Germany beat Poland in the final of the world championship in handball in Köln on the weekend. Through a sport played almost exclusively in Europe, the unexpected teams in the final (France, Spain and Croatia were favoured, Denmark won the bronze medal) offered an opportunity to take a look at relations between the historically uneasy neighbours 18 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. for many, the sight was not very satisfying and there was a nervous feeling that the ongoing animosity between the rich German Wessis and the poor Slavic Ossis was indicative of the general difficulty the EU is having in giving the impression of a united entity.
Bundespräsident Köhler and Polish President Lech Kaczynski sat next to each other, even exchanged national shawls, but the photos show two uneasy, even unhappyfaces, and the Polish president was given an unfriendly welcome by the mainly German fans. This could be interpreted as just part of the increasingly unpleasant sporting scene in Europe, but it goes deeper than that. The Poles seem incapable of fogetting what happened 60 years ago; the Germans seem incapable of understanding why the Poles let their contemporary politics with regard to Germany revolve so steadily around that memory. Certainly there are leading figures on both sides who would like nothing better than to get these two large nations to work together and form transnational centres along their boundaries, as has happened in Malmö/Copenhagen. But there is little sign of this, and the bickering and irritations dominate a relationship that seemed very promising not so long ago.
Canada and France, Round five
So the French have managed to do it yet again. The magnificently named socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal announced in Paris to visiting separatist Parti Quebecois leader André Boisclair that she favours “the sovereignty and liberty” of Quebec. Mme Royal, who declined an invitation by the provincial government to visit Quebec and apparently has never been there, received thundering blasts from both the premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, and the new federal Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion, telling her to mind her own business. The tone of these responses should give her some idea of how France’s relationship would be with her NATO ally should she become president. Dion, a dual Canadian/French citizen with an honours PhD from France’s most elite graduate institute, reminded Mme. Royal of historical developments she seems to have overlooked, and didn’t even mention the liberation of France in 1944 by, among others, Canadian troops.
“The problem with her declaration” said Dion from Quebec City in his native French, “is that we have been free longer than the French because we had responsible government while they were still in the midst of debating empires and revolutions. So Canada is a pioneer of freedom and always will be…. I don’t understand. We do not interfere in the affairs of a friend country”.
After Charles de Gaulle trumpeted his infamous “Vive le Quebec libre” in Montreal forty years ago, he was ordered out of the country. Mme. Royal may find she has trouble getting a visa to even enter.
Storms over Bavaria
There has been virtually no winter in southern Germany this year – last year there was snow on the ground from late November to mid-March – but a hurricane thundered in yesterday across western Europe. As the wind blew everything unchained around the garden of the palace of the Bavarian kings, a Shakesperean drama played out its final act in the seat of government at the edge of the Hofgarten in the wings of the old War Museum. Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber, 14 years in power, announced that he would resign all his posts as of Sept. 30, 2007.
For Stoiber, at 65, it was a tragic end to a life-long career that had brought him within a very few votes of becoming German Kanzler in 2002. The way it played out demonstrated the wide gulf that separates the Protestant north of Germany, with its power centre in bankrupt Berlin, and the Catholic south, with its baroque splendour in booming Munich. In 2005, Stoiber actually set up shop in the grand coalition government ruled by Angela Merkel, where he offered to play the role of a kind of super minister. When Merkel offered him quite a bit less than that, he fled back to Munich to resume his position as Bavarian premier, much to the despair of many of his party colleagues. When the Süddeutsche Zeitung speculated that the Bavarians would never forgive “einen feigen Hund” (a cowardly dog) for cohabiting with the despised Prussians before fleeing back to safe home territory without a fight, the storm flags were flying, and the prognosis was correct.
But Stoiber didn’t give up, and his (angry) potential successors all swore they were loyal and would not be candidates if he ran again in 2008, as he said he would. Behind the scenes, however, the knives were out, and the mortal blow came, appropriately enough, from an unknown female backbencher in his own party who accused him of sending spies on her trail.
Yesterday, in the midst of the hurricane, it was all too much, and Stoiber gave up. But in many ways he may have also won. The leftist Süddeutsche, a permanent thorn in the side of Stoiber’s conservative CSU party, concluded in its lead editorial this morning, that all in all Stoiber had been a good premier of Bavaria – somethung that had never crossed its mind previously – and that it was sort of sad that he had been brought down both by his own weakness in going, however briefly, to Berlin, and by his inablility to realize that the red-haired backbencher from Franconia, who “loves to hear her own voice and see her own photographs” had made a charge he had to take seriously. Small failures in a major political figure, one would think, but maybe that’s what Shakespeare is all about.
Russia, Germany, energy
If you live east of Estonia, Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria, a new kind of iron curtain went up on your borders on January 1, 2007. Bulgaria and Rumania joined the European Union, despite many doubts in western Europe about the real state of their economies and of their willingness to fight corruption. Suddenly citizens of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were the frontuer states on the wrong side of the borderless united Europe. There are many questions about just how united this Europe is, but one thing is sure. If you have a passport from the new states carved out of the Soviet Union (with the exception of the three small Baltic states), you have been excluded from the promised land, and will face daunting bureaucratic hurdles to even enter it temporarily.
But there is something that comes out of Russia, passes through Belarus or Ukraine, and becomes essential when it reaches the European Union – natural gas delivered from Russian wells through Russian-controlled pipelines . It may have seemed easy to naively dismiss Russia as a chaotic paper dragon not so long ago, albeit with nuclear weapons, but Europe is busy learning that it better think twice before putting that in the context of the energy that keeps houses warm in the winter. Last year, Germany was like Siberia for months, and this year Russia has reminded everyone that it controls the switches that determine the price the customer has to pay to keep cozy. Both Belarus and Ukraine thought they had privileged discount positions because of the Slavic brotherhood, but this year they have both learned what the price is for the special deal. And Germany and its smaller neighbours wonder when it might be their turn to discover just what it means to be competely dependant on Russian pricing, good will, and reliability.
The surprise winner in Canada
So it turns out that the Liberal party of Canada decided at the last minute that Michael Ignatieff had made a few too many strange remarks, had identified himself too closely with too many strange US policies and had ultimately not shown that he deserved to be catapulted over the line of long-serving candidates seeking the position of head of the Liberal Party and future Prime Minister of Canada. A quick survey by one of the Mackenzies shows that there is general satisfaction with the result across Canada, except among the separatistes in Quebec.
Nobody could be less in cahoots with the Bush regime than the winner, Stephan Dion. Here we have a highly intellectual and very French political professor with ten years of political service under his belt and an impeccable record as the minister of environment responsible for Canada’s signing of the Kyoto Accord, which the current conservative governement is attempting to weasel its way out of. Dion won’t win a seat in Alberta where all the oil is, but he’ll win some in British Columbia and the Maritimes. The big quesion is whether Ontario can warm up to someone so French and whether the separatistes in Quebec, who dislike Dion because of his commitment to Canada, can ruin his chances in Quebec. But the Mackenzie Brothers once spent a week with Dion in Iceland and are ready to predict that the man’s basic decency and
honest humility (certainly very unfrench qualities for a politician), combined with his eloquent French and heavily accented English will prove to be a tough challenge for the Alberta-dominated Conservatives when it comes to the vote in Quebec. Could be even a tougher challenge for the Bushmen if they have to sit down and deal with Dion as prime minister and Ignatieff as foreign minister.
Corruption Where It Is Unexpected
Germany is swiftly losing its confidence in the basic honesty of the men (and I think that they all are men) who run some of their most prestigious companies. the director of the Deutsche Bank managed to escape prosecution for misuse of funds only by paying what amounts to a fine of over 3 million Euros. Worst of all, it seems like a group of top level financial managers in Siemens managed to squirrel together a bribery pot of more than 200 million Euros, much of which was used for bribes in Nigeria. There is a suspicion that this could not have been done without the knowledge of the absolute top level directors of Germany’s premier high tech company. The question now is: where will it end, what can still be coming, and how long has this been going on. OK, the Germans would recently have said that they expect that from some of their new European Union colleagues, like Rumania, Number 84 on the list of corruption-infiltrated countries, just behind Cuba and Burkano Fasso. But Germany? Speaking of the EU, it is quickly displaying some of its basic weaknesses. It seems like they didn’t really mean it when they wrote in the constitution that decisions had to be made unanimously. Or perhaps they hadn’t considered what that meant when Malta and Cypress joined. But it is Poland, run by the strangest of all family duos, which has demonstrated what it means. They vetoed an otherwise unanimous motion to negotiate with Russia on energy matters, since the Russians banned their meat imports. So now they can’t talk to Russia which supplies most of the energy to Europe. Putin can laugh his way back to Moscow.
Jews return to the heart of a German city?
It´s time for some potential good news. Last weekend the largest Jewish centre in Europe was opened to great fanfare in the centre of Munich on St. Jakob´s Platz. 68 years to the day from Kristallnacht which ended in the Holocaust. Every member of the Bavarian parliament was at the ceremony opening the new syngogue along with all the leading German politicians except Chancellor Merkel. On the next day, 15000 Munich citizens, watched over by 1500 police and elite soldiers, spent hours standing in line so they could take a look at the new buildings. Skepticism about the size of the complex, including a synagogue, community, centre, school and museum. seemed to disappear in the presence of what was universally felt to be a powerful piece of architecture. Some members of the now 10000 strong Jewish community of Munich remain skeptical that Jewish life can be said to have returned to the centre of the former birthplace of Naziism when 1500 soldiers are a very welcome part of the procession. But nevertheless something has changed dramatically with the building of this centre and that will surely bear fruit in the future.
Canada Leaves Green for Brown
Canada is making it into the German papers more than it used to, but it’s not always for flattering reasons. It used to be that the only Canadian stories worth carrying had to do with grizzly bear attacks, Quebec separatism (almost always misportrayed) and sports; Steve Nash is Dirk Nowitzky’s best friend or Canadian thugs won another match against European skilled squads. The latter has however disappeared of late as Sweden showed it could beat anybody in any number of ways, including thuggery.
Bur now Prime Minister Harper actually gets his photo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, just like the fantastic twins now ruling Poland. And that’s a bad sign, because the twins never get in unless they’ve done something extremely silly. So there was Harper making a speech in which he attempted to announce that Canada was getting out of its Kyoto commitments. This did not go over well, to put it mildly, and now this decision will have to be reconsidered. A Canadian prime minister should know he’s in big trouble when the foreign press begins to compare him very unfavourably to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Whither democracy?
The German media is obsessed with two items these days. One involves the metaphysical dimensions of “Borat”, the film in which a British Jewish comic has the nerve to make fun of almost everything, insulting almost everyone on his journey across the US in the role of a Kazakh reporter out to discover the wonders of “the greatest country in the world”. But nothing comes off worse than US society itself. The other topic involves the dirty tricks that are slashing through the supposedly civilized veneer of the electoral process in the the US in its final days. The chaotic absurdity of the two scenarios are related, and to the Germans add up to a serious questioing of the democratic process itself in the US. Is this the process for which German soldiers should go to war? Never mind Iraq, considered an illegal lost cause from the start, what about all those other places where help is requested to set up democracies? Suppose they don’t work any better than this miserable election? Democracy isn’t doing very well as a concept of a political concept in Europe these days. Germany struggles along with a coalition government that has little leadership. but it works fine compared to its neighbours. Austria has had no government at all in the month since its election and seems unable to make any progress in finding one. Sweden couldn’t get through one week of a newly-elected government without firing several new cabinet ministers because they had failed to fulfill the fundamental duties of a democratic society. Several hadn’t paid obligatory broadcasting fees for ten years, including the new minister of culture, others avoided taxes by hamstering money in off-shore accounts, several employed illegal cheap workers. Worst of all, none of the East European states under Soviet control has come up with a stable working democracy after fifteen years iof trying, and several, like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, are getting worse. Only Slovenia from the former Yugoslavia really seems to have joined the west. Could it be that German ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder got it right when he recently wrote that Vladimir Putin, a loyal friend of Germany, and a “pure democrat”, was the only kind of leader that could bring order to Eastern Europe. Maybe Borat knows.
What ever happened to the Wehrmacht?
So let’s get this straight. North Korea outwits all the military powers in the world and sets off an atomic bomb. Just like Tom Lehrer predicted. But even Tom couldn’t have written a satire in which Germany protests that one of its naval ships was fired upon by the Israeli air force in the same week that Polish custom guards would shoot at a German tourist boat as it entered Polish waters. It turns out that the German military command seems to have been mistaken when it took over coast guarding in Lebanon on the assumption that they would give the orders. Looks like the Lebanese navy, such as it is, will, and that the Israelis have information on every helicopter that takes off from a German naval ship.
Finally, at a Nato meeting in Finland, the Canadian defence minister accuses all the NATO allies except Canada, the UK and the USA of shirking their military responsibilities in Afghanistan as they hide behind thick garrison walls in safe parts of the country, while Canadian soldiers get killed while fighting around Kandahar, something he thought all NATO troops were understood to be doing. Now that would include such tough guys as Germany, France, Spain, Italy, all safely hidden,while Canada, the US and the UK actually engage the enemy. The leading Geman paper brings this story on its front page and wonders if the word “feig” (cowardly) is appropriate.