Europe

Blair or Balkenende?

EU "democracy"
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Really? That’s going to be our choice for president of Europe, a choice between a war criminal and a Harry Potter lookalike (and also a war criminal)? Have we lost all selfrespect in Europe, do we really think the EU is so unimportant we get to choice between those two shits? Blair is hated all over Europe for his role in enabling the War on Iraq, while Balkenende is (fortunately for him) almost unknown outside Holland other than for his uncanny resemblance to the nerdy boy wizard, but equally loathed inside the country. If we had a choice, neither would be in the running.

But then we don’t, do we? In this greater and glorious post-Lisbon non-treaty Europe, we still don’t get a vote in who gets to run the EU, instead our betters will decide for us. The choice for Blair makes sense in that context, loved by his peers, hated by everybody else. The EU gets the leader it deserves and it’s telling that this election is big in the newspapers, where all the Serious People are explaining why Blair/Balkenende is the obvious choice, but not on the streets, where other than a few snorts of disgust I haven’t heard anybody talk about it at all. It’s our current political system in a nutshell, played in the media for the political classes, with no role for the rest of us other than in the voting rituals that happen every couple of years.

The EU’s role in the British postal strike

EU "democracy", Unions
Published on 1 Comment on The EU’s role in the British postal strike

Lenny tackles the fear, uncertainty and doubts being spread about the postal workers strike:

These myths – about union intransigence, about the economic necessity of job losses, about the superior efficiency of private competitors, etc. – are being deployed for the purposes of turning a low-cost public service provider into a marketplace of competing providers in accordance with the extraordinarily resilient neoliberal orthodoxy. This brings with it the usual problems – soaring costs, as companies seek to make a profit, duplication of capacity as they fight for market share, and poorer service as low paid, casualised and de-unionised workers are less committed to the job, and less likely to have the time and training necessary to develop their skills. Royal Mail, for all its faults, is one of the last bargains in town. Less than forty pence for a first class letter to anywhere in the UK is nothing. What else would you spend that money on? You couldn’t even buy a pint of milk or a Mars bar with that money. Additionally, as much as businesses might whine when there is a strike on, capital makes a big efficiency gain with Royal Mail, especially if they use the metered mail service which gives them a further discount. Admittedly, the Royal Mail is not as cheap as America’s socialised mail service, where a first class letter can cost as little as $0.44 (£0.27). But we can’t all be as communistic as the yanks.

And the reason why we can’t be is the European Union. The decision to end the post office’s monopoly and (part-)privatise the mail service is not something New Labour thought up on its own –though they’re obviously not against the idea– it’s been an EU directive to “liberalise” the postal markets for years. And because it is an EU directive, individual countries can’t opt out, but are “forced” to carry through these sort of unpopular or even harmful reforms. This is the role the EU was created for, the bogeyman that can force through decisions governments want, but know would be electoral suicide to pursue themselves.

And even with the European parliament there’s little to no democratic oversight about these decisions and little attention paid to them or the EU’s role in determining Europe wide economic policies, even by people and organisations who should know better. We tend to focus on our national governments and parliaments rather than on Brussels, but much of what they supposedly decide has been decided for them.

Without the EU New Labour would probably still have wanted to privatise mail deliveries, but it would’ve been much more difficult to make it seem unavoidable.

UPDATE: it seems the above has been misinterpreted as me blaming everything on the EU. But of course it’s not the case of evil eurocrats forcing privatisation of the post office on New Labour. Quite the opposite. Neoliberal governments like New Labour have used the EU as a tool, creating EU regulation and treaty obligations to be used to force their own desires through. The opening up of the postal market is one example of this, another one was the “deregulation” of public transport, which here in the Netherlands almost meant the Amsterdam city owned public transport company had to be privatised. Luckily in that case internal resistance was string enough loopholes were found to prevent this.

The EU in its current incarnation is a tool of capitalism, used by neoliberal governments to overcome opposition in their own countries. EU laws, regulation and treaties lay the framework within which the part-privatisation of the post office can be made inevitable, and often it is too late once these issues surface on a national level. One of the few unions to understand this have been the dock workers fighting against deregulation on an European scale, pressuring both their national governments as well as Brussels.

South Ossetia: why this war now?

Europe, War on south Ossetia
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map of Georgia, showing the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

The one big question that I keep coming back to is what in hell possessed Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili to start this war in the first place. Yes, this has been a crisis that’s been building for some time, with tensions having mounted again in the past month, but there was nothing going on that forced Saakashvili to escalate so drastically. What made him think invading South Ossetia was a good idea when he should know this would bring Russia in and the balance of forces never favoured Georgia, to say the least. As the events of the past few days proved, the Georgian army was no matchfor a serious Russian counteroffensive. Over at A FistFul of Euros, Douglas Muir speculated that it was a gamble on Saakashvili’s part, taking his chance to overrun South Ossetia before the Russians could mobilise:

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital)
and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains.

It is the sort of plan that is very tempting when the situation is right, if your own army is ready and willing and you can manage to find a situation in which the enemy is not. But it’s a high risk gamble, as we’ve seen again and it almost never pays off. In Georgia’s case, if Saakashvili did think this way and perhaps took Putin’s presence at the Olympics as a sign that Russia was distracted enough to risk the gamble, he made an awful mistake. He should’ve known the military commander on the gorund in North Ossetia also knows the facts as Doug sketches them above and that his first thought would beto get his troops through the tunnel as quickly as possible, just in case they do need to fight Georgian forces. Trying a blitzkrieg is the most obvious thing for the Georgians to try, so doubtlessly the Russians had contingency plans drawn up for this eventuality long ago.

But even had the Georgians succeeded in blitzkrieging South Ossetia, they still wouldn’t be in a good situation, as there still would be Abkhazia, the other, much larger breakaway region to content with. A Georgian victory would’ve brought them a long, slow guerilla war in South Ossetia and a Russian reinforced Abkhazia that would offer the constant threat of a second front. Which makes the decision to invade South Ossetia even more strange, with Abkhazia left alone. Perhaps Saakashvili thought that the latter was a lost cause anyway, even when conquered too easily invaded from Russia again and took the risk that had the gamble succeeded Russia would be content with bluster rather than military attack.

No means No, except in Europe

EU "democracy"
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Last Thursday the Irish, as the sole EU inhabitants to get the option, voted to reject the Treaty of Lisbon which was to further centralise and restructure the union. Which means that after three years of navelgazing and rapackaging the quest to establish an EU constitution is once again back at square one. Then it was the French and the Dutch who rejected the constitution and who therefore this time didn’t get to vote on it. If you vote the wrong way you’ve clearly shown not to be mature enough to decide on these weighty matters. For the Irish government it was more difficult to ignore the population, as the need for a referendum on constitutional matters is enshrined in law, so they had no choice but to call for a vote and hope for the best.

but once again these hopes were dashed, and this in a country traditionally quite Europe-minded. Once again it leaves the EU project floundering and once again the immediate response of European politicians and media is to blame the voter, not the treaty. Three years ago the rejection of the constitution led to a “process of reflection” from which emerged this treaty, largely the result of copying the constitution into a new document and doing global search and replace, with some relatively minor concession and symbolic changes. As if making the EU flag the mandatory symbol of Europe was why people objected to the contitution. Doing the same again isn’t feasable, but the process has to move forward so instead we get various European bigwigs like French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner threatening the Irish for their impudence while Gordon Brown amongst others has called for ignoring the vote by going ahead with the ratification in other countries and leave the Irish government to sort out things at their end.

Because the people in charge are convinced of the essential rightness of the constitreaty we don’t get any serious attempt to understand why first the French and the Dutch and then the Irish voted against it, but instead we get whisper campaigns to delegitimise the results of these referenda. For the Irish result the talking point being pushed is that it’s quite undemocratic for one million Irish to decide for 250 million other Europeans (one example). I agree with that, but it wasn’t the no-voters who decide the rest of Europe shouldn’t have a vote. The other way to delegitimise the Irish vote, and one much in evidence three years ago as well, is to disparage the motives of the voters. If you look at this Crooked Timber thread for example you see arguments that the Irish voted no because of their ignorance, their fear of foreigners, because the yes campaign wasn’t good enough, that it was just too complex for ordinary people to understand, and so on.

The common thread in all of this is that yet another no vote should not intefere with the orderly transition to the EU the European political elites want, but their voters are at best lukewarm about. It is brought as a matter of survival, as if the very functioning of the EU is under threat if these changes aren’t made, but we’ve seen how true that is in the three years since the rejection of the original constitution. Yet somehow the EU muddled through. It’s no wonder people are skeptical when all these grand plans are made without their input, their vote is only taken seriously if they vote yes and when they do vote against them their leaders don’t listen and they’re portrayed as xenophobic ignorami.

Long live the European constitution Lisbon Treaty

EU "democracy"
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Michael Greenwell calls out the fundamental undemocratic nature of the European Union:

The rebranding of the constitution has also allowed New Labour to squirm out of its manifesto commitment to a referendum as it promised a vote on the constitution (which it cancelled after the defeat in Holland and France ensured it couldn’t be ratified – all the countries have to agree for something of this sort to be passed) but it hadn’t promised a vote on the treaty.

The people of Ireland will have the chance to have a referendum and it looks like they are going to be the only ones. Myself and millions of others can only hope they say no but given the importance that the leaders in various European countries attach to this treaty I can only assume that every trick in the book will be employed to make them say yes and that a lot of cash will be given to the yes campaign.

If the public had went along with the idea then I am sure panegyrics would have been written about the wonderful democracies we live in. The fact that the public didn’t and don’t want these measures means that instead our (sic) leaders simply change the name, try to do it on the quiet and say ‘fuck you’ to the lot of us (Iraq, trident, nuclear power, GM foods etc etc).

That’s the whole point of a liberal democracy, of which the European Union might just be the ultimate example: the voters are only there to give their consent to the decisions their leaders made for them. If they withhold their consent, they don’t fulfill their part of the contract. Because France and the Netherlands said “no” last time they don’t get to vote this time, as these voters have proven themselves to be irresponsible. If the Irish are so willful as to reject the Treaty, another referendum will be held until they vote the right way. The European project is too important to be endangered by democracy.