American disdain is doubtless accentuated by the obscurity of the politicians appointed to the two posts at an EU dinner Thursday night in Brussels – Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, who becomes President of the Council, and Lady Catherine Ashton of the UK, currently EU Trade Commissioner, who is to be foreign policy czar. Neither has much foreign policy experience, and both are little-known even inside Europe.

The New York Times hits the nail on the head, reporting that “the selection of such low-profile figures seemed to highlight Europe’s problems instead of its readiness to take a more united and forceful place in world affairs” and that “the leaders of Europe’s most powerful countries, France and Germany, did not want to be overshadowed. Nor apparently did their foreign ministers.”

The desire of major EU states to retain their national influence in foreign policy was among the reasons why former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was rejected for the presidential post, although he had many other strikes against him, including his prominent support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The U.S. media’s obsession with celebrity, however, ensures that the defeated Blair’s candidacy remains more compelling to some than those of the two winners. CNN’s piece briefly names Van Rompuy and Ashton, but the bulk of the article is dedicated to Blair.

The Wall Street Journal describes Van Rompuy as “an accidental holder of his current office,” and names Blair no fewer than eight times, together with a dejected close-up photo. “The choices of two politicians largely unknown outside their home countries suggest the long-held ambitions of some to give the bloc a bigger presence on the world stage had been scaled back,” it says in reference to the eight-year-long struggle to reshape the EU institutions that began in 2001.

Overall, The Wall Street Journal article portrays the European Union, the world’s largest economy, as a weak organization that has just chosen two meek and feeble leaders – a humble approach the two winners themselves appeared to confirm. One of Ashton’s first comments was that she planned to conduct “quiet diplomacy,” while Van Rompuy promised to be “discreet” in his new job.

These modest ambitions were reflected in editorial decisions at the three traditional U.S. network news shows. Neither NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, nor CBS Evening News mentioned the EU appointments Thursday night. And three of the most prominent daily newspapers have little to no front-page coverage of the event Friday. The Wall Street Journal features a 16 word teaser while The New York Times and The Washington Post have no reference on their front pages, but leave plenty of room for Oprah.

The Washington Post does quite a good job of putting the story in context, but completely ignores Ashton, apart from a single mention at the top, even though many Brussels experts believe her job will turn out to be more important than that of Van Rompuy.

The Washington Post online edition sloppily features a November 19 photo of Van Rompuy, who it says is “believed to be one of the candidates,” alongside a November 20 report on his winning the job.

Desperately seeking entertaining angles about Van Rompuy, some of the U.S. media settle on his penchant for writing Japanese-style haikus, often quite well. A blog published by The Wall Street Journal showcases some of Van Rompuy’s poetry, and reports that imitators have sprung up elsewhere in the media. CNN also mentions his love of haikus.

A sample from the balding Van Rompuy:

Hair blows in the wind
After years there is still wind
Sadly no more hair

The Los Angeles Times pokes fun at Van Rompuy’s poetry, including the hair-loss haiku, after likening him to an absent-minded professor and calling him a Harry Potter lookalike in a previous article, EU’s Angst Over Choosing a President Hasn’t Helped its Image. To be fair, this article makes fun of other candidates, too, depicting them as sad and pathetic. The reporter says that “despite self-congratulatory pep rallies in Brussels, [the EU] still isn’t ready for prime time,” a statement with which some Europeans might take issue.

In the more recent article, the Los Angeles Times makes the inaccurate statement that that Van Rompuy and Ashton will “represent the continent,” confusing Europe with the European Union. Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and most West Balkan states are not EU members, nor are Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Turkey, which has at least a toe-hold in Europe – not to mention Russia. The same reporter also propagates the hackneyed myth of Henry Kissinger’s desire for a single telephone number on which “to call Europe,” debunked in a previous post on this blog.

Sarah Bellotti contributed to this blog.

This is perhaps surprising, given that the Wall’s fall is one of the most dramatically symbolic moments in human history – embodying in the most graphic possible manner the victory of light over darkness, freedom over oppression, and the dawn of unity for a war worn continent.

But while such an obvious interpretation was clear to those who joyously celebrated the opening of the floodgates dividing East and West Berlin in November, 1989, today’s observers find much to carp about in the two decades that have followed, as well as many unanswered questions about the actual event.

In a report from Paris in The New York Times, The Legacy of 1989 Is Still Up for Debate, Steven Erlanger pays tribute to the historic legacy for Europe of the Wall’s fall, but adds, “1989 also created new divisions and fierce nationalisms that hobble the European Union today, between East and West, France and Germany, Europe and Russia.”

Some of the intensity of those divisions is evident in the tug of war, in both Europe and the United States, over whether the achievements of 1989 owe more to the resolute anti-Communism of President Ronald Reagan or its inverse, the white-glove embrace of the East by many in Western Europe, Erlanger writes.

It is a tribute to 1989, not unlike the French Revolution 200 years before it, that its meaning is hotly contested. Different groups in different countries see the anniversary differently, usually from their own ideological points of view.

Erlanger cites the verdict of Robert Kagan, a historian with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, that conservatives won the debate in the United States. “The standard narrative is Reagan,” Kagan says. This is not the case in Europe. According to Kagan, “if 90 percent of Americans say it was the U.S. being firm, 99 percent of Europeans think it was they being soft – that the wall fell through Ostpolitik and West German TV.”

In The Washington Post, columnist Anne Applebaum writes from Berlin that Central Europe’s success since the Wall fell deserves more attention. In November, 1989, nobody knew what the future held for Europe, she states correctly. Now she is bothered by the tone of the commemorations.

Too many of them treat too much of the past two decades as a foregone conclusion, focusing on what didn’t happen rather than what did. Too many have taken the achievements for granted. Too many of us forget that there are few historical precedents for the past two decades.

On the other hand, Slavoj Zizek, an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, remarks that anti-Communism is now resurgent in the region, and dismisses the nostalgia for Communist times apparent in some quarters today.

Far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, [this nostalgia] is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.

 

Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of the Communist party.

 

They denied the very legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.

In the Financial Times, however, Klaus Zimmermann tries to extract ideology from recent developments altogether and belittles Eastern Germany’s Communist heritage as the reason why the region has been so slow to change since the Wall’s fall.

The most interesting – and overlooked – insight of east Germany’s transformation is that its difficulty in catching up with the west ultimately proves to be not so much a reflection of its communist past than of its rural, low-density population structure. Simply put, economic value increases with population density. The more companies swap ideas and the closer they cooperate, the better it is for productivity – and incomes.

 

This holds true not just in Germany, but across the board. Companies locate headquarters in densely populated areas because they offer a better habitat for decision-making in disciplines ranging from sales and marketing to research and development and overall strategy. It is in these regions that highly skilled service-sector jobs, such as software developers, finance managers, advertising specialists, business consultants and trade facilitators, are created.

 

This analysis suggests the real distinction is not so much between “east” and “west” as between low-density and high-density regions, no matter where they are in Germany.

Not many who have known the region before and after 1989 are likely to fall for this simplistic armchair depiction of the complex cultural, social, historical and economic map of Europe.

Many journalists understandably look for distinctive, if sometimes opposing, angles. Deborah Seward of the Associated Press describes a Franco-German role reversal over the past 20 years in an analysis from Paris:

Throughout the Cold War, Germany was the steadfast trans-Atlantic ally – and France the perpetual skeptic. Paris snubbed NATO, booted allied soldiers off its soil and sought a privileged relationship with Moscow. Then one night the Berlin Wall fell – and 20 years later, the roles subtly have shifted. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking to be a NATO stalwart, winning two commands by returning to the alliance earlier this year. At the same time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – while reaching out to the United States – is pursuing closer ties with Russia that have left Washington unsettled.

Writing for Le Figaro, Yves Thréard nevertheless hopes that while the history of the Wall’s fall is still being written – and rewritten – today’s French and German leaders will understand that they won’t break down any of the world’s other walls unless they work together. That may be too much to hope for.

In the hand-wringing department, Pierre Rousselin uses a blog post for Le Figaro to deplore the absence of President Barack Obama at the anniversary celebrations in Berlin on November 9. Any other U.S. President would have been there, he writes.

The absence of Barack Obama from the group of leaders of countries that have made our history is an eloquent confirmation of his lukewarm approach to a continent that is no longer a priority for the United States.

In a blog for The Daily Telegraph of the UK, Nile Gardiner, a conservative Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator, berates U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for writing Reagan out of the history of the Wall’s fall.

It’s bad enough that President Obama could not be bothered to attend the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Hillary Clinton’s refusal to even acknowledge the role played by Ronald Reagan in the Wall’s demise as well as the downfall of Communism was highly insulting towards one of the greatest figures of our time, and reeked of petty and partisan mean-spiritedness.

 

The Secretary of State’s remarks in Berlin completely erased from history the huge contribution played not only by President Reagan but also by the United States in confronting the Soviet Empire. In her speech she applauded half of Europe, but could not bring herself to thank those Americans who bravely served their country and in many cases laid down their lives in defeating Communism, under Reagan’s leadership.

Perhaps by the time of the 50th anniversary we will have got the story straight. But then again, maybe not.

How often do U.S. broadcast reports begin with a phrase like: “Yesterday saw the most violence in Afghanistan that we have seen so far this year.”? Translation: “Yesterday was the most violent day in Afghanistan so far this year.”

The following gem was delivered by a Fox News business reporter in mid-October: “The figures we’ll see for manufacturing production are unlikely to be as strong as we were expecting to see. We’ll have to see what we see there.”

Translation: “Figures for manufacturing production are likely to be weaker than expected.”

The ubiquitous phrase, “We’ll have to see what happens,” and its variants should be banned from American TV and radio. As long as we survive with our senses intact, we have no choice but to see what happens, and this irritating cliché adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge.

The misuse of “see” is not just bad style; its imprecision can obscure the meaning of a sentence. The Economist recently wrote of “the frenzied economic growth that saw the state’s [Nevada’s] population double between 1990 and 2007,” leaving it unclear whether the economic growth caused the population growth or vice versa – or whether the two just happened at the same time.

The writer probably meant that the frenzied pace of economic growth drew a lot more people to Nevada, as the word “saw” often seems to be used to suggest an underlying causal connection. Thus a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London recently wrote:

The economic crisis saw the authority of Brussels seriously weakened as governments took unilateral action to save their countries’ banks, car companies and jobs.

This presumably means: “The economic crisis seriously weakened the authority of Brussels as governments…” although it could mean just that the weakening coincided with the economic crisis.

“See” and “saw,” particularly when followed by a passive verb, as above, often generate long-winded vagueness instead of clarity and precision. Describing climate change negotiations in October, the Financial Times reported:

Instead of demanding the transfer of intellectual property, developing countries are now willing to discuss collaborating on the development of low-carbon technologies. Such a scenario would see rich world companies encouraged to co-develop new technology with developing country partners.

Apart from the absurdity of a scenario “seeing” anything, the second sentence contains no information that is not in the first sentence, other than that rich-world companies would be encouraged to join in the process. This could be conveyed by adding “…with rich-world companies encouraged to participate” to the first sentence, cutting the verbiage from 17 words to seven. But the main problem is that that the writer’s formulation – “see” followed by the passive verb – avoids any explanation of who or what would encourage the companies to participate.

Financial Times writers are frequent offenders in perpetrating this imprecise, ungainly, and usually unnecessary usage. A recent front-page story reported that: “The U.S. has seen job shedding at a rate not seen elsewhere…”

Why not: “The U.S. has shed jobs faster than elsewhere”?

Although, of course, the sentence could mean: “The U.S. has shed jobs more slowly than elsewhere.”

All too often the verb is inserted in an automaton-like way when it is totally unnecessary, as in: “Unemployment is higher than the levels seen last year,” which just means that unemployment is higher than last year.

Likewise, a BBC report said that:

The memorandum of understanding on Scots Gaelic is similar to one signed for Welsh last July. However, the move does not see it added to the EU’s list of “official” languages.

Normal English for the second sentence: “Scots Gaelic will not, however, become an official EU language.”

The Washington Post recently contained a headline: House districts that could see 2010 party switch, which should anyway be “switches” as House districts are plural. Much better would be: House districts where parties may switch in 2010.

Reporting on GM’s proposed sale of its German subsidiary Opel, the Associated Press inelegantly referred to “…Magna’s original plan, part of the bid it made in July, which saw cuts including of up to 2,045 at the plant in Bochum…” Plain English: “which included cuts of up to 2,045 at the plant in Bochum…”

Where many writers go wrong is in making some event or abstract concept the subject of the verb “to see.” Thus, the Monday Media section of The Guardian recently contained the phrase: “…a station rebrand – along with the rest of the BBC’s national networks – that saw the Radio 2 logo turn… ginger.” Another story from The Guardian referred to “…the global commodity boom, which saw his company’s profits and shares rocket,” and the Financial Times said “the peaceful revolution of 1989 saw much of eastern Europe embrace the market.” Surely, much of Eastern Europe embraced the market after the peaceful revolution, a development that was not actually witnessed by the revolution itself. In any case, how can a move, a rebrand, a commodity boom or a peaceful revolution see anything?

Is it too much to ask writers to adopt a simple rule of thumb: Apply the verb “to see” only to creatures with eyes? Unfortunately, it probably is.

Applebaum’s rather good October 13 column is entitled La Dolce Berlusconi, which is presumably meant to remind the cognoscenti of La Dolce Vita (”The Sweet Life”), the famous 1960 movie by Federico Fellini that showed decadence in contemporary Rome.

Unfortunately, use of the feminine definite article “la” makes Berlusconi female – as in “The Sweet Berlusconi Woman.” (The masculine equivalent is “il.”) So the Post headline actually appears to be about Berlusconi’s wife. Just another example of how the American media almost invariably slip up when they venture, even minimally, into a foreign tongue. Far better to stick to English – always.

This time the story was the “Yes” vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – designed to update and consolidate the EU institutions – greeted with jubilation and relief in Dublin, Brussels and elsewhere on Saturday, October 3. Considering that around 35 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, one might think that the nation’s TV stations would show more than zero interest in an event so crucial for their mother country’s future – just 16 months after Ireland rejected the Treaty in a first referendum.

An Irish “No” in the second referendum would have not only produced a crisis in Ireland’s relations with its 26 EU partners but also condemned the European Union to a further difficult period of political and institutional stagnation. The Irish “Yes” was necessary for the EU-wide adoption of the Treaty, the aims of which include enhancing the Union’s global influence though revamped foreign policy leadership.

Yet not one of the main TV stations – not even “news” channels like CNN and Fox – did stories on the referendum’s results, although viewers with sharp eyes might have detected a brief mention in the rapidly scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen. CNN preferred to run a piece Saturday about a pair of “giant marionettes” roaming the streets of Berlin to celebrate the unification of East and West Germany in 1990.

The U.S. print media covered the story with varying degrees of detail and skill, with many reports, especially the one in The Washington Post, containing serious mistakes – another regular feature of American EU coverage. The most honorable exception was The New York Times, with an excellent, error-free, Dublin-datelined piece that reported the significance of the vote for both Ireland and the European Union as a whole, and put the whole process in context. A story from The Wall Street Journal was accurate but pedestrian.

The New York Times lead was apposite and informative:

They rejected it only 16 months ago. But in a stunning about-face spurred by economic turmoil, Ireland’s voters have overwhelmingly approved a far-reaching treaty meant to consolidate the power of the European Union and reorganize the way it does business, the government announced Saturday.

 

Ireland’s approval of the pact, known as the Lisbon Treaty, removes one of the biggest stumbling blocks to its eventual enactment by Europe as a whole. The treaty would give Europe a more powerful foreign policy chief and its first full-time president, and strengthen the role of the European Parliament; it is also meant to more clearly delineate the relationship between national legislatures and Europe.

Washington Post Full of Errors

The Washington Post, on the other hand, published a report from London (is the paper really too cheap to afford a roundtrip ticket from London to Dublin?) that was so riddled with errors that it would have been better not to have run it at all. It is worth looking at these mistakes in some detail to showcase the extraordinary ignorance of most of the American media with regard to the European Union. The Post report starts with one of the hoariest, though misguided clichés in the book:

Henry Kissinger once famously asked, “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” The answer, thanks to the Irish, may soon be the president of Europe.

What’s wrong with this? Just about everything. First of all, it is very improbable that Henry Kissinger ever used that ungrammatical phrase (it should be: “Whom…”), and he himself has disowned it. Kissinger didn’t really want a “single telephone number” for Europe, because his policy was to play the various national governments off against each other and he was more than happy with multiple telephone numbers. Anyway, adoption of the Lisbon Treaty following the Irish referendum would not make the president of Europe the only person to call – there would actually be three of them.

The Treaty provides Europe with a confusing and untested triad of leaders in foreign relations – the President of the European Council, the President of the European Commission and a High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. As Kissinger never achieved a rank higher than Secretary of State, the person for him to call under Lisbon would be the High Representative, not the President.

[In an interesting article (see below) the French newspaper Le Monde argues that this triple leadership will make the European Union’s foreign policy even more chaotic than it is at present.]

Next, the WP reporter, Anthony Faiola, describes the European Union as an “alliance,” which it isn’t, and in his third paragraph he contradicts his own lead by acknowledging that, in addition to the new President, the Treaty also creates the post of High Representative, whom he describes as the European Union’s “Secretary of State.” This is misleading because the U.S. Secretary of State is a cabinet member in a national government and the European Union does not have a government comparable to that of the United States, which is one reason why the British won’t allow the High Representative to be called a Foreign Minister.

Faiola describes the President and “Secretary of State” as “more closely linking the region’s foreign policies and affording the alliance new clout on the world stage.” But it will remain up to the member governments, not the new leaders, to decide whether they want to link their foreign policies more closely, and it still has to be seen whether the Union acquires “new clout,” although that is the aim. The report continues:

The [Irish referendum] results illustrate how the global financial crisis has forced hard-hit nations such as Ireland to find new value in their EU membership, reenergizing a project in cross-border governance that some said would never work.

The author omits to mention that predictions that the project wouldn’t work date mainly from British officials and commentators in the 1950s. Further on, Faiola says the Treaty

…would fortify the power of the European Parliament on regional issues including security, agriculture and transportation, but EU nations would largely remain autonomous on the vast majority of issues.

In fact, the Treaty does not “fortify” the power of the European Parliament on security, where the Parliament’s role remains consultative, although it does increase the number of issues on which EU members would become less autonomous by losing their national vetoes in the Council of Ministers. In reality, a huge range of decisions has already been transferred by national governments to the EU institutions in Brussels, and, even without the Lisbon Treaty, it is not true that “EU nations would largely remain autonomous on the vast majority of issues.”

Next, the report states:

The position [of EU President] is envisioned to be filled with (sic) a major European statesman, similar to the U.N. secretary general.

Apart from the fact that Faiola assumes this personage will be male, the position in not at all similar to that of the UN Secretary General. The EU President’s main role is to chair the European Council, the Union’s top decision-making body, whereas the Secretary General does not chair the UN Security Council. The Secretary General never comes from a country that is a permanent member of the Security Council, but there is no such prohibition on the country of origin of the EU President. The EU President must be a current or former Head of State or Government – a prerequisite that does not apply to the UN Secretary General, who is actually more like the President of the European Commission than the President of the European Council, although that is by no means an exact fit either.

Finally, says Faiola, “Irish rejection of the treaty probably would have killed it.” No, the whole point was that a second Irish rejection would definitely, not “probably,” have killed the Treaty, which must be approved by all 27 member states. In sum, the 650-word story averages roughly two major mistakes for every three paragraphs.

A sketchy report in the Washington Examiner manages a slightly better rate of one minor and one major mistake in six paragraphs. The report repeats a common error by describing the Irish “Yes” vote as representing “a 20.5 percent swing” since the first referendum, when it means “a 20.5 point swing,” which is much larger (emphasis added). The more serious blunder is to describe Munster as a county of Ireland, when it is in fact a province, thus undermining the entire report’s credibility.

AP Confuses Council and Commission

An Associated Press report from Dublin commits an astonishing error by suggesting that the European Commission is composed of Ministers. The report includes the following sentence:

Ireland staged a second vote Friday after winning legal assurances from EU chiefs that Brussels would not interfere in any of those areas, nor take away Ireland’s guaranteed ministerial seat on the European Commission (emphasis added).

A reporter who doesn’t know the difference between the Commission, composed of high-level bureaucrats, and the Council, in which ministers meet, should not be writing about the European Union. The mistake is akin to asserting that the White House is staffed by U.S. Senators. The AP report then includes the curious sentence:

Expressions of joy and relief flooded in from European capitals, particularly neighboring Britain, where Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resisted right-wing demands to subject the Lisbon Treaty to a referendum there, too.

First of all Britain is a country, not a capital; secondly, pressure for a referendum in Britain will continue now that Ireland has voted “Yes” – a “No” vote would have removed the pressure because there would be no treaty to have a referendum about; and thirdly, as polls show that most people in Britain oppose the Lisbon Treaty, they are unlikely to have been indulging in “expressions of joy and relief” that the Irish approved it.

The AP report concludes:

One divisive alternative would have been a “two-speed Europe” in which a core of like-minded nations would move ahead of naysayers like Ireland.

The writer seems unaware that there already is a “two-speed Europe,” as not all EU countries are members of the common currency, the euro, nor of the Schengen agreement, which removes internal frontiers among participating states. It would be more accurate to say “further development of a two-speed Europe,” and that would not necessarily be divisive, because such arrangements are already envisaged under existing EU treaties, and they are designed to resolve, not create, divisions by reducing tensions between countries that wish to proceed at differing speeds.

Still No George Washington for Europe

Finally, it is worth noting a fascinating article in the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, by Arnaud Leparmentier, entitled The Still Improbable European George Washington. Leparmentier points out that at the recent G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Britain and Germany clashed over economic policy, French President Nicolas Sarkozy continued his diatribe against bankers, while Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi repeated his usual monologue against speculators in the oil market. Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Dutch Prime Minister, with only a courtesy seat at the summit went on about everything. With a disproportionate eight seats at the table, Europe produced a veritable a cacophony. He continues:

No matter, seen from Washington or Beijing: if nothing changes the G-20 will quickly be condensed into a G-2, in which the U.S. and Chinese presidents will run the planet’s affairs.

 

Can one imagine, after the Irish “Yes” to the Lisbon Treaty, that the Europeans will one day speak with a single voice to influence world affairs? That was the dream of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing [former French President, who presided over the EU Constitutional Convention], who introduced into the Treaty the idea of a full-time presidency of the European Council: a person elected for two and a half years to represent the Union on the international stage. “Europe should seek and invent its George Washington,” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing exhorts.

 

Contrary to a tenacious legend, the reorganization foreseen by the Lisbon Treaty will not simplify the functioning of the Union: it will give birth to a three-headed monster that will make Europe even more ungovernable. “George Washington” will have to cohabit with the President of the Commission, jealous of his commercial and budgetary prerogatives, and the minister of foreign affairs, who will have the [future EU] diplomatic service under his thumb. And no big European country is thinking of giving up its seat – on the G-20, the IMF, or the UN Security Council – for the sake of a unified EU representation.

 

Only a charismatic personality could federate this Europe, which is worthy of the city states of ancient Greece or the cities of the Italian Renaissance, which were doomed to marginalization because they were incapable of uniting in the face of a changing world. But few people believe in such a providential leader, given that the 27 member states were so quick to reappoint the very cautious José Manuel Barroso as President of the Commission.

 

The role of the full-time President of the Council also looks limited. Mr. Sarkozy claims to want a strong personality in the job, but he is pushing one of yesterday’s men, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, architect of the Iraq War and inventor of a bankrupt financial model, who faces considerable opposition. He seems to have given up on Mr. Blair: Mrs. Merkel wants a shadowy personality, who would not be the face of Europe but the secretary of the Heads of State and Government. The name of [Dutch Prime Minister] Balkenende, not a great euro-enthusiast, is being circulated, but a more euro-enthusiastic Finnish candidacy is possible.

 

In the absence of a sudden burst of energy on this front, Mr. Sarkozy is counting on palliating these weaknesses by giving priority to his relationship with Mrs. Merkel: aren’t these two the charismatic leaders of Europe, given that London is out of the race? Mr. Brown is at his last gasp, while his probable successor, the Conservative David Cameron, will rule himself out because of his euro-skepticism.

 

In fact, however, the French and Germans are going to tear themselves apart when the explosion of public debt threatens the euro. The two countries are moving further apart each day: Germany, which now devotes a smaller share of its budget to social spending than the United Kingdom, plans to pursue its efforts to increase productivity. Mr. Sarkozy, the man who refuses austerity, is presiding over the world champion of public spending, ahead of Sweden.

 

In industry, the Germans aim to continue their lone rider role and refuse to join France in constructing new designs. “No serious cooperation is managing to get off the ground in research,” adds a French minister, while old quarrels about the common agricultural policy and the European budget are going to resurface. “A clarification on both sides of the Rhine is indispensable,” this minister worries.

 

Almost imperceptibly, each country is looking for new frontiers outside the European Union. Germany is dealing with Russia and its Chinese clients, while the country’s constitutional court and public opinion reject any further European integration, Mr. Sarkozy is gradually de-Europeanizing his policy and forming alliances on each continent, with Brazil, Egypt, the Gulf Emirates and even India.

If U.S. journalists read this kind of analysis in the European media, they might produced better-informed, more interesting reports.

In France, the daily newspaper Le Parisien writes lyrically:

In the four corners of the world, the award of the Nobel Prize to the American President Barack Obama – astonishing to some, but little contested – is greeted as a “hope,” a reflection of expectations of “a safer world,” with the prize constituting an encouragement to “move to action.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was equally effusive, addressing his “warmest congratulations” to Obama in a message that said the prize “finally consecrates the return of America to the heart of all the world’s people.” In more prosaic vein, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “We should all support him [Obama] to make world peace more possible.”

In a first reaction, the international version of Spiegel Online places the whole of Europe in the same camp:

The sensational selection of Barack Obama as the next Nobel Peace Prize recipient surprised many leaders in Europe on Friday. The honor comes with joy and great expectations. The first reaction from the White House? A simple “wow.” The first reaction from Europe: Keep up the change, President Obama.

But 20 Minutes, a free daily published in France, Spain, and Switzerland, advises greater caution, noting that there are spreading “criticisms and reservations” concerning the award. Lech Walesa, Polish hero of the struggle against communism and winner of the award in 1983, was among the first to express doubts, saying: “Who, Obama? So fast? Too fast – he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet. For the time being Obama’s just making proposals.”

A similar line is taken by Claus Christian Malzahn, in a commentary on Spiegel Online, who writes that the prize has come too early for Obama, who “cannot point to any real diplomatic successes to date, and there are few prospects of any to come.” He continues:

Obama is just getting started. Awarding him the Nobel Prize now is like giving a medal to a marathon runner who has just managed the first few kilometers. The situation in Iraq is still fragile; in Afghanistan, it has even got worse. Despite the massive efforts by the U.S. administration, there seems little immediate prospect of reaching a compromise between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. The Iranian regime is still playing its nuclear games with the West at the diplomatic level, while at home one dissident after another is put on the scaffold. A nuclear-armed Pakistan looks close to collapse, while in North Korea, Dr. Strangelove is stroking his bomb.

Absurd Decision: London Times

A comment in The Times, headlined Absurd Decision on Obama Makes a Mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, is much more openly hostile. Michael Binyon writes:

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself. Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world. Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace. . . . The spectacle of Mr Obama mounting the podium in Oslo to accept a prize that once went to Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. However just such a war may be deemed in Western eyes, Muslims would not be the only group to complain that peace is hardly compatible with an escalation in hostilities.

Gideon Rachman, foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, is less averse to the award, but still dubious. He writes on his blog:

I am a genuine admirer of Obama. And I am very pleased that George W. Bush is no longer president. But I doubt that I am alone in wondering whether this award is slightly premature. It is hard to point to a single place where Obama’s efforts have actually brought about peace — Gaza, Iran, Sri Lanka? While it is OK to give school children prizes for ‘effort’ — my kids get them all the time — I think international statesmen should probably be held to a higher standard.

For Gideon Rachman’s views in greater detail, see his column Obama Must Start Punching Harder in the Financial Times of October 13, in which he argues that the award “did the U.S. President no favors,” by focusing attention on right-wing criticisms that he is a weak leader who apologizes for America and is more loved abroad than at home.

Many commentators also use the German results as a peg to write about the broader decline of socialism in Europe, in contrast to the leftward move in the United States with the election of President Barack Obama last November.

Under the headline SPD Debacle Shows Agony of European Centre-Left, Paul Taylor of Reuters writes: “It was a black night for Germany’s Social Democrats. Their catastrophic general election score of just 23 percent was by far the worst since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949.”

In The New York Times, Steven Erlanger reports from Paris that “the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse” is haunting Europe and that the situation in France is even worse for the left. He concludes with an expert’s viewpoint that Socialism will have no future in Europe unless it undertakes sweeping and difficult reforms. Analysts on America’s Fox News Channel say the German poll results are a rejection of the kind of leftish policies that Obama is pursuing in the United States.

Too few analysts, however, note that the defeat of the SPD (Germany’s Social Democratic Party) was matched by a decline in support for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and big swings away from the two main parties toward both right and left. The big winners were the open-market, pro-American Free Democrats (FDP), who will now form a coalition with Merkel.

But parties to the left of the Social Democrats, the Left Party (heir of the former East German Communist Party) and the pro-environmental, internationalist Greens, made significant gains. It is an over-simplification to regard the elections as simply a huge setback for socialism, when the vote was just as much a reaction against the centrist “Grand Coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats that has governed Germany for the past four years.

In an opinion piece published by Germany’s Spiegel Online, entitled Welcome to the New Germany, Claus Christian Malzahn equally goes overboard with the following comments:

After Sunday’s election, Germany’s political landscape has been shaken up, perhaps for ever. Angela Merkel’s conservatives will be able to form a coalition government with the business-friendly FDP, but the balance of power between the two parties has fundamentally shifted. And the once-powerful Social Democrats may never recover from their defeat.

That may or may not be so, but it is most unwise to use the words “for ever” and “never” in making political predictions.

Merkel may also face party revolt

On the other hand, Malzahn makes an interesting point, largely neglected elsewhere, that Merkel’s own position as leader has been weakened by the relatively poor showing of her CDU party. Malzahn says:

The charge that Merkel handed victory to the competition [the FDP] because she had such a low profile in her position as leader of the conservatives will not be long in coming from within the ranks of the Christian Democrats. The attack on her position as party leader need not happen immediately, but it is safe to assume that the regional CDU governors will soon be discussing and preparing it. There is no shortage of candidates who have their eye on the CDU leadership.

 

This means that, over the coming months, Angela Merkel will be waging a battle on two fronts: in a coalition where she will be fighting for influence with the FDP as junior coalition partner, and within her own party.

A report by Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international public broadcaster focuses on the internal upheavals that now lie ahead for the SPD: “The big losers of Germany’s general election were the Social Democrats; a miserable showing pushing them into the opposition for the first time in 11 years. In the wake of electoral disaster, heads have begun to roll.” Deutsche Welle goes on to detail the shake-up of policies and personalities that has already begun.

The international version of Spiegel Online gives a useful summary of reactions in Britain and France. In Britain, it reports:

The Guardian said that Merkel’s performance over the last four years shows that she is “Germany’s better social democrat” and that the risk-averse Germans had elected her because they are content with what they have. “Despite her huge personal popularity, she led her center-right Christian Democratic Union to its second poorest result,” the paper added. “It leaves her vulnerable to backstabbing within her party.”

 

In his blog, Gavin Hewitt, the BBC’s Europe editor, wrote that Mer”el’s coalition with the FDP will now give her “the opportunity to reveal where her true instincts lie.” At the same time, he noted that “her record in power suggests she will be pragmatic.”

In France, according to Spiegel Online:

Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy gushed with joy that his closest ally on the international stage emerged even stronger from the election. Even before the official election results had been published, Sarkozy had sent Merkel a congratulatory note wishing her “every success in the great task that the Germans are entrusting you with for the second time.” He signed the note: “Your Friend, Nicolas Sarkozy.” But the left-leaning Paris newspaper Libération appeared puzzled by the “German contradiction” that would have a pro-business party join the ruling coalition in the midst of a financial crisis. It predicted that “Supermerkel” will “surely make pragmatic politics with the FDP, albeit more in a more liberal manner than before.”

UK election likely on May 6

Continuing the tale of woe for center-left parties, Bloomberg reports that in the UK the ruling Labour Party under Prime Minister Gordon Brown has fallen to third place in an opinion poll (behind the opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) for the first time since 1982. It adds that Labour Party activists have received a campaign timetable pointing to a general election on May 6, 2010, the date that has been considered the most likely for some weeks. If current trends persist, Labour is heading for a resounding defeat in the election, which must be held by early June at the latest.

Written by Reginald Dale

On the contrary, Angela Merkel, who is expected to continue as Chancellor at the head of a coalition after the elections, has specifically pledged to return Germany to its traditional export-dependent approach after the effects of the global financial crisis wear off. She has made it clear that temporary stimulus and job-boosting measures are meant simply to tide the economy over until its export dominance can resume – neglecting the argument that countries like China and Germany will have to reduce their huge trade surpluses if the global imbalances underlying the crisis are to be resolved, and the corresponding U.S. deficit reduced. The diversion of Germany’s output from the domestic market to exports – mainly of cars, machinery, consumer durables and chemicals - is also holding back the living standards of the country’s people.

One of the factors behind German thriftiness is a Puritan streak that favors hard work and the production of goods over purportedly frivolous spending on services and financial speculation. And while Germany is quick to blame the alleged excesses of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism for the global crisis, it is less good at examining its own contribution through persistent current account surpluses, which, by definition, not everyone else can match. The answer is for Germany to boost its domestic demand and allow the share of services in the economy to grow closer to that in other advanced countries.

A French newspaper asks whether Obama is “still green,” and a well-known German magazine suggests that he is not yet ready for a global climate change agreement. One British newspaper reports that EU officials are growing increasingly frustrated with the United States, while another contains a scathing commentary entitled Obama the Impotent, which suggests the U.S. President may be out of his depth. A Danish paper is calling for decisions to be postponed by six months, given that the Copenhagen conference risks turning into a fiasco because America is unprepared.

Asking whether Obama is still green, France-Soir says more and more voices are being raised in Europe to remind Obama of his electoral promises on the environment – promises today erased by the economic crisis and reform of the U.S. health care system.

Under the heading Yes We Can – But Not Yet, the international version of Germany’s Spiegel Online reports that “the climate debate has run aground in the U.S. Environmental protection has many opponents and they’re extremely well organized. Even President Obama’s own party is withholding its support.” The report continues:

The House of Representatives in June passed a climate law with tougher emissions rules. But it was diluted to such an extent that Brent Blackwelder of environmental group Friends of the Earth said: “The lobby for oil giants, dirty coal, farming giants and Wall Street castrated the law.”

This watered-down version of the law is still stuck in the U.S. Senate where Obama can’t even count on his fellow Democrats. But without U.S. leadership, a deal in Copenhagen looks impossible.

The Financial Times carries a report September 22 headlined Rift with U.S. Clouds Climate Summit, and another entitled EU Sees U.S. as Biggest Obstacle to Agreement. The FT says that whereas China and India used to be seen as the countries most likely to hang back on commitments to curb greenhouse gases, “Brussels policymakers are making a surprising re-evaluation: that the U.S. is more of an obstacle to a deal.”

An astonishingly hard-hitting commentary in The Guardian, Obama the Impotent, written by an American, says:

Many leaders and supporters are beginning to wonder what is causing this growing gap between the Barack Obama that many people saw on the campaign trail, and the Obama they see in the White House?

Beyond Obama’s oratorical skills, which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he is mostly untested as a politician. . . . A sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

As a result, the writer concludes:

Unless Barack Obama is able to demonstrate a better level of political skill than he has shown so far, everyone needs to fasten their seatbelts. The world is about to enter a challenging phase where the U.S. – the undisputed leader of the free world for the past 60 years – is going to rapidly cede its place at the head of the line. It appears that the wheels may be coming off the world’s post-war leader, and not even Barack Obama can stop it happening.

In Denmark, site of the December conference, an editorial in the daily newspaper Politiken calls for the climate talks to be moved to next summer. “No one can be served by a pompous climate summit in Copenhagen which doesn’t bind the world’s major countries to a real reorganization of energy consumption,” the paper writes. It adds:

Following the announcement by the Democrats in the United States that they neither can nor will bind themselves to concrete climate targets prior to the summit in December, the likelihood of success in Copenhagen has fallen to zero. The dream of Denmark as the stage for a global rescue plan has burst. . . . On the contrary, the Climate Summit risks becoming a fiasco.

The Americans are, and will continue to be, decisive in the negotiations for a more ambitious replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. As long as Congress is not ready to give President Barack Obama a clear mandate, the other major countries are not going to bind themselves to extensive reductions in CO2 emissions either. . . . The time has come to consider a Plan B. The most obvious would be to call for a new conference next summer, so the Americans have time to negotiate a quota system.

The video shows a young blonde Danish woman, “Karen,” with her baby, “August,” saying she wants to let the anonymous father know that he has a child in Denmark – the fruit of a single, casual encounter. “Karen” says she doesn’t even know the father’s name or country of origin, but she doesn’t “blame” him. It turns out, however, that the “mother” is in fact actress Ditte Arnth Jorgensen, who has launched a similar stunt video before, that “August” is not her baby, and that the video was produced by the Grey Group international advertising agency.

When Danish media revealed that the tourist board was behind the video, it was assailed for trying to sell the country by suggesting that willing young blondes were readily available. Similar disapproval was voiced by the media in Britain and other European countries, and even by some in the United States. Passport, the blog of the U.S. Foreign Policy magazine, described the video as “the worst tourist advertisement ever produced.” Others wondered exactly what clientele the tourist board was targeting – certainly not women, seniors, couples, or families.

With the outcry mounting, the tourist board announced that it had removed the video from YouTube – assuming such a thing to be possible after a video has gone viral – but not before it had already scored more than 800,000 hits. A Grey advertising representative hailed the video as “the most successful viral advertising ever,” saying it had “cut through the media clutter” – all for the same cost as a 30-second commercial aired a few times on Danish TV.

Dorte Kiilerich of VisitDenmark described the video as the “most effective thing we have ever done to market Denmark,” claiming that it shows Denmark as a place where women live in a free society and can make their own choices. “This is a good, sweet and really harmless story and it’s not unusual to sell false stories when you communicate,” Kiilerich said. That sounded laughable to the ad’s critics, especially the notion that it’s OK for government bodies to “sell false stories” – even though few may find that surprising.