The Gods of the Copybook Headings

The European Industrial Guilt Complex

Move over white liberal guilt. 

Do you remember that Harry Enfield character, Jürgen the German – the young tourist who went around apologising for his country, and shouting abuse at anyone who demurred? I'm afraid I've met a couple of German MEPs like that – aggressive in their internationalism, bellicose in their pacifism.

Is there a German word for moderation? For seventy years they were the world's greatest fighters. For the next seventy years they led the world in self-abnegation. In whatever she does, Deutschland über alles. Half way measures are for the weak...and the insufficiently neurotic.

In creating their half-baked version of a federal state most of Europe's leaders had two objectives: control Germany and provide a counter-weight to the Americans and the Soviets. For the Germans the creation of first the EEC and then the EU was a collective form of atonement for the sins of their fathers.

The Soviets are kaput. Obama led America seems intent on going the same way. European debt levels may bring down the world's economy. So what is the point of the EU today? United or no, the pincer movements of an unsustainable welfare state and the continents nihilistic demographics will wreck the place within a generation or two. Merkel, Sarkzo and the EU's stodge in Athens are simply re-arranging the deck chairs.

Why keep going? The most powerful force in politics is inertia. Millions of Europeans obtain their daily bread from the beneficence of Brussels. Some are bureaucrats, others are subsidized farmers and still more businesses whose meagre profits hinge on navigating the regulatory labyrinth of the superstate. It works well for the many people who will riot to protect their unearned privileges. The victims, as with most rent seeking activities, are many and scattered. The unemployed young Spaniard or struggling small French entrepreneur are certainly Brussels victims, though they rarely understand themselves as such.

This is why the Eurocrats are fighting to save the quixotic Euro. You cannot separate fiscal and monetary policy. The father of the Euro, the Canadian born economist Robert Mundell, pointed this out half a century ago. He is now arguing for greater "fiscal harmonisation and authority." Which is also the goal of the continent's political leadership.The Euro will make or break a federalized Europe.

Economics was never the the point of the EU, it was only the means. Since the time of Aristide Briand the goal has been to create a United States of Europe. The free trade area, the single currency and the Schengen Area were steps along the way. By entangling the economies of Europe it would make political union far more likely, if not inevitable.

This is the ass-backward way of creating a country. The traditional manner, favoured by chaps like George Washington and John A Macdonald, was to create the country first and then figure out how to set up a national economy. This would require, however, at least a rough political consensus in that direction. The people of Europe don't want a federal Europe. They certainly want to trade and travel freely, so long as they are protected from the downsides of those activities, but they are still attached to their nationalities.

The recent debt crisis has only highlighted the vast differences in Europe's cultures. For all the talk of a new European, it is the old Greece and the old Germany that we have seen these last three years. Whatever the post-nationalist pretensions of the Bruges-Brussels elite, the tabloid and populace of the continent still view the world much as their ancestors did, through the prism of nationalism and history. It has been some decades since the media was filled with so many veiled, and not so veiled, references to the Second World War. 

They've certainly put away the guns. Not that Europe's parade ground armies are much of a threat to each other, or indeed anyone else. One of the reasons the EU trembles before Vladimir Putin, a tin-pot dictator in all but name. The enfeebled and decadent Europe of today whiles away the epoch trading bailouts and historical grievances. This is the way world ends, not with a bang but with some tired old ethnic jokes.

The Euro will be saved because it must be saved, otherwise the European projects ends. The Eurocrats are not letting this very good crisis go to waste. The choice being given in the media is between yet another bailout or a default. There is a third option and that is the one we are now seeing implemented: colonization.

Greece is becoming a protectorate of Brussels. It now finds itself much in the same position Newfoundland did during the Great Depression, broke and with no hope of recovery. So the self-governing Dominion of Newfoundland voted itself back into colonial status, with London picking up the tab. 

Greece is the new Newfoundland. That may save Greece for the moment, and the Euro for the moment after that, it will do little to save Europe in the long-run. London couldn't pick up the tab even if it wanted to.

 

When Irish Eyes Are Smiling...

...you know Obama will soon be there:

There's no doubt Americans love to have an Irish connection, and the Irish are loving this particular link-up too. Local church records detail President Obama's family ties to Moneygall.

Records show that Mr Obama's great-great-great grandfather was born in Ireland in 1831 and left for America in 1850. When the ancestral link was first revealed four years ago, the news was met with initial scepticism.

I'm sensing a conspiracy theory...

Master Class

The French elites are different from you and me. They're French. From the Steyn:

Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn't do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. "We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization," sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was "not like other men" and wondering why "this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion." Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America's "absurd" justice system, not to mention this ghastly "American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other."

As you'll recall - at least those of you not victimized by a public school education - a couple of centuries back the French had a revolution. Let me differ with Zhou Enlai and say that enough time has passed for us to make a judgment. The French Revolution was a failure. This was rather apparent at the time. A bid toward liberal democracy quickly degenerated into the modern world's first totalitarian state, then limped along for the better part of a decade until order was restored by Napoleon. Edmund Burke, that great prophet, foretold the disaster almost from its onset. It is rather remarkable that so few have grasped its consequence with the hindsight of two centuries.

The popular image of the revolution is of desperately poor people slaughtering the rich and powerful. The image is a product of Charles Dickens vivid narrative skills in A Tale of Two Cities. Thus most in the English speaking world recall the revolution as delayed justice becoming bloodied vengeance. Up with the people and down with the aristos. Like with most revolutions it was actually run by an intellectualized - and politically inexperienced - middle class.

Another great myth of the revolution is that it established a meritocracy in France. Certainly many professions were opened up to ordinary people. The real power in France, after the fall of Napoleon, has basically been kept within the same social class. Whereas financial success can buy any American into the front row of life, in France going to the right school - such as Sciences Po and the ENA - is vital to having any real influence in the Fifth Republic. While access to these schools is suppose to be meritocratic, their selection pool is so small, and their alumni so influential, this hardly matters. 

The French elite is not fluid and is not especially accountable. It's one of the reasons the French take to the streets as often as they do. Power is centralized overwhelmingly in Paris and in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians. In a society where the state occupied a small slice of the economy this would be of little importance. The French state, however, looms over its society and economy in a manner hardly imaginable by North Americans until the Obama Era. 

The gap between the ENA graduates (Enarques as they are known) and ordinary people is vast. They stand at the end point of a vast government administered selection process. The French state school systems is far tougher than its anglophone counterparts, especially in the maths and sciences. This is one of the reasons that City firms seek out French graduates. Those who don't make their way through the tough academic meat grinder are left with few prospects. While the education is excellent, it is the credential that is vital. No credentials means no luck.

As a point of comparison, take Mark Steyn. By his own admission he barely graduated high school. His first job after leaving was as a DJ at a local radio station, which he obtained by basically talking his way in. Such an improvisational personality would have little chance in the hierarchical society of France. While Anglophone schooling is on average much worse than that of France, our societies are far more dynamic. The purpose of schooling in the Anglo-Saxon world being - in theory - preparation for the real world. In France it is pre-screening for high level positions in the bureaucracy, political apparatus and in the country's highly regulated business sector.

For the French life is much like school. A flood of not always relevant information, regimented hours and lengthy examinations. You spend two decades completing test questionnaires so that, if all goes well, you can spend a life time filling out government questionnaires. The clever and lucky may get to administer those questionnaires. It is a self-contained universe where one is ranked and categorized. After surviving such an ordeal a sense of entitlement is only natural.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was one of those clever boys who won all the prizes (except admission into ENA oddly enough, having to settle for a Ph D from Paris X Nanterre). He was better than everyone else. His test results proved it. Why should he be bound by such hum-drum things as decency, civility and mutual respect. Ordinary rules apply to ordinary men. The French Revolution replaced one aristocracy with another. The ancien regime, however, gave us les liaisons dangereuses. Their modern descendants will bequeath DSK in American handcuffs. You may decide for yourselves which example of decadence is more engaging. 

My Father the Nazi

From TLS:

Davidson’s quest began with a telephone call a week after Langbehn’s death in 1992, during which his mother began to talk more freely about her father than she had ever done while he was alive. Martin finally plucked up courage to ask how it was that a man of his grandfather’s age, who would normally have been serving at the front in 1944–5, had been able to live with them in a flat in Prague. She could have replied that her father had been invalided out of the Wehrmacht in 1940 with a badly broken left hand – and it would have been true. But she did not. Instead, she told him that her father had been in the SS, and thus prompted years of sleuthing, shared by Martin and his sister Vanessa, to uncover the hidden traces of the past. 

Scotland on the Dole

Stop me if this sounds familiar:

"There seems to be a kind of auction going on as to who can offer the longest shopping list," says David Bell, professor of economics at Stirling University and adviser to the Scottish Parliament's finance committee. "There's a collective unwillingness to deviate from the pack."

[…]

As well as the prescriptions, Scots now get free personal home care for the elderly, free school meals for all infants, free all-day bus travel for the over-60s, free eye tests, free bridge tolls, a frozen council tax and, of course, free university tuition.

All the Scottish parties – with the partial exception of the Tories, who don't really count here – promise to defend the full suite of existing entitlements.

Guess who pays for all this fun stuff? The taxpayers of England. I'm sure our Albertan readers understand.

I am loath to say this. Trying. To. Build. Up. Strength. To. Type. It. Urgghhhh.

Modern Scotland has gone all Quebec on us.

That hurt. That really, really hurt to write. Gonna have to lie down now. Feeling physically ill.

Blame the welfare state. Blame Devolution. The fact remain. This isn't your great-grandfather's Scotland. Glad that Adam Smith and George Brown aren't around to see this sad decline. From Scotland the Brave to Scotland the Mooch. All in about three generations.

Brave New Europe

Just one of those things...

In an interview published Thursday in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, Trintignant said he hates French rock musician Bertrand Cantat, convicted of manslaughter in the death of actor Marie Trintignant in 2003, more than anyone in the world. Trintignant, 80, is withdrawing from the July festival, where he was slated to perform his one-man show of French poetry, because Cantat will be appearing there in an adaptation of three of/Sophocles’s plays about women staged by the Quebec director Wajdi Mouawad.

“I don’t understand this man. I don’t understand how he can appear at Avignon,” Trintignant told the Figaro, apologizing for the strength of his feelings. “I used to find him likeable but he has been incapable of taking responsibility for anything since Marie’s death ... Why can’t people understand that there is something terrible in the way he is coming back as though nothing had happened.”

Relativism reaches its nadir.

Bertrand Cantat is a modern day Marquis St. Evrémonde, the decadent and cruel aristocrat who ran over a peasant child with his coach in A Tale of Two Cities, tossing a coin out the window to compensate the distraught parents. Whereas the Marquis was of a higher social status than his victim, Cantat's victim was a scion of a wealthy and famous family. This was violence within the modern French elite.

The shock here is not so much that Cantat is free less than a decade after beating his girlfriend to death, such things are not unheard of in this country, it's the blase attitude of supposedly progressive and feminist French artistic community. The eight year sentence of the Lithuanian court - the killing took place in Vilnius - was based on a judgement that Cantat did not intended to kill Marie Trintignant by striking her nineteen times in a jealous rage. He was released after serving four years - mostly in France - for good behaviour. 

The elite killing ordinary people with impunity was one of those great and obvious injustices that was suppose to have driven the mob to storm the Bastille. Like with most revolutions the French one was run by a middle class professional clique with totalitarian visions of reordering society, not enraged and illiterate peasants. The consequence of July 14, 1789 was bloodshed followed by military dictatorship. Rather than the odd Marquis running over a peasant child it was thousands being led to the guillotine.

One of the French Revolution's earliest prognosticators - and most indefatigable enemies - was Edmund Burke. While most Britons celebrated the early stages of the Revolution, seeing it as a movement toward a more liberal political system akin to Britain's own, the uncanny Burke understood that something deeper and more dangerous had taken place.

The Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille were more than desperate acts, they were the unmooring of a society from its traditional bulwarks. There was now no restraint or hold. What was to follow was not freedom but a cruel and fanatical anarchy tempered by ruthless tyranny. One of the turning points for Burke was the Parisian mob's storming of Marie Antoinette's bedroom, forcing the royal family from Versailles to Tuileries Palace in central Paris. His reaction in Reflections:

...little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. 

The above has caused more than a few of Burke's admirers to wince. It's seemingly melodramatic invocations of an idea of chivalry that was long out of date even in 1790. Yet he understood that a society where angry mobs could threaten the Queen and her children with impunity - and such an act be praised as necessary and just - had left behind morality, justice and compassion. 

The modern world has witnessed a relativist revolution not dissimilar to the one which nearly destroyed France two centuries ago. Murder is not murder. Theft is not theft. The act is no longer viewed objectively but subjectively. It's not what has been done but who has done it. Terrorize a local community and you're a gangster, unless you are of a certain race then your crimes are dismissed as "activism" and you are given the quiet sanction of authoriy, as in Caledonia. The rot has become even more obvious in France. Would Bertrand Cantat have gotten away with his crimes had he been a young Algerian in the banlieue?

The mob that threatened Marie Antoinette was pardoned its "excesses" because they were desperate, poor and ignorant. Can't make an omelette you know... Cantat seems to have been given a pass by France's high cultural priests, being allowed to perform at a prestigious festival, because of his status as a famous though fading pop musician. To their credit the Quebecois have displayed greater moral fortitude, forcing the cancelation of a play Cantat was to appear in next year. Federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Josee Verner has indicated that the feds will refuse to grant the convict entry into Canada.

While researching what the French media dubbed l'affaire Trintignant I was reminded again of Burke's haunting words: "...in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers." Sadly that nation no longer exists. The glory of France is indeed extinguished. For Canada there is still hope.

Broke in the Family

This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a bailout:

In a televised evening address to the nation, Prime Minister Jose Socrates said: "I want to inform the Portuguese that the government decided today to ask...for financial help, to ensure financing for our country, for our financial system and for our economy, "Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, the country’s finance minister, added:

“It is necessary to resort to the financing mechanisms available in the European Union.”

Portugal has followed Greece and Ireland, other financially troubled eurozone countries, in asking for aid from Europe's bailout reserve and the International Monetary Fund.

So they've finally chucked it, eh? Oh, well. It was a good run. As has been the case for the last fifty years or so the taxpayers of Germany will be cleaning up the mess. Send the bill to Berlin. Angela Merkel is currently engaged in a bit of histrionics about defending the German taxpayer. It's a prelude to the Chancellor admitting the inevitable and cutting a check. Why should Deutschland dole out? Who do you think the Portuguese owe all that money to?  Yeap. German banks who were looking for better returns than they were getting on those boring old bunds.

As regular readers will recall your humble correspondent's parents left Portugal back in the 1970s. Thus I'm considered to be Portuguese. So people keep asking me what I think about the fact that "my people" are going broke. Let me be frank and say that I don't really care. They've dug themselves into this mess and and they can dig themselves out.

Portugal is the one country in Europe that cannot make any reasonable claim to having been "screwed" over by some dominating power. The French can blame the Germans. The Poles can blame the Russians. The Greeks can blame the Turks. If the Portuguese are screwed they screwed themselves over. They have an almost miraculous ability to shoot themselves in the foot. A history of the country could be entitled: How to go from irrelevant backwater to world power to irrelevant backwater in three easy steps. 

The history of Portugal, a few glorious moments excepted, has been a long and semi-tragic case study in the importance of separating church and state. For Georgian and Victorian classical liberals Portugal was an example of how not do things. The place has been run by gangsters (quasi-absolute monarchs), power-lusting priests and politically connected merchants for centuries. Until the 1780s the Portuguese Inquisition was burning Jews at the stake for the high crime of not being Catholic. 

The wealth of Portugal's tiny and parasitic ruling class was derived from exploiting the country's vast and mostly illiterate peasantry. When they ran out of poor Portuguese peasants to exploit they went off and started kidnapping black people and working them to death in Brazil. In fairness the English were doing much the same thing, except they were working the poor wretches to death in their Caribbean and American colonies. Another difference was that the British eventually stopped of their own accord. There was a recognition that slavery was immoral and should be abolished. Portugal abolished slavery due to pressure from London. As well as a massive bribe and the implicit threat of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet.

Historically the British think. As do the Dutch, the Germans, the Scandinavians and the French. Serious intellectual debate is part of their culture. Thus a small hunk of rock on the north edge of the British Isles - Scotland - was in the eighteenth century able to produce James Watt, Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Campbell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Robert Burns, Adam Ferguson, John Playfair, Joseph Black and James Hutton. What did Portugal, a nation of comparable size and population, produce in that same time period? Nothing except some semi-charming tiled mosaics, a few oversized palaces and one "enlightened despot."  

What explains the barrenness of the country's intellectual life? The Catholic Church did most of the country's thinking until recently. Now government bureaucrats and politicians have replaced the Church. Independent thinking simply does not happen to any significant degree. If you meet someone with an interesting or clever idea, 9 to 1 he picked it up from somewhere else. This groupthink leads to an obvious problem, which is now being played out, that in a crisis the whole country goes lemming like off the nearest cliff.

Think back to Britain in the 1970s. It was in much worse shape than Portugal is today, with the exception that its fiscal house was in better order. Seeing the mess they were in a small group of intellectuals - like Hayek - and politicians - like Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher - dissented from the consensus opinion and argued for a new political approach. They convinced a critical mass of the electorate to give their ideas a try and the electorate gave their approval in four consecutive elections. Britain reversed course and saved itself, as it is in the process of doing again.

Why? Because Britain has a culture of free debate and inquiry. Being a radical with a new idea is something acceptable and even honourable. It was OK to stand up and say the current way is nonsense and let's try something else and persuade people of your point of view. This sounds like common sense. In many countries - and Portugal is hardly the worst - it is very uncommon. The people defer to the elites and the elites pretty much agree on all the essentials, a few cosmetic differences aside. The innovator is distrusted and not celebrated.

Look. Portugal is a nice country. Fine people. Nothing against them. I'm just not much on the ethnic tribalism stuff. When I see short-sighted stupidity I don't call it wonderful because the idiots in question are distant cousins. Old Publius also fancies himself something of individualist. Having your identity determined by an accident of birth isn't especially appealing. When that identity consists of defending economic illiteracy in the name of national identity - no nasty Anglo-Saxon Capitalism here - that's just another reason to take a pass.

In the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith mentions Portugal no less than eighty-nine times. His comments are not flattering. In his discussions on free trade the land of Magellan and Vasco da Gama is used as a classic example of the pitfalls of mercantilism. Sure English trade policy is bad, but check out the Portuguese...

I would assume that Smith's magnum opus has been translated into Portuguese. I doubt anyone has read it. The recently resigned Prime Minister is a Socialist. I don't mean that as epithet, like when I call Bob Rae or Jack Layton socialists, he is the leader of an actual living and breathing Socialist Party. The President of Portugal is Anibal Cavaco Silva, his political party is called Social Democratic. He is what passes for a conservative on the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula. Imagine a political system where Brian Mulroney would be considered a libertarian and Pierre Trudeau a moderate centrist. The policy spectrum extends from going broke today to going broker next week. 

Supporting all this spendthrift politicking is an economy with all the vibrancy and dynamism of Newfoundland before Hibernia. It's no wonder that they've gone begging. The only amazing thing is that Germany continues to fund this nonsense. The practical effect of the Eurozone was giving weak economies like those of Portugal and Greece a Teutonic / Scandinavian credit rating. Think of your spendthrift brother-in-law getting Bill Gates' credit card. The results were only to be expected. The delusion of One Europe under One Government has prevent the continent's leadership from grasping this obvious fact.