The Opium Route

Passes through Bulgaria, it seems. FP Passport writes:

Bulgaria, the EU’s newest member state, is fast becoming one of Brussels' main headaches.

Back in January, corruption accusations grew so rampant around the country’s road construction projects that the EU froze all related funding until further investigation.

[...]I’m all for the EU accession of Western Balkan states –- if nothing else because there is presently no other viable alternative for an economically and politically stable future in the region. But it's because of the lack of an alternative that accession standards have slipped as far as they have. And if the EU can’t hold Bulgaria on its commitment to anti-corruption standards, how will it ever manage the likes of Bosnia and Serbia?

I spent some attention to the Bulgarian accession back in 2006 and the issues of corruption and crime:

Questions of how 'fit' a state is for membership of an international organisation always need to consider the question whether the state might sooner become acceptable through membership than when the membership is denied.[...]

So the question is not simply if Bulgaria is fit for entry, but how the former scenario can best be accoplished. If postponing accession a year will cause Bulgaria's politicians to become serious about fighting crime, and membership erases the incentives for doing so, postponing Bulgaria's entry until 2008 (and allowing Romania, which seems to have only technical problems) might be a good solution.

If Bulgaria does enter, that does not mean that no bargaining chips remain with which its government can be pushed to fight organised crime.

From a later piece:

the important question with regard to the Bulgarian (and to a lesser extent, the Romanian) accession into the EU is not whether they fulfil the criteria, but how we get it to become a stable and prospering democracy tied to the EU. One thing one needs to realise in this context is that the negotiations do not end after accession.

At this time, the Commission's strategy appears to be headed towards accession instead of a 1-year postponement, but it wants to keep more chips on the table to bargain with.

There's another report on Bulgarian troubles in the EUobserver. It notes that there will be assessment reports for Bulgaria and Romania in early summer as part of the monitoring process. The problems of Bulgaria are a crucial test for the European Union, especially with regard to enlargement. If it can not successfully effect change in a country after its entry... that will be a very strong argument against further enlargement.

Forza Nederlandia!

While the foreign press has been rambling on about the latest stunt of Geert Wilders, the peroxide-dyed agitator from Limburg, a far more potent force on the right has emerged in the Netherlands.

Rita Verdonk, a former minister from the second Balkenende cabinet and deeply involved in the fall of that cabinet over the Ayaan Hirsi Ali citizenship controversy, has launched her 'political movement' Trots Op Nederland (proud of NL).

Verdonk and her Americophile campaign manager Kay van der Linde launched the "it's not a party, it's a movement!" in the bombastic style of a US party convention:

Right now Verdonk is being given a cold shoulder by the international media. Google news only has 38 stories on her, whereas Wilders gets 3,607 for his crappy movie. That difference severely overestimates the impact Wilders can have on Dutch politics: he is not perceived as serious by the overwhelming majority of Dutch voters, and will never get more than the 6% of the vote he got in the last elections. Verdonk, on the other hand, is favourited by 20% (nl) to become the next Prime Minister, and would get at least 17% of the vote if the Parliamentary elections were held tomorrow.

Part of the reason for that difference, aside of his ridiculous hair and general wackiness, is that Wilders is a one-note politician who has built his party on an anti-immigration, anti-Islam platform. Verdonk is much smarter about her image, which she is styling as pro-Netherlands.

The next elections, however, will be in early 2011. That is, unless the Balkenende IV cabinet falls, as all of Balkenende's previous cabinets have. Previous to that, however, there will be elections for the European Parliament in 2009 and for the communal elections in 2010. As the Dutch daily NRC reports (nl), Verdonk's party has a strong pull on local branches of the traditional, large right-liberal VVD party. She should also have a strong pull on many of the localist parties that have sprung up across the Netherlands in the past decade. The anti-the Hague feeling of most of these parties is precisely what Verdonk now is appropriating. If she can find a new way to integrate these localists into her party - in a more loose and flexible manner than how the national parties organise their local parties - she would have a powerful machine.

The communal elections could be a harbinger of what happens in the general, as they were in 2002, when they boosted another movement: that of Pim Fortuyn.

Parallels between Verdonk and Fortuyn cannot be stressed enough. But it also has to be stressed that they mostly lie in the political. Fortuyn launched his personal movement on the basis of an originally localist, anti-the Hague movement. His financial backers were much the same crowd that is now backing Verdonk: real estate magnates and self-styled entrepreneurs. And Verdonk will have to define and mobilise the same electorate. As Dutch pollster Maurice de Hond called it in the day: two completely disparate groups of people, one for whom economical and social change is progressing too fast and one for whom the very same change is not progressing fast enough.

Kay van der Linde is noted as saying that you can either be a pro-establishment candidate or an anti-establishment candidate in the Netherlands. But that is too simple. What Fortuyn in a way symbolised and what Rita Verdonk symbolises even more is a struggle for political power between the political establishment and a commercial establishment. That commercial establishment has in part unweaved itself from the centrist Christian Democrats and right-liberal VVD during the 1990s and is also partially a new force, furthered by the commercialisation of television and, ironically, the third way policies crafted by the Hague in the nineties.

Verdonk so far has not offered much of a program. The main points right now are promising to eliminate (or strongly cut back) the provinces and reduce the number of seats in the Dutch parliament from 150 to 75. These are both somewhat reasonable proposals, though I'd prefer a parliament of 100 and merging provinces to eliminating them. The anti-liberal part of the platform starts with its calls for stronger punishment of minorities and minimum sentences. Special justice is a perversion of justice, as is intervening with a judge's ability to decide on the specifics of a case.

The platform of Verdonk, however, is not mainly about policy. It's about feelings, patriotism, and an anti-government, leave-us-alone sentiment that is broadly shared by the people of the Netherlands. This can only be counteracted by other parties if they manage to define Verdonk, and the next elections, on their terms.

Malcolm X on Nationalism

A current discussion.

In the United States of America, Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama has tried, in his words, to start a dialogue between the different races. In the European Union, we are supposed to have the 'year of intercultural dialogue'.

So here is an attempt at such dialogue.

Please entertain the following excerpts from a speech by Malcolm X, read by Mos Def:



Malcolm X was a black nationalist. Listening to what he says may be uncomfortable. But he speaks very clearly. And he speaks of universal topics that nationalism deals with. We have had nationalism, and we are seeing attempts to fire up nationalism, both in small regions and Europe-wide, all around us. Any speech on nationalism that achieves honesty and clarity should be relevant to us.

This speech shows both the best and the worst aspects of building a nation, and shows them as two sides of the very same medal.

The good side is bridging differences, and building unity:

And every time you look at yourself, be you black, brown, red, or yellow -- a so-called Negro -- you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for America because you're not wanted. Once you face this as a fact, then you can start plotting a course that will make you appear intelligent, instead of unintelligent.

What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don't come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don't catch hell 'cause you're a Baptist, and you don't catch hell 'cause you're a Methodist. You don't catch hell 'cause you're a Methodist or Baptist. You don't catch hell because you're a Democrat or a Republican. You don't catch hell because you're a Mason or an Elk. And you sure don't catch hell 'cause you're an American; 'cause if you was an American, you wouldn't catch no hell. You catch hell 'cause you're a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason.

This is what happened in nation-building across Europe in the 19th century. The stupid thing is that it happened for much the same reasons as Malcolm X outlines:

We have a common enemy. We have this in common: We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have this common enemy, then we unite on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy -- the white man. He's an enemy to all of us.

Unity is much easier to build when you can define a common identity against someone. But what have we got to be against, today, personified? In Europe, very little. There are those who'd want us to stir up fights with Russia, or Islam. This is a long way from the things that really ail us, which have become diffuse and hard to define. And most of all: less urgent.

Unfortunately, when you ask people what ails their country, a prime answer still seems to be 'furriners'. Which shows how little progress we have made.

Building unity through opposition has problems. One problem is what it does to the community you try to build. Dark side of the force, and all that jazz. Another problem is what happens when the common enemy changes or your common problem becomes less of a problem. Then your movement becomes smaller, grows more detached from reality, gets marginalised and ultimately dissipates.

Our European Union has the fortune also to have been built for positive reasons. A common commitment to economic integration and peace, originally, which has been expanded to a commitment towards sustainable development, and social as well as economic cohesion between the different countries, and equality between men and women.

These goals are not yet perfect. They need to be made more clear. If you can state a positive goal to unite as clearly as you can point to a common enemy, you will have a powerful tool for integration. That is what we will need to build an 'ever closer union'.

A Political Alliance

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO Secretary General, on NATO and EU enlargement:

As in previous rounds of NATO enlargement, the Bucharest decision will ultimately be a political one. I cannot and do not want to prejudge that decision here and now. It will reflect the consensus among our current 26 members on the next stage of NATO enlargement. Clearly, though, NATO does not suffer from enlargement fatigue – and I hope that the same can be said for the European Union. Because it is the combination of NATO and EU enlargement that offers the best guarantee for long-term peace and stability on our continent.

It is good that De Hoop Scheffer recognises that the decisions NATO makes are political. It may not seem too controversial a thing to state, but as I wrote three years ago:

According to president Bush NATO is a "performance-based organisation" which has an open door for any country in the region that wants to join. Of course this is sophistry, any decision to enlarge NATO is political and strategic, military capacity can then always be built.

At the present, most political and strategic considerations would counsel against pushing forward with NATO enlargement. With the exception of Croatia, all the countries considered for joining or starting the membership application process are insufficiently stable, and would cause further regional instability if they are taken in.

EU enlargement has become something I like less, as it is used as a panacea for dealing with political and security problems. I have no problem with enlargement per se, but it would be nice to at least attempt to solve some of the issues in Eastern Europe through diplomacy as well.

Bonde Bowing Out

The EUobserver wire reports that Danish eurosceptic MEP Jens-Peter Bonde is not going to put himself up for re-election.He's going to be replaced May 9th, this year.

Bonde was one of the more reasonable eurosceptics around, and also one of the more pro-active and internet-savvy MEPs altogether. Bonde contacted me back when we were still discussing the dead 'Constitution' and later launched an online petition calling for a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, which has garnered nearly 35,000 signatures so far.

Not to turn this into more of a eulogy, go read the one Bonde wrote for himself on bonde.com

Wish List Time, Again

After an easy ratification in the European Parliament and 5 Member States, the Lisbon Treaty is running into its first problems:

• The Åland Islands, a miniscule part of Finland that will have its own vote on the treaty, is making rumblings over... chewing tobacco. Basically, it wants some exemptions from an EU ban on a particular kind of chewing tobacco. Mark Mardell has more.
• Irish farmers are the first to make a move for Ireland's wish list, which may become quite long as the country has a high-profile referendum coming up in June - the only one in the EU. The farmers (predictably) are linking their possible support to the EU's position in the Doha round negotiations. More on this on the CAP Health Check blog.
• In Germany, Peter Gauweiler is (once again) bringing a constitutional challenge to the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Karlsruhe. Earlier commentary on the case he brought agains the 'Constitution', here. Further details on the current case in the EUobserver.

Will more countries follow the example of the Åland Islands and more interest groups that of the Irish farmers?

Bet on it.

Macedonia the Great

The dispute between Macedonia and Greece over the name of Macedonia (via Nosemonkey) is really rather strange.

Greece opposes Skopje’s use of the name “Republic of Macedonia” even though it has been recognised by over 120 countries. Athens argues the name suggests Skopje could make territorial claims over Greece's own northern province of Macedonia.

There is a province in Belgium called Luxembourg, adjacent to the state of Luxembourg. As far as I've been able to determine, the state of Belgium has not expressed fears that the state of Luxembourg would take over this province. Luxembourg does not have a history of conquering half the civilised world, but the last time Macedonia did that was over 2,300 years ago.