a review of French reporting and comment is appropriate. (Tony Blair was also a leading protagonist – or at least according to the French press, as we shall see – but I’ll let you read the on-line British papers about that yourself – and pay for it, in the case of The Times.) (more…)

That’s what I’m talkin’ about! News of an almost-miraculous Swedish by-product of the current Euro2004 national football championship in Portugal comes to us from (of all sources) the Flemish newspaper De Standaard. On Friday, 11 June, the automobile of 85-year-old Sören Gellerstedt gave out in a stretch of wilderness near Jokkmokk, a town some 900km north of Stockholm. And so he was stuck there, without food or water, waiting for someone to finally notice that he hadn’t arrived where he should have, that perhaps something had happened with him. The authorities eventually did notice this and sent out searchers to look for him, with dogs and even helicopters. But they eventually gave him up for dead after he had already endured out there for three days, and called the search parties back in.

Fortunately, Gellerstedt still had power for his car radio, and it was on that very same Monday when they were giving up on him that he heard that the Swedish football team had beaten Bulgaria 5-0 that evening. “That victory kept me alive,” he said, and the next day he was finally found by family members who had been willing to keep on searching even as the city/state search assets had given up.

Yesterday I ventured to suggest that the disorder being caused by English fans down in Portugal on the occasion of Euro2004 will stay within acceptable limits, among other reasons because of the authorities’ tacit policy of encouraging the substitution of alcohol consumption with dope. Later news reports make me not so sure anymore. In any case, there’s an excellent and entertaining description in the Guardian (and so in English: Man, oh man), by novelist Andrew O’Hagan, that examines the phenomenon of the societal cohort from which these folk spring, the British “lad” (a.k.a “bloke,” often “lout”), as observed especially through the prism of the “lads’ magazines” that have sprung up in the British press since the mid-1990s to cater to their attitudes and desires. (more…)

Today’s on-line Le Monde goes deeper into the question of who will succeed Romano Prodi at the beginning of next year as EU Commission President, putting forth five candidates in all under a link Les cinq prétendants: “the five claimants,” or even “the five pretenders” if you like.

(I simply reported yesterday on Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt being tipped as the likely successor by the Czech business newspaper Hospodárské noviny. By the way, I can’t give you any link to this Le Monde article, because the five putative candidates are presented in turn by means of a pop-up picture gallery, with underlying comment that is presented for such a short time that you can barely read it before it disappears for the next picture. So those of you who can read French, but slowly, you’ll have to give up on this one and simply go with what I can report to you below.) (more…)

The Euro2004 European Football Championships are now well underway, with the first set of games completed last night, and the usual fears of violence among national team supporters that accompany such tournaments so far proving unfounded. Yes, there recently was some sort of confrontations with the police by English fans in Albufeira, as well as a German attack on rival fans in Porto, but the Guardian reports that Portuguese officials are playing down the seriousness of such incidents. (The British Home Office supplied here a useful explanatory phrase: “typical of the alcohol-fueled disorder common in Mediterranean resorts rather than orchestrated football hooliganism.”) Such assessments could well mean that the incidents were truly not serious – or they could ironically mean in the case of the English fans that authorities are desperately trying to ensure that the bluff of the European football association (UEFA) is not called, to the effect that the British football team would be expelled from the entire tournament if British fans misbehaved.

But let’s take the optimistic view that the confrontations in the fields outside the respective Portuguese sports stadiums are going along fairly peacefully. This could very well be thanks to a new policy wrinkle taken up by the Portuguese police, and reported in the German weekly Die Zeit (Learn from Holland): a green light for smoking dope. (more…)

The Czech Republic’s leading business newspaper, Hospodárské noviny (yes, of all sources) has tipped the successor to Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission when the present Commission’s term of office expires at the end of this year: Guy Verhofstadt, currently Belgian prime minister. Described in the article’s lead as a “Euro-optimist and centralist,” Verhofstadt is said to have strong support for the job from both French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. (It helps that Verhofstadt, from the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, also speaks fluent French. I’m not aware whether he speaks German.) In days gone by those two endorsements would have been all that it took to get the job, even in the teeth of what the article calls British “reluctance” towards him and even American distrust. But the recent addition since then of ten new member-states, who have shown themselves unwilling simply to blindly fall in line with the dictates of the Franco-German EU “motor,” may turn out to change this dynamic – although the article also reports that the new member-states have all uniformly had good experiences with Verhofstadt. (more…)

You’ll be glad to know that the Dutch government approved last Friday an extension to the deployment of that country’s around 1300 troops in Iraq, who otherwise would have packed up and left next month. You may recall that there were increasing doubts about whether having troops there was really such a good thing, especially after the first Dutch soldier was killed last month (coverage of that was itself covered, of course, here in EuroSavant). But now in fact what’s been approved is not the usual six-month extension but one of eight months, until March of 2005 – designed to have Dutch troops in place to help provide security for those Iraqi elections scheduled for next January, plus a safety margin of a number of weeks beyond.

What has made all the difference has been that United Nations Security Council resolution on the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraq that was passed unanimously last week, as an analysis in the NRC Handelsblad by René Moerland and Floris van Straaten makes clear (From Dilemma to Necessity – free registration required). (more…)

My review of and commentary upon the cultural portraits of the EU member-states presented in the Europa XL series by the Danish newspaper Politiken is an on-going feature of this site, and you see over on the left-side of the homepage that links to the individual portraits, by country, are gathered together there for readers’ convenience. Today I discovered that the same series is also being presented by the Dutch newspaper Trouw. Yes, now these selections of each country’s typical painting, photograph, person, food-dish, etc. are available in the form of Danish and Dutch versions of the same explanatory texts (but the copyright is held by Politiken).

Maybe that’s not so much of a big deal for those of you who don’t read either Danish or Dutch, but it could be interesting for those Dutch-speakers out there, to enjoy the unalloyed texts themselves and check up on what I write all the more closely! Also, now I get the choice of practicing one of those two languages or the other when I want to cover the next cultural portrait – or maybe both, to cross-check. By the way, I also noticed that the portrait of the Czech Republic has now been added to the series, as chosen by Czech writer Ivan Klima. An excellent choice! I’m sure to cover this one very soon.

The Danish press is also wise to George W. Bush’s attempts to have himself labeled a latter-day Ronald Reagan. (This is something discussed first with respect to the Dutch/Flemish press in my previous €S entry; I’m making this entry separate to preserve this site’s “Category” integrity.) A good example of this comes from Klaus Justsen, US correspondent for the mainstream daily Jyllands-Posten (Bush Suns Himself in Reagan’s Light). (more…)

I’m way over here on the other side of the Big Water, so could someone enlighten me? People are not really falling – are they? – for the current president’s attempt to shore up the sagging belief in his elementary competence by invoking the mantel of the recently-deceased Ronald Reagan? Such as by giving his campaign website such a thorough-going makeover that it could make you think that it was Reagan who was campaigning for the presidency? It looks like at least some editorial cartoonists have this covered (a more-elaborate production here), as does the US’ “newspaper of record” (registration required). Or at least that latter is available to those who page/click through to the “Arts” section. But I fear such enlightenment is likely limited to the usual East Coast, wine-and-brie set, as well as to whoever else regularly surfs over to read flaming liberal web-zines like Salon.

Rest assured that the intelligent classes over here are not fooled. (But they’re pretty good about these things. They saw right through the Bush administration’s attempt to equate Iraq with the D-Day landings, too.) (more…)

The elections for EuroParliament delegates are now going on in the 25 member states, according to when each state prefers to have its citizens go to the polls during the required Thursday-to-Sunday time-frame. (But you already know that, as I recently covered the rise of the UKIP in Britain in this context.) Whoever wins one of the EP’s 786 seats gets – among other rights and obligations – a very decent, tax-free salary-plus-allowances for the next five years. Especially for MEPs from the new member-states of Central Europe, the pay and perks of representing your country in Strasbourg easily rival anything you might be able to earn at home, in either the private or public sector (often including even as president or prime minister). What’s more, the election rules are such that it is common that such legislators are elected off of party lists, rather than on the basis of geographical constituencies. How many of those on the list are elected – i.e. how far down the list the candidates are chosen for office – depends on how much voter support the party itself gets in the given election.

So why not put list-positions up for sale? (more…)

Today: How is Austria different from Germany, anyway? Our guide, via the Danish newspaper Politiken, is Marlene Streeruwitz, once again a prize-winning author (novels, plays, radio-plays) and translator, whose works we are told focus upon “the terror of every-day life, nearly-unbearable normality, and the laid-waste relation between the sexes.” We get an initial clue about her homeland from the review of one of her radio-dramas that was broadcast a couple years ago on Danish Radio, which judged Frau Streeruwitz’ anger as “typically Austrian, that is, substantial and implacable.” Indeed, take a look at Frau Streeruwitz’ portrait, if you please. That’s only a half-smile you see there, at best; indeed, I’d also call her look “substantial and implacable.” (I bet she’s divorced.) But to proceed . . . (more…)

The every-five-years elections to the European Parliament will begin tomorrow (some countries vote on Thursday, others on the following Sunday), and polls in the UK are pointing toward a surprising result. The heretofore almost-unknown UK Independence Party (UKIP) stands to post impressive results, which could catapult it up into the company of that country’s main political parties (Labour and the Conservatives) and leave the Liberal Democrats back in a distant fourth place.

The reason why this is alarming to many is at the same time the reason why the UKIP seems to be gaining so much support, namely its call for a “friendly” but complete withdrawal of Britain from the European Union. Up until the UKIP, the most “extreme” position on this issue had been that of the Conservatives, who maintain a suspicious attitude about what goes on within EU institutions, and who don’t want any new European Constitution and certainly won’t give up the pound sterling for the euro, but who don’t go so far as to advocate withdrawal (upon which, in the UKIP’s imaginings, the UK would join the ranks of countries like Norway and Switzerland, who supposedly enjoy much of the trade benefits associated with the EU anyway without having to put up with all that quasi-governmental stuff).

Even if most or all of the new British Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) turn out to come from the UKIP, that would not mean Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. But the worrying thing about that party’s seeming rise in popularity is that the British people’s attitudes towards the EU were supposed to get steadily more warm and chummy with time, guided by constant persuasion (propaganda?) from the bully-pulpit manned by a Labour government that has been in power since 1997. After all, referenda are now in store, eventually, on both the questions of switching to the euro and adopting a new EU Constitution (when/if member-state governments finally succeed in adopting one), and the hope had been that attitudes would have softened enough by the time those happen to ensure “Yes” votes. The UK is not obliged ever to adopt the euro – unlike, say, all of the ten new member-states, whenever they meet certain economic and fiscal criteria – but it’s possible (although still unclear at this point) that a “No” vote on the Constitution could indeed mean insistence from the other EU members that the UK withdraw its membership.

A key factor in the UKIP’s new popularity is said to be its new leading spokesman and candidate, Robert Kilroy-Silk, who had an interview show on the BBC up until earlier this year, when he had to resign after saying nasty things on-air about Arabs. There’s an entertaining portrait from the Guardian available, but I’m more intrigued by this analysis as to whether he might be the “British Pim Fortuyn,” from a source best-placed to judge such things: the Dutch newspaper Trouw. (more…)

Ronald Reagan died late last Saturday, just in time for reactions in all the big Sunday editions of American newspapers. But Sunday editions of European newspapers are rare (let alone – to temporarily borrow a term from McDonalds – “super-sized” editions; those appear on Saturdays, if at all). Rather, reactions and assessments of the meaning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency appeared on Monday, meaning that today, Tuesday, it’s time for EuroSavant to step in and give you a flavor of those.

From the other usual-suspect sources you can get briefed, scattered reaction from English, Arabic, French, and Spanish sources. (But really: only a brief mention from Libération for the French press? No Le Figaro, no Le Monde? We wouldn’t stand for that here at this web-site!) So let’s give the EuroSavant treatment to German coverage. That’s very appropriate, as Reagan’s relations with that country during his eight-year presidency were extremely interesting, with wild highs and lows. (more…)

The cajoling (over Iraq, of course) and the 60-year-old commemorative ceremonies are now over, and President Bush and entourage have caught Air Force One back to the States. He leaves behind, among many other things, an excellent article in the current issue of the authoritative German commentary-newspaper, Die Zeit, which his staff, at least, would have been well-advised to have studied in preparation for this visit (the article is dated June 3). Now, I know that the President doesn’t care much for foreign languages, and maybe that attitude also percolates down to those who work for him, so that that probably did not happen. But that’s OK anyway, because Jan Ross’ piece Bush and Us can also serve just as well as a post-visit dissection of the true attitudes towards George W. Bush and America in general among Europeans, beneath all the World War II-gratitude veneer. (more…)

The anniversary of the D-Day landings as a pretext to take up the Danish newspaper Politiken’s cultural survey of Germany? Especially given that D-Day has never been that big a deal to the German people – just another bloody WWII defeat? Oh, why not – this was after all the first year that the German Bundeskanzler agreed to be present at the commemorative ceremonies, and that supposedly reflects new attitudes among the German people that the D-Day landings actually represented the beginning of the long process of their liberation. So an examination of the German mentality through the ages is warranted. Besides, I’ve been itching to cover the German cultural portrait for some time now. Ultimately, you can just forget about the EU’s other pissant small-fry – Luxembourg, say (Charly Gaul, indeed!), or even Denmark: Germany is the true European colossus, for which there should be a cornucopia of cultural artifacts to choose among (persons; music/song; poems; events!) that should even exceed France’s. One can only hope that the German writer chosen is up to the job. (more…)

The news may have been slow coming through the middle of this past week (as I complained in my previous entry – or maybe I was just manufacturing an excuse to go review the “Europa XL” entry on Italy), but that has quickly ceased to be the case, what with President Bush’s embarking on Air Force One to pay another visit over to Europe. Naturally, Iraq will be foremost in everyone’s minds, as he attempts to gain a little more assistance for that country from our European allies, perhaps with a view towards engineering formal NATO involvement at the upcoming Istanbul NATO summit. The ceremonial pretext, however, is the 60th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy during World War II – although, as we’ll see, the ceremonial and the practical political spheres have already impinged upon each other.

Looking at the on-line Dutch press for D-Day coverage, it’s almost totally absent, save treatment in the leading serious evening daily, the NRC Handelsblad. But there the coverage is extensive and truly multi-faceted. (more…)

This was not a particularly dense news day, meaning I find little interesting out there to choose from and to report on. But at least Dutch readers can catch up with the latest developments in both the Chalabi and the Valerie Plame cases in this comprehensive summary article by the NRC Handelsblad’s US correspondent Marc Chavannes. (For those needing help, Valerie Plame is the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was revealed last July in a newspaper column by Robert Novak to be an undercover CIA agent. That’s against the law; Novak said his information came from administration officials. Probably not-so-coincidentally, Ambassador Wilson had embarrassed the Bush administration by pointing out that allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger – an alleged event he had personally investigated – were false.) Chavannes even has the awareness to cite, from an analysis in Kevin Drum’s “Washington Monthly” weblog, the blatant illogic in President Bush’s recent statements about Ahmed Chalabi – i.e. that he didn’t have much to do with him, he was merely Laura Bush’s guest at the last State of the Union address – in light of the President’s earlier statement on Meet the Press that he had met with Chalabi in the Oval Office.

So much for this, that. Where’s the beef? Hey, we always have the option of taking up another country from Politikens’s “Europa XL” series of cultural portraits. Let’s go for Italy this time, analyzed by writer Stefano Benni; he does quite a good job indeed. (more…)

As everyone knows very well, Polish membership in the EU is now a full month old. So it would seem to be an idle exercise in frustration to go back and review the various crazies who were agitating against that up till the very end: the small-time farmers afraid of being displaced in the market by Western European producers who are both more efficient and more generously supported by funds from the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy; those die-hard anti-German paranoiacs who were convinced that, right after the fireworks had died down, the descendants and representatives of those who had been driven out of what were once German but are now Polish lands would be back demanding their property back.

Except that these “crazies” won’t go away, and may even be proven right! It is support from the countryside that is the main pillar behind the surging Samoobrona, or “Self-Defense,” party headed by Andrzej Lepper, which €S covered here back during our “When Good Post-Communist Regimes Go Bad” series back in April. What’s more, it seems that the old Germans from what was once Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, etc. are getting ready to demand their land back, a tale told in this excellent, long article on-line on the Die Zeit website. (more…)