Life in Spain 2: I've received a response from GasNauralFenosa to my application for the Bono Social. Need I say that they claim the documentation is wrong. This being Spain:- 1. They don't tell me how it's wrong; 2. They have my surname as David; 3. They have my forenames as David Cozin; and 4. there's no number to call them on. My suspicion is that I was daft to send them a copy of my expired NIE as well as copies of my passport, the A4 Certificado confirming my residence status and my empadronamiento certificate. On reflection, I doubt they know we Brits don't get residence cards any more. So, they just ignored all the other documents and seized on the fact that my last NIE card had expired. So . . . I will be writing again today. With no great confidence.
Life in Spain 3: I might have mentioned that I have a (mild) stalker - a guy who spoke to me in a supermarket and who now suggests a coffee once a week. And lately a visit to his home.Yesterday, I bumped into him on the bridge into town, though not as literally as the people I cited last week. Seeing my book, he made the classic Spanish comment: You always have a book. You must be an intellectual.
Talking of books . . . Although I knew I would balk at his religious tone, I bought Christopher Howse's A Pilgrim in Spain. It didn't take me long to become irritated. By the first 2 paragraphs, in fact. In which he makes what I believe are 2 mistakes:-
- That Spanish is the closest language to Latin. Well, here in NW Spain they believe, with some justification, that this (dubious) honour belongs to Gallego/Galician. Which retains the F that Spanish has commuted to H. As in forno/horno and formiga/hormiga.
- That no one calls the Spanish language 'castellano' any more. Well, they do around here, mate. Or perhaps you meant foreigners, not Spaniards. Not that I've ever heard a foreigner do this.
And still on books . . . I've now received the second volume of Arturo Barea's autobiographical novel, The Forging of a Rebel. Inside the front cover is the message: February 1991: Carl: Thank-you for the weekend. Love, Me. xx. I'm trying to decide whether this is more or less affectionate than the message in the first volume: Dear Carl: Merry Xmas '91. Lots of love, Suzanne. xxxx I can't wait to see what's in the front of the third volume. I have to ensure, of course, that I get it from the same supplier. Wouldn't it be nice if either Carl or Suzanne were reading this and could tell us how things went after February 1991. Perhaps they've been happily together for 26 years. Let's hope so.
Spaniards Speaking English/Any Other Language: My internet colleague, Lenox Napier, writes this about Mojácar: Here, where half the students in the school are both foreign and bilingual, there is practically no one in the Town Hall who can manage a second language. Outside, in the shops, bars and restaurants, domination of English is, of course, far higher. Looking more widely, Lenox adds that: Across Spain, around 40% of Spaniards are said to speak a foreign language. Half of these claim to speak English (although only a fifth of these can carry on a 'reasonable' conversation in English said El Mundo 2014). As for the country's politicians: The joke here is that waiters need to speak English, but politicians don't. But the reality is that many party leaders do - Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, Albert Rivera of Ciudadanos and Pedro Sanchez, the last PSOE leader, though President Rajoy famously doesn't speak a word of this or any other
language beside his own. 'El Confidencial' reports this week that Rajoy is not alone - a massive 81% of Spanish parliamentarians don't speak a second language. Possibly even worse than British MPs, then.
I quite Facebook a couple of weeks ago and no longer miss it. Reading this excellent Guardian article yesterday, I felt this had been a good step. The question now is - Can I do without Google. Probably not but I do use Duck Duck Go for my searches, as they don't track you. They say,
As for this crazy world . . . . Are we all so inured to obscene salaries that we just shrug at the fact that the CEO of the advertising agency WPP was paid 40 million pounds last year. 40 MILLION POUNDS. Say, 48 MILLION EUROS. I was going to say 'earned' but this seems rather unlikely.
And on this theme - At the end of this post, there's a very funny article by a German (sic) on the folk who've f*****d the EU dream. Even EUphiles might find it amusing.
Today's cartoon:-
THE ARTICLE
12 people, things that
ruined the EU Konstantin Richter
The EU’s fate was
written in the stars — or in its treaties.
Last
weekend, European leaders gathered in Rome for the 60th
anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. They discussed, not for the first
time, how to get the EU back on track. And they told each other they
are still committed to the Union and believe in its future. (We’ve
heard that one before, too.)
But let’s just
suppose that, when the European leaders sat down for lunch at the
Quirinal Palace, some of them had a little too much of the pinot
grigio and waxed nostalgic about the days when the idea of a united
Europe was still young and promising and beautiful. And then they
talked about this week and how British Prime Minister Theresa
May would send her goodbye letter and they started slurring
their words, saying Grexit, Brexit, Frexit, and they finally admitted
to each other that something has gone horribly wrong.
When they stood up and
got ready to leave, they were devastated, saying to each other: “Good
God, how did it come this and, more importantly, who is to blame?”
We’ve gathered a dozen suggestions.
1. Zeus
Whenever Europe is in
trouble, its advocates claim the EU lacks a proper narrative. The
whole idea of an “ever-closer union” is still a fine one, they
argue, and the only thing that’s needed for people to understand it
is a memorable story. The most memorable story about Europe, of
course, is the one about Zeus. The Greek God disguised himself as a
white bull in order to approach a beautiful girl called Europa. When
Europa, perhaps naively, climbed on his back, the God-turned-bull
abducted and ravished her. No need to take the story too literally
when analyzing the EU’s current malaise (no white bulls there). But
it is good to keep in mind that Europe’s founding myth doesn’t
exactly bode well for its future. If negative narratives about the EU
seem to resonate far more than positive ones, maybe it’s because
the Greek gods loaded the dice.
2. Edith Cresson*
Going straight from
Zeus, ruler of Mount Olympus, to good old Edith Cresson may seem a
bit of a stretch. But as a strong contender for the title of worst
European commissioner ever, the Frenchwoman does have a claim to
fame, too. In the early 1990s, Cresson was a French prime minister
who quickly fell out of favor and was forced to resign after less
than a year in office. That apparently qualified her for a
high-powered job in Brussels. As commissioner for science, research
and development, Cresson famously paid her dentist to be a scientific
adviser. In 1999, allegations of fraud intended to target Cresson
ended up bringing down the entire Commission. To put it crudely:
Cresson did to the EU what Zeus did to Europa.
3. Christoph Blocher
Look at any map of the
European Union and what stands out is the blank spot at its core. The
holdout is Switzerland, mountainous, beautiful and immensely wealthy.
The Swiss owe their status as successful non-members to a man
named Christoph Blocher. Back in the early 1990s — when Geert
Wilders was still a young parliamentary assistant with funny
hair, Marine Le Pen just the daughter of right-wing populist
Jean-Marie Le Pen, and in Germany the letters AfD stood for
Allgemeiner Finanzdienst, a financial services firm that has since
changed its name — the Swiss industrialist led a successful
referendum campaign against the path to EU membership.
Blocher knew how
to push the right buttons and arouse in the Swiss a deep fear of
outsiders, be they from Brussels or the Balkans. His blend of
anti-immigration and anti-EU politics would provide the blueprint for
populist campaigns elsewhere. What’s more, the Alpine nation made a
strong case that the economic benefits of close relations with the EU
can be had without fully joining the club. (Norway provides another
fine example.)
4. Brussels
Some decades ago, when
the EU’s founding member countries were looking for a place to
house institutions such as the European Commission and the European
Council, they thought they had found something suitable. It was a
city located halfway between the glamorous French capital of Paris
and the not-so-glamorous West German capital of Bonn. And it was
called Brussels, like the famous sprouts. The French hoped the
Belgian capital would turn into a twin city of Paris, populated by
sophisticated graduates of the Grand Écoles. What they got instead
was the European Quarter, an architectural nightmare, more Brasilia
than Paris, that is oddly isolated from the indigenous people in its
vicinity. Brussels may not be the “hellhole” U.S. President
Donald Trump described but, as anyone who has worked there knows, the
EU capital lacks atmosphere. As a result, Europe’s de facto capital
has been struggling to attract the kind of talent that would happily
flock to more inspiring places, such as Paris or Amsterdam. Maybe
even Bonn would have been a better choice.
5. François Mitterand
There are quite a few
people who’ve been given the moniker “Father of the euro.” (The
mother of the euro wasn’t around when the currency was conceived.)
Most of these fathers were economists. But Europe’s single currency
was predominantly a political project, not an economic one — and
blaming economists for its failings is missing the point. François
Mitterand, the charismatic French president, knew a lot about
the art of political intrigue and far less about monetary policy.
Looking to subdue the strong Deutschmark (which he called
“Germany’s force de frappe,” or nuclear weapon), he kept
pushing for a single currency — and found an ally in German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also more of a political animal than an
economic one.
When the Berlin Wall
fell and Kohl needed international support for Germany’s
reunification, the French president, allegedly, negotiated a quid pro
quo, convincing the Germans to give up the Deutschmark. But the
father of the euro did not live long enough to see that things
wouldn’t go according to plan. The German economy flourished in the
eurozone, the French one didn’t, and the EU, as a whole, would have
been better off without its wayward child.
6. Antigone Loudiadis
This list of villains
would be incomplete without at least one specimen of the scheming
investment banker. Our candidate goes by the name of Antigone
Loudiadis. Accordingly, there’s a whiff of Greek drama to her
story. Loudiadis was a whip-smart Goldman Sachs banker and worked
with Costas Simitis’ government back in the early noughts, when the
Greeks were desperately seeking to join the eurozone. The Anglo-Greek
banker was instrumental, allegedly, in devising complex derivative
trades to hide the country’s true debt level. In a Sophocles play,
our heroine would have met a terrible fate, perhaps buried alive and
mourned by a chorus of elderly Thebans. In contemporary Europe, she
lived happily ever after, eventually founding a London-based
insurance company and running it as CEO.
7. The unnamed EU
official
There are some 50,000
people working for the EU, depending on how you count. Though their
names can be looked up in the organization’s vast databases, they
mostly toil in anonymity, and the vast majority of EU citizens would
likely not be able to name a single commissioner. In the popular
imagination, Brussels has become a present-day version of Kafka’s
castle, dominated by faceless paper pushers who work for opaque
entities called DG something-or-other and invent regulations
concerning the length of cucumbers.
That sentiment may not
do justice to what unnamed EU officials actually do. But what do they
do? It’s safe to say that the EU hasn’t done enough to capture
the hearts and minds of the people. There’s no stylish image
campaign, no employee-of-the-month program, not even a Pirelli
calendar with sexy bureaucrats posing in attractive office cubicles.
8. Boris Johnson
They say the flapping
of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane somewhere
thousands of miles away. In the early 1990s, Boris Johnson (the
butterfly in this case) was the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in
Brussels — and an early exponent of a literary genre called the
“Euromyth.” One such Euromyth, headlined “Delors plans to rule
Europe,” was read in far-away Denmark where the Danes were holding
a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. In Johnson’s telling (not to
be trusted, of course), the Telegraph story mysteriously tipped the
balance, triggering a Nej and leading to all kinds of
repercussions that still reverberate today. What’s more, the
incident sold Johnson on the fun of flapping his wings, which he did
to even greater effect in early 2016 when he joined the Vote Leave
campaign, eventually effecting a tornado called Brexit. If Johnson
has his way, he’ll enter the history books as the only man who
ruined the EU not once, but twice.
9. The Swabian
housewife
Rumors that the Germans
are making sacrificial offerings to a deity called the Swabian
housewife are probably exaggerated. But Chancellor Angela Merkel did
invoke the German goddess of austerity when the financial crisis hit,
saying that, like the Swabian housewife, she thinks one shouldn’t
live beyond one’s means. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is a
believer, too, stubbornly opposing debt relief and stimulus programs.
Keynesian economists countered by coining the term “Swabian-housewife
fallacy.” They argue that what makes sense on an individual level,
meaning personal finances, can wreak havoc in international politics,
meaning the EU. (But then again, some EU governments could have used
a tad of that Swabish housewifeliness in the run-up to the euro
crisis.)
10. Jean-Marc Bosman
This Belgian football
player didn’t have much of a career. He stopped playing in his
twenties, was sentenced to jail for assault and now lives unemployed
and underfunded in Liège. Nevertheless, Bosman had more of an impact
on European club football than any other player around. In the
early 1990s, when his contract had lapsed, he sued his Belgian club
for, effectively, not letting him go. The case went to the European
Court of Justice, which ruled that clubs cannot demand transfer fees
when contracts have expired. The court also decided that quotas
restricting the number of EU foreigners in club teams had to go.
All of that made sense
from a legal perspective. But football fans only see what happened as
a result: sky-high salaries and transfer fees for star players, a
handful of elite clubs who came to tower above the rest, club teams
composed entirely of non-nationals. The fans feel that football had
been taken away from them. Most of them vent their anger against the
evil forces of globalization, liberalization and commercialization.
But those in the know blame Bosman — and EU law.
11. Viktor Orbán
What was Angela Merkel
thinking when she opened the German borders to refugees in September
2015? Critics charged the German chancellor with failing to consult
with the rest of the bloc before she made her decision, and with
aggravating a refugee crisis that has threatened to tear Europe
apart. What is often overlooked is that Merkel didn’t act entirely
of her own volition. The Hungarian government led by Viktor Orbán
put refugees on buses heading for Austria and Germany — and tricked
the chancellor into taking an idealistic stand on migration. There
would have been no German Willkommenskultur without
Hungarian idegengyülölet, or xenophobia.
12. The Treaty of Rome
Rome stood at the
beginning of a proliferation of treaties. Keeping track of what
exactly was agreed upon in Nice, Maastricht, Lisbon and elsewhere has
become increasingly difficult. There have simply been too many
meetings and too many documents named after too many cities. If EU
leaders keep meeting like this, we’ll eventually have the Toledo
Treaty and the Clermont-Ferrand Regulations. Incidentally, Rome is
also where the principle of the “ever-closer union” first popped
up. Entire dissertations have been written in defense of that idea.
Indeed, closer reading shows that, according to the document, only
the European people were meant to engage in “ever-closer union,”
not (necessarily) governments, central banks or entire armies. But
somehow “ever-closer union” became a synonym for the EU’s
self-aggrandizement anyway.
Now that Britain is
leaving, a little more modesty wouldn’t hurt. So here’s an idea:
EU leaders could meet again next weekend, have some more wine and
solemnly agree that their utmost goal is to keep the European people
“from drifting ever-further apart.” That sounds about right and
not too fancy. All that’s needed is a suitable name. How about the
Pinot Grigio Declaration?
Konstantin Richter is a
contributing writer at POLITICO. His German-language novel,
“The Chancellor,” about Merkel and the refugee crisis will be
published next month.
* Edith Cresson once pronounced that 25% of British men were homosexual. I, for one, was not offended as I took this to be code for "I've never met a Brit who wanted to shag me". Here's a BBC report on her. The fotos perhaps explain her experience. Or lack of it.