Should Turkey Join the EU?

Yesterday’s much-anticipated report from a high-level commission blasting Brussels for its handling of the Turkey accession issue was predictable in many ways. It was perhaps even a little tiresome in the way it relied so heavily on the oft-repeated claim that racism and xenophobia are what drive opposition to Turkey’s membership. But even more predictable still was the very different way the British and continental media covered the report.

The Independent Commission on Turkey’s denunciation of Brussels’ foot-dragging was a headline-generator in the British media. Yet it received scant attention on the continent - even in France, the country which took the most punches in the document. Google news English finds 30 stories about the report, while Google News French finds only three working links (one of which is actually a blog). France24, Le Monde, and Le Figaro all seem to have ignored the news. Perhaps not surprising considering the continental powers are opposed to Turkey’s membership, while the UK is in favour. Those national media outlets on the continent that did cover it took a very different angle than their British counterparts, proving much more sceptical of the report’s conclusions.

The commission condemns the EU for delaying accession talks with Turkey, saying it is violating its previous promises that Turkey will eventually become a member while many (perhaps most) in Brussels have no intention of ever seeing this become a reality, preferring to string Turkey along in order to make it friendly to EU interests and more inclined to push through pro-Western reforms at home. The report accuses national political leaders (read: Sarkozy) for coming out strongly against Turkey’s membership in order to exploit domestic concerns about immigration, job security and Islam. It even goes so far as to say that this contradiction between what the EU had previously publicly avowed in the 1990’s and what its national leaders are saying today “put in question EU credibility, reliability and the principle…that agreements are to be honoured.”

To an outsider it might seem bizarre that the traditionally euroskeptic UK would be the one pushing most vocally for Turkey to enter the EU. Indeed, in the British media the issue is often presented as a no-brainer. Of course Turkey should enter the EU, people here seem to think. Any efforts to keep them out, according to the Brits, are just due to continental (read: French) racism and Islamophobia.

So it isn’t surprising that I find most people here are a bit confused about the debate, and some of the larger issues involved. So, I thought I’d make a little Q&A based on some of the questions someone was asking me last night. Whether or not Turkey should join is a very complex issue that essentially goes to the heart of the larger question about what the EU should be – a federal union or a free trade zone. Countries have therefore split on Turkey’s accession based on their feelings about European federalism – the idea that the EU should have supranational power in areas outside of trade. The fact is that the day Turkey joins the EU is the day the dream of a federal Europe is over. A federal Europe is simply not possible in a union with Turkey as a member.

Questions? Shoot.

Is Turkey part of Europe?

A very small part of Turkey (about 5%) is geographically within what has historically been considered Europe. Of course, the issue gets a little tricky because unlike its ocean border to the west, Europe’s eastern border is not as clearly defined (owing to the fact that geologically speaking it is more accurately part of a larger Eurasian continent). But the traditional border has been understood to run from the Mediterranean and Aegean, through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus straight, across the Black Sea, and North along the Ural mountains in Russia. This makes Turkey and Russia the only two countries straddling the two continents of Europe and Asia. However the 10% of Turkey that lies in Europe is relatively sparsely populated because it is not very hospitable terrain.

Some argue that because the Ottoman Empire (Turkey’s progenitor) at one time controlled all of the Balkans up to Vienna, it is culturally part of Europe. However this is a tenuous claim because if such logic were applied across the board the states of North Africa should also be invited to join, as their progenitors once controlled Spain. Historically speaking it would have been a tough sell to convince the Austrian emperor (or anyone else in 15th century Europe for that matter) that the Ottomans were “European”. The successful defence of Vienna which halted the Ottoman advance into Western Europe gave the city the nickname as the ‘savior of Europe’ at the time. Their motivations may have been racist or religionist, but there can be no doubt that during the Ottoman Empire’s many centuries of existence, few in Europe would have considered the Turks to be “European”.

Additionally, the Ottomans never took much of an interest in actively governing their Balkan or Greek territories, preferring to leave the actual administration to local rulers. They were much more preoccupied with their Middle Eastern and North African territories, which constituted the majority of the empire.

As a secular nation, isn’t Turkey more linked to Europe than to the Middle East?

It is true that the Turkish state founded by Ataturk is rabidly secular, but unlike in Europe, that secularism has had to be enforced through repression and authoritarianism. To this day religious practice is heavily restricted in Turkish public life by law. Ataturk and his successors have considered this necessary because there is a significant amount of the country that is fervently religious, which the ruling class (mainly the military) fears. The rural population is growing increasingly religious with time, following the revival of Islam that has occurred across the Middle East in the past two decades. The recent success of the openly Islamic AKP party demonstrated how much more powerful Islam is becoming as a political force in the country. The fact that secularism has always hung by a thread in Turkey and has had to be guarded by authoritarian means reflects the fact that Turkish secularism does not even resemble the secularism of Europe, which has arisen naturally among the population and not been enforced by the state.

Turkey is the only stable Muslim democracy in the Middle East. Wouldn’t it integrate seamlessly into the EU?

To hear the proponents of Turkey’s accession talk, you would think Turkey was some kind of earthly paradise of humanism and democracy. But while it is true that Turkey is a democracy, it is anything but stable, particularly at the moment. The country is still involved in two ongoing conflicts, one against Kurdish separatists in the East and the other in the Turkish occupation zone of Cyprus to the west, both still unresolved issues. And just this week Turkey took the first move to establish diplomatic ties with its neighbour Armenia for the first time. That tension is unlikely to be resolved any time soon because Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the genocide of ethnic Armenians that took place during World War I.

Turkey doesn’t just have instability in its foreign relations. Its domestic politics are teetering on a wire at the moment as well. With the Islamist AKP taking civilian power in 2007, there is a constant risk of the army staging a coup to preserve Turkey’s secularist code. In the mean time the country maintains one of the Western World’s most authoritarian regimes in the area of human rights. Press freedom is still severely limited in Turkey, where it is still a crime to insult “Turkishness”. Just yesterday Turkey decided it would be the only country in Europe to refuse to sign a resolution in support of a jailed reporter in Kazakhstan, because it contained a provision which stated that journalists, “should be free to report on all issues of interest to the public, including commentary on how the state is run.” Turkey of course couldn’t sign it, because it can technically be a crime in Turkey to criticize how the state is run.

But the EU is taking in Eastern European countries that also have corruption and human rights problems, but who happen to be Christian. Isn’t this hypocrisy?

It is true that the EU took on the countries of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 despite complicated corruption problems, with an eye to providing support and guidance to those countries to help them transition to being transparent and stable democracies. This has been referred to as the “transformative” strategy of EU enlargement and has been very controversial as an idea in and of itself, especially now that the appetite for enlargement has waned. But though Sarkozy and other opponents of Turkish entry have said that enlargement should stop for now, they have held the door open for Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Albania (a Muslim country, by the way) to join eventually. Obviously, these are countries with some fairly significant, and recent, problems.

But there is one key difference between all of these post-communist countries and Turkey, and it’s not just that they are Christian or all indisputably in Europe. They also all have very small populations. They are therefore more easily manageable for an EU that is taking on a “transformative” role. Additionally, these countries’ entry would not make a big demographic difference to the EU.

Turkey, on the other hand, has a population of 75 million, larger than either Britain or France. If it entered the EU it would become the second biggest member of the block. And given that Turkey’s population is expected to reach 85 million or more by 2020, by the time it could feasibly enter it would probably be the largest member and have the largest voting block in all decisions of the European Parliament.

So this isn’t just a question of saying, “Oh well, it’s Europe-ish, they respect human rights ok I guess, sure let them in, why not?” Turkey’s entry would fundamentally change the nature of the union itself, leading to the bizarre situation where the most powerful country in the EU has only 5% of its territory actually in Europe! There’s no way the rest of the EU member states would accept that scenario in a federal Europe, therefore Turkey’s entry into the EU would mean a federal EU is an impossibility, and it would have to be scaled back to be just a free trade zone like NAFTA. Of course, British Euroskeptics would like nothing more than to see this happen.

So when I see the British media go on and on about how Germany and France’s objection to Turkish entry is motivated by racism and Islamophobia, I’m left rather perplexed. If the Independent Commission on Turkey was being a bit more intellectually honest, they really should have pinned more of the blame for the EU’s Turkey double-speak on the British, who are really the ones stringing the Turks along. Using Turkish entry as a backhanded way of changing the EU is hardly a fair thing to do to Turkey, considering that they are promising them membership in a union that would cease to exist as a result of their very entry.

The commission is right about one thing – Brussels needs to stop stringing Turkey along and give them a firm yes or no. But it is wrong in concluding that the recent vocal objection to Turkey’s entry is some kind of populist political ploy by national leaders. It is a legitimate concern and goes to the very heart of what the EU is meant to be. And in that way, this debate really had very little to do with Turkey and much more to do with the conflict between federalists and euroskeptics. And until that conflict is resolved, it is likely Turkey will continue to be unfairly strung along.

Ye Olde York

Driving up the A1 motorway yesterday, my friend and I had our eyes glued to the horizon, each of us hoping to be the first one to see the giant steel angel come soaring into the sky from beyond the hill. Considering my friend was driving, we realized this gazing perhaps wasn’t the smartest strategy as he had to slam on the brakes to avoid a rapid traffic slowdown ahead of us. Searching for angels in the sky can be dangerous!

Eventually the massive Angel of the North, which has come to be a symbol of Northern England since it was erected outside Newcastle in 1998, did at last emerge. If I’m honest, I was a bit underwhelmed. Having been told that with its wingspan it’s as wide as the Statue of Liberty is tall, I was expecting something much bigger. I suppose it was big, sure, but not BIG! Perhaps that’s just my American expectations creeping in.

We were approaching Newcastle, the last stop on an eight-city tour of the Northern England, usually referred to in the UK both affectionately and derisively as just “the North.” It’s a strange land of rolling green meadows, windy moors and bulging dunes – a place where the local accent changes every 10 miles and people cling to their locality and roots with a fierce pride rarely seen in the South. It’s also a land of striking contrasts. This was the industrial heart of Victorian England, a place whose abundance of raw materials gave rise to a rapid overdevelopment, turning small villages like Manchester, Liverpool and Middlesbrough into bulging metropolises virtually overnight. That flurry of industrial activity has long since faded away, leaving the relics of a poverty-stricken rust belt concentrated around the Mersey river on the Irish Sea coast and the Tees river on the North Sea coast.

At the same time the North, particularly Yorkshire, played a hugely important part in British history before industrialisation, and in between the urban conurbations lies some of the most beautiful, history-filled countryside in Britain. It was that contrast that I wanted to discover on this road trip.

Proud Manchester

I made the journey with two American friends who I know from New York but who are now fellow ex-pats in London with me. We first took a train up to Manchester, exploring the city Saturday morning before being entertained by the festivities of the annual Manchester Gay Pride in the afternoon. It’s universally acknowledged as Britain’s biggest and best pride celebration, and I have to say that description bore true. The dinky little London pride paled in comparison to this, and the city’s relatively small size meant that the pride celebration almost seemed to take it over. It was also clearly an activity for the whole city, with lots of straight families turning out for the parade and plenty of straight people at the pride celebration on Canal Street. Actually the whole area around Canal Street ws closed off and you had to pay 20 quid to get in! I had never heard of having to pay to get into Pride festivities, but my friend Lori says that's the way it's done in DC.

There were those in the parade who weren’t so happy with the increasingly celebratory/commercialised nature of gay pride, coming as it does now with corporate sponsorships and such. But when you take a step back, tt is pretty amazing how different a gay pride parade is in the UK than in Eastern Europe, for example, where the parades are still largely an expression of protest and are often met with violence (as happened last year in Budapest). I can sympathise with these marchers’ (pictured left) frustrations about the increasing commercialisation of the gay community and the phenomenon of the ‘pink pound’, but perhaps if they considered the alternative it wouldn’t seem so bad.

Beyond the Pride festivities, which were great, I was very impressed with Manchester as a city. Once a rotting industrial corpse just 15 years ago, today the city’s undergone a complete renovation that has made it England’s unrivalled second city. We went down to the old canals, which in the 19th century would have been heaving with ships bringing coals in to the factories, to find them completely fixed up into a beautiful business and entertainment district. The massive intersection of train tracks, roads and canals at Castlefields is actually quite beautiful, a truly stunning site hovering over the ruins of an ancient Roman fort. And though parts of the interior of the city have been turned into massive indoor shopping complexes, they were architecturally interesting and forgivable. The conversion of city centre spaces into massive indoor shopping malls was to be a theme for the rest of the trip.

On the Road

On Sunday we rented a car to begin our slow journey northeast, diverting first over to Liverpool. Although some redevelopment has been undertaken, notably along the waterfront in preparation for the city’s year as a “European Capital of Culture” in 2008, the city is still a marked contrast to Manchester because it has retained much of its post-industrial squalor. Albert Dock has been the main focus of regeneration, and the area is now rife with Beatles kitsch. In addition to seeing a performance by the ‘Cheatles” right on the dock (pictured) you can also take a Beatles tour of the city to see the houses in which the Liverpool lads grew up (we declined, though we did go to the Beatles experience museum). We also visited the Tate Liverpool, which was otherwise unremarkable save for an AWESOME floor where you listened to disco music in headphones while looking at sexually suggestive sculptures, surrounded by countless disco balls, flashing lights, and even a light-up disco floor in the centre. I kind of wanted it to be my apartment.

Aside from the dock, the other main thing to see in the city is the two cathedrals, one Anglican and one Catholic, facing each other on opposite ends of Hope Street. They were both built at a feverish pace during a time of increasing conflict between Anglican Protestants of Liverpool, native English, and the Roman Catholics, descendants of the Irish immigrants who had flooded into the city during the industrial revolution (cousins of the Irish who left at the same time for America during the potato famine). Both the cathedrals are massive, with the two sides desperate to outdo each other. But looking at the two today, it’s clear who won. Though it is the fifth largest cathedral in the world, the Anglican Liverpool Cathedral is pretty bland and uninteresting, clearly trying to mimic older architectural styles even though it was just completed in the 1950’s. The Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, on the other hand, is a stunning modernist achievement. The outside is rather strange-looking, with locals often deriding it as the “Liverpool funnel”, but I thought the inside was beautiful. It has a theatre-in-the-round style, with stunning lighting leading up the interior of the cone to the roof. I was very impressed. I have to say, the most interesting modernist cathedrals I’ve seen in Europe have all been Roman Catholic – defying that denomination’s reputation for a staid rigidity in embracing new ideas.

We then checked out the inevitable massive indoor shopping centre complex next to the water, completed just a year ago. My friend Josh, who is an architect, was eager to see it. However it was pretty uninspiring, and in some parts heinously ugly.

However if we thought that was bad, we hadn’t seen anything yet. Our next stop was Leeds, which I can report has to be one of the most characterless cities I’ve ever seen in Europe. Like some of its Northern neighbours, Leeds has also undertaken a redevelopment project. However theirs has involved turning the city centre into a giant shopping mall. Almost the whole place has been turned into the massive indoor complexes. We arrived at night around six when the indoor centres were all closed. We found to our frustration that all of the restaurants were actually located inside the malls, so we had a hell of a time finding anywhere to eat. All we could find was street after street of bland high street chain stores, all closed. I suppose if you needed to do a whole lot of shopping in one day, Leeds would be a good place to go. Otherwise, the city seemed like a total waste of time to me. But then again, I don’t like shopping.

I enquired of my friend Josh if any rust belt cities in the US were considering turning their empty city centres into indoor shopping malls. “What city centres?” he responded. It’s true, Americans don’t want to go into a city centre even if it’s to buy things, they prefer their shopping malls to be out in the suburbs where they live. And judging by the results of such a redevelopment in Leeds, I’m not sure I would endorse such a plan for cities in the US. Josh says the problem is that all these redevelopment plans are centred around shopping, and when something like the recession hits it puts the breaks on the whole project. It’s not that the developers can’t get financing any more. Since the only thing they’ve planned for development are shops, the plan is going to hit a hurdle when people stop shopping. From what we saw of Leeds, it appears the recession is having a pretty bad effect on the city. The place was deserted.

Winding, Windy Moors

Nearby the city of York, our next stop, couldn’t have been more of a contrast. A hugely important city from the 11th to the 18th century, it was almost entirely bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and remains remarkably preserved. Even the city walls (pictured) remain standing, as do an original Norman castle and a stunning, massive cathedral. It’s all a bit Disney, but it is truly beautiful.

The Romans founded York about 2,000 years ago, and since then it’s had a sucession of rulers – first the Anglo-Saxons, then the Vikings, then the Normans. Each of the four rulers left their mark on the city (and progressively changed its name along the way – from Eboracum to Eoforwic to Jorvik to York. It was without a doubt the highlight of the trip, and a particular delight for us New Yorkers – an interesting view of the former glory of our city’s namesake.

We also stopped off at Harrogate, a town that was the first thing out of everyone’s mouths when I asked them what they recommended to do in Yorkshire. I have to say I don’t get why everyone was recommending it. It’s cute I guess, but there’s nothing to do there. We stopped and had the requisite tea and scones at Betty’s, and then headed over to the Royal Baths only to find the building had been taken over by a Chinese restaurant! So we headed out. Harrogate- am I missing something?

From York we drove up to Castle Howard, the sprawling estate of one of Yorkshire’s most famous aristocratic families. The grounds are massive – I particularly enjoyed frolicking with the cows next to the ‘Temple of the Four Winds’. The Howard family still lives in the castle, though most of it has now been opened to visitors. As we entered the main staircase we learned about the current owner of the house, the Baron Howard who lives there with his wife and two daughters (he’s in the portrait on the left in the photo below in a rather funny aristocratic outfit). Later on the tour the guide remarked casually as he looked out the window, “ah there he is now.” Sure enough, there was the guy from the portrait out in front of the house playing with his dog. Weird!

Like many aristocratic families, the current owner’s father Baron George Howard opened up the house to the public in the 1960’s, knowing it was the only way to be able to maintain ownership of it. For the most part, those aristocratic families who didn’t open up their massive estates for public viewing back in the 50’s and 60’s later found that it was too late to do so and had to sell them to the state. Interesting foresight on George Howard’s part. He came back from fighting in WW2 to find his estate burned down and his two surviving brothers dead. He decided to open up the house to the public and to this day the family still lives there. I guess the lack of privacy for the Howard family is a small price to pay to live in such an amazing home.

Next we drove through the North York moors, which were stunningly beautiful. I still don’t quite understand what a moor is, I just know that the Kate Bush song ‘Wuthering Heights’ refers to them as being wild and windy. I’ve never read the book but I’m thinking maybe I should. At least now I can picture the landscape in which it takes place. Or maybe I’ll rent the movie. The film Brideshead Revisted was shot at Castle Howard, so many I can watch the two of them some time as some kind of Yorkshire double bill.

We got the full moors experience at a little village called Hutton-le-Hole, where we stopped and had yet more tea and scones. The place was literally crawling with sheep, not fenced in or anything. One came up behind me while we were taking our tea and let out a deafening “BAAAAA!” right in my ear. It nearly scared the guts out of me.

We also stopped at Rievaulx Abbey in the moors as well, which was pretty amazing. It was established in the 12th century by a group of Cistercian monks from France, shortly after the Norman conquest. The ruins are in surprisingly good shape, and you’re really able to get a feel for the layout of the monastery as you walk around. The abbey was destroyed during the reformation by Henry VIII after he split from the Roman Catholic church and confiscated the property from most of the monasteries. This seemed to have a traumatic effect on the North akin to the “harrying of the North” by the Normans judging by the way it is described by the guides at the churches and monasteries up there. They all seemed ready to spit at the ground every time they mentioned Henry VIII’s name.

Northumbrian by Nature

As we headed further North, the local accents became more and more difficult to understand. We had already been struggling to understand Manc, Scouse, and Tyke accents, and we were hardly prepared for the Teesside, Pitmatic and Geordie accents waiting for us in the Northeast. Luckily I recently discovered this handy guide to the 37 different English accents in the UK) The Teesside accent we encountered in Darlington was particularly difficult to understand. The whole Tees Valley was kind of a nasty place, a blighted post-Industrial conurbation.

We spent the next night in Durham, another old city first set up by the Normans, with a remarkable Norman Castle and Cathedral. The Castle is in surprisingly good shape, but it is completely owned by the university at Durham and options to see it are fairly limited. As a town Durham was kind of underwhelming, it’s a university town and the fall term hasn’t yet started. Durham is considered the third best British university with a collegiate system (after Oxford and Cambridge), often derided as a fallback choice for people who didn’t get in to the first two (what we call “safety schools” in the US). I have to say if you were planning to go to Oxford or Cambridge and ended up at Durham instead, it would probably be a bit of a disappointment. The town is alright, but it just doesn’t compare to Oxford or Cambridge (and is obviously a lot further to London!).

We spent the first half of our last day looking at the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall, the defensive ramparts that marked the Northern boundary of the Roman Empire. The wall basically runs straight west from Newcastle to Carlisle, in the neck section of Great Britain that gets quite narrow before it becomes Scotland. We explored the ruins of a Roman Fort at Chesters, one of the border crossing points on the wall that would have served as a sort of immigration check and customs house of Celtic travellers wishing to enter and leave the Empire. Looking at the wall I thought a bit of the US-Mexico border, trying to imagine this line as the dividing point between wilderness and the greatest empire the world had ever seen to that point. The comparison probably isn’t too apt though because Mexico isn’t exactly barbarian wilderness, and even the areas to the South of the wall were still dangerous, wild places during Roman times. In fact the better comparison looking at the fort would probably have been to a small US base in Afghanistan, an outpost in the middle of a dangerous wilderness where the empire tried to recreate the comforts of home for the Roman troops. The bathhouse of the fort, located just to the side and by the river, is remarkably well-preserved. One can only imagine what the native Celtic population thought of these strange Romans and their bathing rituals. Perhaps it’s the same as what Afghanis think of the supermarkets and movie theatres set up on American bases. From my brother’s description of his time at Bagram Air Force Base, this is what it sounds like anyway.

The last stop was Newcastle, where we encountered the slightly underwhelming Angel offering us a greeting. Newcastle was pretty grimey, but they have made clear efforts to fix up the riverfront section along the Tyne. They’ve built this massive concert hall on the Gateshead side of the river that looks like some kind of giant glass worm. Neither me my architect friend cared for it.

The thing in Newcastle that will stick in my head the most though is the bizarre situation of the Norman Castle, which gave the town its name when it was built as a “new castle” by William the Conquerer’s son shortly after the Norman conquest (an event featured in the Bayeux Tapestry). However all that is left of the castle today is the central keep, and it is now surrounded by a dizzying intersection of Victorian-era railway bridges, under which it is almost lost (pictured below). It would be a bit as if the only thing left of the Tower of London complex was the central keep (the tower itself), and the City of London completely surrounded it with motorways and rail tracks. Not exactly picturesque! Still, it was interesting to go inside, and to learn about all of the various strange uses the Geordies have put it to through the centuries (it at various points held a barber shop, brothel, mansion home, cess pit and trash heap).

We then took the three-hour train ride back, which I mostly spent grumbling about the lack of high-speed railways in Britain. People often fly from Newcastle to London actually, as absurd as that may seem.

All in all it was a great trip, and I was able to experience a part of the UK I had very little knowledge of before. Living in London it often feels like you’re not really in England, and you can often feel like you’re in a little bubble separated from the rest of the country. So it’s good to get out into real Britain every once in awhile and see the sights.

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Road Trip Up North

I'm off to the North of England for the next week, doing a road trip with two American friends to further our knowledge of this crazy place we live in. I've wanted to do this road trip forever, as the North was the big gap in my visitation of Britain. I've been to most places in Southeast England, Wales and Scotland - but never to the North.

We're starting in Manchester, taking a train up there tonight. We'll spend all day tomorrow in Mancs before renting the car on Sunday and spending the day in Liverpool. We'll then drive to Leeds where we'll spend Sunday night, before heading out to do Yorkshire on Monday, taking in Harrogate and York (the old one). Tuesday we're going to do some Yorkshire castles and then head up to the North York Moors. We'll then drive up to Northumbria and spend Tuesday night in Durham, and then on Wednesday we'll head up to the ruins of Hadrian's Wall, the ancient dividing line between Roman Britain and the great Celtic beyond (later the border between England and Scotland). We'll finish out the day in Newcastle before taking a train back to London that night.

It should be interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing both the gritty industrial Northwest as well as the bucolic moors and dales of the Northeast. I'm also looking forward to hearing all the crazy accents they have up there - we'll be hearing Scouse in Liverpool, Manc in Manchester, Tyke in Yorkshire, Teesside in Middleborough, Pitmatic in Durham and Geordie in Newcastle. It's incredible that such a small area could have so many different accents - we're travelling less than 300 miles! Just goes to show how incredibly different the UK is from the US in terms of accents.

If anyone will be in any of these cities while I am let me know!

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Libya and the Devolution Discord

Over the past few days Brits have been approaching me in hushed, frightened voices to ask the question that seems to be occupying everyone’s minds here right now – “Are they really going to boycott us?”

It would seem everyone is terrified of ending up like France, which was on the receiving end of a notorious boycott campaign (not to mention the renaming of “freedom fries” and “freedom toast”) when they refused to participate in the Iraq war in 2003. But beyond the fact that the 2003 France boycott was actually not economically significant in the slightest, I can assure you that the level of anger in the US about the premature release of the Lockerbie bomber isn’t anywhere near the height of vitriol against France in the run-up to Iraq. Still, the anger is real, and the incident has really gone a long way to illustrate the very deep gulf that exists between Americans and Brits on issues of criminal justice and punishment.

People here in the UK have tended to have mixed opinions about the decision to release the only person convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie airplane bombing, with most people I know defending the decision to release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi on compassionate grounds - because he is suffering from terminal cancer and has three months to live. My Scottish friends in particular have been insisting that Scottish law has a long tradition of compassion, and that it shows how civilized they are as a society that they would let him go. But you’d be hard pressed to find one person in the US who agrees with this analysis. They are, quite frankly, enraged. Most Americans probably don’t understand why he’s even still alive at all (Texas would have killed him 6 times over by now). Even Chuck Schumer, one of the most liberal members of the US senate, was railing against the decision on Meet the Press on Sunday, calling it a "disgrace".

I must confess maybe it’s the American in me, but I also find myself perplexed by this decision by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill. Megrahi was given a life sentence, not a ‘life sentence unless you get sick’. Even if MacAskill felt that it would be cruel to make the convicted terrorist die in prison, surely there was a hospice or hospital in Scotland he could have been taken to. Why on earth did he have to be taken to Libya?

As with most big decisions, you know there’s got to be some more complicated factors at work here. I have no doubt that MacAskill probably genuinely believes it would have been cruel to allow Megrahi to die in prison, but the fact is this probably has more to do with two larger issues – Scottish nationalism and Britain’s diplomatic relations with Libya.

Devolution D'oh!

Yesterday the BBC24 presenters were speaking with a Time Magazine reporter in Washington about the threats of boycotts against the UK, and one of them asked her in seeming expasperation something like, ‘Surely the Americans realise that this is the Scottish government taking this decision, not the UK.’ The Time reporter seemed a bit bemused (or maybe actually confused) by the question. Brace yourselves for a shock, but most Americans aren’t too versed in the latest news on Scottish devolution – which, after all, is a recent development.

So for my American readers – a bit of backstory. Scotland is obviously part of the United Kingdom, but through a kind of curious accident of history it has always been a separate entity from England and Wales, with its own separate civic institutions – most notably its legal system. The Act of Union in 1707 shut down the separate Scottish parliament and merged it with that of England, but Scotland’s separate institutions persisted. In the early 20th century there were calls for Scotland to be granted home rule along with Ireland, but in the end it didn’t get its own parliament again until 1997, when Labour leader Tony Blair campaigned with a promise to give Scotland a semi-autonomous status through a system known as devolution. Wales and Northern Ireland were eventually also given their own parliaments through devolution, though they have considerably less independence than Scotland. Devolution has led to the bizarre situation today where every ‘country’ of the UK has local parliaments except England (effectively giving every Scottish, Welsh and Irish UK citizen double the representation of any English citizen).

So who is this Kenny MacAskill, and why is Gordon Brown claiming the British government has no control over what he does? MacAskill is a member of the Scottish National Party, which advocates for the complete secession of Scotland from the UK. The SNP was elected into a majority in the Scottish Parliament (known as ‘Holyrood’) in 2007 – an election result largely seen as a rebuke to New Labour. Therefor all the Scottish ministers are now SNP members - beyond the control of the Labour government in London. The comparable US analogy would be if Texas were to be granted semi-autonomous powers and was not subject to the final authority of Washington. The ‘Texas Independence Party’ could then be elected there and make decisions (in some areas) that Washington would have no control over. In Scotland, law is one of those areas.

(it should be noted that the centre-left Scottish National Party should not be confused with the far-right British National Party, which bans membership for nonwhites and won two seats in the European Parliament in the British Euroelection in June).

In theory, areas of foreign policy and diplomatic relations shouldn’t be at all under the authority of the Scottish government. But in this particular case the area of law had a huge impact on foreign relations, something Labour perhaps didn’t anticipate when they set this up in 1997. Washington sees this as a UK decision, and Gordon Brown’s silence on the issue has been seen as, if not callous, downright incompetent. Yet in actuality, because of devolution, there was nothing Brown could have done about it.

Back Room Deal?

Of course, that’s just one way of looking at it. But there is a much more nefarious theory making the rounds in the US – that the release was part of a secret deal to secure lucrative business contracts with Libya. Only time will tell if that allegation is true, but at the very least it is certain that the detention of Megrahi was a festering sore in relations between Libya and the UK.

The fact is, the majority of people and governments in the Middle East and North Africa believe Megrahi is innocent. Megrahi himself has all along insisted on his own innocence, and his conviction for the terrorist act was both controversial and razor thin. His co-accused was found not guilty, and the evidence against Megrahi was anything but airtight. He was in the middle of a long process appealing the decision when he was released last week. You’d be hard pressed to find any Libyan who thinks he’s actually guilty, and most have viewed him as a political prisoner. It is feasible to believe that there are those in the Libyan political and business community who were refusing to do serious business with the UK until the Megrahi question was settled, particularly as he is so popular in his home country.

Many British people share this view. In fact a number of the Lockerbie victims’ families believe Megrahi is innocent, saying theyblieve that the US and UK governments railroaded through a false conviction in 2002 out of embarrassment at not being able to figure out who was really responsible. Many in Scotland are defending MacAskill’s decision on the basis of their belief that Megrahi is “probably innocent” and therefore doesn’t deserve to die in prison.

Of course if he is indeed innocent, the appeals process is the appropriate venue to prove that case. MacAskill’s decision not only leaves open the question of who actually perpetrated the Lockerbie bombing, it also appears to circumvent the proper exercise of justice.

It’s a mess all around, and now there is even speculation that the controversy could bring down the SNP government. An emergency session of the Scottish Parliament was called yesterday, bringing MSPs back from their summer recess early, so that members could demand that MacAskill explain his actions. He and his fellow party members were defiant, couching the decision in 'Scottish values' and appearing to hope that by presenting this as an ‘us versus them’ question of Celts versus the Anglo-Saxon English and Americans, they can stave off a revolt that would bring down their government. But considering their majority technically rests on just one seat, this strategy may not work. One thing’s for sure, it’s going to be an interesting week in Edinburgh.

Can the British be taught to love Europe?

Dominic Brett with the Commission’s London representation office alerted me today to a Eurobarometre study released in July that I hadn’t noticed – surveying the British public’s knowledge of and attitude toward the EU. As Brett notes in today’s E! Sharpweb special, they survey results go a long way in disproving the Eurosceptics’ long-standing denial that it is ignorance which makes the British public dislikes the EU rather than an actual reasoned and thought-out objection. It’s always nice when the raw numbers back up what can be clearly observed anecdotally.

The results, in which 83% of Britons surveyed said they knew “little or nothing” about the EU, were actually interpreted quite optimistically by Brett. He argues in his column today that even if the EU as a concept attracts such animosity in Britain, most of what it actually does meets public approval. He says getting the British public to be more positive toward the EU would just be a simple task of educating people on what it does. Considering that I recently learned that the British education system doesn’t teach pupils anything about the EU system which governs them, perhaps primary school would be the place to start such an outreach.

Don't be so Shocked, Europe - US Healthfight similiar to EU Debate

You could call it a rude awakening. Over the past few weeks Europeans have reacted with shock and incredulity as they’ve watched the “debate” over US healthcare reform unfold across the pond. How could it be, they’ve asked me in tones of sheer exasperation, that even in the face of a healthcare crisis Americans could be so credulous as to believe the outlandish lies being spread about Obama’s healthcare reform effort. Death panels? Enemy lists? Nazi euthanasia? How, they’ve asked, could anyone be so stupid?

I haven’t had a good answer to give them, except that this is the cold hard reality of the place American politics has found itself in today. As I’ve written about before, many Europeans were lulled into a premature sense of relief when Barack Obama was elected in November. But while the head may have changed, the body remains the same – this is the same American public that elected George W. Bush twice. The combination of powerful vested interests in Washington, a strong right-wing media that dominates civic discourse, and a population that is, let’s face it, rather uninformed, mean that Barack Obama has his work cut out for him if he wants to effect real change. Getting elected was just the first step.

The mobs that have turned up to congressional town halls to shout down any discussion of healthcare reform, waving placards of Obama with a Hitler moustache and screaming about his “Nazi policies”, aren’t actually concerned about healthcare. This is about something much bigger, a general right-wing paranoia and militarism that tends to arise every time a progressive Democratic president is elected. It happened in the 1960’s culminating in a wave of political assassinations, it happened in the 1990’s culminating in the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma city by right-wing fanatic Timothy McVeigh, and it’s happening again now. Progressive Democratic presidents scare the bejesus out of the right-wing fringe inspiring hysteria and violence (although why this didn’t happen with Carter I don’t know, any ideas?).

What’s different this time around is that powerful Washington forces have decided to tap into this right-wing rage and use it to their own political advantage. Fox News has seen an opportunity to define themselves in the Obama era by stoking the flames of hysteria and paranoia, increasing their viewership handily over the past several months. The healthcare and energy lobbies have been able to tap into this paranoid rage by convincing people that attempts to reform their industries are actually part of a grand fascist scheme to enforce a dictatorship.

The most absurd example of this came yesterday when protesters congregated in Texas to rail against Obama’s “Nazi” climate change bill, which would finally sign the US up to international agreements to fight climate change. At first glance it might seem bizarre that ordinary citizens are turning up to yell and scream about a piece of legislation that doesn’t have much to do with them but rather affects the oil and gas industries, right? Well if you look at the bottom of their placards many read that they are concerned “Energy Citizens”, and if you look into the origin of this group you can see it’s actually sponsored by the oil and gas industry, whose trade organisation was recently revealed in a leaked memo to be suggesting that oil company employees be mobilized for these “grass roots protests” in order to “put a human face” on the resistance to the bill.

The same has been true of the healthcare protest and the “tea-bagging” protests, both organised by powerful Washington lobby groups working with the aid of Fox news, which gets people revved up telling them the healthcare reform bill will kill their grandma.

Is this in the bill? No. Is it rational to say Obama is a racist Nazi because he’s trying to reform the nation’s healthcare system? No. But these myths persist, with the majority of Americans now saying they’re concerned about Obama’s healthcare reform effort. It now looks like the administration is going to take the public option off the table or break up the legislation, which would effectively mean the myth-spreading tactics have worked. Meaningful healthcare reform could be dead.

Don’t Get too Smug, Europe

But before Europeans shake their heads and roll their eyes at the seemingly hopeless ignorance of the American public, might I remind them that they are not immune to these impulses either. In trying to explain to Europeans the raw emotion surrounding this debate, I’ve been struggling to think of an issue here that brings out the same level of irrationality. It wasn’t long before my mind settled on the EU. When it comes to ridiculous irrational myths, European knowledge of the EU - particularly in the UK - could give these American healthcare protesters a run for their money.

Take the debate over the Lisbon reform treaty. The accusations levelled against it in the UK and Irish media have been absurd almost to the point of self-parody. According to the British media the treaty is a “massive power grab” that will turn the EU into a “totalitarian super-state”. Sound familiar? In reality, the treaty simply makes tweaks to the EU’s governing structure, changes that have been made necessary by the recent EU enlargement. The main purpose of the treaty is to make the EU more efficient and cost-effective, not to give it more power. Its goal, much like the healthcare reform bill, is to help people – not to hurt them. But that doesn't stop the totalitariansism comparisons. Just take a look at this over-the-top video from YouTube.



Euromyths are rampant in the UK. Some examples of completely baseless euromyths spread by the British media: English fish and chips shops would be forced to use Latin names for the fish (The Sun, 5 September 2001), double-decker buses would be banned (The Times, 9 April 1998), British rhubarb must be straight and barmaids would have to cover up their cleavage. (Update April 2010: Here's a recent patently absurd - and easily disprovable - example from the Daily Mail about the EU supposedly changing the name of the British Channel to the "Anglo-French Pond". That story was picked up by numerous other media outlets including the BBC's 'Have I got News for You'.) All of these are widely believed in Britain yet are completely untrue. Many euromyths can be traced directly to deliberate attempts by lobbysists to influence policy in Brussels. And they’re frequently presented in the same kind of screaming-headline, hysterical tone that is now being employed in the US healthcare debate.

And of course, a recurring complaint about both the Healthcare reform bill and the Lisbon reform treaty is that they're too long and complicated for ordinary people to understand. And because they're so long, they must be trying to pull something over on everyone. Because naturally, incredibly complex pieces of legislation should be easily understandable by your local trash collector.

In the UK, the right-leaning media makes completely baseless and false accusations about the EU and about the Lisbon Treaty, saying it will do things that are not at all in the document such as ban abortion across the EU, mandate an EU army, establish an EU constitution or subjugate member state courts. The public comes to accept these myths as fact. Then when it comes time for a vote, as occurred with the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty last June, the public bases their vote on the misinformation they’ve received about the EU and the treaty. Democracy at its finest.

Can you imagine if healthcare reform were being put to a referendum in the US? It would never have any hope of passing. In fact the only way that this legislation may actually come to pass now is if the US congress does the right thing and bypasses the will of the people, making the responsible informed decision that a vast swathe of the American public cannot make themselves because they are so misinformed. This is how representative democracy is supposed to work – citizens elect representatives and entrust them with the responsibility of becoming versed in issues that ordinary citizens are not equipped to make decisions on themselves. This is why it is irresponsible to put a complex legal document like the Lisbon Treaty or healthcare reform to a public referendum. It is the worst perversion of Democracy – mob rule.

People tend to be pretty gullible, and powerful interests will always be able to manipulate them. Now that the internet has brought us what sociologists have termed the "post-fact society", this misinformation is very easy to spread - be it in America or Europe.

No Appetite for Revolution

Now to be fair, the level of hyperbole used in mainstream media around the Lisbon Treaty hasn’t reached the alarming heights of the US healthcare debate. And the Lisbon Treaty hasn’t inspired gun-totting mobs to show up at politician’s doorsteps last time I checked. Comparisons to Nazis are rarely used in continental Europe, as the memory of what the Nazis really were is still too raw to throw around the comparisons as lightly as Americans and, to a lesser extent, Brits do. But the difficulties encountered in both efforts for reform show how difficult it can be to change societal systems at the dawn of the new millennium, as we prepare to enter the 7th decade of peacetime in the Western world. 

The fact is all of these big social programs, on either side of the Atlantic, were instituted in the years following World War II at a time when the public was still traumatised enough to have the appetite for real massive change. People are living in an era of unprecedented peace in the Western world, and even if there are major problems with system X, it’s working just fine for now thank you very much. Whether it be the EU project or healthcare reform, people in 2009 are just not mentally prepared for big change. Having lived their entire lives in peace, they just don’t have the appetite for risk. And powerful interests have grown up around the existing institutions that will resist change in order to safeguard their own interests.

Yet in both situations, the seeming comfort of the status quo is an illusion. Neither current situation is tenable in the long-term. In the US, while one out of every five Americans under 65 is uninsured, the majority do have insurance and, since they don’t know any better because they’ve never seen a European healthcare system, they think their coverage is the best in the world (Americans usually by default assume their anything is the best in the world). But the system of employer-funded healthcare is untenable. The US now spends around 15% of its GDP on healthcare, second only to East Timor among United Nations member states. Left unchanged, that number could rise to something like 30% in just a few decades. The current system is literally strangling small business. But all most Americans with insurance see is that they go to the doctor, he treats them, they get better. There is no crisis, they assume.

The same can be said of Europeans and their thoughts about the place in the world of their individual member state. The fact is that in a post Cold War world, with the rising power of India and China and the fact that the US no longer has a strategic long-term interest in safeguarding European defence, no individual European member state can hope to be a significant player on the world stage in the 21st century on its own. Yet your average British person hasn’t come to grips with this fact. As far as they can see, they appear to have a big influence on the world culturally (they often mistake American cultural imperialism and the widespread use of English as somehow attributable to themselves), they are nuclear armed, they have a seat on the UN security council and they are in the G8. But the fact is in 50 years they are unlikely to have any of these things (except perhaps an ageing fleet of dangerous and dilapidated Trident submarines) if they were to go it on their own. It’s a situation where the prospect of the UK separating from the EU could easily appear to be fine to the average British person, but where people with a real knowledge of world events and future projections know that is not a viable option.

In the meantime the media, big business and right-leaning politicians are all too willing to exploit the average person’s ignorance and lack of foresight in order to serve their own interests, convincing them that reform efforts that are meant to help the average person are actually an effort to impose a dictatorial superstate. It’s the situation we find ourselves in at the dawn of the 21st century on either side of the Atlantic.

We are, it would seem, a risk-averse species by nature. And a gullible one to boot.