Blogoir

Driving down the M40 to visit my elderly mother today for Mother's Day, there was a sudden whooshing sound and dazzling lights as my car was swept into hyperspace (a bit like that extended cosmic Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Or maybe it was a traffic jam, and I started day-dreaming.

Whatever.

Arriving in HemeI Hempstead I found myself in the strange Parallel Universe of Maltastar.

Here is its banner heading as flickering across my screen right now, at 19.21 UK time this evening:

Highlights: Crawford refuses to answer Maltastar questions

What?

What?!?

I have had no request from Maltastar to answer questions. What I have had amidst dozens of hard-to-follow comments from Malta posted on my blog is an email from one Glenn Dangerfield. It was sent at 12.36 to the contact link on my site, thus:

Dear Mr Crawford 

With reference to media reports and to your blog on your homepage we would like to call you to get your reaction on tonight’s edition of One News.

Where can we contact you please?

Regards,

Glenn Bedingfield

Political Editor

One News

There was no telephone number, no explanation of what One News is, nor even any indication that One News is in fact in Malta. 

Being at my mother's house with no computer and having no way to check what if anything this might be about, plus not wanting to get dragged into a fatuous non-story in Malta if indeed that was the subject, I quickly and politely replied from my iPhone:

Oh dear.

I have achieved media prominence of a sort in Malta today, becoming a leading story in the Malta Star.

This publication does not like the current Malta government.

Its article boldly asserts that I am the Maltese Prime Minister's new 'Spin Doctor', brought in to help the PM 'deal with the problems within the nationalist party parliamentary group'.

More: Crawford was the person who recommended to Dr Gonzi to give his disgruntled backbenchers an apprenticeship with various Government Ministries, and pay them from public funds...

He also states repeatedly on his blog http://www.charlescrawford.biz that he is a euro-sceptic. This means that the Leader of the Nationalist Party is now taking advice from a prominent euro-sceptic after years leading his party’s electoral campaigns with a stance of of anti-euro-scepticism...

Charles Crawford has in fact become so involved in the Nationalist Party’s internal organisation that he has, on various occasions, quoted blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia in his own blog.

Another article (seemingly referring to this first one) says that some officials within the Nationalist Party are shocked that an external spin doctor has been brought in to help the Prime Minister.

Malta! Here are the facts. NB No-one in Malta including the Malta Star has been in touch with me to ask about them.

• I left the FCO in late 2007 to start a new career, part of which has turned out to be senior training of different sorts
• Last year I was asked by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official in Malta to give some officials diplomatic communications training
• Which I duly did, drawing on training work I have previously done for the FCO in London as well as for one other EU member state and for the European Commission in Brussels
• The training in Malta as elsewhere focused on writing and presenting good English for different official purposes
• My visit had nothing whatsoever to do with the Nationalist Party's internal affairs
• I will be pleased to come back to Malta to advise any party or organisation who wishes to pay for this training, including the Malta Star. Book early to avoid disappointment
• The article in the Malta Star seems to insinuate that I have been drawing on my mediation skills during the recent training in Valletta, to help one particular political party. Alas not - that is a separate course, which so far I have given only to EU officials in Brussels
• In short, I have made no recommendations to anyone in Malta other than to show some officials how to write and present brisk official English
• In particular I of course have NOT said or recommended anything to anyone about giving Parliamentarians paid roles in Government Ministries
• I am not a Spin Doctor. But if someone in Malta or anywhere else wants to pay me generously to be one, I'll be happy to have a go.

Finally, I have linked to the site of Daphne Caruana Galizia for my small but select readership, as its popularity in Malta seems to be a striking example of the impact blogging can have in smaller countries.

Maybe I'm wrong on that. Likewise if other Malta bloggers with different views are having a similar impact, I'll be delighted to link to them too. But I do not plan to let this blog be overwhelmed with things Maltese, gripping as they are.

Just to add that my first visit to beautiful Malta prompted me to write some general thoughts about democracy and participation for my own readers, who are unlikely to be familiar with the subject as it applies in Malta: here.

All clear now?

Sure?

Good. Thank you.

Former Bosnia Presidency member Ejup Ganic has been released on bail, albeit subject to some strict conditions. Serbia has to continue mustering evidence for the process to move forward.

In the end current BH Bosniac Presidency member Haris Silajdzic did not visit him in jail, but instead remonstrated with David Miliband about the whole business.

The British Government are sticking to the line that this is a purely legal matter with no (no) political connotations in any way whatsoever either for the present or in terms of any view of what happened in the past. See HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Michael Tatham, on his blog (in Bosnian!).

That position, of course, is exactly what critics of the whole affair are attacking:

Please. Be serious. How can the fact that you have arrested a former senior Bosniac on war crimes charges emanating from a Serbia which refuses to hand over Mladic be 'solely' a legal matter?

Fair enough. But that's today's Europe. Better to tackle complex questions by stuffing all concerned with the Porridge of Procedure than through ethnic cleansing and the rest?

So on it all trundles. As things now stand, it is hard to imagine that the Serbia side will not assemble enough material to persuade a judge that prima facie the issue deserves a substantive hearing (unless, that is, the Bosniac side knock down the extradition application on jurisdictional or other procedural grounds).

Is a British court in due course to pore over the origins of the Bosnian conflict and the Dobrovoljacka St shootings back in 1992 and try to reach a conclusion?

"It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest."

“Yes, sir.”

“What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?”

“One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.”

“You mean imagination boggles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.

Over at Business and Politics.

Thus:

Remember the Bible parable of the Prodigal Son? He squandered his fortune but saw the error of his ways and crept back home. He was warmly welcomed by his father, who explained the significance of his repentance to an older brother unimpressed by the precedent being set:

This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The moral core of this story turns on the fact of his sincere repentance – and an unambiguous willingness by the wastrel to work hard to put things right.

The Bible does not say that the wastrel is ‘entitled’ to carry on sponging off his relatives indefinitely – that they have to show him limitless ‘solidarity’.

As we look at Greece’s manoeuvres to persuade partners and markets to lend them yet more money to help stave off self-induced Disaster, the issues boil down to this:

• Is Greece serious about repenting its erstwhile wasteful ways?

• Is Greece capable of sustaining the sort of brisk standards now being set by Poland?

Indeed. So what are the answers?

Under the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has a new External Action Service, led by Baroness Ashton.

And as expected, it is struggling to trundle out of the hangar and get on the runway.

The main issue in the arguments over setting up the EAS is not all about how the EU might best throw its weight around in the world.

No! Much more important matters principles are at stake. Namely:

• who gets which top jobs?
• who decides?

In one early and much criticised power-play, probably the most important overseas job in the EAS went to ... a close colleague of Commission President Barroso, who was bundled through by Barroso before the EAS was properly set up. Many Europhiles see this as at best unseemly:

The fear is that the appointment of a Portuguese official, formerly Barroso’s chef de cabinet smacks of patronage and inappropriate influence. 

Not an inspired move, if the aim is to make the EU effective?

Since then there has been the long anticipated three-way struggle between member states (keen to get EAS defined and run in such a way as to pose no threat to national foreign ministries), the European Parliament (ever scheming to extend its power) and the Commission (having hundreds of people previously serving at Commission 'representations' overseas who need placing).

Behind all that are key European policy competences. Who leads and sets the overall agenda? The Commission, the Parliament, or Member States?

Zzzz.

Meanwhile Cathy Ashton too is being attacked openly from various quarters (including France) for being 'just not up to the job'. Although some of the examples cited are a bit strange:

... some experienced EU officials say she would have done better to have waited two months in order to learn the ropes from Mr Solana and his team.

“She hasn’t had the tools she needs. When Haiti hit, she did not even have a television in her office,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

Huh?

Good. The last thing she needs is tedious 24/7 media propaganda flickering away distractingly in the corner.

Nor should she have rushed to Haiti to 'see for herself' the earthquake devastation there. Trips like that are basically do-something resource-intensive self-indulgence by the leaders concerned.

Maybe patiently plodding along is the inglorious but overall best available approach.

In short, all going just as I predicted.

The arrest of former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic here in the UK in response to an extradition request from the Belgrade authorities is a striking development. See this short account on the Belgrade-based B92 website.

In fact the issue has been rumbling on for a couple of days, with Bosniac leader Silajdzic in Sarajevo unwisely denying that anything amiss was happening.

Here is a quick piece I have done for the Independent website. It gives what I hope is a fairly untendentious (and highly simplified for space reasons) account of the confusing events in Sarajevo's 'Volunteer Street' back in 1992, when a convoy of Yugoslav Army (JNA) troops withdrawing was attacked.

Amidst heavy fighting arising from Bosnia's declaration of independence and pro-Yugoslav forces' attacks on part of Sarajevo, Bosniac leader Alija Izetbegovic had been captured by the JNA. A plan emerged. JNA forces surrounded in Sarajevo by Bosniac forces could leave the city in exchange for Izetbegovic's release.

Agreement to this effect was reached with UN active engagement, to the point of UN vehicles leading the convoys intended to effect the swap.

To get a sense of what all this was about, there is no better source than the magnificent Death of Yugoslavia TV series.

Here is part of it describing the negotiations over Izetbegovic's release, with Ejup Ganic himself figuring prominently in interviews afterwards and in live footage taken at the time:

This then describes what happened: 

Legal and foreign policy questions swirling away in the coming hours and days will include:

• is the Serbia extradition application properly made in itself?
• do the circumstances back in 1992 as alleged by the Serb side in principle meet the legal requirements for extradition now?
• can enough persuasive factual evidence be adduced by Belgrade to show that there is a case to answer?
• what about other agreements between Belgrade and Sarajevo on how war crimes allegations arising from the BH conflict are to be handled - should a UK court take cognisance of them?
• do wider political factors need to be taken into account, and properly might be by the English courts? What impact might Ganic's extradition to Belgrade have on already unhappy Bosnian internal processes and prospects for EU membership? (Answer: negative) 
• even if the political impact might well be negative, should the UK government properly stay out of this one and let the legal chips lie where they fall?
• and many many more

On the substance, the vivid Death of Yugoslavia footage shows clearly where the Bosniac leadership seek to escape any responsibility for the Volunteer Street shootings. Their argument is (variously) that parts of the deal had not been finally nailed down and/or that they had no operational control over the actions of Bosniac militia forces who acted (they claim) spontaneously.

As in all such situations, it is next to impossible to prove how far any attack was explicitly ordered by the leadership, as opposed to encouraged by a sly wink at the right time.

Did Ganic and/or some of the other Bosniac leaders/commanders plan all along to double-cross the Serbs, suspecting that that is what the Serbs would do to them if things were reversed? What if anything did the UN people on the spot know or suspect?

Bear in mind too the wider politics now.

President Tadic in Belgrade is pressing Serbia's Parliament to pass a resolution condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. And, as luck has it, Radovan Karadzic's trial at the Hague Tribunal moves into the media spotlight again.

Tadic needs to show Serbia's public opinion that he is taking a position of principle - just as Serbs allegedly responsible for war crimes in Bosnia need to face justice, so do those suspected of crimes against Serbs.

Meanwhile in Sarajevo Bosniac President Silajdzic is loudly insisting that any extradition of Ganic will amount to Bosnia's legitimate self-defence being put on trial, yet another example (he says) of the 'relativisation of responsibility' for the Bosnian conflict at the main victims' expense.

Phew.

Will we see another protracted example of other countries' affairs being pored over exhaustively in the London courts?

Note: declaration of interest. I knew Ganic and his family quite well when I was in Sarajevo and he was a top leader of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the so-called 'Muslim-Croat Entity'). He was a genial wily negotiating partner, albeit often ruefully joking that his prospects were limited in Sarajevo as he was seen by other Bosniacs as a bit too Serb/Yugoslav (he was born in the Sandzak area of Serbia).

I was far away in London in mid-1992, knee-deep in the papers generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. So insofar as I know anything about the Volunteer St shootings it is not from first-hand experience. 

What's the difference between the way top leaders deal with other and the beery ruminations of blokes in pubs, banging on about the about the mischief and duplicity of foreigners?

Less than you might think!

A fascinating sub-plot (or maybe it IS the plot) in the Greece/Eurozone debacle is the role played by über-bankers Goldman Sachs, as bailed out by the US government. Whose people and former people pop up everywhere.

Baseline Scenario is hot on the case. It looks as if Mario Draghi's hopes of becoming ECB president are in steep decline. He has some searching questions to answer.

Will the last guinea pig on the Titanic please switch off the lights?

Families are tricky. They stretch to outer limits our private sense of responsibility.

You are Diligent. You work hard and honestly, you treat everyone fairly, you are generous towards friends and family, but you dislike being exploited or ‘expected’ to help others who don’t do all they can to help themselves.

You have four siblings, Dopey, Grumpy, Lazy and Feckless:

• Dopey does his best, but is dim and usually misses opportunities to do better; he appreciates favours from other family members, and now and then reciprocates in a cack-handed way
• Grumpy works hard and has had more success in life, but begrudges others their success; she expects favours to be offered generously by other family members, but is ungrateful/dismissive when that happens and never offers favours in return
• Lazy never tries hard, preferring the idea of the good life to the reality of the hard work needed to achieve it – she values favours, but usually does not reciprocate. Not exactly selfish or mean-spirited – just somehow air-headed and not that bothered
• Feckless works hard but squanders the results on fun and parties – has no long-term plan and lives only for the moment

You may or may not be your siblings’ keeper. But if you have good fortune or they fall on hard times, how far might those siblings make a moral claim to part of your success?

Complex issues and emotions are involved:

• The limits of generosity of the would-be giver – should Diligent be so generous to the others as to put his/her own immediate family’s welfare at risk?
• A calculation by Diligent as to how far the favour will in fact be used well – better to give more support to someone who at least tries hard but usually fails, or to the sibling who is in more need but likely to fritter away any support given?
• Does reciprocity or at least genuine gratitude come into play? Should Diligent’s generosity be affected by how far the individual recipients of generosity might extend favours if roles were reversed? Is it somehow better or more just to share more generously with people who are grateful, than with people who ‘expect’ support and then sneer at its level?
• And underlying it all is a philosophy of how the world should work. Does Diligent believe that the best way for people to get through life is to take responsibility for their own fate, and that those who make miscalculations should themselves bear the cost of the consequences and not try to get others to bail them out?
• Or does some sort of abstract ‘solidarity’ automatically kick in, so that any sibling falling on hard times through the results of selfishness or idleness or greed or fecklessness or incompetence can call on Diligent to sacrifice some of the results of his/her hard work and thrift?
• If that ‘solidarity’ principle applies, how far might Diligent insist that the selfish/idle/greedy sibling be shown to have mended his/her ways as a condition for support? Is it not heartless to expect everyone to behave well as Diligent invariably does?
• If Diligent subsidises his siblings’ poor work, is he doing them benefit or harm in the long run? 

A lot going on here at the most human micro-level, even in the happiest families.

So welcome to the European Union, namely Article 122 of the THE TREATY ON THE FUNCTIONING OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (Consolidated Version - emphasis added):

1. Without prejudice to any other procedures provided for in the Treaties, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy.

2. Where a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may grant, under certain conditions, Union financial assistance to the Member State concerned. The President of the Council shall inform the European Parliament of the decision taken.

Should Diligent Germany now help Feckless/Lazy/Grumpy/Dopey Greece and the other PIIGS?

The rule when the Eurozone was set up were clear. No bail-outs for countries not accepting financial discipline!

The threat of this awful implacable inflexible harshness was thought to be a necessary and sufficient condition to compel countries which had no serious tradition of running a currency successfully to realise that they were being promoted to the major league, and had to lift their game.

Ha ha. That boring northern European stuff is not for us gay southern European types. Who dares deny us our carefree way of life? We always knew that we wouldn’t accept all that drab discipline and paperwork and transparency – and taxes! And you stuffy Germans knew that too, even if you say now that you trusted us to behave like you.

So what’s the problem now? If there’s a crisis now, it’s your fault, not ours. You knew for years exactly what was going on, but looked the other way.

Wha-a-a-a-t? You’re saying now that we have misbehaved and that you won’t bail us out? That we have to tidy our room, work harder, tighten our belts and be poorer? That we are to get less lavish dinners than everyone else here? For years to come?

Are you patronising and selfish oh-so-clever people crazy as well? Where’s the solidarity in that?

Don’t you realise that what you are dealing with here?

When you brought us into your neat, tidy house, the whole point was that we would set the limits of general tidiness, not you! Which means that if you now insist that we tidy our room, we’ll wreck the whole place - just to spite you - dragging everything down to our level.

So what would you rather have? A complete mess, or a quiet life?

Borrow some money from some other suckers such as your own taxpayers’ kids if you have to. It will be years before they realise that you can’t repay it.

And puh-lease. Don’t start whinging that the Irish are behaving well, so we should do the same. If they want to make a scrawny fool of themselves by going on a long-term diet, that’s their problem.

It’s just not our style, here in the sunny south. It’s our culture, see? And Europe is all about celebrating diverse cultures.

Now excuse me. It’s long lunch time - I'll send you the bill later. Then I’ll need a siesta.

* * * * *

All of which goes to show that the Eurozone crisis is exposing the very heart of European Solidarity (or not). Since it goes to really very simple issues of trust and responsibility.

And perhaps there just are limits to trust and responsibility. Perhaps it makes no sense to set up supranational institutions which ultimately are unable to cope with these simple values, as the political legitimacy of those institutions is grounded not in trust and responsibility backed by law and elections, but in vainglorious elite ambition and hoping for the best. In the end, it just can't - and more importantly won't - work that way. 

See also in the USA. The Tea Party tendency is protesting that government is Just Too Big:

... more and more people are waking up to the fact that this just doesn’t work. We don’t have the money to keep throwing more and more of it into dysfunctional public schools, overpriced state colleges and government at all levels. In the competitive world we all live in now, our society has no choice but to learn how to do these things much more cheaply. Otherwise the blue sector will drag the whole country down with it.

This is part of what drives the Tea Parties: there’s a sense out there that the time for careful, limited reform is past. We need a crowbar, not a scalpel, to fix the blue beast.

It’s all the same point, expressed differently on either side of the Atlantic.

In the banking sector and in the public sector alike, limits of risk-management and common-sense responsibility have got lost in a sea of complexity. And accountability has spiralled out of control.

Back to manageable family values?

I have had an enquiry from someone who follows closely UK immigration issues asking about the policy issues surrounding the opening of the UK labour market to Poles in 2004 when Poland joined the EU:

Did the UK government encourage mass Polish immigration into the UK?

No.

Well, not really.

What happened was this.

Parts of the Blair government were very nervous about a tidal wave of Poles and other Eastern Europeans washing over the UK once we opened our Labour markets unconditionally.

Or rather they were nervous about the Conservatives making a big row about it after Jack Straw announced the policy in 2003. The more so since most other EU countries in a show of noisy EU anti-solidarity made clear that they would not open their labour markets unconditionally.

Which meant that whatever tendency there was for millions of Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and the rest to storm out from their respective homelands to look for jobs would be funnelled mainly in our direction, making the tidal wave even more fast, big and scary.

So intense consultations took place round Whitehall - should the UK row back on this commitment?

PM Blair took a breezy decision. Let it rip.

Previous experience with Portugal and Spain suggested that there would be a surge of interest (and people) but in due course it would all calm down without too many problems. But he threw a small bone to anti-immigration fears by setting up a 'registration scheme' for new arrivals with a view to at least having some sort of numbers to use in subsequent debates on the issue. Other administrative devices were used to try to stop people coming over to UK and promptly claiming benefits.

Thus it transpired that I as Ambassador had to go along to the then Polish Interior Minister Jozef Oleksy to break the official news of our keenly awaited decision. Oleksy previously had been Polish Prime Minister, but had an unerring knack of attracting controversy and scandals - a droll and unconventional figure by most former communist standards.

I pompously told Oleksy that I had the honour to inform the Polish Government that HMG had taken an important decision concerning the UK labour market after Poland's EU accession in May 2004, namely:

• The labour market would be opened unconditionally with immediate effect on 1 May 2004.
• Any Poles who wished to travel to the UK to live or work could do so with out a visa.
• Moreover, an effective amnesty would be given to all Poles who had been living in the UK and working illegally.
• All Poles seeking to work in the UK would be expected to register under a new scheme, but registration was not a condition for getting a job.

Oleksy looked at me in amazement and said in Polish: "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?" What's the catch?

"No haczyk," I replied. "It's as simple as that."

Oleksy simply did not believe me. He was sure that just as most EU capitals were announcing different severe restrictions on Polish workers after Poland's EU accession, the UK had to do the same. There had to be a catch with those tricky Brits!

He kept pressing:  "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?"

I assured him that there really was no haczyk.

We meant it. Unconditional opening with immediate effect after Poland's accession. The Brits were simply generous, open-hearted people. The Poles might like to remember who their real European friends were after this.

That's how the Polish Flood started.

By mid-2006 there were claims that there were more Poles in the UK than in Warsaw. Some indeed were feckless.

But by 2009 as the UK economy drooped many were heading back home. 

In the great sweep of things, Tony Blair got this one just right.

Ten years from now, let alone twenty or fifty or one hundred, the whole episode will have been forgotten. Those Poles who have stayed in the UK will be doing well, often paying taxes and generally acting as a force for good sense and intelligent conservative values. If any country wants immigrants, get Poles.

Although in a famous telegram to London I did warn Whitehall that this was coming the UK's way - whether we liked it or not. (I'll write this up separately).

Unfortunately there were risks for Poles coming to our country, as the families of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka so tragically found out.

For most others the experience seems to have been positive and helpful, with lots of Polish compliments to the UK on its easy-going ways and lack of bureaucracy(!).

And let's not forget that a while ago we were exporting our unemployed people to Poland in large numbers to look for work.

These things come and go.

The Greek masses are revolting:

Public sector workers in Greece have launched a nationwide strike in protest at government measures to tackle the country's huge budget deficit.

Flights have been grounded, many schools closed, and hospitals are operating an emergency-only service.

The government wants to cut pay, reduce pensions and revise the tax system...

Hey! We can't pay our way. So you government types in Athens need to force other people in the EU to pay for us! What's the matter with you all out there? Don't you care about our feelings?

A superb Negotiation between Germany and the Markets. The more desperate the situation in Greece, the more the German government has to scramble around for options while at the same time appearing to stand firm against a bail-out, since wobbly noises might make it even more expensive when it finally happens.

But maybe it is best to bring in the IMF, humiliating as this might be to the Eurozone, and let them take the obloquy and rage of the Greeks as they thrash around in the mess they have made for themselves?

Comfortless as this situation is for most practical purposes, it is nonetheless instructive and helpful to see so stark an illustration of the Reality of the Consequences of Evading Reality.

As you try to grasp what is happening in Ukraine, you may well be asking yourself: what does Ukraine mean anyway?

And, needless to say, views differ. There is a root word kraj in Slav languages which has all sorts of nuanced meanings in different Slavonic languages, linked to the idea of land, or borders of land, or land on or around the borders of a country/territory.

Remember the Krajina Serbs, who attempted to set up a Serbian territory separate from Croatia until Croatian forces crushed their resistance and most Serbs fled to Serbia?

Or indeed Momcilo Krajisnik? Another unhappy Slav with the kraj root in his name.

So Ukraine suggests either a 'border' territory, or a 'separate' principality or territory in its own right, depending on who's talking.

Ukraine's voters accordingly seem to face two eternal choices. Either to be somehow part of the Russian psychological space, on the frontiers of Russia's western lands. Or to be a separate territory, defined in their own terms, and looking at least as much to Europe as to Russia.

Which explains why any person elected President needs to be a magic knight:

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is not a particularly happy one: the majority of Ukrainians don't want a head of state with clearly formulated ideological priorities, with the experience and attitudes of a radical political fighter, with an explicit geopolitical orientation, and with an economic-reform program that can be hard on their wallets. That may explain why different groups of Ukrainians have such widely diverging views of their country's past and future...

... the voting habits of the majority of Ukrainians could still enable a politician to become head of state who is capable both of winning the support of the majority of voters and of implementing genuine modernization.

That politician would simply have to have enough human virtues, combined with managerial ability, to overcome all possible objections on the part of either the east or the west of the country, and both the right and the left.

That may sound like a fantasy, but then the whole of Ukrainian history for the past 20 years has resembled a fantastic saga of wandering in circles locked in time, waiting for a knight to break the spell.

Elections there tend to be close-run things these days. Western Ukraine, predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, looks mainly West towards Brussels. Eastern Ukraine, predominantly Russian-speaking, looks mainly East towards Moscow.

Viktor Yanukovych is seen as East, Yulia Tymoshenko as West. It looks as if this time round East has edged home in front.

A triumph for Moscow over the West/Europe?

Maybe. But not a huge one.

There is now a lively and tough political space in Ukraine, and whoever runs the place has no real choice but to manage relations with both Moscow and the EU carefully.

Ukraine's main problem is that it is the subject of an existential tug-of-war between a Westernising trend in Slavic thinking and a more traditional Moscow/Eastern trend.

Alas for Ukraine, the Russians weigh less but pull harder on their end of the rope than the EU does. 

Some Europeans are more European than others. Too many EU capitals in general (and Paris in particular) are quite happy for that part of Europe to be seen as 'not quite European enough', and to stay mainly outside European processes. Why annoy the Russians for the sake of all that empty space and complicated people? 

Some Russians hanker after reabsorbing Ukraine somehow, although the grisly case of Belarus and wider failed attempts at CIS integration show that even under what appear to be optimal conditions it is not possible to put chunks of the Soviet Union back together again.

So Moscow contents itself with making sure that if Russia can't have Ukraine, the West won't have it either.

We can expect Yanukovych (if confirmed as President) to talk a lot about Europe, safe in the knowledge that the EU doesn't know what to do about Ukraine other than send in lots of consultants and bureaucratic experts, some of whom do some useful work now and then. Nothing much will happen on Ukraine/NATO.

Which is not to say that Ukraine will stagnate (necessarily). As someone has wittily put it:

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues.

On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer. 

Following Swedish developments closely as one must, I found this story linking my team Tottenham to an individual example of Swedish bandy extremism.

And is some furtive ethnic cleansing busily under way in Malmo? 

It is always difficult to work out when something is just an idiotic if unpleasant episode of local and no wider significance, and when something is part of a wider, really worrying trend.

Partly because this is just not easy to prove anyway with scientific confidence even when all the facts are clear, as they never are.

And partly because each side of the argument will tend to play up evidence it likes and downplay evidence it does not like.

Not to mention media and politicians making whatever noise suits their immediate purposes.

So is anti-semitism on the rise in Sweden?

If so, is it nonetheless still a marginal and at worst nasty phenomenon?

How would we tell?  

As regular readers will recall, I have written at some length about the bewildering complexity - and stunning simplicity - of the EU Budget process.

When all the feuding and whining subsides, it comes down to the banal fact that a few countries Give, and most countries Get.

Those who Get damn the reluctant Givers as meanies, and proclaim themselves to to be the true high-minded Europeans. They fulfil all the lofty moral attributes of angry beggars snarling at the selfishness of anyone who hands them anything less than a fiver. 

Here at European Voice the line-up for the next round of sordid haggling is explored.

But with rather more polite nomenclature.

Perusing the website of the British High Commission in Malta (as of course one does) I found this link to a letter written by PM Gordon Brown to Dr Alan Williams MP of the Liaison Committee on the way forward after the Copenhagen Climate Change summit.

It also is on the No 10 website, adorned with a ridiculous photograph.

The Liaison Committee of what? you cry.

Dunno. It doesn't say. But it looks like a UK Parliamentary Committee.

Anyway.

Forget the policy, whose credibility is quickly dripping away as per that photograph. Look rather at the inept clumsy drafting.

If those countries which agreed the Accord in Copenhagen inscribe (sic) into it the commitments they made in the run-up to the conference - and I believe it is very much in the global interest that they should do so - the international community will have taken the first steps towards an historic transformation in the trajectory of global emissions.

What? Apart from the rather smutty imagery, how can you transform historically or otherwise the trajectory of a global emission?

It is important that the European Union maintains its commitment to move to a 30 per cent reduction in emissions if others are also ambitious.

And if they are not ambitious?

I believe it is strongly in the Ell’s (sic) economic interest to incentivise low carbon energy and technology investment through this goal.

What the 'ell is the EII?

As ail (sic) countries implement their own domestic plans, the global opportunities for green growth will be enormous.

It's your climate policy which is ailing, Prime Minister.

Already a $3 trillion global market, I (sic) am convinced that the benefits will flow not just to developed economies but to emerging and developing ones as well.

Since when was Gordon Brown a £3 trillion global market? Not worth quite as much as that, methinks?

We cannot afford to delay in implementing the far-reaching commitments on reducing deforestation which many countries have made, and to (sic) utilising the finance which has been committed.

Grammar?

We need to begin now the process of ensuring a trajectory from 2013 towards the 2020 goal agreed in the Accord of $100bn pa in finance flows to developing countries.

Aaargh. Another trajectory. What is it about all these Brownian trajectories?

And so on.

This is another musty needy NuLabour production. The word 'must' appears 12 times. The word 'need' 9 times:

This strange repetitive exhortatory language detached from any real analysis of the problems is reminiscent of the communist apparatchik from Party HQ standing on a barren collective farm field and addressing the workers.

He hectors them to even greater efforts to bring about the triumph of socialist productivity. They stare blankly at him, lost in their own thoughts and the disappointed emptiness of their blighted lives.

What the Ell is happening at No 10 which allows such poor work to be produced and issued for the historical record?

Were I HM Ambassador at a post overseas, I would refuse to link to this awful piece of work on my post's website until a corrected version was posted at no 10.

Why should my Embassy's good name be diminished by No 10's incompetence?

Robert Lucas. Some readers will have heard of him.

He won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Economics, in part for pioneering work in the field of 'rational expectations':

One important implication of Lucas’s work, which was confirmed by Thomas Sargent is that a government that is credible—that is, a government that makes itself understood and believed—can quickly end a major inflation without a big increase in unemployment. The reason: government credibility will cause people to quickly adjust their expectations.

He also looked deeply at what really makes societies grow, and how success compounds up over time:

"Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the “nature of India” that makes it so?

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else..."

Indeed.

Which is why it is so amazing to run the numbers to compare eg Slovenia with Serbia since 1990 to see the Cost of Milosevic (several hundred billion dollars lost to Serbia for ever, and the loss is growing fast).

Or the Cost of Mugabe, the wealth lost to Zimbabwe by Mugabe's insane policies which will have caused needless misery and disadvantage down far decades to come.

The modern drama we face in the West (Greece, UK and USA and beyond) is simple. Public debt has reached such a level (as with a credit-card) that the total debt starts to compound up faster than the likely capacity of the system to repay the debts by squeezing  new taxes out of the system. Plus the more tax is taken, the less the growth, so the less wealth generated to pay the debt.

Aaargh.

That can stagger on for some time. It suits the governments concerned to project an ability and willingness to honour their debts, just as it suits the institutions which have lent the money to believe that it will one day be repaid.

Sooner or later, the numbers no longer make sense.

See for example Illinois. Illinois has unfathomable commitments for unsupportable health benefits and pensions for bureaucrats:

By July, Illinois will be $130,000,000,000 (that’s BILLION!) in debt. This crushing load hampers the state’s ability to fund public schools and universities, health care, and other essential public services. Most of that money is owed to the state’s pension funds and retiree health care plans...

How did this happen? Basically, Illinois spends $3 for every $2 it takes in. Only in Springfield is this kind of math possible. The state accomplishes this by borrowing or by simply ignoring its unpaid bills. And it has been doing so for years.

Look at the graph of growing official Illinois liabilities since 1998:

California ditto.

So who pays?

It is a moral hazard disaster to expect people who have been relatively prudent to have to dig deep into their own pockets to help deal with greedy state-sponsored profligacy on this scale, the more so since the profligates tend to be in denial and snarl angrily when anyone tells them to cut back on their banal, unsustainable lifestyles.

Which is why wise Germany claims to be holding out against paying for foolish Greece's fast escalating debt.

But if no bail-out, then what?

As Robert Lucas showed, "a government that is credible—that is, a government that makes itself understood and believed—can quickly end a major inflation without a big increase in unemployment.government credibility will cause people to quickly adjust their expectations".

But the corollary of that is that wild and sustained government stupidity as we are seeing in so many places and policy areas can lead to people adjusting their expectations - and behaviour - in wild and persisting stupid directions:

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else...

A friendly reader asks:

Thank you for producing such a thought-provoking and readable blog.

I thought you may be interested in this link to a press release from the Swedish MFA. They plan to close 6 Posts and open 10.

http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/12653/a/138250

Several of these post closures are in the EU. I would be interested in reading your view in the blog (if you have time) about their choices.

Do you think it is a good strategy to close EU posts or is it better to shrink them? Also now with the development of the European External Action Service, is it more important to have posts in EU capitals than outside the EU (not counting the US, China, etc)? 

Then a Member State can lobby in each EU capital to push for the EU to follow a foreign policy most likely to benefit that Member State's national interest.

Well.

It depends upon what each country believes its diplomacy is for.

In the UK's case, we are a major net contributor to the EU budget. Plus we have allowed all sorts of issues within the EU to be decided by 'qualified majority voting'. Which means that EU decisions we disagree with and which may cost us a lot of taxpayers' money to implement can be imposed on us by a majority vote.

So we have very good reasons to want to make sure that we have an effective diplomatic network around the EU, both (a) to work out what dire schemes are out there and (b) to lobby hard to get other governments to support us in blocking stupid measures intended to damage our competitiveness. See the heroic work by the Embassy in Warsaw to work with Poland to fend off the evil Working Time Directive.

This, by the way, is another reason why HMG Targets for the FCO as proclaimed by Brown/Miliband have been utterly malign.

It takes only one successful intervention by an Embassy in Europe to save the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. Yet there is no way to make that calculation in the way the Brown/Treasury targets allocate the money to the FCO. Hence the FCO is now facing another round of heavy cuts, footling in overall terms but more than enough to create real risks to national interests. Madness.

We also have a strong diplomatic tradition far beyond Europe, which more than justifies itself in terms of giving the UK international impact and insight. The idea that we are 'punching above our weight' is annoying. Our collective British weight is substantial, and we should punch away, preferably below the belt now and again to show we mean it.

Meanwhile the EU External Action Service is creeping into the picture.

It is going to take a long time (say 10 years) for this new formation to acquire coherence and a clear role. Its own position within the EU system is still complex and not fully defined (eg what is it meant to be doing with and in eastern European countries covered by the Enlargement Commissioner?).

Yet slowly but surely it will take on some sort of shape on the ground. And member states diplomats will be seconded to it. Rumours suggest that a sizeable number of FCO staff have put their names forward for secondments, no doubt dismayed by the collapse of the FCO's morale and impressed by the higher salaries EAS offers.

Thus we have a perverse situation (or not, depending what you want). The EAS is deconstructing national diplomatic services in favour of some ambivalent European supranational formation. Taxpayers are seeing their national foreign services eroding for lack of funds, and this new organisation growing.

All of which rests on one profound Euro-collectivist premise: that in the EU 'national' foreign policies are on the whole a negative phenomenon.

So to answer (I hope) the questions.

Most EU member states' embassies in other EU countries these days are mainly symbolic or heavily focused on a tiny number of issues.

Only the larger member states' Embassies play a serious role in lobbying locally on foreign policy questions, since only the larger EU member states actually have foreign policies (ie positions matched to some resources for advancing them).

Those small/medium member states aspiring to wider diplomatic/political influence and impact beyond the EU lose little by scaling back their diplomatic presence in EU capitals. They just have to take their chances in Brussels with Voting; they can not deploy firepower of sufficient intensity to lobby much on internal EU issues in all those EU capitals.

Hence we see Sweden not unreasonably cutting back in EU Europe but redeploying in non-EU Europe and some places in Africa, where Swedish diplomacy can make a difference.

That would be unwise for the UK, as it would make us all the more vulnerable to fatuous EU decisions with dangerous implications for our national budget. Yet Brown/Beckett/Miliband have been busy for years doing just that.

One way to fend off Eurosceptics in the UK is to show that we almost always thwart the stupid aspects of EU integration, but that just can not be done by bickering between bureaucratic experts in capitals and last-minute haggling in Brussels alone.

You need a team of excellent energetic people (UK-based and Locals alike) on the ground too, to lobby for UK positions and to identify weak points in the positions and psychologies of others - just as I had in Warsaw.

Oh, and a government in Westminster which has not completely lost sight of common sense.

Adam Jasser (Polish, Reuters journalist-turned-pundit, good egg) argues that the grim problems besetting Greece and its public finances could lead to the Eurozone getting even stronger:

In all the talk about the pain inflicted on countries in the Eurozone which fail to run their affairs sensibly it is overlooked that that pain is the WHOLE POINT.

Because there is no ready way to bail out profligate countries, and because a wide single multilingual/multicultural currency zone has stickiness in terms of the way people move about (ie it is quite unlike the USA), the threat of that horrible pain is what is meant to compel slack members to reform their ways.

Which is why Adam is dead right here:

The EU is therefore right to begin pondering how to enhance policy coordination and strengthen the community’s ability to fine tune individual economies. Convergence criteria will most likely have to evolve to include a limit on current account balances and an enforcement mechanism for sticking with the rules will have to be put in the hands of the Commission. 

But all of that falls short of what is really required. What the euro is clandestinely working towards (like a sleeper planted by the EU “federalists”) is a far-reaching unification of the social and economic models that today function in the EU.  The existence of variously efficient pension systems, labour market rules, business environments and tax regulations are the root cause of the imbalances inside the euro zone...

In short, the Euro will work properly only if national economic decision-making can be superseded by ruthless EU-level decision-making to 'fine-tune' a national economy if a country gets too far out of order.

Lots (lots) more harmonisation towards a 'federal' Europe, where Germany calls the ultimate shots.

Maybe some countries will think this is just too high a price to pay for 'integration', and either retreat gracefully from the Eurozone in due course or crash painfully out of it.

Either event could be quite a good outcome, paving the way for a quite new set of variable geometry relations between all EU member states and eg Turkey/Ukraine too, which, being based on experience of how such 'deep' integration works (and has to work) in practice, will be all the more acceptable to the various populations of our happy continent.

Here from euobserver is a detailed account of the goings-on behind the EU scenes, as everyone tries to work out how the new EU External Action Service will be structured.

And who will get which jobs, since that will have a huge influence on the way it all works (or not) in practice, not to mention the opportunities for dispensing patronage.

Here is another euobserver article on the shape of the EU's future representation overseas.

Lo and behold, up my droll friend James Morrison has popp'd up as the head of Baroness Ashton's cabinet. She is in good hands.

Never underestimate the grinding unrelenting power of the EU machinery and the pooled wealth behind it. Key points to look out for as the discussions continue:

• where in all this fit member states and their diplomats
• how EU positions will be articulated at the UN
• what if any oversight and associated 'control' is grabbed by the European Parliament

Member states face a dilemma. The Lisbon Treaty strengthens their role in EU foreign policy at the coalface since it makes provision for member states diplomats to be seconded to EU missions.

But whom to send? The best, the worst, or the average?

Sending the best people takes them away from national foreign policy roles and boosts the long-term legitimacy of the EAS. Send the worst or the average - if others send the best - reduces the likely impact they are likely to have within EAS deliberations.

Most member states will want to cherry-pick, lobbying furiously for a certain number of key Ambassadorships and Deputies for their nationals as the price for getting the whole thing going. Within the member states there will be ruthless knifing as 'new' member states jostle for position against 'old' member states:

One thorny little bramble for Ms Ashton will be ensuring that new member states get a satisfactory share of senior appointments.

The EU Council and the commission, which will furnish two-thirds of EEAS personnel, are currently dominated by people from old member states. Out of the commission's 1,657 foreign relations officials, 117 are from the 12 countries that joined the union after 2004. Just one of them, Hungarian diplomat Janos Herman in the commission's Norway embassy, holds a top-level post.

"The Brussels mafia has made sure that our dirty moustaches are kept out of this," one Polish-origin EU official said.

And all this in turn will provoke intense sulking within the Commission as people who have dreamed of heading their own EU mission get trumped near the finishing line by smug member states diplomats keen to show that they are the real thing.

This is only the very start of a process which will last years if not decades. There are bound to be all sorts of difficulties working out the new structures, let alone doing anything with them.

Here in the UK we have the prosepct of regime change this year, so a Conservative government led by a team not exactly oozing Europhilia will need to look hard at what D Miliband has done in the twlight days of his rule and see if they want to unscramble any of it.

The Ever-Closer the Union, the Much Harder the property settlement if there is ever a Divorce?

European Voice looks at the humiliation of the Eurozone if Greece has to go to the IMF for help with its uneconomic economy, and the different schemes being cooked up by other EU members to try to manage the problem:

There is mounting concern in Frankfurt, Brussels and in other eurozone capitals that, if the crisis is handled badly, contagion might spread from Greece to create financing difficulties for some other member countries of the eurozone, notably Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy.

The discussions are complicated by the Maastricht treaty's “no bail-out” clause for eurozone members. The treaty prohibits the direct financing of public entities' deficits by national central banks or the European Central Bank.

But, according to an EU official, the “no bail-out” clause might be side-stepped if the crisis was dealt with inter-governmentally within the Eurogroup. The Eurogroup – the gathering of finance ministers of the eurozone – is now recognised as an official EU institution under the Lisbon treaty

It all boils down to a simple proposition. Someone has to lend Greece money on a significant scale, knowing that Greece needs this money because it has shown itself to be highly incompetent at running its own affairs.

So the lent money too will be at risk, even with 'conditions'. Who wants to subsidise the likelihood of Greece behaving responsibly, or not? Will EU taxpayers in those other member states which have run their affairs sensibly want to see their savings at risk in that part of the continent?

And what if Greece won't or just can't meet the promised conditions?

Quite interesting.

Here, by the way, is a banal example of a Greek Gift sacrifice in chess - where taking the proffered 'gift' leads to rapid disaster.