Global News Journal

Europe can’t put out the blaze

If the world thought that Europe’s finance ministers were running in to put out the blaze spreading through Athens and Rome this week, it might come as a surprise to learn they still don’t agree on the size of the fire or how to deal with it.

Any training course will tell you that if a small fire isn’t tackled quickly, it could make things a lot worse. The Greek crisis is like a small electrical fire that has grown into a dangerous inferno now threatening to gut Italy.

But ministers meeting in Brussels have clearly not been on any fire extinguisher training courses lately — they don’t know their water from their foam and their dry powder. In fact, they appear to be pouring oil on the fire.

Belgium’s Finance Minister Didier Reynders says it is best to try to smother the blaze with a small cloth soaked in a chemical called a financial transaction tax, while Sweden’s Anders Borg and Austria’s Maria Fekter say they can’t spare any of their CO2 extinguishers.

“Italy can achieve a lot from its own doing,” Fekter told reporters who were watching the fire grow closer. Borg, Fekter and others are sure the Italians in the burning building down the street will be able to sort things out themselves.

Spain’s Elena Salgado is meanwhile clearly upset that the smoke from that fire is billowing into her garden, but France’s Francois Baroin says there was no need to reach for a fire hose: “Tout va bien” (Everything’s going well), he said, wiping his brow from the heat. A combustible mix of hot air and faulty wiring seem to be one assessment of the causes of the euro zone flames, which no one is really willing to consider. But as the sound of emergency sirens grows louder, it may be time to remove the safety pin from the extinguisher marked “European Central Bank” — it may be the only way to remove all the oxygen feeding the fire.

Waiting for Europe’s “appropriate response”

Will the euro zone finally act decisively?

Investors are hoping for something big from European leaders at the EU summit on Oct. 23 and of the Group of 20 on Nov. 3. But they also know the 17 nations of the euro have a habit of offering delayed, half-hearted rescues that have cost them credibility.

So there’s been a lot of “urging” and “warning” in Brussels lately — politicians and central bankers have all been demanding Europe act as international alarm grows that its sovereign debt problems may drag the world into recession. “Further delays are only aggravating the situation,” said European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Tuesday in his last appearance at the European Parliament, before he hands over the post to Mario Draghi on Nov. 1.

A day earlier, Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister, Joerg Asmussen, at the parliament to promote his candidacy to join the ECB‘s board, made his call, saying “cooperation has to be increased,” across the euro members, divided as to who should pay to rescue the heavily indebted nations of southern Europe. “I want to see a solution for debt sustainability for Greece,” Asmussen said. So do so many others, especially Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who in Brussels on Thursday said it was a “crucial element to make the necessary decisions concerning Greece.”

The European Roundtable of Industrialists, a business lobby of multinationals ranging from French car maker Renault to Spain’s Telefonica, has also come through Brussels to make its point. The group’s head, Leif Johansson, who is also chairman of Swedish phone maker Ericsson, warned that if European leaders fail to act, businesses could see a repeat of the liquidity freeze that followed the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.

“The worst element of the 2008/2009 crisis was when liquidity froze,” he said. “The worst scenario we have right now is that that could happen again … and there is a real downside risk.” 

The Oct. 23 summit is being billed as a make-or-break event where Germany and France, the main powers in the euro zone, must come up with the solutions investors want. A meeting last Sunday between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and their promise of a comprehensive strategy, suggests there will be a serious attempt to put forward a framework to try to resolve the crisis.

from FaithWorld:

Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim?

(Photo: Muslims who could not fit into a small Paris mosque pray in the street, a practice the French far-right has compared to the Nazi occupation, December 17, 2010/Charles Platiau)

One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill "Eurabia" claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.

The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye'or popularised the term with her 2005 book "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.

A good example is the video "Muslim Demographics," an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an "Islamic republic" by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children -- a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a "Muslim state" by 2050 and that "in only 15 years" the Dutch population would be half Muslim. "Some studies show that, at Islam's current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world," the video declares as it urges viewers to "share the Gospel message in a changing world."

The BBC produced its own video entitled "Welcome to Eurabia?" that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video's claims. Watching "Muslim Demographics" and "Welcome to Eurabia?" back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of "Eurabia" created by Oren Neu Dag.

Articles defending the "Eurabia" claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled "The Future of the Global Muslim Population" (here's the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:

from MacroScope:

Will China make the world green?

Joschka Fischer was never one to mince words when he was Germany's foreign minister in the late '90s and early noughts. So it is not overly surprising that he has painted a picture in a new post of a world with only two powers -- the United States and China -- and an ineffective and divided Europe on the sidelines.

More controversial, however, is his view that China will not only grow into the world's most important market over the coming years, but will determine what the world produces and consumes -- and that that will be green.

Fischer, who was leader of  Germany's Green Party, reckons that due to its sheer size and needed GDP growth, China will have to pursue a green economy. Without that, he writes in his Project Syndicate post, China will quickly reach limits to growth with disastrous ecological and, as a result, political consequences.

This will have serious consequences on the the way the West lives.

Consider the transition from the traditional automobile to electric transport. Despite European illusions to the contrary, this will be decided in China, not in the West. All that will be decided by the West’s globally dominant automobile industry is whether it will adapt and have a chance to survive or go the way of other old Western industries: to the developing world.

This is not the usual view of China. Many greens have long feared the impact of a huge leap in Chinese growth on the global environment -- refrigerators in a billion homes, cars in a billion garages etc.

EU delivers its own “State of the Union” address

The European Union talks frequently about wanting to be a bigger player in the world, about making its political influence match its economic weight and the need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States.

And at least in one respect it can now say it’s America’s equal – both have a State of the Union address.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, delivered his inaugural State of the Union speech to the European Parliament on Tuesday, a sweeping assessment of where the bloc of 27 countries stands and what it needs to do to be better in the future, tapping a similar vein to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress in January.

But beyond the matching titles, and some common themes, there were few similarities, at least from a rhetorical point of view.

Barroso’s 4,300-word discourse was heavy on EU-speak, the need for the Union’s member states to stand closely together, work on “economic governance” and build “strategic partnerships” for the future.  It was hardly a grand rallying cry to the glories of greater European unity.

Compare for example this passage from early in Barroso’s address, assessing Europe’s response to the economic crisis, to a similar passage from Obama’s State of the Union.

“As I look back at how we have reacted, I believe that we have withstood the test,” said Barroso. “We have provided many of the answers needed — on financial assistance to member states facing exceptional circumstances, on economic governance, on financial regulation, on growth and jobs. And we have been able to build a base camp from which to modernise our economies. Europe has shown it will stand up and be counted.”

Whatever happened to Europe’s debt crisis?

If people stop commenting on the financial crisis, does it still exist?

A month ago, Europe was in the throes of fretting about Greece’s debt problems and whether they were going to spill over to Portugal and Spain, bringing down the euro and a decade of monetary union with it. At the same time there was intense anxiety about impending results from stress tests on nearly 100 European banks.

Every day — and sometimes several times a day – European Union officials, ministers, leaders or central bank governors would say something about the crisis, providing more fodder for frazzled financial markets to make another round of cliff-hanging calls over whether things were getting better or worse.

The market gyrations would prompt more questioning of officials, adding more verbal fuel to the fire, keeping the merry-go-round twirling.

Of course, decisions were also being taken that helped calm fevered brows — Greece took steps to cut government spending, the stress test results largely proved reassuring, and Portugal and Spain financed their debts through the markets without too much disruption.

But mostly, officials just stopped commenting on the crisis. Why? In large part because European went on holiday.

The European Union effectively shuts down in August — the Commission holds no briefings, the European Parliament is in recess and there are no leaders’ summits. This year most headed for the beaches in the last week of July.

“It’s good to talk” EU tells Serbia, Kosovo

The message to Serbia from Brussels is clear: swallow your pride and start talking to Kosovo. Without strong evidence that Belgrade is mending ties with its former province, the message goes on, Serbia’s pathway to European Union entry will be rocky, if not blocked entirely.

Quietly, EU diplomats warn that Serbia must tread carefully on the issue. Since the International Court of Justice ruled last week that Kosovo’s 2008 secession was legal, the province is gone from Serbia for good, they caution.

“After the ICJ decision, anyone who thinks the status of Kosovo as independent will be reversed is delusional,” one  Brussels-based diplomat stated plainly.

At the same time, it’s not as if the EU is above mixed messages. Twenty-two of the EU’s member states recognise Kosovo’s independence, while the remaining five are more sympathetic to Serbia. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers this week, several governments pressed for Serbia to be given inducements, such as a smoother ride towards EU entry, to get it to start negotiating with Kosovo.

But no such incentives emerged. On the contrary, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said after the meeting that the bloc was waiting for Serbia, and for good measure Kosovo too, to make the first step.

That has fallen on deaf ears in Belgrade, where politicians insist they will never recognise Kosovo.

Hostility between the two runs deep. Serbia sees Kosovo as the inseparable birthplace of its Orthodox Church. Kosovars will never forget the brutal crackdown by Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb army that ended with NATO bombings in 1999.

Religious leaders and the EU take tentative first steps

Top European Union officials held talks this week with religious leaders, part of a policy of holding consultations with religious groups that was enshrined in the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty, which came into force last December. But not everyone supports the move.   More than two dozen Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders — joined by a representative each from the Hindu and Sikh communities — met  the presidents of the European Parliament, European Commission and European Council on Monday to discuss how to fight poverty and social exclusion.

It was the the sixth such consultation since 2005, but the first to take place in the context of the Lisbon treaty, the EU’s latest collective agreement.  Article 17 of the treaty commits the EU to maintaining “an open, transparent and regular dialogue with … churches and (non-confessional and philosophical) organisations”.

But opponents of the guidance say that because many Europeans are secular and an increasing number practise non-Christian religions, churches should not have special rights.

“Leaders need to respect the separation between church and state,” said Jean de Brueker, deputy secretary general of the European Humanist Federation, which advocates more secularism in Europe. De Brueker’s organisation says separate consultation agreements should be limited to elected officials and those with recognised special expertise.     Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, said the EU was a secular organisation but spoke about the moral significance of the 27-country bloc, hinting at the need for spiritual and religious input.      “The European Union has to be a union of values. That is our added value in the world. That is the soft power of Europe in the world,” he told reporters.     Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Poland, who spent decades in the Vatican as private secretary to Pope John Paul II — who played a subtle but intimate role in late Soviet politics — has spoken in favour of Article 17.     “I believe there is a need for such consultations with churches so as not to make mistakes on moral or ethical issues, for the benefit of societies,” Dziwisz told Reuters in December. “Let’s not forget that religion is also a great force that creates cultures and societies. It cannot be bypassed.”     The European Parliament will meet Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox leaders on Sept. 30 to discuss how to implement Article 17, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said.

One way or another, debate over what role the Church, and by extension churches, can play in engaging with the European Union is only likely to intensify. The EU’s hopes of ‘reaching out’ to religious communities may very well end up drawing it deeper into a complex, centuries-old debate.

Life no paradise in EU’s outer regions

Times are hard in distant corners of the European Union, even when the sun is shining and the euro zone’s debt problems are thousands of miles away.

Leaders of nine regions on the edges of the EU are asking the rest of the 27-country bloc to pay more attention to their needs and shape investment policies better to their problems, exacerbated in some cases by the global economic crisis.

“Poverty in the sunshine is no easier than poverty in the snow”, said Frantz Gumbs, leader of the small French community on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.

“We’re not asking for more and more”, he told a conference in Brussels. “We’re asking for better.”

The voices of territories as far away as the Indian Ocean and South America are rarely heard at the heart of the EU. So leaders from these regions, the most distant of which was the island of Reunion, a French territory about 9,000 km (5,640 miles) from Brussels, took the chance offered by the first Forum for Outermost Europe.

The leaders said EU support should be better tailored to their specific needs and their efforts to strengthen their traditional economic sectors, boost competitiveness and develop entrepreneurship.

The French community of Saint Martin makes up just under half of the about 75,000 population of the island, half of which is French and half of which is part of the Netherlands’ Antilles.

EU squabbles feed market frenzy

  The European Union can rarely have been more in need of a show of unity than now, as it tries to convince financial markets it can handle the euro zone’s debt crisis.

    Hardly a day goes by without a European leader underlining the need to act together, but hardly a day passes without signs of differences among them that undermine the impression of unity.

    This week is no exception. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a speech in Brussels on Tuesday: “We can turn today’s challenges into opportunities only if we stand together, give a collective response.”

    But comments he made in an interview published hours earlier showed the EU’s leaders are anything but united in their vision of how to tackle the crisis.

    In the interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Barroso dismissed as “naive” Germany’s call for the EU treaty to be modified to prevent a repeat of Greece’s debt crisis — and Germany hit back quickly.

    Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said he was surprised at the remarks and went on to criticise a joint euro bond proposed by European Union President Herman Van Rompuy, saying it would create the wrong incentives and reward member states that do not pursue sensible budget policies.

    “What we need are clear signals for solid state finances in order to secure trust in the euro over the long term, and to prevent future crises,” Bruederle said.