Checking
one of the (numerous) toll receipts garnered down in Portugal
recently, I noticed that the numbers of the credit card used were not
those of my card. For a moment, I thought either I'd been given the
wrong receipt or, better, that someone else had been hit by my
charges. But all the other receipts bore the same four numbers and I
finally realised these were not the four final numbers used in Spain,
but the four before these. No idea why but, in this case, it looks
like Portugal is different.
The
EU and its future has been a somewhat dormant issue since the the
panic of last summer was finally calmed by Mario Draghi's
announcement that the ECB
would move heaven and earth to save the currency. Whatever the
legality, was the impression. Happily for Spain, the rates on her
sovereign bonds then fell significantly and President Mariano Rajoy
has felt able to postpone (sine
die?)
a humiliating bail-out request. One gets the impression that, since
mid 2012, not much progress has been made on addressing the core
deficiencies of the EU but, then, as someone commented recently, it's
only crises which bestir the members into substantive action. And the
next crisis could be around little Cyprus, which looks like
defaulting on its debts and, besides, is a centre for the laundering
of untold millions belonging to the Russian mafia. No less a
personage than Mr Draghi has stressed
that Cypriot banks are big enough to pose a systemic risk to the
eurozone. Olli Rehn, the EU’s currency chief, fears that failure to
back Cyprus could once again shatter trust, setting off fresh capital
flight. “It’s
essential that everybody realises that a disorderly default of Cyprus
could lead to an exit of Cyprus from the eurozone,” he said. “It
would be extremely stupid to take any risk of that nature.”
So, in short, interesting times may well return.
Talking
of the Russian mafia . . . The mayor of the Catalan town of Lloret de Mar was today taken to the local calaboose, accused of running a
large-scale money-laundering operation for their benefit. No doubt at a price. We await
developments with interest. Especially as to what name this case will
be given.
If
you were planning to go to the Las Ventas bullring in Madrid for
any of its upcoming events, you need to think again. The new roof
installed there only fa few days ago has fallen down, even though
“All the instructions of the French manufacturers were obeyed to
the letter.”
Finally
. . . Re-watching Napoleon Dynamite tonight with the Spanish
subtitles on, I noticed the English term Liger – lion plus
tiger – was translated as Tileon, or tiger plus lion. Same
thing, of course, but one wonders why. Other than the word Ligre
– león plus tigre – doesn't exist in Spanish.
Except it does. Whereas tileón doesn't. Odd.
Supplement
Commentators
all over the world have been analysing David Cameron's speech on
Britain and the EU. And, as you'd expect, coming to wildly divergent
conclusions. Here's an article from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who
believes – if I've got him right – that Britain should stay in
the EU but that the latter needs to be thoroughly reformed to take
cognisance of today's realities. Not those of 1948.
David
Cameron has one great ally: the people of Europe.
Cherry-picking.
Europe a la carte. And from Madrid, a finger-waving admonition that
"David Cameron must understand he cannot pretend to renegotiate
the treaties, and undo what we have done, or slow the speed of the EU
cruiser."
There
speaks the old guard, still struggling to grasp the magnitude of what
has just happened. They offer no flicker of recognition that the EU
itself has over-reached disastrously and must learn to respect the
nation-state democracies if it is to survive at all.
For
the first time since the Treaty of Rome in 1957 a country has
challenged the Monnet doctrine of ever-closer union. Some 180,000
pages of acquis communautaire supposedly written in stone are being
thrown open.
If
Europe's leaders dig in their feet, there is a high likelihood that
Britain will walk away in 2017, setting off a complex chain-reaction
in the alliance system of Northwest Europe.
The
first reflex has been to dismiss Mr Cameron's speech as an entirely
British act of perfidy, or as party intrigue to see off UKIP, or
both. But matters are not so simple.
Very
large numbers of people across Europe agree with him, and that is a
greater danger for Brussels. The latest Eurobarometer surveys shows
that just 30pc of Europeans now have a "positive view" of
the EU.
France's
Vox Agora praised David Cameron for breaking the taboo and igniting a
pan-European debate, running a red-blooded headline: "towards
the end of European dictatorship?"
"The
British prime minister has scored a bulls-eye," said the
Frankurter Allgemeine, Germany's most venerable newspaper. "Cameron
is right: the EU must be more flexible and competitive. The return of
competences to the national authorities must be made possible. The EU
must be made more democratic at long last."
Germany
is in ferment as citizens awaken to danger that EMU bail-out funds
will shoe-horn their country into an EU fiscal union with shared
debts. To the extent that this is buttressed by the actions of the
European Central Bank -- bond purchases, bank liquidity, or Target2
imbalances -- it is more insidious, since it amounts to fiscal union
by stealth.
The
Free Voter party won 10pc of votes in Bavaria with calls to block the
European Stability Mechanism (ESM), and this in turn has forced the
Bavarian Social Christians to harden their message, including demands
for a referendum on transfers of power to Brussels. Chancellor Angela
Merkel has her own "UKIP problem".
So
too does the French establishment. Marine Le Pen's Front National --
at 18pc in the polls -- is threatening the right-flank of the
Gaullistes with calls for an in/out referendum. President Francois
Hollande's Socialists face a parallel attack on the other side from
the Left Front.
So
too do Italy's mandarins. The triple alliance of Beppe Grillo, Silvio
Berlusconi, and the Northern League commands 37% of the vote on
EU-bashing of one kind or another. Holland,
Finland, and Austria all have eurosceptic parties large enough to
upset politics. Austria's Freedom Party now wants an Alpine alliance
with Switzerland and a vote on EU-exit.
It
is hard to know exactly what has caused the dam to break. The failure
of EMU has played its part. Half Europe is trapped in depression,
with 1930s levels of unemployment, deprived of the policy levers
needed to extricate themselves. The gap in growth between the US and
Eurozone is running at 20-year highs of almost 3pc, and looks likely
to continue with powerful compound effects through much of the
decade.
I
have long argued that the EU's refusal to respect the French and
Dutch `No' votes against the European Constitution in 2005 was the
moment when the Project crossed a line and lost its legitimacy, but
everybody has their own particular grievance. What lies behind the
anger is the sense that little can be done to redress it. You can
vote out your government, but you can't vote out the EU machinery.
It
is well understood in Germany that EU fiscal union erodes the tax and
spending powers of the Bundestag and therefore must eviscerate German
democracy. As the ECB's retired prophet Otmar Issing keeps warning,
this is the issue over which the English Civil War was fought. It is
not only about money. It is about self-government.
The
hot debate in Germany is perhaps why Mrs Merkel has refused to join
the chorus of attacks on David Cameron, instead holding out an olive
branch with talk of a "fair compromise". In Davos she went
so far as to embrace his message of deep reform.
The
new political fact in EU affairs is the Anglo-German Entente, a twist
that has caught many by surprise. You could say this is raw trade
politics. Britain has become Germany's biggest trade partner,
overtaking France for the first time in the modern era.
Germany
is looking beyond the EMU stagnation sphere, where its trade has
fallen from 46% to 37% in just over a decade. It has a spanking new
capital, just 80 miles for the Polish frontier, with an "Ossi"
Chancellor who grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and is
moreover appalled by French foot-dragging on reform.
You
could say too that Berlin does not much like the prospects of an EU
that gains Romania, Bulgaria, and soon the rest of the Balkans, and
loses a wealthy, free-trade, Atlantic ally. It is bad enough to be
stuck in EMU, outnumbered by a ring of mostly Latin states needing
transfers in perpetuity.
Yet
there is another motive for seeking to win over David Cameron.
Germany's leaders feel unloved and are alarmed by their owned
unwanted power. Their modest national ambition is to make things,
sell them, prepare for Germany's ageing crisis in five years time,
play the piano, and be a good neighbour.
Already
faced with the burden of hegemony and all its painful associations,
the last thing they want is a British exit that would drastically
upset the EU balance of power.
What
is surprising is that France has been so slow to face up to the
implications of a reunited Greater Germany. Everybody knows
Franco-German condominium is an illusion. It can no longer mask
German power.
The
EU has completely changed in any case with Nordic and Eastern
enlargement. There is no going back to the glory days when Emile Noël
was able to run the European Commission as an outpost of the French
civil service for thirty years, from 1957 to 1987, with the benign
acquiescence of Bonn. That world has vanished for ever.
One
might expect the French to bite their tongues and seek to bind the
British as closely to their side as they did in 1904, and again in
the 1930s, for purely diplomatic purposes this time of course. Yet Mr
Hollande's first reaction to the Cameron speech was a tone-deaf
reminder that Britain must abide by its "obligations".
This
may change. Finance minister Pierre Moscovici was more subtle,
admitting that the UK is "extremely useful" in the EU. The
reality is that British and French forces worked side by side with in
the Balkans, and again in Libya, and do so now in Mali. An
Anglo-French military union already exists.
There
are some who will play to stereotypes. Spain's foreign minister José
Manuel Garcia-Margallo helpfully told us that Brexit would lead to
"terrible devastation" of our industries with nothing left
but "a few petty bankers" in xenophobic isolation. I hardly
have to remind readers that England is the only major nation that
happily lets foreigners run its football team and its central bank,
or lets the Spanish run its airports, or lets the Hong Kong Chinese
run the rail transport of its capital city. What Britons dislike is
foreign rule, not foreigners.
David
Cameron has at last established this sentiment as British state
policy. My guess is that other leaders of Europe's historic nation
states will be forced by their own peoples to fix the limits of EU
power in a similar fashion.
If
he has set that process in motion he may just help to save a European
Union worth saving.
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