Cartoon de Kroll para o jornal Le Soir

As fantasias ocidentais sobre a revolução iraniana revisitadas por Daniel J. Flynn no City Journal

The bloody scenes in Tehran, with at least 19 protestors killed so far in clashes with government forces, may seem like a repeat in miniature of the violence there more than 30 years ago. The glaring difference is that the protestors who toppled a corrupt, oppressive regime in 1979 have become the corrupt, oppressive regime in 2009.

With the 1979 Iranian revolution so close in the rearview mirror, the mistakes of Western observers then bear remembering today, as the seeds of something momentous may be again at hand. In the late seventies, some intellectuals, enamored with the idea of revolution in general and the anti-Western outlook of the Iranian revolutionaries in particular, projected their political values on the shah’s deposers. When, instead of embracing the ideology of Harvard Square or Telegraph Avenue, the revolutionaries exported terror, exhibited a toxic anti-Semitism, persecuted homosexuals, and pursued nuclear weapons, many of these intellectuals emerged with egg on their faces. As Mother Jones editor Adam Hochschild candidly admitted after Iranian reality had dashed Western dreams: “The Left is always better at seeing what leads to revolutions than at seeing what may follow them.” Though criticisms of the shah of Iran for human-rights abuses and other crimes seemed on the mark, Hochschild conceded in 1980 that his magazine had been “embarrassingly nearsighted about [the shah’s] successors.”

A year earlier, Mother Jones had been much more buoyant about the Iranian revolution’s prospects. “What kind of state might result if Khomeini or his followers take power?,” Eqbal Ahmad asked in the magazine’s April 1979 issue. “As someone who has talked with him at length, I believe that, when Khomeini speaks of an Islamic state for Iran, it is a Shi’ite scholar’s way of saying that he wants a good state in Iran. His concept of a good state includes democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government.” Ahmad ridiculed the view that “reactionary Muslim mullahs motivated by their hostility to modernization and reforms” led the revolution. “Left alone,” he speculated, “Iran without the Shah would probably evolve into a country that looked like Spain or Portugal without Franco or Salazar.” Even by the magazine’s postdated publication date, the prediction appeared ridiculous.

Sounding like the ideological tourists who visited Iran’s Soviet neighbors several generations earlier, Kai Bird opined in the March 31, 1979 issue of The Nation that “there is every reason to believe that the still unpublished [Iranian] Constitution will include all the elements of a liberal democratic system.” The future Pulitzer Prize winner exuberantly noted how merchants hawked Lenin and Marx on the streets. He imagined decentralized workers’ collectives, rather than the state, controlling Iran’s oil industry. In the April 21, 1979 issue, Bird described the economic views of Iranian oil workers as not very different from those of the average Nation reader. He wrote, “The worker komitehs want to participate in [oil policy] decisions—and if they persevere, there will be little room left for the fellows from Exxon.” In an unsigned editorial in the March 24, 1979 issue, anticipating its special correspondent’s report, The Nation excused “the revolutionary insistence on summary justice” by maintaining that it “may have staved off a far bloodier round of private vengeance.” After all, “less than forty former Pahlevi officials have been executed, and with only one possible exception, each was prominently associated with the worst excesses of state power in the Shah’s era.” But just a few months after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumph, events forced Bird to concede that the Islamic Revolution had been a “disappointment.”

“One thing must be clear,” warned postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault in the fall of 1978. “By ‘Islamic government,’ nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.” An atheist homosexual, Foucault nevertheless found himself seduced by an Islamic revolution that targeted people like himself once it had consolidated power. Writing for the French and Italian press, the celebrity intellectual made two trips to Iran in the fall of 1978 to compile material for his firsthand dispatches.

Prophetic in seeing Islam as a “powder keg” of political force, Foucault was horribly remiss in his uncritical assessment of Islamism. From his conversations in Iran, and in Paris with exiles such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, Foucault was not, unlike other Western intellectuals, deluded into believing that the shah’s overthrow would result in a secular government familiar to Westerners. Rather, he believed that an Islamic theocracy might consist of equal rights for men and women, a socialist redistribution of oil profits, and a responsive democracy, among other things.

Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur in October 1978, Foucault outlined the principles that he believed would undergird any emergent Islamic state in Iran: “Islam values work; no one can be deprived of the fruits of his labor; what must belong to all (water, the subsoil) shall not be appropriated by anyone. With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others; minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not injure the majority; between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is a natural difference. With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs.”

The devotion to socialism, pluralism, democracy, and disarmament that Foucault, Bird, and others imagined in their Persian proxies turned out to be remarkable delusions. Rather than looking at Iran and describing the ugliness they saw, prominent intellectuals instead looked in the mirror, reported the beauty they saw there, and called it Iran.

Their blindness offers a cautionary lesson for today. As a new generation of Iranians rebel against yesterday’s revolutionaries, conservatives appalled by the anti-Americanism of the Iranian old guard risk projecting their political values upon today’s revolutionaries. This is Iran, after all, and even the opposition candidate despises Israel, aggressively pushes for a nuclear Iran, and has heretofore shown little interest during his long political career in transitioning from government by ayatollahs and mullahs to government by the people.

President Obama, who undermines his credibility by vacillating between remaining strategically outside of the fray and inserting himself in it by telling Iranians that the whole world is watching, nevertheless seems to understand the danger of getting Western hopes up too high: “Although there is amazing ferment taking place in Iran, the difference in actual policies between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as advertised,” the president explained on CNBC last week. “I think it’s important to understand that either way, we are going to be dealing with a regime in Iran that is hostile to the U.S.”

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0624df.html

JPTF 2009/06/26

Leituras: As Faces de Janus: Marxismo e Fascismo no Século XX, de A. James Gregor (Imprensa da Universidade de Yale, 2000)

Descrição do livro:
Attempting to understand the catalogue of horrors that has characterised much of twentieth-century history, Western scholars generally distinguish between violent revolutions of the "right" and the "left". Fascist regimes are assigned to the evil right, Marxist-Leninist regimes to the benign left. But this distinction has left us without a coherent understanding of the revolutionary history of the twentieth century, contends A. James Gregor in this insightful book. He traces the evolution of Marxist theory from the 1920s through the 1990s and argues that the ideology of Marxism-Leninism devolved into fascism. Fascist regimes and Communist regimes - both anti-democratic ideocracies - are far more closely related than has been recognised. Employing wide-ranging primary source materials in Italian, German, Russian, and Chinese, the book opens with an examination of the first standard Marxist interpretation of Mussolini's fascism in the early 1920s and proceeds through the emergence of fascist phenomena in post-Communist Russia. A clearer understanding of the relation between fascism and communism provides a sharper lens through which to view twentieth-century history as well as the present and future politics of Russia, Communist China, and other non-democratic states, Gregor concludes.
JPTF 2009/06/24

Cartoon: O rastilho explosivo da eleição presidencial iraniana

‘O ataque dos BRIC‘: Brasil, Rússia, Índia e China ensaiam bloco contra o G7 in Courrier International

Le Brésil, la Russie, l’Inde et la Chine, pays désormais rassemblés sous l’acronyme "BRIC", se sont réunis pour la première fois en vue de tenir un langage commun face aux grands défis internationaux. Ils ont affirmé vouloir une réforme rapide du système financier mondial, même si la question d'une monnaie de réserve supranationale fait débat entre eux, et ont manifesté le souhait d'être plus influents et de se faire entendre davantage aux Nations unies. Le sommet qui a eu lieu le 16 juin dernier dans l’Oural, à Ekaterinbourg, la troisième ville de Russie, se voulait le contrepoids du sommet du G7 (groupe des sept pays les plus industrialisés) qui aura lieu dans un mois en Italie. Le ministre des Affaires étrangères brésilien, Celso Amorim, a donné le ton vendredi. "Le G7 est mort. Il ne représente plus rien. Je ne sais pas comment sera l’enterrement…", a-t-il confié à l'AFP. Les grands pays émergents représentent 25 % des terres habitables de la planète, 40 % de la population mondiale et 15 % du produit intérieur brut mondial. Ce sont en réalité des pays encore très pauvres, mais leur potentiel de croissance est de plus en plus important. Selon Goldman Sachs, qui a inventé l’acronyme BRIC en 2001, ces pays pèseront de plus en plus dans l’économie mondiale. Le PIB de la Chine, par exemple, dépassera celui des Etats-Unis d’ici à 2050. Aujourd’hui, les pays du BRIC pèsent pour 15 % dans le commerce mondial, un chiffre qui devrait augmenter au fil des années. Nandan Unnikrishnan, chercheur à l'Observer Research Foundation de New Delhi et qui a l’oreille des autorités indiennes, met en exergue ce qui unit les quatre pays. Il évoque aussi les relations tumultueuses entre l’Inde et la Chine, les deux moteurs asiatiques du BRIC.

LE TEMPS Le BRIC est-il un concept viable ?
NANDAN UNNIKRISHNAN Les quatre pays ont de nombreuses préoccupations communes : les réformes de la gouvernance mondiale, la mise en place d’une nouvelle architecture financière avec un système de régulation, la démocratisation du Fonds monétaire international pour refléter le véritable poids économique de chaque pays membre, des réformes à apporter à l’ONU et au Conseil de sécurité. Ces revendications ne doivent pas laisser penser que le BRIC est une nouvelle version des pays non-alignés. Les quatre pays ne sont pas identiques. Les économies brésilienne et russe sont fondées sur l’exploitation et l’exportation des matières premières, alors que l’Inde et la Chine sont des importateurs. Dans le domaine industriel, la Russie et le Brésil ont déjà des secteurs très avancés, notamment l’aviation, que la Chine et l’Inde voudraient développer.

La Chine et l’Inde peuvent-elles vraiment s’entendre ?
Les relations entre les deux pays sont très complexes et représentent un défi. Ils souffrent de l’héritage de la colonisation. Les frontières ont été découpées de façon arbitraire. Elles ont donné lieu à une guerre entre les deux pays en 1962. Le différend n’est toujours pas réglé. Une commission y travaille, mais elle ressemble davantage à un chien qui dort et qu’il ne faut pas réveiller. Il s’agit d’une question difficile, c’est pourquoi il faudra encore beaucoup de temps pour la résoudre. Le plus important, c'est que les possibilités d’une nouvelle guerre sont pratiquement inexistantes.

Y a-t-il des points de convergence ?
Les deux pays sont des économies émergentes. Le commerce entre eux ne cesse d’augmenter : il se monte aujourd’hui à plus de 45 milliards de dollars. Nous avons beaucoup de positions communes dans les forums internationaux, notamment dans les négociations commerciales du cycle de Doha. Le fait que nos diplomates s’entendent nous aide à construire une relation de confiance. Construire cette confiance est un objectif majeur.

Les pays du BRIC ne sont-ils pas concurrents dans le commerce international ?
Absolument. Pas seulement dans la conquête des marchés, mais aussi dans la course aux matières premières. Nous avons tous un grand besoin d’énergie ou d’acier. Le Brésil, la Chine et l’Inde se concurrencent, notamment en Afrique. Il y a aussi une vraie concurrence dans le développement des voies maritimes : Pékin et Delhi tentent de s’assurer l’accès aux ports en Asie et en Afrique.

Comment expliquez-vous qu’il y ait plusieurs plaintes commerciales déposées à l’OMC entre le Brésil, l’Inde et la Chine ? Récemment, l’Inde a d’ailleurs interdit l’importation de différents produits chinois ?
C’est de bonne guerre. Lorsque les enfants font leurs dents, ils cherchent toujours à mordre. Il ne s’agit pas de problèmes fondamentaux. Il faut voir le nombre de choses que nous faisons déjà ensemble.
Des entreprises chinoises investissent en Inde. Des entreprises indiennes produisent en Chine.

http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2009/06/18/bresil-russie-inde-chine-l-attaque-des-bric
JPTF 2009/06/19

Leituras: ‘A Europa como Império. A natureza da União Europeia Alargada‘ de Jan Zielonka

Derrota generalizada dos partidos socialistas/sociais-democratas nas eleições europeias in Guardian, 8 de Junho de 2009

Europe's mainstream centre-left parties suffered humiliation last night when four days of voting in the EU's biggest-ever election concluded with disastrous results for social democrats.

Results from the national rounds of the European parliament election across the 27 member states also showed support for centre-right Christian democrats diminishing in places, but nonetheless notching up handsome victories in several key states.

In Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the centre right won the elections, with stunning defeats for the left in certain cases.

In the EU's biggest country, Germany, returning 99 of the parliament's 736 seats, the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition, sunk to an all-time low, with 21% of the vote.

The result was slightly worse than a dismal performance five years ago that all the opinion polls had predicted would not be repeated.

"The result is significantly worse than we expected," said Franz Müntefering, the SPD's chairman. "This is a difficult evening."

Less than four months before Germany's general election, last night's outcome augured well for Merkel's hopes of ditching her grand coalition in favour of a centre-right alliance with the small Free Democrats, who made the biggest gains, from six to more than 10%.

Next door in Austria, the chancellor and leader of the Social Democrats, Werner Faymann, led his party to its worst ever election result, just over 23%.

In both countries, the Christian democrats won comfortably, but Merkel's Christian Democrats and her Bavarian CSU allies were six points down, on 38%.

France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed triumph with 28% for his UMP party to the Socialists 17%, the first time a sitting French president has won a European election since the vote began 30 years ago.

In Italy, the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi also did well, despite his marital breakdown and scandals over parties at his Sardinian villa, while in Spain the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero also lost the election to conservatives.

"It is bitterly disappointing, we had hoped for a better result. In most countries it went pretty bad for us," said Martin Schulz, the leader of the Socialist group in the European parliament.

With the social democrats licking their wounds and the centre-right scoring victories whether in power or in opposition, the other signal trend of the ballot was the breakthroughs achieved by extreme right-wing nationalists and xenophobes.

Following on from the triumph of Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam campaigner, who came second with 17% in the Netherlands on Thursday, the hard-right and neo fascists chalked up further victories .

The anti-Gypsy extremists in Hungary, Jobbik, took three of the country's 22 seats; in Austria two far-right parties mustered 18%, and extreme Slovak nationalists gained their first seat in the European parliament.

Anti-Brussels candidates and Eurosceptics also won more seats in Denmark, Finland, Austria, and the Czech Republic.

The misery for the centre left, exemplified by Germany's SPD and Labour's traumas in the UK, deepened as results trickled in from other big EU states, such as France, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

The main opposition for Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, is further to the right, while the leaders in France and Italy appeared to benefit from tough anti-immigration and law-and-order stances, despite the soap opera nature of both leaders' private lives.

With the jobless numbers soaring amid the worst economic crisis in the lifetimes of European voters, the centre left is clearly failing to benefit politically in circumstances that might be expected to boost its support.

In the Netherlands on Thursday, in the first of the four-day election marathon, the Dutch Labour party, junior partner in the government, also took a hammering, losing 11 points to come third and failing for the first time to lead in at least one of the country's four big cities.

If the social democrats in the big countries of Europe faced a bout of soul-searching pessimism last night, many of the smaller EU countries offered little consolation.

The opposition centre-right in Ireland also notched up gains, while the Fianna Fáil government performed wretchedly. The opposition right in Hungary scored a landslide victory against a discredited socialist government.

Crumbs of comfort for the centre left came from Portugal, Greece, and Malta.

But analysts noted that the protest votes and victories for mavericks could also be ascribed to a lackluster election campaign in which leaders of key countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the other big member states failed to project any persuasive pro-European vision in the midst of the most worrying economic crisis ever experienced by voters.

Yesterday was the big election day, with 18 of the 27 staging ballots, as well as Italy voting for the second day. Britain and the Netherlands kicked off the voting marathon on Thursday last week, with a further five countries following on Friday and Saturday.

Estimates of the new balance of power in the 736-seat assembly suggest that the centre right will have around 270 seats to the socialists' 160, a much wider margin than predicted.

The four-day vote was the biggest ever for the EU's only directly elected institution, with 375 million people entitled to choose from more than 10,000 candidates for 736 seats.

Hans-Gert Pöttering, the outgoing president, or speaker, of the European parliament, stressed that Europeans "want" the parliament, but conceded that that desire would not be reflected in the turnout.

Pöttering, a German Christian Democrat, is likely to be the sole MEP to serve in all seven parliaments since voting began in 1979.

The assembly, he said, closing the final session last month, is "the centre of a European parliamentary democracy of which we could only dream in 1979".

The damning popular verdict on that assertion, however, was the lowest turnout in 30 years. It was estimated at around 43%, compared with 45% last time, and 62% in Europe's first election in 1979.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/07/eu-elections-social-democrats
JPTF 2009/06/08

Cartoon de Bleibel no Courrier International

‘O drama multicultural‘ da Holanda: resultados eleitorais mostram uma crescente polarização da sociedade holandesa

In politics, things can turn on a euro cent. Just six month ago Wouter Bos was celebrated for the way he dealt with the financial crisis. The Dutch Labour party leader and finance minister soared in the opinion polls. But all that was forgotten when people went to vote on Thursday, and dealt Bos' party a devastating blow: Labour lost four of its seven seats in the European parliament.

The Christian democrats, the other major coalition partner, also took a severe beating: it went from seven to five seats. That didn't keep prime minister and party leader Jan Peter Balkenende from claiming victory: "We said we wanted to remain the biggest party and that's what happened," Balkenende said, adding nevertheless that his coalition government will have to work hard to regain the public's confidence.

The big winner of Thursday's election was undoubtedly Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom (PVV) went from zero to four seats, making it the second biggest Dutch party in the Brussels parliament in its first European election.

Low turnout

The mainstream parties had silently hoped that the traditional low turnout for European elections would prevent a PVV breakthrough, going on the assumption that Wilders supporters are not that interested in Europe and wouldn't bother to vote. That turned out to be wrong. Despite a record low turnout - 36.5 percent, 2.5 points less than in 2004 - the PVV was able to attract 16.9 percent of all voters. According to research by public broadcaster NOS, many PVV voters were men and/or over fifty.

At a party meeting on Monday, Wilders had correctly predicted that the PVV would become bigger than his old party, the right-wing liberal VVD, which he broke away from in 2004. Still, VVD party leader Mark Rutte was not entirely unhappy with his party's three seats - down from four. Opinion polls had predicted a bigger loss. Just ahead of the election, Rutte had caused a controversy by proposing to broaden the definition of freedom of speech to include Holocaust denial. No matter how hard he tried to explain what exactly he meant, Rutte was ruthlessly attacked by political friends and foes alike. "This is a good result, " Rutte said on Thursday night.

But even Wilders had not expected his party to become bigger than Labour. "This the day the PVV finally made its breakthrough," he said. "People have had enough of the Balkenende and Bos cabinet." Wilders will not be going to Brussels himself; preferring to concentrate on national politics. Instead, an aide, Barry Madlener, will lead the PVV's four-man delegation to the European parliament, an institution it would like to see abolished.

'No real answers'

Just two months ago, the other parties said they were thrilled that the PVV had decided to take part in the European elections. Finally, they would get a chance to prove that the PVV had no real answers to European problems, was the thinking. The mainstream parties would have no trouble at all convincing the electorate that Europe was in the end a good thing for the Netherlands, or so they thought.

But the PVV's Barry Madlener, a former real estate agent, ran a better campaign than expected. His message was clear and simple: Brussels should have less power, and Turkey will never ever join the European Union. The mainstream parties, by contrast, had a much fuzzier stand on Europe, as Madlener never failed to point out.

In fact, the only other party to do well in these elections was at the other end of the political spectrum. The left-wing liberal party D66, which went to the polls with an outspoken pro-European stance, won over 10 percent of the voters and went from one to three seats in the European parliament.

The Netherlands is a more polarised country since Thursday's election. The political landscape has splintered. Stable government coalitions made up of two major parties and a sometimes a smaller third party may be a thing of the past. If national elections were held today with the same outcome, it could take months of negotiations to form a government. And any government coalition would probably require four parties, since most parties have already ruled out governing with the PVV. (The Christian democrats are on the fence about sharing power with Wilders.)

Penalised by voters

All this makes it easy to forget that this election was really about Europe. So what does the Dutch result say about the position of the Netherlands in Europe? The Netherlands was a founding member of the European Union. Does the PVV victory, on top of the Dutch 'no' in the 2005 referendum about the European constitution, mean that the Netherlands is now firmly in the eurosceptic camp?

Not quite. The electoral gains of the eurosceptic PVV are offset by the success of the pro-European D66. Another eurosceptical party, the Socialist Party, gained slightly compared to the 2004 election but lost big-time compared to the 2006 national election. The pro-European Green party held its own.

By contrast, parties like Labour, the Christian democrats and the right-wing liberal party VVD, who tried to be pro-European and eurosceptic at the same time, were penalised by the voters. In the European context too, the Netherlands is now a polarised country.

http://www.nrc.nl/international/Features/article2262197.ece/The_Netherlands_is_now_a_polarised_country
JPTF 2009/06/06

A (im)previsível bomba nuclear da Coreia do Norte

Paradoxos da Europa: primeiro partido criado como movimento europeu é... ‘eurocéptico‘ ?!

Não sabe em quem votar nas eleições europeias? Escolha um partido como um produto no mercado no EU profiler

O regresso do passado otomano à Grécia? ‘Emigrantes muçulmanos confrontam-se com a polícia em Atenas‘ in Kathimerini

A Muslim immigrant shouts in front of a row of riot policemen during a rally in central Athens yesterday. Hundreds of Muslims marched through the center to protest the alleged defacement of a copy of the Quran by a Greek policeman.

Police clashed with hundreds of Muslim immigrants in central Athens for a second day yesterday in an escalating protest at reports that a policeman had defaced a copy of the Quran during a routine inspection earlier this week.

An estimated 1,500 demonstrators, mostly immigrants from Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, hurled sticks and stones at police officers in full riot gear who had been stationed outside Parliament yesterday afternoon. Police responded with tear gas and stun grenades. In the escalating unrest, which saw several store facades smashed, parked cars overturned and traffic lights vandalized, one officer and four protesters were said to have sustained minor injuries. More than 15 protesters were arrested. The demonstration followed a less violent protest that broke out near Omonia Square on Thursday in the wake of reports that a policeman had torn up a copy of the Quran and then stamped on it during a routine inspection conducted on four Syrian migrants in the city center. After word spread about the alleged incident, local migrant groups organized the protest. Later on Thursday an Afghan national was arrested in the run-down Athens district of Aghios Panteleimonas after allegedly throwing a firebomb at a police station, causing limited damage but serious injury to himself.

The Muslim Union of Greece, which represents thousands of immigrants in the capital, said that it had taken legal action against the unidentified policeman alleged to have defaced the Syrian’s copy of Islam’s holy book. Police said an internal investigation had been launched.

Meanwhile, in a related development, Athens Mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis welcomed a proposal by Athens Prefect Yiannis Sgouros to purchase the building of the old Athens appeals court in the city center where hundreds of illegal immigrants have been squatting for the past six months.

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100003_23/05/2009_107438
JPTF 2009/05/23

‘Elites governantes sob fogo nas eleições europeias‘ in EU Observer

Ruling parties in some of the EU's biggest member states are coming under heavy fire in EU election campaigns, giving eurosceptic groups a chance to grab attention.

Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, whose right-wing PDL party is polled to scoop up to 40 percent of the country's EU vote, faced calls to resign on Wednesday (20 May) over alleged links to a corporate bribery scandal.

A court in Milan has ruled that a Berlusconi proxy paid British-born lawyer David Mills €435,000 to act as a "false witness" for the premier in a series of fraud trials which implicated the media tycoon. The PM's spokesman said the resignation calls were "politically timed" to damage Mr Berlusconi, who heads his party list.

British eurosceptic party UKIP is to spend €2.3 million in the next two weeks to woo unhappy Labour voters in the wake of the parliament expenses scandal.

"Of the recent inquiries we have had from our first-time buyers [new supporters], around 60 percent of them have come from Labour," UKIP leader Nigel Farrage said, the Times reports. UKIP and Labour are both polling at around 16 percent, compared to UKIP's 6 percent at the start of May.

The anti-Lisbon treaty Libertas party has targeted the Conservative opposition party, which currently leads UK polls, with a video clip making fun of Tory leader David Cameron's apology for the expenses problem. Libertas says the clip has had over 1 million hits.

France's ruling UMP party has fended off a legal challenge against its promotional video, with the audiovisual regulator, the CSA, on Wednesday ruling the clip was not "propaganda."

The centre-right Civic Platform government in Poland has seen its approval ratings dip for the fourth month in a row, according to CBOS surveys. Approval dipped from 44 percent to 42 percent in May. Prime Minister Donald Tusk's personal rating fell three points to 48 percent.

Eurosceptic opposition Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski on Wednesday said Poland faces an "infernal [economic] crisis," urging Poles to give Civic Platform "a warning" in the EU vote.

Laziest MEPs shamed

The Polish political elite in general has come under fire in articles detailing the laziest MEPs and euro-deputies' lavish lifestyles. Tabloid Fakt said Civic Platform MEP Krzysztof Holowczyc was absent for 65 percent of EU parliament sessions. Daily broadsheet Rzeczpospolita wrote that from June, MEPs are to fly around Europe in business class and have in the past sipped cocktails on African beaches at symposia on poverty.

In Germany , a joint campaign by the ruling CDU and CSU parties is trying to appeal to the most conservative end of the spectrum of centre-right voters.

The campaign focuses on religious issues, such as making a reference to God in future EU treaties, keeping Turkey out of the EU and strengthening the role of the German language in the European Union. The parties also pledge to see if European competences can be clawed back to the national level.

Greek opposition socialist party Pasok has attacked the governing New Democracy faction for dissolving parliament early in what it sees as an attempt to run away from a series of corruption scandals. "Pasok is linking the European elections with national elections," socialist leader George Papandreou said on Wednesday. "We want citizens to ...change the direction of the country."

The Czech left-wing opposition party, the CSSD, is planning to pump up to €2.6 million into its EU election battle against the conservative ODS faction. CSSD chairman Jiri Paroubek said the recent ODS government managed to draw less than 1 percent of EU funds for the country available up to 2013.

Fears over voter apathy are being confirmed in Ireland and Romania , where people appear to be more interested in local by-elections and upcoming presidential elections, respectively, than the EU vote.

Election posters cause annoyance

Irish people have begun to complain about plastic EU election posters obscuring important road signs. In a letter to the Irish Times on Thursday, an academic from the Catholic University of Louvain informs Irish readers that the Belgian government erects temporary structures offering a designated space for a limited amount of recyclable paper posters instead.

Sweden is bucking the trend, however. In Gothenburg, pre-voting in the EU election at the major Nordstan polling station shows that 900 people cast ballots on Wednesday compared to just 278 at the same stage in the general election two years back.

Austrian Greens are doing their bit to kindle EU sympathies, with street theatre in Vienna on Wednesday designed to dispel cliches, such as the notion that Brussels spends all its time regulating on bendy bananas.

Meanwhile, the Spanish government has put forward a legal proposal to EU member states, which would allow the EU parliament to increase the number of MEPs from 736 to 754 as soon as the Lisbon treaty is ratified (potentially in early 2010) instead of in 2014 (as currently envisaged).

The move, reported by the Irish Times, is to be considered at the June EU summit. Spain, France, Sweden, Austria, Britain, Poland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovenia and Malta stand to benefit from the extra seats if it goes through.

http://euobserver.com/9/28172?print=1
JPTF 2009/05/22

‘Da Fatwa à Jihad: o caso Rushdie e o seu legado‘, de Kenan Malik

‘With images of Geert Wilders being turned back at Heathrow fresh in our minds, seldom can a book have had a more searing relevance to contemporary events. Seldom has a book offered a more revealing portrait of both a religion and a nation's frail carapace and intellectual and moral failings. And seldom do we see so clearly that one of the lessons of history is that no one learns the lessons of history.
The government's shameful and self-defeating ban on Wilders, continuing a policy of appeasement in the face of extremist threat, makes Malik's case for him: that the Rushdie affair continues to cast a long, baleful shadow over the British cultural landscape.
Malik, an Indian-born, Manchester-raised writer and broadcaster, is perhaps best known as an acute commentator on race and a staunch critic of multiculturalism, a case he has refined in his previous books The Meaning of Race (1996) and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in The Race Debate (2008). This book is both a social and intellectual history and a personal journey, since the Rushdie affair stands as a decisive turning point in his own relationship with the left, where, as a member of the Socialist Workers' Party in the 1980s, he cut his political teeth [...]‘. (Extracto da recensão do livro feita por Lindsay Johns para o New Humanist).

JPTF 2009/05/21

A investida chinesa em África, cartoon de Springs para o Financial Times

Open Europe: informação e perspectiva crítica sobre a União Europeia

Com as eleições para o Parlamento Europeu a aproximarem-se, impõe-se aprofundar o conhecimento e a discussão sobre o rumo e as políticas da União Europeia. A Open Europe - um think tank britânico -, contrasta flagrantemente com a usual falta de informação e a visão monolítica que predomina nos media e no espectro político, onde ou se é europeísta ou então é-se eurocéptico (aparentemente, não há nada no meio...). Entre nós, instalou-se assim um absurdo consenso sobre a ‘política externa‘ (interrogação: as questões europeias não serão já política interna?), que se alimenta de fundos estruturais, despolitiza o debate e torna os cidadãos (ainda) mais alheados da Europa, pela óbvia falta de alternativas reais de escolha.

JPTF 2009/05/09

Para quem vai o dinheiro da política agrícola europeia?

A Política Agrícola Comum (PAC) é tradicionalmente a maior despesa isolada da União Europeia. Mas quem são os seus principais beneficiários, quer em termos de Estados-membros da UE, quer, sobretudo, em termos de empresas que concretamente recebem esses benefícios? Esta informação, até há pouco tempo praticamente inacessível ao público, está agora disponível nos sites da Farmsubsidy.org e da Caphealthcheck.

JPTF 2009/05/08

Itália um nicho de ‘subsídios agrícolas milionários‘ in EU Observer

Companies in Italy received the biggest single payments from the EU's farm subsidies in 2008, with 180 of them provided with more than a million euros, a study released on Thursday (7 May) showed.

Sugar producers Italia Zuccheri and Eridania Sadam were also the only two companies winning more than a €100 million each under the EU's Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), being awarded €139.8 and €125.3 million respectively, according to a study by Farmsubsidy.org – a cross-border network of journalists, reasearchers and campaigners pushing for more transparency in the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

The only non-Italian company to rank among the top five "farm-subsidy millionaires" was Ireland's Greencore Group – a manufacturer and supplier of food and food ingredients – which came fourth, having received €83.4 million.

Some 165 companies in Spain, 47 in the Netherlands, 38 in Portugal, 22 in Belgium, 21 in the UK and 12 in both Bulgaria and Romania received more than a million euros.

In France – the top overall beneficiary of the CAP, with €10.4 out of the total €55 billion – 142 companies were granted more than a million.

The Doux Group, which sells chicken products worldwide, was the biggest single recipient in the country, with €62.8 million and coming sixth in the overall millionaire ranking.

Altogether, the 707 millionaires received between five and 10 percent of the total amount of the CAP in 2008, said Farmsubsidy.org co-founder Nils Mulvad at a press conference in Brussels. He stressed however that full data from only 18 member states had been taken into account at this stage.

Data from Cyprus, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia has not been included because these countries "have not yet published data on farm subsidy beneficiaries or have made it very difficult to access the data they have published," the organisation said.

It explained that information from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland would be added to the study as soon as the conversion of the sums into euros is finalised.

Most countries breaching the rules

The research also included an evaluation of member states' transposition of the European Commission's transparency rules that oblige governments to disclose information on farm funds recipients.

Member states had until 30 April to publish information on the beneficiaries of farm subsidies for 2008, but the study found that only eight countries had fully complied with the rules.

Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Romania, Slovenia and the UK were the only countries to implement the commission's transparency law well.

Ten countries, including Spain and Ireland, but also a number of new member states such as Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and Bulgaria, were "clearly in breach of the regulations."

Eight others – France, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Sweden – presented "important deficiencies, likely to be in breach of the regulations."

The organisation cited Hungary, Ireland and the Netherlands as being among a number of countries "engaging in apparent deliberate obfuscation of their websites," saying that Hungary had presented its data in a "totally unstructured" PDF document of more than 13,000 pages.

Poland was also cited as "one bad example" publishing only the names of the person applying for the subsidies and not of the companies, while the Netherlands was criticised for failing to provide a total amount for each recipient, making it difficult to find out how much a particular Dutch company has received.

Germany bashed

Germany is the only member state refusing to publish its figures, arguing that it has legal constraints due to data protection laws in local districts.

But the European Commission has refused to give Berlin an extension and has said it would start infringement procedures against the country if it does not fall into line.

"All 27 agreed on [the rules] and took this obligation ... You take an obligation, you have to stick to it. It is that simple," said Kristian Schmidt, deputy head of EU anti-fraud commissioner Siim Kallas' cabinet.

He added the commission was "quite disappointed" by Germany's behaviour and its "last-minute second thoughts."

http://euobserver.com/9/2808

JPTF 2009/05/08

‘A União Europeia ainda está a digerir o alargamento de 2004‘ in EU Observer

On 1 May 2004 the EU marked its biggest ever enlargement, accepting 10 new countries and bringing the number of member states to 25. Five years later, both "old" and "new" member states are still "digesting" the move, experts say, while prospects for future expansion look increasingly grim.

The 10 new member states – Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta – brought 73 million people to the union and moved its borders considerably further east.

The European Commission says that the accession of these countries, most of them formerly part of the Eastern Bloc, has been an unquestionable success.

"EU enlargement has served as an anchor of stability and democracy and as a driver of personal freedom and economic dynamism in Europe," EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said during a speech in Berlin earlier this week.

In February, the commission published a report stressing the economic benefits enlargement brought to both old and new member states and saying that trade between them almost tripled in less than 10 years.

The bloc's executive has also encouraged old member states to scrap remaining restrictions to workers from the new countries insisting that "migration flows following the 2004 and 2007 enlargements have had positive economic effects in those countries which did not restrict free movement of workers."

On Friday (1 May) Denmark and Belgium lifted those restrictions, with Copenhagen also doing so for workers from Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the bloc on 1 January 2007.

This left only Germany and Austria with barriers in place for the so-called EU-8 countries (workers from Cyprus and Malta have been exempted from the restrictions). By contrast, most old member states still have restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians.

Institutional machinery works

The biggest enlargement in the EU's history also brought institutional changes, swelling the size of the three main EU bodies - the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council (the secretariat of EU member states).

This has not damaged the decision-making process, as some had expected, says Sara Hagemann, an EU institutional affairs analyst with the Brussels-based European Policy Centre (EPC) think-tank.

"The decision processes [in all EU institutions] ...have not slowed down. There has not been a deadlock in the system, as some observers had predicted," she told EUobserver.

"The numbers of legislation adopted each year have actually, compared to the last few years, increased. So, one can say that the machinery is working and performing and meeting the demand for policy-making."

In terms of policy making, there has been no clear division between old and new, as neither group is a coherent entity. But some areas, especially where unanimity is required – such as justice and home affairs – have suffered as a consequence of the increase, according to Ms Hagemann.

"Research has shown that the numbers are low in terms of how much and how detailed legislation is provided from the EU level compared to what could be expected," in the justice field, she said, arguing that the Lisbon Treaty is a much needed tool for improving the new model bloc's functioning.

"It is not [simply] a political statement that the Lisbon Treaty has to go through."

Wanted: 'centre of gravity'

The last five years have changed the EU's political identity however, analysts argue.

"It's an EU of 27 member states, the dynamics are completely different," said EU affairs analyst Piotr Kaczynski from the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) think-tank.

The so-called Franco-German engine of the old EU setup is no longer "the centre of gravity" in the 27-nation bloc, he explained.

"Most of the questions between [German chancellor] Merkel and [French president] Sarkozy are now between France and Germany ...They are primarily Franco-German topics," Mr Kaczynski told this website.

"The centre of gravity has moved and we are looking for it ...This means that we have an inflation of summits – micro-summits, different groups meeting in different forms and different formulas, there are lots of government to government meetings. We have really multiplied levels of governance."

A report released earlier this week by the Open Society Institute-Sofia think-tank to which Mr Kaczynski also contributed, said that the EU agenda would look rather different from what it does today if the "new" member states were setting it alone.

The report, called Not Your Grandfather's Eastern Bloc, argues that EU expansion and economic liberalisation would be pushed further if the "new" states were the agenda-setters.

"If these countries had more clout, Europe would adopt Lisbon Treaty and grant membership to Croatia and Serbia in a matter of months, consider membership for Ukraine and Moldova, pursue more robust economic liberalisation, and take a 'Nato-first' approach toward European defence and security," it says.

"Despite the economic crisis, these countries would keep state protectionism at bay and fully liberalise labor markets."

Still digesting

The EU has not yet reached the point where the new member states can be the agenda-setters, however, both because those countries' governments are still too focused domestically and because the bloc has not yet finished "digesting" the big-bang enlargement, Mr Kaczynski says.

In this context, enthusiasm for further enlargement has cooled in several European capitals. The Lisbon treaty deadlock and the economic crisis have exasperated this trend.

And while enlargement to candidate and potential candidate countries from the western Balkans is still seen just as a matter of time, expansion beyond, to countries like Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia or even to EU candidate Turkey, is seen at the moment as unlikely in the foreseeable future.

"That [further enlargement] can only happen when digestion [of the latest enlargement] is over. When there is no long a question in the Eurobarometer 'how do you perceive the 2004 enlargement,' with the majority of western Europeans saying 'bad' and the majority of eastern Europeans saying 'good'," Mr Kaczynski said, referring to the EU's regular opinion poll service.

"As long as this is relevant, it means that digestion is not over. So, only when it's over, can you consider Ukraine and Georgia."

http://euobserver.com/9/28049
JPTF 2009/05/03