The depressive Estonian and his prominent lover

An occasional series about people behind the scenes in Brussels.
I don't know whether it is appropriate to betray this memory of a friend. But then all writing is betrayal. I write this post today because well Christmas is often ia season of depressives, and when I think of depressives I think of Mart.
I lived with this Estonian cameraman, Mart, for a while. Actually he was no longer working as a cameraman – his onetime boss, M., Estonian television’s one-time only foreign correspondent, formerly based in Brussels, had returned home to be with her husband, who worked in the Estonian defence ministry in Tallinn. Her successor as correspondent Indrek, found no use for his services – after leaving
Indrek, he worked a little as a freelance for Czech television, then the European Union’s own broadcasting service, then…nothing.
He still had a few months of his Estonian press accreditation to run, though (the card has to be renewed every year), and before I got to know him I used to see him in the press centre, on the phone most of the day and into the evening long after most other correspondents had filed and gone – like me, he sometimes stayed until midnight. Judging by the fact that he was speaking Estonian, and the way he looked
furtively around him, I figured he was on the phone to Estonia quite a lot and that he was quite a lonely man. The parliament’s press centre offered free calls
around the world then – he was just of several journalists staying on late, using the facility every night, and not even the most assiduous. A number of
African journalists used to stay every night too, speaking tribal languages and/or French to people they knew clearly in Zaire or Rwanda or places like that.
One joker had a running gag with a friend or relative of his:
“Ici Osama Bin Laden,” he used to say, followed by a chesty, rollicking laugh. I hear it often; I sat opposite him.

I got to speak to Mart at a drinks party. He wasn’t an Estonian nationalist – a first – and seemed highly intelligent, sensitive and interesting. He was older than he looked: 38. He told me how he had almost lost a leg serving with the Soviet army
in Kamchatka. Like me, in those weeks when parliament were in session in Brussels, about half the time, he was a habitué of the various drinks parties held in
the lobbies of the EP. After a while, if returning from an interview at 630 or so to the press room, and seeing Mart on the phone, I’d tip him off if I had seen
preparations for a drinks party underway – tables wheeled out, penguin suits rubbing bottles of champagne, stagiaires gathering, ready to pounce on
the peanuts, the free wedges of parma cheese…
We’d usually stay drinking later than most other people, and we’d find ourselves going on to pubs and clubs as the receptions closed. I started crashing outin his flat, and, gradually, over a number of mornings drinking green tea and listening to his Jan Garbarek albums, I got to learn the story of Marianne – and his other women. Marianne had got pregnant, had an abortion, left him, and now he had no sexual energy left.I told him he was a very interesting guy but that he should avoid sentences in the first person pronoun because then he suddenly became boring. I worried about Mart: his father, a philosophy professor, had committed suicide. I stayed with him, in an informal arrangement that suited the uncertainties regarding how long I would be staying in Brussels. I felt I had a duty to get him a girlfriend: this, he said, would solve all his problems. He was in a bit of a Catch-22 though: no on wanted him in his current state.
I sometimes chatted up girls on his behalf. One such was the formidable Irish politician Avril Doyle’s beautiful assistant Kate, a real Irish beauty: pale, faintly
freckled skin, elfin eyes, full lips. Long dark hair.
He had seen her in the European parliament and
announced: “That is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”
Well, since last week anyway, I thought.
One evening, in the Wild Geese, I introduced Mart, who made awkward conversation with her. He came back and reported that they might meet up …nothing happened though over the next few days. It wasn’t clear if he had her phone number or if they had just agreed to have a further chat when they saw each other again…another evening in the Wild Geese, he went over, hand in pockets, hunched shoulders, (he was well over six feet tall) wearing a velour jumper which I knew smelt unwashed. (I wish I had been a good enough friend to tell him before we went out.) He returned, inevitably, a few minutes later.
“I think she likes me.”
Later in the evening I got talking to her – she said (diplomatically) that Mart seemed handsome, and nice, but alas he had a boyfriend.
I went to dance. An hour passed. Then I went looking for Mart with rising panic – out of self interest,I confess, since I had nowhere else to stay. I need not have worried. There was a roped off quiet area where people could sit at candle lit tables and chat – Katie was sitting with her girlfriend with whom she had danced somewhat tentatively earlier and had that slightly self conscious air of someone who is aware they are watched. Which of course they were. Not one metre away, on the other side tf the rope, Mart was standing, hands on picket, hunched, STARING. Standing,a figure of depression – his mouth in depressive downturn. He probably stood there in his tall stoop for a good ten minutes, transfixed. Like my grandfather after his wife had died.
“That is not the way to seduce a woman, Mart,” I said later.
“The security guards actually told me to move.
“Well, it was VERY obvious.“
He chuckled: a true surprise eruption. the first time I had heard him laugh for months.
“Keep it up Mart.” I qualified the comment, to avoid misunderstanding: “I mean, keep up laughing.”
Shortly afterwards I moved out – I had somewhere else to stay.
About a day or two later, he stopped turning up at the European parliament. He left a note that his press card had run out. I didn’t see him much – he had no
phone, he lived too out of the way to make a speculative spontaneous visit, and though I emailed him from time to time, telling him to come to parties
– I had him signed in by assistants I knew - he only came out once or twice that spring.
I only saw him a few times a year these days and we seldom have the intensity of relation to discover what his love life is like.
But recently I was at an European council summit – the highlight of the EU season, a biannual ceremony when all prime ministers of all member states gather and discuss iover two days the future direction of the union. Thousands of journalists turn up – there is a buzz in the air, the summits sometimes go on very late into the night. There is free food and drink from the bar, and loads of gossip and rumour. The EU set up work stations and free phones – sitting at one such work station I heard behind me.
“Ha, ha – ici Osama Bin Laden.”
Well – just as well the African found this. Because the parliament had by then stopped its free global phonecalls policy. (The grand summits, being so important and of such short duration, had no such restrictions)
The joke brought back thoughts of Mart – and I thought of Mart lying one February evening while the snowflakes were falling gently outside on cushions on the floor while I lay on his sofa, and Mart translating every single sentence of Tarkovsky’s Mirror in its unsubtitled Russian original version into English for my benefit. Two hours: quietly, doggedly – because he so wanted to give.

That is three years ago, but when I went back to his flat in November, it was empty, and a neighbour said she was wrorried he might commit suicide. He told me his family had considered putting him into a mental home. I am considering contacting M, who is now one of Estonia's most prominent politicians. Even they have baggage.

EU doesn't pass too many laws

An occasional entry in a series on why Europe can be unfairly maligned,
Gunther Verheugen, the powerful German commissioner for industry, has been in the headlines this week. Photographs have been circulated that show him holding hands with his assistant on a nude beach in Lithuania. The German media have leapt on the story; his wife has told reporters she knew of the trip. Both assistant and Verheugen deny an affair. They are acknowledged though in Brussels to be very close, and that you cannot get through to him without first passing through her. It has been speculated that the story of their close relationship was brought to the attention of the press by EU officials enraged at his recent strong attacks on the regulating instincts of the EU bureaucracy. Which brings us to the subject of this post.
There is a good argument - and Verheugen makes it frequently - that says that Europe wants to introduce too much regulation. It doesn't follow that all the regulation it wishes to introduce is poor and superfluous.
In some cases Europe wants to introduce entirely sensible regulation which is banned by veto-holding member states, the result of which being that Europe can have poorer rules on a subject than the US.
This is not a Europhile screed. Sometimes EU regulations can be absurd. For instance, the law on protection from optical radiation - sunlight to you and me - which would have required builders and masons to wear a fairly ridiculous shape of hat. Another rule concerned the ideal ergonomic shape of a farmer's tractor seat.
But these overreported examples must not obscure the fact that sometimes governments are responsible for foisting legislation on the commission - those seats were a German - and other times, goivernments are reactionary when it comes to sensible laws, the stupidity of which decision is obscured by clouds of euroscepticm unfairly targeted blather.
Consider the example of cheap disposal lighter and children's safety. (Cheap lights, under two euross, since dear ones pose little threat: Cartier lighters fall beyond regulation, since their owners reintrudce the implement into their pockets quickly after use.)
Europe does not have child proof lighters. The US does. They are cheap, the modification costing only a few more cents, and they save lives. In 2004, the number of children who died from fires in the USA was down 60 percent on 1993, the year the regulations were introduced: in that latter year there were an estimated 5,000 fires, with 170 deaths and 1,150 injuries involving children younger than five years of age. Since then, Australia, Canada and New Zealand followed suit. Not Europe, though.
Why? Because domestic importers intervened to put pressure on national governments. The regulations that require childproof safety catch for cheap lighters woulkd discriminate against lighters from China, which lack such a feature. Brussels is replete with lobbies and special interest groups, from the inernational timber association to the association of international bus manufacturers. In 2001 one of the more abstruse members of the club was formed, the "Association of European Importers of Cigarette Lighters," or "Elias" for short, was founded on the initiative of a Hamburg firm that imports disposable lighters from China. Their motive was simple: to oppose legislation that could harm their business prospects.
At their first meeting, held in a hotel in Frankfurt, the ladies and gentlemen in attendance made no bones about their aims. Chinese commercial representatives started visiting member state capitals, complaining that the regulation harmed free trade. Their anxiety was based on the following Hobson's choice. Raising the prices beyond the limit of 2 euros at which safety catches did not need to be installed would erose the competitive price advantage with manufacturers in Europe and Japan; installing the safety catches, while only a few cents, would first require buying expensive patents - and these were held by European firms. Either way, the Chinese would be in trouble, Towns such as Wenzhou, with 200 manufacturers made over 850 million lighters annually, provided Europe with 80 percent of its imports. The importers' lobby went into action. Not by apppealing to European alytruism towards manufacturing towns in China, but to euroscepticism about Brussels bureaucracy.
And the results were soon on display.
When the commission wanted to publish its paper on harmornised standards, they came up against objections from national capitals. The testing requirements for the new lighters were too complex, absurd. The test for child proof standards required 100 children no older than 51 months of age, no more two children present in the same room, even the minimum space between their chairs was specified. A lighter passed the test if 85 out of the 100 children couldn't light it up. Bavaria's minister for Europe had a field day when she presented the testing requirements to the Bavarian parliament in October, scoffing at these symptoms of “Excessive regulation, an out-of-control bureaucracy”, she scornfully pointed out how little this had to so with "normal people living normal lives in this country". And promised to take the battle to her government, who would take it to Brussels. The commission had been presented with the "overly bureaucratic" argument before, in direct representations from the importers' lobby.
But are these tests really so ridiculous? In fact, Bic at Clichy-la-Garenne near Paris has been carrying out these tests since 1993, since as the world's largest manufacturer of disposable lighters it caters also to the American market. The tests are not so onerous since they only have to be conducted once for each model; and such scientific testing is standard in all manufacturing areas where there is consumer protection - in medicine packaging for instance, when making childproof caps.
But the commission must submit to the member states veto, and still a billion or so lighters without safety mechanisms flood into Europe every year.
Unwitting though Bavarian ministers for Europe may be about this, there is a tradeoff between Chinese jobs and European child safety - and in this case the winners were Chinese jobs (and European importers.) But to say it onesidedly it is victory against against excessive regulation - when "pro business" America has had rules for 15 years on this - is, as must be evident, far too simplistic. A few weeks ago, in Holland a four-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister were seriously injured in an apartment fire in a Rotterdam suburb. A helicopter rushed the children to a hospital, where both died. An inquiry determined that they have been playing with a cigarette lighter.

Bildt and the burning of Sudan

At the EU summit at the weekend there was the usual feverish excitement - hundreds of journalists with their laptops, drinking in the bar, watching the television screens, clustering around spokesmen emerging from the talks. So - Turkey's application has been put on hold. That's plenty written about elsewhere. I have a feeling this is one area where even elite public opinion (just read the Guardian blogs) is pretty much united - against. But for the purposes of what I want to write today, what is interesting is how Sweden's foreign minister made a minor splash, quoted even in the British paper. Sweden hasn't had a guided foreign policy for years now, and its practitioners have been silent on the European scene.
But the new foreign minister is Carl Bildt, a man of a strong personality, much experience (ex Swedish prime minister, chief peace negotiator in the Balkans, a kind of godfather of Baltic independence.) and many European contacts. He is well known in Brussels, frequently contributes to the op-ed pages of the international press, and sits on the board of various EU think-tanks. He is highly respected.
His appearance in the international press is in connection with his hard core pro-enlargement stance, rare among Europe's leaders these days. This will probably earn him friends among liberals elsewhere. But in fact - in a story I have been researching for two weeks (see passim) - he has not always acted so selflessly in favour of the underdog. (if you assume Turkey is the underdog in these negotiations.)
I am thinking about his involvement in the Sudan.
During what one could call his relative wilderness years - when he was without a formal heavy post from Balkans peacemaker in 2001 until his surprise appointment as foreign minister in October - Bildt was a prominent figure in Lundin Oil, one of the biggest investors in Sudan's growth industry - the oil that fuels an arrogant regime's defiance of the world. The association made him rich. It is also quite controversial.

I wonder if Carl Bildt ever dreams about little black boys, hunted, running for their lives.
Hydrocephalic, uselessly lolling heads, small sticklike legs like pistons powering through the dust, as Antonov bombers circle overhead. A boy, separated from his parents, that disappears into the swamp, or becomes a child soldier - if he is not killed by the horsemen who come riding in behind the bombers.

He must have known - well before the oil development started. Six months before the company he had business interests in, Lundin Oil, Sweden's largest independent, started developing its concession there were negative reports about what was happening in a neighbouring concession, owned by Canada's largest independent oil company, Talisman, from a number of respected NGOs, UN figures and from a Canadian human rights commission.
This is what the UN's Sudan rapporteur wrote. Leonard Franco, on oil development in western Upper Nile, October 1999:
[Reports available to the Special Rapporteur indicate that] “long-term efforts by the various Governments of Sudan to protect oil production have included a policy of forcible population displacement in order to clear oil-producing areas and the transportation routes of southern civilians….”
This is what a Canadian government Harker report set up in response to Talisman's prospecting said a few months later.
"On 9 May 1999, a new offensive was launched from the Nuba Mountains and Pariang. Antonovs and helicopter gunships supported troops using armoured personnel carriers. Roads built by the oil companies enabled these to reach their destinations more easily than before. From April to July 1999, the decline in population in Ruweng County seems to have been in the order of 50%.”
"The civilian population living in oil fields and surrounding areas has been deliberately targeted for massive human rights abuses---forced displacement, aerial bombardments, strafing from helicopter gunships.”
This is what Amnesty wrote in May 2000: ”Government forces have used ground attacks, helicopter gunship and indiscriminate high-altitude bombardment to clear the local population from oil-rich areas. This massive displacement of the local population followed the deployment of additional weaponry and forces specifically drafted in to protect the oilfields. The military tactics of the government's security forces of destroying harvests, looting livestock and occupying the area is designed to prevent the return of the displaced population."

A few months passed before Lundin, having made no acknowledgment of the reports, forged ahead in its own sector, . Southern Sudan is without doubt one of the most underdeveloped areas in the whole world; in an area the size of France, the population of 8m black Africans have been held back by decades of neglect by central government, Khartoum in the Arabised North; there was one stretch of tarmac road in the whole region, in the centre of the administrative capital of Juba; in nsome areas maternal mortality rates are one third, and a child much more likely to die giving birth than complete primary school.
The six month wet season made work harder - a paved road was needed.
As in the neighbouring Talisman sector, villages were situated in the way of the road and needed to be cleared. One of the first villages attacked in Lundin's sector was Chotyiel, in October 1999. On hearing gunships, 80-year-old Liu-Liu ran to the
forest with six of his grandchildren. "We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top," he said. "Then soldiers came to burn the houses. Helicopters flew overhead. If they saw you, they killed you. We stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit. It was not easy to move as we had blind people there. The Arabs are forcing the road to the village. They’re going to Rier, to the
oilfield."
A few days later, the village of Kuach was attacked by troops who arrived in lorries. "When I heard bullets I took one child and ran naked to the forest,’ said Simon Dual, a father of two. "But it was far and three people were killed as they ran. When I went back the next day to see what had happened, I found the house burned and the body of my child, Stephen, in the fire. They want to chase us off our
land because they want the oil."
Journalist Julie Flint, who covered the events, wrote that "the second wave of displacement [after Talisman] came as Lundin attempted to build its road. Many of those displaced in this fighting escaped with nothing but the clothes they were wearing when government forces attacked their villages.".
"It it was a story, from villages all the way down to Rier - villages like Chotyiel, Guit, Dhor Riang, Chiengyar, Chotyien. Small villages - some of them with barely 1,000 inhabitants - but villages that made up a relatively densely populated area despite the swampy nature of the land."
Of course it's not black and white. Two groups of southern militias that were used by the government defected to the opposition to fight the government for southerners' right to oil, they fell out and fought each other. But it is also true that Lundin and Talisman were the facilitators for the violence, and that Canadian human rights delegation led by Sudan expert John Harker, sponsored by the Canadian foreign ministry, visiting Sudan in December 1999 interviewed many people who felt that the oil discoveries had brought nothing but ill. "Did a foreign oil company ask our permission to take our oil, and sell it? Why is a rich country, taking our oil without our permission, and without any of benefit to us?” one eyewitness that Harker interviewed said. “We are going to lose our lives for oil,” one civilian predicted. Referring to their displacement, burned houses, disease, and dead children, he said: "The discovery of oil has caused these problems—before, the Arabs weren’t able to exploit the oil but now they can with the help of the west. The Arabs are united against us and want to push us out.” Another simply stated to the Canadians, “By the time your report is out we will be dead. The [government of Sudan] will kill us because you visited.”
By August 2000, NGOs reported flying in relief plaves over the Lundin oil road and seeing an empty landscape, all villages deserted, and government armed posts every few kilometres. Tens of thousands of southern Sudanese had been displaced.
Soon after, the respected organisation Human rights Watch, who had sent Lundin a letter early on what of the repeat activities that were happening, received a reply expressing scepticism that the violence was taking place, blaming a shortage of Lundin's own staff on the ground.

So what did Carl Bildt – prominent board member and adviser at Lundin - have to say when he was finally interviewed about this in April 2001, by a Swedish journalist? By now yet another UN special rapporteur had written about the displacements, yet another report by a western NGO, Christian Aid, had come out, and there were numerous international journalists' accounts.
Bildt said: "To leave the area - which is the consequence of stopping all activities - would be both wrong and dangerous. Everyone wants us to remain in one way or another. That applies to all people there - they rather would like us to do more and more.”
Then he said: “And neither the UN nor Amnesty have said we should leave - while they say clearly that the activities shall be carried out in such a way that they contribute to the respect for human rights. These are good demands - and we plan to live up to them.”
He then said:
"After careful checks been able to say that the reports about planned and extensive people displacements in the area where Lundin is active do not correlate with reality.”
Finally he said Swedish TV: "As far as I understand it's a matter of moving a number of people. This is not completely unusual, it is as in Sweden when you build motorways."
So there was no change of course. Though he represented a commercial operation, it is strange that one of Europe's premier statesmen seems to have dropped his humanitarian negotiating instincts: in the interview, he talked blithely about the southern Sudanese preferring to have a western democratic presence than the Chinese. But his company did not walk the walk by putting any of that western superiority on display: no concern for human rights of the displaced (which of course they denied against the evidence existed), no constructive attempt put pressure on the regime by withdrawing expertise and work until a ceasefire had been obtained (while holding on to the concession), no distancing from the regime by dialogue with the rebels, no follow-up of the suggestion to set aside a trust fund from oil revenues for the south, no attempt to ban military flights from oil company airfields and stop the flight ban on relief flights, no attempt to institute monitoring processes independent of the small number of own security guard and the inveitably biased Government of Sudan forces that maintained their larger security to ensure that those human rights were lived up to, no call to have the International Labour organisation monitoring recruitment to the oil concession, which excluded southerners ...is it any wonder given past western exploitation and Lundin's own his in the area that the rebels continued fighting. The fighting continued unabated, as rebels who felt disenfranchised from the oil wealth they felt was theirs poured into the cleared areas and harassed the government troops and the oil workers.
Lundin pulled out, then pulled out permnanently. Talisman had pulled out of their concession a year earlier. But there was a difference. The Canadian government had written the Harker report, deeply critical of their largest independent company's activities. The Swedish government had done no equivalent thing. Talisman pulled out because of human rights pressure. Lundin pulled out because of the security situation. The attitudes of the two companies as expressed by their spokesmen was also different. Jim Buckee, president and chief executive of Talisman Energy Inc., the Calgary company at the heart of a controversy over the exploitation of Sudan's southern oilfields, wrote to shareholders this week saying, "I would like to make it clear that Talisman is vehemently opposed to forced relocation for oil development and I personally believe such practices are abhorrent." Carl Bildt said, more defiantly: "It would be easy for the company to leave but the oil will still be in ethe ground, and others would take over. The Chinese are the ones who want to expand in Sudan."


Failure to engage successfully in Sudan hasn't harmed Lundin's profits, from other territories - cashing in on the company's share options and shares have made Carl Bildt the richest politician in Sweden. The Swedish press have left him alone; while they managed to get the arts minister sacked for the heinous crime of not having paid her TV licence. “The media are awed by his reputation,” said Egbert Wesselink of the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan.
Regarding his presence at the recent EU summit, left wing political commentator Lena Mellin wrote effusively of the right-wing foreign minister after giving him a five star "power rating." "In the area of foreign policy, not many people beat him. He knows everyone worth knowing in the world," she cooed.
As for many of the displaced, their fates are not recorded since that slew of reports in the 2000-2003. "None of them have received compensation," says Julie Flint, the Sudan expert. Perhaps they now make up some the 1.5m southerners in displacement camps outside Khartoum. Bildt refuses to answer questions on either the regime of Sudan or his past involvement there, to the Swedish press. His deputy, Gunilla Carlsson, wrote an op-ed piece a few months ago urging UN intervention in Darfur. Now she is silent. The exact closeness of Bildt's relationship with the Sudan regime - (called genocidal by secretary of state Colin Powell, and subject to US sanctions)- which after all granted Lundin a concession and provided itys "security" - would be interesting to look at. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is very hostile to UN intervention in Darfur. And the new Swedish foreign policy, clearly, has not spoken out against Bildt's old Khartoum interlocutor - in contrast to Blair, for instance,who talks of EU sanctions.
It is sad that a talented man who aspires to be Europe's foreign minister based on his achievements to undo the vicious effects of ethnic cleansing in Europe seems to have this murky story of forced displacements in Africa hanging over him. This most productive of men - who keeps a blog and a website devboted to his essays and daily musings - reaelly does need to explain himself regards his involvements in a country and company that have provided his main source of income in the last five years. His last vaguely Sudan related published words came in October on the death of Adolph Lundin, the roguish, bucaneering patriarch of the oil company that bears his name and Bildt's patron. lavishing him with share options in several of his companies. In a short comment, Bildt cited him as an inspiration while adding that he wasn't a man of the "fine salons". We would like to know more.

Idiot's guide to the EU, by a useful such one.....

While waiting for the end of week EU summit - and no, Bing didn't phone incidentally - my thoughts turn to what Europe is about. It's good to have outsiders; they force you to think. And I wrote the screed below.

It's funny, as soon as you write something you stop believing it - so it is in my case. After the piece defending Europe - and I sometimes wonder why I do this - I thought, this is complete nonsense. Anyways.

"...the EU is *not* an heir to the constructivist society of communist Russia, not an heir to the French revolution. It is not run by a revolutionary, unaccountable cadre of irreligious zealots and fanatics, all speaking French and producing pyramids of corpses in the abstract interests of Mankind. (The EU has never killed anyone, unlike the US.)
I used to think so, at university and living in the UK. Many British and American academics sitting in Oxford or wherever probably think so still, in their deluded fantasy.
But practical experience - occasionally useful you know, to have practical experience of something - of Brussels tells me it is ivery different. There are just too many checks and balances, too many different national interests, too many actors - the whole corporate, legal, NGO world is THERE, represented, including from the US. (And there are many nations and actors that are religious.. Others are not....it's not an issue) So many of them would cry foul at the slightest infraction on freedom. There are literally hundreds of meetings every day of expert groups, seminars, between all areas of business, finance, civil service and politics of mature democracies in the square miles that comprise the EU capital.
There is highly transparent decision making, monitored by the world's largest press corps. Everything is online, every commission official is contactable.
Everything has to go through multiple stages of verification. This is how the EU legislative process works: everyone has a say:
If you went to Brussels, and bumped in Mandela one day, the chairman of Texaco and ultracapitalist the next, a left wing NGO scurrying through the corridors on the third, and you spouted your stuff about the new Soviet Union, they would laugh at you. Elitist, yes.
But not totalitarian, not centralised. And it takes years to get a decision through that satisfies everyone.

It is the place of European - and globalised - dealmakers, got that? It is the City of London/New York Stock Exchange of world politics;Europe at the core, the rest of the world in concentric circles.The same international elite that goes to the city to make money goes to Brussels to lobby for financial legislation.
Every evening, the global elite with their briefcases get on the eurostar high speed trains back to London, under the channel, to Paris, to Dusseldorf....

Now my conceit about it being a Burkean aristocracy is this.
These "players" act in moderation to each other as aristocrats in the English parliament did of yore. The EU is not democratic - does not fish for the votes of the single mother of Birmingham or the Amsterdam ethnic street youth - it is no more a democracy that pre 1832 reform act England was. But aristocracies can sometimes make for better legislation, and make for better preservation of freedoms, and guarantee the rule of law, than democracies - especially populist democracies of interwar east Europe that persecuted Jews, or the revolutionary people's democracies that quickly turned totalitarian of France/Russia post 1789/1917.

In fact there are more checks and balances than in the modern UK. While British political instincts are good - its people are more tolerant and open to argument than continentals - the system at the moment is close to an elective dictatorship. That is, once elections are held, the ruling party and government always has a majority in parliament, MPs always vote with their government because they want jobs in govt. The revising chamber, the House of lords, is weak.
Tony Bliar has lost one or two votes in the last decade. It is not the same as parliament of Burke's era, when MPs were unwhipped and just voted with the best argument.
The closes approximation to the House of commons of say 1780 is actually the European parliament, where I have spent god knows how much time. Because MEPs (members of the European parliament) cannot get jobs in govt, I guess they are like the senate, they cannot be bribed into loyalty. They are a genuine revising chamber, looking at arguments on their merits. This is where reasoned, moderate Burkean rumination goes on.
Because of this elective dictatorship in the UK, I always tell lobbyists that if they want something done they should go to Brussels. Why? Because the effective British opposition at the moment is not the conservative party (which under the system always loses every parliamentary vote), it is MEPs and - above all - -those nation states who oppose those bits of legislation that, say, the British govt wants to introduce. Lobby for instance the French or Danish government; they have real power to oppose Blair. The British parliament does not.

As you know, European law precedes nation state law, it is an increasingly federal system, with nation states akin to US states, and Brussels like Washington. Probably sixty percent of legislation coming into the statute book of any given country come from Brussels; the rest are "local", ie nation state, issues. The nation state also has some powers to revise or adapt the general directives coming from Brussels.
But it is at the nation state level where the balance of power is dysfunctional. Ie the supra level is "balanced", and subject to checks and balances, it is when we get down to the UK level that we have elective dictatorship.

That is why Blair likes going to war. War is still a nation state issue. He has complete omnipotent powers here. More than he has about say, fish stocks or civil liberties.

Language of Barbarians

There have been two worthwhile events towards the end of the week. One has been the launch of the transnational radical party in the European parliament, in which Maurizio Turco, a rather cool Italian MEP, gave the keynote speech. Policies such as legalising drugs are part of his box of ideas. Fifteen minute speeches by the Esperanto Radical Association, the Antiprohibitionist International League and the anticlericale.net organisation give some flavour of its ideas. I didn’t stay too long. It will be interesting how it follows up.

Another was a conference on Human Rights featuring – here is a sample – one senior adviser of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. The United Nations People’s stateless organisation secretary general, the Lao Movement for Human Rights. I will be writing about this elsewhere; but I want to tell a little story.
At lunch, I left the meeting and went to a bar café in the area of Matonge. It has a high Congolese population. Congo is Belgium’s former colony. A president, the first freely elected in 40 years, Laurent Kabila, whose father was assassinated a few years back, had just been sworn in. Kabila is very popular in the east, which is Swahili-speaking and under the influence of the English-speaking neighbours to the east. He is less popular in the west, which is French and Lingala-speaking. The fact that Congo has been the battleground for “Africa’s World War” between Rwanda and Uganda on the one hand, and Angola, Nambia and Zimbabwe, which killed up to three million people, is less well known than it should be in the West. The war ended in 2003, a threat of renewed conflict still lingers.
I bought a group of about five people beers. Then one leaned over and said: “English is the language of barbarians.”
I felt a bit uncomfortable about this, given the accusations of complicity to genocide flung back and forth between the French government and the Rwandan government.
I had a sense that language, supremacism and mass murder could well be linked in Africa. The French government supported the French-speaking Rwandan Hutu militias withdrawing to Congyo in 1994. In turn, the French say the guerrillas who went on to form the Rwandan government who came from Uganda where they had been reared and trained in rebel camps in an Anglophone environment also committed butchery, English is now the de facto language of Rwanda.

There is no doubt that British commercial culture can sometimes grate when you have come from the continent, the P&O ferries forming an introduction to this. But I felt a rare twinge of pride, coming back on the coach. (The trains had hiked their prices to a level even newspapers wouldn’t pay for.)
We were searched by French customs officers, who asked quite intrusive questions, and stopped everyone. My experience of British customs is that they only stop people on suspicion. And they have to write up a note, which you have to sign, after the search is completed. The French officers snapped their rubber gloves in a loud and rather juvenile way.
When we got back on the bus, there were several Belgian Moroccans with whom I struck up conversation, each saying that Britain was a much less racist than the continent, more fair, more open. Shortly after, British passport officers in civilian suits welcomed us into the UK with a smile.

Nokia nation shuns mobile workers

An occasional series of stories from little-covered Scandinavian countries. It's been the Finnish presidency of EU for six months - and the climax of this period is the bi-annual summit of European leaders due to take place on Friday. I will try to write about it then: one of the key issues will be the Turkish membership question, which is on the rails, a tug of war between member states who want to retard the process, and others that are impatient - one of which countries is Finland. With that in mind, until then, this little story catches my eye
EU legislation is one thing in theory; another thing, as everyone knows, in practice. So also with free labour mobility. On 1 May Finland – new holders of EU presidency - proudly joined a number of other member states, including Portugal, Greece and Spain in opening its borders to labour from the new member states. The UK, Sweden and Ireland opened their borders already in 2004.
So is it easy to get a job in Finland now? Not really, if the experiences of a Polish journalist from Wroclaw are anything to go by. Her newspaper sent reporters to all the capitals that had opened their borders, to pose as ordinary job applicants. The Lisbon, Athens, London, Stockholm and Barcelona bound hacks had all found menial jobs within a week.
The girl who drew the Helsinki lot was less lucky.
“You can’t even get a job as a cleaner without some knowledge of Finnish. It was told that measuring and mixing cleaning fluid was so demanding English is not enough, even though everyone spoke it,” Aleksandra “Ola” Pezda wrote afterwards, for Gazeta Wyborcza. “They don’t really want foreigners here.”
She was told that she was the wrong sex to get a job as a painter; though she might get a job handing out copies of metro later. At two employment agencies serving foreigners, Eures and Staffpoint, she was told that "nobody will accept an application form" if she does not speak Finnish, Europe’s most complicated and most obscure language. She went around restaurants, called about available jobs and went to St Henry’s Catholic church. In other cities these have “Wailing Wall” noticeboards for jobs, usually for the Polish community. In the Helsinki church the only notice was for alcoholics anonymous. Pezda was astonished to see the largest trade union headquarters she had seen anywhere and speculated whether this was the cause of the Finns’ hostility to foreigners. She was surprised the Finns wanted so much personal information by email, unlike other cities. “They are afraid to say no to your face,” she was told.
She found Helsinki extremely expensive; and one Pole she did meet was only ever able to send back 500 euros a month. Even student restaurants were unaffordable and she learnt to bake her own bread. People knew the prices of everything down to the last cent. Finally she did find a woman called Ritta who apologised for the application forms being only in Finnish – the first Finn to do so. Pezda went out into the street and hailed a Finn at who random, who could help her through the labyrinthine application. However she never got to know if she was given the job, since she had to catch her plane back home, and the manager had said “I will see you later, maybe in a few weeks.” My thought about this: if the Finns have made Enlargement the principal theme of their presidency, it could be because they do not fear it.

When I hear culture I reach for my EU dictionary

I am in Brussels this week. This is a typical routine on my biweekly commutes to that city, for your reference.
I spent Monday at a culture conference, the contents of which have been somewhat anti-culture. The meeting concerned the online consultation that DG culture (in its wannabe way, perhaps) held earlier this year: with a number of citizens giving their input, the commission produced a briefing statement, brought in several bigwigs from the DG - including commissioner Jan Figel - and devoted a day to talking about it with various cultural stakeholders in European arts policy of whom you will, of course, never have heard.
Outsiders were informed that since "its inclusion in the Treaty on the European Union, cultural cooperation has become a new community competency." So what can Europe do for culture?
Here is a sample of the online consultation inputs - all of which are from leading stakeholder figures (didn't see any citizens), from organisations such as the International Photography Network and the Nordic Innovation Centre.
"We need to have a closer cooperation with stakeholders from different sectors supporting Culture and Creative Industries. If Europe should contribute to a professionalizing of the Creative Industries, we must strongly emphasise on the role of the Creative Industries entrepreneur through enhancing the knowledge of the economic setting and business know-how."
"Yes they are linked. Contribute - by making clear that the cultural disciplines have always influenced each other through history. - organise crosscultural concerts as well as crosscultural exhibitions, to be performed/shown in more than one place. - by creating chances for artists to take part in exchange and co-operation programmes. Give them more chances to elaborate projects on cultural integration."
Then:
"Art and culture come from the grass roots way of life. Artists should be empowered to continually reflect this social phenomenon with their artistic creations. The EC should empower inter-statal organisations to lead their members to the goal of integration in diversity."
I don't know quite what to make of all of this; the conference speeches were in the same vein.
I did vaguely why the conference hadn't invited in, say, Gunther Grass or Ryszard Kapuscinski to bring some liveliness into the proceedings.

At the usual elaborate lunch I met the chair of MTV Europe. We discussed Steve Strange, a music DJ from our youths - the early 90s - whom I remembered interviewing once at a European parliament theme television programme recording at the station's studios in Camden Lock, London. "We are trying to become more serious," he said.
MEPs were quizzed on what the knew of European youth culture. Patricia Rawlings - an authentic bluerinse Tory, no longer in the EP - was shown a man who walked on stage in bikers' gear, unzipped a banana from his trousers and started to eat. She replied, "He is obviously a squatter." (He was a heavy metal fan.) Another MEP in an elegant suit lamented that not enough discussion was devoted to the 20 million youth unemployed in Europe but spoilt it somewhat by bringing out a balloon which, when she had inflated it in front of my face, said, "vote socialist" - and I remember finishing my article with the words "MTV is becoming more serious, but not as serious clearly as the European parliament."
Of course, it was the facetiousness of youth. Now I know that the European parliament - indeed the whole EU - truly is a serious place.