Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Spain
- The Guardia Civil this weekend boarded a yacht stocked with 18 tonnes of cocaine. This happened near the Canary islands but there's a yet no confirmation of my suspicion it was heading for our coast.
- This is sad news on sexual crimes but, of course, it might well be a case of increased reporting rather than more offences.
Life in Spain
- Check here on how well you know Spain. Some of the questions are pretty esoteric.
- An interesting article on the different cost of some healthcare treatments in different countries. Spain, as you'd expect, comes out well.
- If you're an intern – I'm not sure what that is – you'll appreciate this guide on how to survive/flourish during Spain's summer. Well, Madrid's summer really.
The EU
- More on its travails and challenges in the longish article below. It's entitled Nationalists are Ripping up the Franco German Map of Europe and I cited bits of this yesterday.
- This article – cited by reader Perry – suggests there's a core of Republican neocons who are determined that the USA's foreign policy objective should remain regime change, rather than deals with authoritarian regimes in the commercial/strategic interests of the USA. Apparently these folk see Iraq and Libya as huge successes. More than a tad worrying.
The UK
- I've never seen Love Island but this comment struck me as both pertinent and funny: A worrying story in the weekend papers reported that teenage boys who go to the gym are being tempted to use steroids in the hope of getting “Love Island bodies”. More worrying still is the way they are being tempted to bash their heads repeatedly against concrete walls, in the hope of getting Love Island brains.
Galicia/Pontevedra
- I've said there's a list of as many as 15 criteria for a good public toilet. One of these, of course, is a door which closes. The bar toilet I used yesterday lacked this. Because the cable for the hand dryer was plugged into a socket outside the toilet and then threaded between the door and the door jamb.
- After the weekend San Xoan fiestas, 22 people were admitted to hospital for alcoholic poisoning. About 10 times more people were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.
The World Cup
- More (mis?) applications of VAR show that things still depend on the quality of the referees. The final decisions currently remain with them. And their conclusions, as in the Portugal-Iran match, can differ from those of the rest of the world. You can't eliminate human error. But you can give the VAR interpretations to someone with less of a vested interest.
- Despite last night's controversies I'm still with those who think VAR is a good thing but that it needs to be better used.
- A British newspaper has a test of your ability to call decisions prior to seeing what VAR shows. I'm pleased to say I did very well at this. Maybe I should apply to replace the ref of the Iran-Portugal match, who – to say the least - didn't impress the British commentators.
Finally . . .
- That old buffoon Alfie Mittington is furious with me for not identifying him as the person who pointed out my De Tocqueville/Montesquieu error of Sunday. Despite his occasional useful pedantry, I could happily do without him as a reader. . .
© David Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 26.6.18
THE ARTICLE
Nationalists are ripping up the Franco German map of Europe: David Charter
With immigration and economic policies failing, Merkel and Macron are unable to keep a lid on the revolt against integration
The raw emotion of the British withdrawal finally proved too much for Angela Merkel this week. In between talks to save her governing coalition, she allowed her true feelings to show at a special farewell concert where she led wild applause tinged with regret.
Not even the threat of German and EU political meltdown could stop Merkel from attending one of the final performances given by Sir Simon Rattle as he bowed out as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic after 16 years.
The symbolism of his departure — his last concert will be on Monday, two years and a day after the Brexit vote — has not been lost on the Germans.
For Merkel it comes at a time of growing disharmony, not just among her own conservative alliance, but between rival factions openly battling for control of the European Union, a project that has always been close to her heart.
Anyone reading this week’s Meseberg Declaration could be forgiven for thinking that the “Franco-German motor” that drives the EU was fully revved up for the next round of reform. The formal statement by Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron after their meeting at Schloss Meseberg, Germany’s Baroque version of Chequers, included several classic aspirations of the federal European dream.
There was the push to end national vetoes over common foreign policy as well as creating an EU security council, the call for “harmonising asylum practices in the member states” and turning EU border patrol agency Frontex into “a genuine European border police”. And of course there was the French president’s centrepiece project of a single budget for eurozone members by 2021.
Yet never before have such steps on the EU’s path to “ever closer union” seemed more fanciful or harder to agree. Two years after the British referendum, the 27 member states being left behind by the United Kingdom have maintained a remarkable unity on the withdrawal negotiations but can point to precious few areas of agreement on what to do next with their own union.
“In the past the Franco-German motor worked when the other countries went in behind France or Germany, depending on their point of view” said John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. This meant that when Paris and Berlin agreed, everyone agreed. “The problems now are the new dividing lines between the traditional allies of France and those of Germany. Anti-European integration nationalism is taking hold in traditional partners of internationalism.”
Despite the claims of some Brexiteers, it’s not Britain’s imminent departure that threatens the EU, but the rise of nationalist parties, driven largely by the bloc’s failing immigration and economic policies.
And at the epicentre of the EU’s degeneration sits one person: Angela Merkel. It would have been an unthinkable claim to make at any other time in EU history — a German chancellor to blame for the fragmentation of the organisation which enabled Germany’s postwar rehabilitation, and guilty of stoking nationalism across Europe including in her own country.
But don’t take my word for it.
In a blistering article in Thursday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — the sober conservative newspaper regarded as the in-house journal of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party — the editor, Holger Steltzner, denounced the 63-year-old German chancellor. He blamed her for splitting the EU with her migrant and euro policies, contributing to Brexit by allowing too many asylum seekers in, and endangering German taxpayers’ cash with a reckless commitment to Macron’s eurozone budget plans.
“Angela Merkel claims to want to prevent the division of the EU,” Steltzner wrote. “Yet with her ‘welcome policy’ and also with her euro bailout policy, she is driving several wedges between the member states. Although nobody in the chancellery wants to hear it: three years ago, she suddenly and alone decided to open the borders for more than one million migrants without consulting her EU partners (except for Austria), without clarifying their identities and entitlement to asylum.” He added: “An immediate consequence was the Brexit vote because the images of uncontrolled influx were the famous straws that broke the British back. In Germany, Merkel’s lonely decision led to a lasting surge by the protest party AfD (Alternative for Germany). The climate in society has also become increasingly toxic ever since.”
This was an important sign of the conservative establishment preparing to jettison Merkel as her grip on power weakens after almost 13 years at the top. But it was also a frank admission that Germany is killing the EU goose with its insistence on euro austerity and the common acceptance of migrants.
Take a look at the flags on Norman Foster’s restored Reichstag building in Berlin: the German tricolour flies from three corners and the EU’s ring of gold stars on blue from the fourth. This is designed to show that the EU is one of modern Germany’s founding pillars, part of its DNA. Not any longer, it would seem. Suddenly Germany has become the symbol of everything wrong with the EU and a struggle has begun for control of the direction of the bloc. Rising young power brokers like Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old right-wing chancellor of Austria, have very different ideas to the ‘founding fathers’ of European integration. His country is bruised from years of uncontrolled borders that have brought voters to boiling point over illegal immigration. Nor did the brash new leaders of Italy arrive in office by accident. Italian appeals for “solidarity” from their EU friends to help cope with the increasing number of asylum seekers using Italy as a gateway to the Continent fell on deaf ears for years.
In 2011, an exasperated Silvio Berlusconi used words which sound an awful lot like those heard from Merkel today. Berlusconi wanted other EU countries to help accommodate and process the migrants who entered the bloc through Italy and he wanted more funding for Frontex, the fledgling multinational border patrol force. “Europe is either something real and concrete or it does not exist. In that case it would be better for us to separate again and follow our own fears and selfishness,” he said on a visit to Lampedusa, the tiny Mediterranean island where the boats from Africa often first dock in Europe.
The answer from Merkel’s government? Hans-Peter Friedrich, the then interior minister, told Die Welt: “Italy must settle its refugee problem itself.” Now the boot is on the other foot.
Friedrich was a senior member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian conservative party that has had its fill of asylum seekers coming over the border from Austria. The CSU has given Merkel until July 1 to strike bilateral deals with EU arrival countries like Italy before Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader and Germany’s interior minister, orders thousands to be turned away at the Bavarian border. This will cause chaos all the way down the line to the entry nations.
Merkel’s answer was to press Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, to call an extraordinary summit on immigration with nine other national leaders in Brussels on Sunday. Its aim, ostensibly to head off a row at next week’s full meeting of the 28 EU leaders, is transparently all about saving Merkel’s coalition from a CSU walk-out. Her main appeal is for “solidarity” from Germany’s European friends, chiefly Italy and Greece — the two countries most clobbered by German EU policies over the past decade. In Merkel’s chancellery the sound of chickens coming home to roost must be deafening.
She does not seem to have learnt anything from her attempt in 2015 to force every EU member to emulate the German approach of distributing asylum seekers around its own 16 states. This move persuaded 12.6 per cent of Germany’s voters to back the AfD last year and hand a party with far-right xenophobic tendencies a significant presence in the Bundestag for the first time since the Second World War.
But the multilateralist world which has served Germany so well for decades seems to be unravelling almost as fast as her own tenure as chancellor. Just as unthinkable as the rise of the AfD until recently was the refusal of EU member nations to follow EU law.
The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia opposed the law which mandated the distribution of migrants to every member country in the common asylum area (a system Britain opted out of in 1997). Hungary and Poland, following a change of government to the anti-immigration Law and Justice party, simply ignored the legislation and took no refugees despite being set quotas of 1,294 and 5,082 respectively. The Czech Republic took in 12 and Slovakia 16, against quotas of 1,591 and 802. The European Commission is threatening fines but the awkward squad have no intention of relenting.
It is a sign of things to come. One of the key reasons for Brexit was the seemingly remorseless push by true believers in Brussels towards “ever closer union”, which prompted David Cameron to negotiate an opt-out from the treaty clause that enshrined the phrase.
The political philosophy behind the EU’s obsession with “ever closer union” was neofunctionalism. It originated with the union’s founding father, Jean Monnet, who believed that by integrating in areas of general agreement, further integration in more controversial areas would become irresistible as the power of the supranational institutions grew.
Britain never bought into neofunctionalism. Now, it seems, central and eastern EU countries share our view. Mr Kurz of Austria has become their unofficial shop steward and has potentially far more influence than Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister reviled in Berlin for his egocentric nationalism. The awkward squad, also comprising Poland, the Czech republic, Slovakia and Italy, want a new wave of EU development which sees power flowing back to national capitals. They are not alone.
President Macron’s attempts to further integrate the eurozone, seen by those outside the single currency as cementing a two-tier EU, already face opposition from the Dutch, Finns and Austrians — all net EU contributors within the inner core who are wary of demands for extra money. In the outer ring the Polish president’s chief of staff sounded an apocalyptic note: “If the eurozone states decide to spend extra money for this budget, then that is their internal matter, but if it were to be created at the expense of their contributions to the general (EU) budget, then that would be the end of the EU.”
Nevertheless in Berlin there is still optimism for the future of the EU, especially because of the way Brexit has boosted support for the organisation rather than encourage others to flirt with departure. The sheer hell it has exposed of decoupling from the EU, its institutions and treaties, has given sceptical nations pause for thought. And the increasing unilateralism of President Trump has caused them to dwell on the value of Europe being able to fight a trade war and tackle climate change coherently.
Even the most fervent nationalist governments cannot imagine life outside the EU — Austria for economic and monetary reasons, Poland over defence and security, and Hungary over trade and the funding benefits.
The Meseberg Declaration showed how even in the ten months since Macron set out his goals for greater European integration, his vaunting ambitions have been reined in. His calls last September for European universities, a European carbon tax and pan-European lists for the European Parliament elections have been kicked into the long grass. Progress still seems possible on European defence forces and limited eurozone reforms, although the search for a common asylum policy remains elusive.
Olaf Wientzek, a European policy expert with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, insists: “There is still a willingness to keep unity and a relatively strong consensus that, together as 27, we are better off. Even the Italian government has toned down its heavy rhetoric on Europe now that it is in office. On migration, those states which advocate greater national sovereignty at the same time say they need better security at the EU external borders, which you cannot do just through national sovereignty.”
It is hard, however, to imagine Spain’s left-wing government finding common ground with the Italian populists after the Aquarius incident, when Rome repelled a boat load of 629 African migrants who eventually found a berth in Valencia this week.
As the 27 member states struggle to shape their post-Brexit union they would do well to take a look back at the now-forgotten Bratislava Declaration, issued in September 2016 after the first heads of government meeting without the British. Among many of the same goals reheated by Macron a year later, they stated: “Although one country has decided to leave, the EU remains indispensable for the rest of us… We committed in Bratislava to offer to our citizens in the upcoming months a vision of an attractive EU they can trust and support. We are confident that we have the will and the capacity to achieve it.”
A clue to what France and Germany are now trying to achieve is contained in the language of Merkel and Macron’s Meseberg Declaration. It talks mainly about “cooperation” and avoids the suggestion of a new EU treaty, the traditional vehicle for taking a leap forward but now seen as virtually impossible given the consent required from every national government and parliament. “France and Germany are strongly committed to not only preserve the achievements of the European Union but also to further strengthen their cooperation within the European Union,” they said. The real goal among today’s pro-EU forces is not so much to advance their project as to preserve it.
With immigration and economic policies failing, Merkel and Macron are unable to keep a lid on the revolt against integration
The raw emotion of the British withdrawal finally proved too much for Angela Merkel this week. In between talks to save her governing coalition, she allowed her true feelings to show at a special farewell concert where she led wild applause tinged with regret.
Not even the threat of German and EU political meltdown could stop Merkel from attending one of the final performances given by Sir Simon Rattle as he bowed out as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic after 16 years.
The symbolism of his departure — his last concert will be on Monday, two years and a day after the Brexit vote — has not been lost on the Germans.
For Merkel it comes at a time of growing disharmony, not just among her own conservative alliance, but between rival factions openly battling for control of the European Union, a project that has always been close to her heart.
Anyone reading this week’s Meseberg Declaration could be forgiven for thinking that the “Franco-German motor” that drives the EU was fully revved up for the next round of reform. The formal statement by Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron after their meeting at Schloss Meseberg, Germany’s Baroque version of Chequers, included several classic aspirations of the federal European dream.
There was the push to end national vetoes over common foreign policy as well as creating an EU security council, the call for “harmonising asylum practices in the member states” and turning EU border patrol agency Frontex into “a genuine European border police”. And of course there was the French president’s centrepiece project of a single budget for eurozone members by 2021.
Yet never before have such steps on the EU’s path to “ever closer union” seemed more fanciful or harder to agree. Two years after the British referendum, the 27 member states being left behind by the United Kingdom have maintained a remarkable unity on the withdrawal negotiations but can point to precious few areas of agreement on what to do next with their own union.
“In the past the Franco-German motor worked when the other countries went in behind France or Germany, depending on their point of view” said John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. This meant that when Paris and Berlin agreed, everyone agreed. “The problems now are the new dividing lines between the traditional allies of France and those of Germany. Anti-European integration nationalism is taking hold in traditional partners of internationalism.”
Despite the claims of some Brexiteers, it’s not Britain’s imminent departure that threatens the EU, but the rise of nationalist parties, driven largely by the bloc’s failing immigration and economic policies.
And at the epicentre of the EU’s degeneration sits one person: Angela Merkel. It would have been an unthinkable claim to make at any other time in EU history — a German chancellor to blame for the fragmentation of the organisation which enabled Germany’s postwar rehabilitation, and guilty of stoking nationalism across Europe including in her own country.
But don’t take my word for it.
In a blistering article in Thursday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — the sober conservative newspaper regarded as the in-house journal of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party — the editor, Holger Steltzner, denounced the 63-year-old German chancellor. He blamed her for splitting the EU with her migrant and euro policies, contributing to Brexit by allowing too many asylum seekers in, and endangering German taxpayers’ cash with a reckless commitment to Macron’s eurozone budget plans.
“Angela Merkel claims to want to prevent the division of the EU,” Steltzner wrote. “Yet with her ‘welcome policy’ and also with her euro bailout policy, she is driving several wedges between the member states. Although nobody in the chancellery wants to hear it: three years ago, she suddenly and alone decided to open the borders for more than one million migrants without consulting her EU partners (except for Austria), without clarifying their identities and entitlement to asylum.” He added: “An immediate consequence was the Brexit vote because the images of uncontrolled influx were the famous straws that broke the British back. In Germany, Merkel’s lonely decision led to a lasting surge by the protest party AfD (Alternative for Germany). The climate in society has also become increasingly toxic ever since.”
This was an important sign of the conservative establishment preparing to jettison Merkel as her grip on power weakens after almost 13 years at the top. But it was also a frank admission that Germany is killing the EU goose with its insistence on euro austerity and the common acceptance of migrants.
Take a look at the flags on Norman Foster’s restored Reichstag building in Berlin: the German tricolour flies from three corners and the EU’s ring of gold stars on blue from the fourth. This is designed to show that the EU is one of modern Germany’s founding pillars, part of its DNA. Not any longer, it would seem. Suddenly Germany has become the symbol of everything wrong with the EU and a struggle has begun for control of the direction of the bloc. Rising young power brokers like Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old right-wing chancellor of Austria, have very different ideas to the ‘founding fathers’ of European integration. His country is bruised from years of uncontrolled borders that have brought voters to boiling point over illegal immigration. Nor did the brash new leaders of Italy arrive in office by accident. Italian appeals for “solidarity” from their EU friends to help cope with the increasing number of asylum seekers using Italy as a gateway to the Continent fell on deaf ears for years.
In 2011, an exasperated Silvio Berlusconi used words which sound an awful lot like those heard from Merkel today. Berlusconi wanted other EU countries to help accommodate and process the migrants who entered the bloc through Italy and he wanted more funding for Frontex, the fledgling multinational border patrol force. “Europe is either something real and concrete or it does not exist. In that case it would be better for us to separate again and follow our own fears and selfishness,” he said on a visit to Lampedusa, the tiny Mediterranean island where the boats from Africa often first dock in Europe.
The answer from Merkel’s government? Hans-Peter Friedrich, the then interior minister, told Die Welt: “Italy must settle its refugee problem itself.” Now the boot is on the other foot.
Friedrich was a senior member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian conservative party that has had its fill of asylum seekers coming over the border from Austria. The CSU has given Merkel until July 1 to strike bilateral deals with EU arrival countries like Italy before Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader and Germany’s interior minister, orders thousands to be turned away at the Bavarian border. This will cause chaos all the way down the line to the entry nations.
Merkel’s answer was to press Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, to call an extraordinary summit on immigration with nine other national leaders in Brussels on Sunday. Its aim, ostensibly to head off a row at next week’s full meeting of the 28 EU leaders, is transparently all about saving Merkel’s coalition from a CSU walk-out. Her main appeal is for “solidarity” from Germany’s European friends, chiefly Italy and Greece — the two countries most clobbered by German EU policies over the past decade. In Merkel’s chancellery the sound of chickens coming home to roost must be deafening.
She does not seem to have learnt anything from her attempt in 2015 to force every EU member to emulate the German approach of distributing asylum seekers around its own 16 states. This move persuaded 12.6 per cent of Germany’s voters to back the AfD last year and hand a party with far-right xenophobic tendencies a significant presence in the Bundestag for the first time since the Second World War.
But the multilateralist world which has served Germany so well for decades seems to be unravelling almost as fast as her own tenure as chancellor. Just as unthinkable as the rise of the AfD until recently was the refusal of EU member nations to follow EU law.
The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia opposed the law which mandated the distribution of migrants to every member country in the common asylum area (a system Britain opted out of in 1997). Hungary and Poland, following a change of government to the anti-immigration Law and Justice party, simply ignored the legislation and took no refugees despite being set quotas of 1,294 and 5,082 respectively. The Czech Republic took in 12 and Slovakia 16, against quotas of 1,591 and 802. The European Commission is threatening fines but the awkward squad have no intention of relenting.
It is a sign of things to come. One of the key reasons for Brexit was the seemingly remorseless push by true believers in Brussels towards “ever closer union”, which prompted David Cameron to negotiate an opt-out from the treaty clause that enshrined the phrase.
The political philosophy behind the EU’s obsession with “ever closer union” was neofunctionalism. It originated with the union’s founding father, Jean Monnet, who believed that by integrating in areas of general agreement, further integration in more controversial areas would become irresistible as the power of the supranational institutions grew.
Britain never bought into neofunctionalism. Now, it seems, central and eastern EU countries share our view. Mr Kurz of Austria has become their unofficial shop steward and has potentially far more influence than Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister reviled in Berlin for his egocentric nationalism. The awkward squad, also comprising Poland, the Czech republic, Slovakia and Italy, want a new wave of EU development which sees power flowing back to national capitals. They are not alone.
President Macron’s attempts to further integrate the eurozone, seen by those outside the single currency as cementing a two-tier EU, already face opposition from the Dutch, Finns and Austrians — all net EU contributors within the inner core who are wary of demands for extra money. In the outer ring the Polish president’s chief of staff sounded an apocalyptic note: “If the eurozone states decide to spend extra money for this budget, then that is their internal matter, but if it were to be created at the expense of their contributions to the general (EU) budget, then that would be the end of the EU.”
Nevertheless in Berlin there is still optimism for the future of the EU, especially because of the way Brexit has boosted support for the organisation rather than encourage others to flirt with departure. The sheer hell it has exposed of decoupling from the EU, its institutions and treaties, has given sceptical nations pause for thought. And the increasing unilateralism of President Trump has caused them to dwell on the value of Europe being able to fight a trade war and tackle climate change coherently.
Even the most fervent nationalist governments cannot imagine life outside the EU — Austria for economic and monetary reasons, Poland over defence and security, and Hungary over trade and the funding benefits.
The Meseberg Declaration showed how even in the ten months since Macron set out his goals for greater European integration, his vaunting ambitions have been reined in. His calls last September for European universities, a European carbon tax and pan-European lists for the European Parliament elections have been kicked into the long grass. Progress still seems possible on European defence forces and limited eurozone reforms, although the search for a common asylum policy remains elusive.
Olaf Wientzek, a European policy expert with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, insists: “There is still a willingness to keep unity and a relatively strong consensus that, together as 27, we are better off. Even the Italian government has toned down its heavy rhetoric on Europe now that it is in office. On migration, those states which advocate greater national sovereignty at the same time say they need better security at the EU external borders, which you cannot do just through national sovereignty.”
It is hard, however, to imagine Spain’s left-wing government finding common ground with the Italian populists after the Aquarius incident, when Rome repelled a boat load of 629 African migrants who eventually found a berth in Valencia this week.
As the 27 member states struggle to shape their post-Brexit union they would do well to take a look back at the now-forgotten Bratislava Declaration, issued in September 2016 after the first heads of government meeting without the British. Among many of the same goals reheated by Macron a year later, they stated: “Although one country has decided to leave, the EU remains indispensable for the rest of us… We committed in Bratislava to offer to our citizens in the upcoming months a vision of an attractive EU they can trust and support. We are confident that we have the will and the capacity to achieve it.”
A clue to what France and Germany are now trying to achieve is contained in the language of Merkel and Macron’s Meseberg Declaration. It talks mainly about “cooperation” and avoids the suggestion of a new EU treaty, the traditional vehicle for taking a leap forward but now seen as virtually impossible given the consent required from every national government and parliament. “France and Germany are strongly committed to not only preserve the achievements of the European Union but also to further strengthen their cooperation within the European Union,” they said. The real goal among today’s pro-EU forces is not so much to advance their project as to preserve it.
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