Chinese Year of the Pig no match for EU-China Year of Science

It may be the Chinese Year of the Pig but what is really getting the Chinese worked up is the EU-China Year of Science.

Only weeks into the Chinese new year and enthusiasm has already receeded to to point of whimper. Grafitti referring to the 'Year of the damp Squib' has allegedly begun to spring up on dams around the country. Were it the Year of the Dragon, one would be tempted to say that it had run out of puff.

No Puff?

Sources are suggesting that it was the unrelenting style and verve of the Commission's original press release that first attracted the Chinese. "How can a few firework displays compete with prose like that", complained a depressed Beijing mandarin charged with the uneviable task of reigniting the public interest. "Since that damned press missive it has been simple damage limitation."

Even the fact that it is a Lunar Year of the Pig - think multiple milleniums, as one China gazer put it - has left the Chinese unmoved. "It simply does not possess the same sort of attraction for young people as the recent joint EU-China exhibit on S&T co-operation at the Shenzhen High Tech Fair or the EU-Asia East Midland’s cooperation event at Leicester University", commented a well known face on the Shanghai party scene.

It is understood that all hope has been lost. Chinese officials in the department of the new year are now placing all of their hopes on next year's Year of the Rat but are watching nervously to see what the EU might have up its sleeve. An EU-China Year of Food Safety could be disastrous, they fear.

Inside: Vietnam and Korea break diplomatic ties with EU in bid to avoid similar fiascos.

Alotta Fagina

Ronald Plasterk, Dutch politician and current minister for Education, Culture and Science in the government of Harry Potter, sorry I mean Jan Peter Balkenende, has called for a single working language in the European Union.

In an interview with the NRC Handelsblatt, Plasterk says that "there is not a single serious international organisation where a single language isn't spoken, generally English. In science, business, sport, the army, art, in show business, " Ankara your votes please", nowhere else have you a circus in which 25 languages are translated in all different directions. Even at the European Central Bank they speak English; not because England is the boss, in fact there is only one member country where they speak English, and that is Ireland."

Being Dutch, Plasterk touches on a number of controversial subjects. Calling the Eurovision song contest show business is one. Calling for a single language for the EU institutions clearly (his main point and) another. Then there is the question of which language is spoken in Ireland. Ireland's first official language is actually Irish / Gaelic. It is also, presumably much to Plasterk's displeasure, the latest addition to the list of official EU languages.

I'm with Ronald on this one. I was slightly surprised by the Irish government's decision to request the possibility for Irish to be used at EU level. Ireland is an increasingly wealthy, self-confident nation, unphased by the past. It is now richer than its larger neighbour. In sport, it welcomed the old nemesis into the home of Gaelic games only last week and handed it the mother of all thrashings. Hell, an Irishman, Pierce Brosnan, has even played James Bond, the quintessential Englishman.

Despite all of this success, however, use of the the Irish language remains stagnant. It is a sad state of affairs, to be sure, but not one that is likely to be rectified by granting the people of Ireland the opportunity to request a copy of the Regulation to establish a common authorisation procedure for food additives, food enzymes and food flavourings.

Indeed, the European Commission's press release – stop yawning down the back - states that "currently, there are virtually no interpreters available who can work from Irish." Could it be any clearer that the life or death struggle for the language will be fought at home in Ireland? The (eventual) training of five translators to live and work in Brussels is not going to make the difference.

Stop with the symbolic gestures and get down to the real business of saving the language. Otherwise it is only a matter of time before the remnants of Gaelic will only be seen in the many words it has bequeathed to English. A clan, as many people will know, is the Gaelic for tribe. Phoney comes from fáinne, ring. The term apparently originated from Irish immigrants in US referring to fake gold rings illegally marketed there. Smithereens comes from smidiríní meaning little pieces. And not a lot of people know that galore comes from the Gaelic go leor, which means, enough .

The EU has done a lot for Ireland but it is too big an ask for Brussels to rectify a situation in which the English handed out 800 years of oppression and destroyed a language in return for, well, a single James Bond and.....Pussy Galore.

Second Life - You Read it Here First

‘EU Considers Going Virtual’ claimed EUObserver.com on 2 March

But on 23 February, you read it on the witloof first

Commission spokesman Mikolaj Dowgielewicz – a virtual pat on the back for the first person to pronounce that correctly – did not comment on whether they are considering relocating entirely.

Junior consultant labels EP vote ‘significant’, faces can

Rupert Leffler, Junior Consultant for EU Affairs with lobbyists Influence Pedl Inc., has caused outrage amongst the firm’s client base by labelling as “significant” the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee first reading vote on the draft directive on the importance of commercial distinction between fundamentally similar products.

Frustrations with the directive appear to have spilled over with Leffler bearing the brunt. In email exchanges seen by the witloof, the words “bitch slap”, reappear regularly. It goes on to say that they would like to “open a can of whoopass” on Leffler’s head.

Influence Pedl Inc. with an address at 1 Rue des Portes Pivotantes, represents a number of clients for whom the directive is problematic, including Pepsi and Murphy’s Stout.

Article 7 of the draft directive stipulates that simply being a different company is not sufficient to prove that the products actually differ. It introduces a requirement for the distinctions between a product and its main competitors to be clearly included on the label. The Parliament, in its infinite wisdom, has voted to maintain this requirement.

Pepsi and Murphy’s, who have mounted expensive lobbying campaigns, have whinged that they cannot comply because their main competitors, Coke and Guinness, will not actually tell them what their products are made of.

The firm’s senior partner, McKensie Mucksavage, Scottish, has moved to calm clients by claiming that Leffler had “slightly overestimated the role of the Parliament in the democratic process”. We are confident that the member states will recognise the anomaly that this proposal creates, he said, possibly forgetting that the Irish have even less influence over Council discussions than the Americans, who are not even present.

Leffler commented obliquely “following on from the recent doubts over my parentage it is the last thing that I needed right now”.

Inside: Murphy’s to reveal country in which legal drinking age is 2.
(click on picture to enlarge)

Vlaams Belang goes to Washington II

Find more on the VB trip to Washington here.
Jeez, even where there are checks and balances it appears that these guys are getting air time....

Vlaams Belang goes to Washington

Although mindful that there are lies, damn lies, and then statistics, a recent state of the blogosphere makes for interesting reading. It tells us that:
 technorati is currently tracking more than 57 million blogs and counting.
 as of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day.
 the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days
 about 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

What is everybody blogging about? You name it. There are blogs on almost any topic you can imagine. The sublime, the ridiculous. I love even the dullest blog in the world.

In an interesting article in The Guardian, Nick Cohen writes that ‘most bloggers …write about their lives, what books they are reading and music they are listening to.’

The most successful chroniclers of their everyday escapades - Zoe Margolis as the Girl with a one track mind, Judith O’Reilly as Wife in the North, and can anyone have escaped the furore caused by Catherine Sanderson, alias La Petite Anglaise - become quite famous in their own right.

Some blogs appear to be quite influential in other ways. I was reading only this week of the key role that bloggers are playing in the run up to the Oscars.

Cohen is more interested, however, in the relationship between politics and the blog. Whether the internet is giving a voice to the disenfranchised as well as to the over/under-sexed singleton or the mother of four in ruritania. Here things are not going as well as planned. ‘Although the net has given welcome space to new political writers who otherwise would never have been published’, he argues that it has generally failed to meet the inflated expectations of those who expected it ‘would allow oppressed peoples to escape censors and read forbidden opinions’. Instead – witness the recent imprisoning off the Egyptian author of a blog called The Critic - the net is proving surprisingly easy for dictatorships to control.

I would not dispute any of this. In fact I would argue that even in Europe or the U.S. the lack of checks and balances, referred to in the opening paragraph of Cohen’s article, on the web can cause potential problems.

With a headline ‘Vlaams Belang goes to Washington’, Belgian newspaper De Standaard reported on 21/02 that Filip Dewinter and Frank Vanhecke, the two top men from the (very) right-wing Belgian political party (formerly known as Vlaams Blok), are going on a three-day visit to the US. They quote elements of the speeches that the two men will deliver during their visit. With reference to Eurabia and the ‘dangers’ that Islam poses to Europe:

“We are fighting for the survival of the West. We are fighting for us and for our children, We are fighting for Europe, but also for America. Therefore we deserve your support. Help us to survive.”

The speechwriter, according to De Standaard, is Paul Belien, the man behind the popular blog Brusselsjournal.com

There are several blogs that I know of with a focus on life in Brussels that have links to the Brussels Journal in their blogroll. I am sure that they have absolutely no intention of providing support for a forum that cherishes ideas such as those espoused by Vlaams Belang. But the links are there.

Nobody wants censorship on the web, as Cohen outlines all too powerfully. If the authorities in democracies are to be kept out of it, however, self-censorship is important. Those of us active here in Bruxelles can make a start by removing the links to the Brussels Journal.

Commission to establish mission on second life. Eyes permanent move.

Sources within the European Commission have exclusively revealed that the Commission is seeking to open a Mission on Second Life. “We are seeking to open a Mission on Second Life”, they said.

The move comes just a month after Sweden announced similar intentions. The key difference, however, is that the Commission is believed to be thinking of moving permanently and in its entirety. Officials believe, and they would be right, that this can be done without any noticeable effect on European life.

It is understood that the idea, which emanates from the Commission President’s ‘crack ideas team’, the self-styled ‘wonks boffins’ - or boffins wonks in French - of the Bureau of European Policy Advisors, is a panic reaction to alarming new statistics revealing the extent their own uselessness. Contacts at Eurostat refused to comment but seemed to combine a cough with the figure 100%.

The secret operation is understood to have been given the codename ‘lock, stock and barrel move to second life by 31.12.2007’. Disgruntled former KGB code-crackers contacted by the witloof are interpreting this as an indication that the Commission is hoping complete the move by the end of the year. Experienced Commission watchers are sceptical that any (and by that they appear to mean any) policy can be effectively implemented by the end of the millennium.

Nobody from Second Life could be reached for comment but, let’s face it, they are unlikely to be very enthusiastic.

Poll: Would you invite the European Commission into your home?

The Perils of enlargement

The Witloof takes a look at the enlargement process and makes some ridiculous comparisons to a football tournament and a music competition.

And so in the most easily predictable result since Don Quixote did more damage to himself than to the windmill, the European Commission has recommended that Bulgaria and Romania should be allowed to enter the European Union on 1 January 2007. You can read the entire (52) page turning report here.

With Bucharest and Sofia (in EU speak most countries seem to be referred to as their capital cities – ‘Warsaw today said that it was aware of the obligations of membership of the European Union but that it couldn’t give a fiddler’s toss about the free movement of goods or capital’.) now safely ensconced at Europe’s top table, the whole show now moves on to Croatia and Turkey. And then to Macedonia. Then to Serbia and Montenegro, possibly followed by Albania and Kosovo and why not Moldova? Ukraine? Where does the whole process end? Does it end? Does the visit of the Mongol hordes to Hungary in the thirteenth century bestow on them sufficient link to Europe to perhaps think of filling out the application forms?

Quite possibly if we take a look at what has been going on with the membership of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). For some years now it has included in its ranks countries such as Israel, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Ok, so I can see that charity was probably necessary in the case of Israel. Can you imagine the reception the travelling fans would receive on an away trip to Tehran for a crucial qualifier in the Asian zone? But what the hell have Kazachstan got to fear? And more to the point what do they have to do with Europe? As a Danish pal ranted at me shortly after Denmark’s hopes of reaching the 2006 world cup had been fatally damaged during a visit to Astana: “Kazachstan?! That’s not Europe. That’s eight flipping (I’m sure it was flipping he said) time zones away!”

This time it is poor Belgium that has to make its way out central Asia to visit the Kazakhs. They’ve also managed to land themselves in a group with Azerbaijan and Armenia. Which makes me wonder what happens if the Nagorno Karabakh suddenly manages to free itself from the Azeri yolk? Would the Belgians have to play them too? Or what if Vlad Putin decided that the Chechens were getting just too Bolshy for even the Kremlin to maintain an interest? Might UEFA just think ‘Ah feck it, just throw them in with the Belgians, they’ll probably be somewhere out there now anyway’?

There are signs that the EU may not be about to expand at quite such a UEFA like pace. The European Commission, in ‘welcoming’ Bucharest and Sofia on board, has announced that further widening of the union is on hold until vital institutional reforms can be agreed. Now you look at this statement and conclude that given the fate of the EU Constitution that the reforms will never be agreed and therefore the enlargement process is complete. Indeed in the short term this is may well be exactly what happens; nothing. Eventually, however, the political will will undoubtedly be scraped together to ensure that things can still get done while the membership of the club continues to widen and possibly even embrace Turkmenistan. The different methods of doing this will be debated and will undoubtedly fail to stir the interest of the voters who will prefer to make jokes about Regulation X concerning the curvature of proper bananas. However, if it all sounds unimportant or dull, just consider the frankly shocking example of what has happened to the Eurovision song contest in recent years.

Much like UEFA, the organisers of the Eurovision song contest appear to regard geographical distance from Europe as a distinct advantage in gaining entry. This has led to familiar faces such as Israel, Morocco, Ukraine and Armenia popping up with regular abandon in Europe’s annual search for its ‘best’ song and it can only be a matter of time before Kazachstan knocks on the door.

Unlike UEFA, however, the Eurovision apparatchniks realised that the influx of new ‘talent’ could not be accommodated within the existing framework. Listening to the ‘musical’ offerings of 45 entrants would test the patience of even the most diehard eurovisionfreak. In response to this threat, they opted for a two tier system in which those with the worst record in recent events would have to qualify for the final. While this has had the desired effect of ensuring that not all 120 million viewers are asleep by the time the winner is crowned, it has had the (presumably) undesired consequence of making it more than likely that the victor will hail from one of the Nordic or Baltic states.

A quick look at the winners podium over the last decade should prove any doubters wrong. In the ten years between 1997 and 2006, they accounted for 5 of the 10 victories including a seismic 4 in a row between 1999 and 2002. Even in Abba’s heyday this was unprecedented. Waterloo was the only victory in the entirety of the 70’s. In the 80’s things brightened a little with Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley from Sweden’s The Herreys and La det Swinge from the Norwegian Bobbysocks. But 5 from 10, it’s simply not fair. Something has got to be done.

The other major innovation of the previous few years, phone voting by the public, has failed to eliminate the political bias of the voting patterns. It has probably increased it. As Terry Wogan so eruditely put it when Denmark was awarding Sweden its annual ‘douze points’: “hands across the Skaggerak”. What is needed is to completely democratise the system. One vote should be worth exactly that, one vote. So if 36 million Germans vote while only 1 million Romanians do, the Germans have 36 times the impact on the final result. And because nobody is allowed to vote for their own entry, the result cannot be abused.

This is what is really up for grabs in the ‘vital institutional reforms’ that the Commission is referring to. Artificial voting schemes favour those tightly nit snow laden communities. Democracy must out. The one Commissioner, one vote rule needs abolishing. Qualified majority voting should be extended to everything. And if this sounds like anathema to many of the (smaller) member states they should consider the alternative: Nordica Baltica über alles.

Wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof, baby?

Europe loves nothing more than a big project, something to really put it on the map. It is constantly on the look out for ideas, so if you have any you should get in touch with the European Commission. I’m sure they’d jump on it. Particularly if the US has already been there and got the t-shirt, preferably several years previously. But don’t bother calling if your idea is a common currency - some member states managed to get one introduced in 2002 – or European search engine to try to curtail the influence of google - backed with a sizeable chunk of French and German funds, Quaero is apparently a soon to be unveiled attempt to create euroGoogle – or an aircraft company to rival Boeing.

Another idea already taken, I’m afraid, is that of a European GPS system. The Galileo positioning system - named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (was science really so rock’n’roll that they needed stage names in the 16th Century?) - is a proposed satellite navigation system, to be built by the EU as an alternative to the Global Positioning System (which is controlled by the United States military) and the Russian GLONASS. The system, which should be operational by 2010, is intended to provide:
· Greater precision to all users than is currently available.
· Improved coverage of satellite signals at higher latitudes, which northern regions such as Scandinavia will benefit from.
· A positioning system upon which European nations can rely even in times of war or political disagreement.

Now these may all seem like perfectly legitimate reasons for a European positioning system - or they may appear like ridiculous excuses - I just think that it is a valuable opportunity missed. What Europe really should have done is to focus on the end market applications. Its where the EU could make a real difference to the lives of its citizens. Here’s my thinking:

As a well-known comedian once noted, GPS is like your wife. When things are going well and you are obeying her orders, everyone is happy. As she (for GPS is invariably female – ironic given that gender’s reputation for map reading) purrs ‘please turn right here’ or ‘straight ahead for 200 metres’ you can almost imagine her being as a deliciously restrained Mrs Moneypenny. As soon as you put a foot out of line, however, she snaps utterly and immediately, ‘I said turn right HERE. HERE. NOW. FOR GOD SAKE MAN WOULD YOU EVER JUST LISTEN TO WHAT I AM TELLING YOU AND TURN RIGHT IMMEDIATELY’. A complete battleaxe. And what makes the wife comparison even more eerily accurate is that she is normally completely wrong.

Given all of this, what the Europeans need to concentrate on more than the space satellites that provide you with your position is on the actual GPS – or Galileo if you prefer - applications installed in your car. Give Galileo an upper class British accent and have her say things like ‘ooo you naughty boy, you were supposed to have turned right there but nevermind, you’re the boss.’ Or perhaps for the German market, Fraulein Ingrid could, at the end of a successful navigation, mutter things like, ‘Reinhard, you are so punctual, have you ever been late’? Imagine the commercial success you would be looking at in the respective markets.

It is here that the Europeans can steal a real march on the Americans. Now I know the Beach Boys were full of praise for the diversity of American women but they can keep the mid-west farmers daughters and even their Californian girls if a European GPS system could give us a glimpse of sassy Sweden or sumptuous Slovenia. Picture this, you step into your car and turn it on to be greeted by the following dulcet tones, ‘hallo its Inga here, are you gonna take me for a little ride today’. Goddamn right Inga, let’s get it on.

Jeremy Clarkson is on holidays

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/energy_transport/galileo/index_en.htm