Peter’s Blog

I just posted my LSE Masters dissertation on Danish and Irish EU referendum voting to the papers section of my site.

Normally I really like Roger Cohen’s columns but today’s, “The EU in an Irish bog,” is atrocious. He buys hook, line and sink into the rediculous argument that because the Irish have benefitted significantly from EU membership their No vote is dumb, crass, ungrateful, etc, etc. He even says their voting was ‘unconscionable’! I hate this attitude towards politics, as it reduces people’s options to the ‘right choice’ or being guilty of false consciousness.

Charlemagne | Ask a silly question | Economist.com

The commissioner charged with “communicating Europe to citizens”, Margot Wallstrom, has unveiled proposals for opinion polling to be used “strategically”, so the wrinkles of pan-European opinion are not just taken into account when selling finished laws and directives to the public, but during the cut and thrust of policy making. On paper, the commission’s aim is straightforward: to respond to citizens’ concerns about big, trans-national phenomena such as climate change, migration or globalisation, and convince them that action at the European level is the answer. Tantalisingly for Eurocrats, Eurobarometer polls tell them that voters like European-wide action on all sorts of issues (fully 81% say they want joint European action against terrorism). Yet national governments can point to other Eurobarometer polls showing that among the very same citizens, support for the EU is not that high. Across the club, support for EU membership has hovered stubbornly around the 50% mark for years (the most recent poll showed 58% support, a 13-year high).

To some officials, supportive opinion polls offer a form of quasi-democratic mandate. One Brussels official admits that his commissioner “absolutely” uses poll data to browbeat reluctant governments, in private and in public. With the new Lisbon treaty about to create the first full-time president of the EU council (the bit of the machine that represents national governments), the same Brussels official says the commission must become more political and “open” to survive, “especially if we get some fantastic Mr Blair-type as president of the council.”

There are several problems with relying upon polling and other (hopefully) representative forms of gathering citizens’ opinions to guide public policy. First, if you truly wanted going to incorporate popular will into a current decision, you should have a general election or referendum. Second, it implies a failure of representative democracy, with the people’s elective representatives either lacking the knowledge or sense of national opinions or without enough legitimacy to create the public policy they were elected to make. Part of this may be attributed how politicians are elected. When elections are contested within a narrower and narrower range of policy prescriptions and related to this a desire to highlight just seemingly dramatic policy differences with one’s opponents, it becomes more and more likely that victorious politicians will encounter political issues that they have not discussed on the campaign trail and thus have little established popular support for their solutions.

Giving the desire to be everything to everyone both during and after elections (and under the ‘permanent campaign’, there is apparently no distinction anyway), it is not surprising that recent politicians have been the most aggressive in their polling. The Blair government in the UK perhaps institutionalized it the most with the e-petitions website.

One criticism of polling that is somewhat easier to dismiss is that it inordinately favors special interests passionate enough to take them time to stand and be counted. But this is also true in every country where voting is optional (ie everywhere but Belgium and Australia), for in both cases the opinions of the apathetic will not be taken into consideration. That being said, there is a significant difference between hearing from 1000 people in a survey and from the 122 million who voted in the 2004 US presidential election.

While polling and may seem democratic, direct democracy it is not. Instead it is really nothing more than what the Chinese are calling consultative democracy – nicer than simple authoritarianism, for sure, but smacking of superficial openness rather than true acceptance of popular will.

Face value | Mr High-speed Europe | Economist.com

TGV accounts for only one-third of SNCF revenues, but its fat margins lifted the railway to a profit of €695m in 2006, after fees paid to RFF, the track owner, are taken into account. How do the TGVs make so much money when so many railways struggle? Mr Pepy points out that a double-decker TGV can make two round trips between Paris and the south or west of France every day, carrying about a thousand passengers on each leg. The combination of size and speed brings economies of scale, boosted further by the route through Strasbourg to Germany opened last summer, and the new high-speed Eurostar link to London.

French railways stand out in Europe not only because they manage to turn a profit, but because they remain solidly in the public sector while doing so. Instead of conflict between politicians and managers, there is a clear division of responsibility. French towns and regions now pay SNCF to run less glamorous local services or even extend TGV services on slower lines into the depths of Brittany. Since the regions pay, they, rather than the railway, decide where and when the local trains run. This keeps the politicians off the backs of Mr Pepy and Anne-Marie Idrac, his chairman. It also keeps politics out of the railway, since no party would dream of privatising SNCF—sparing France the agonies that Britain and Germany have faced over privatisation.

I wonder if SNCF’s TGV group’s profitability includes tracks funded by the French government. Assuming that RFF doesn’t rent the tracks to them at a loss, I guess so. If this is true, this makes me more optimistic for the California high speed rail project. I love the idea but have been worried that there was no pay the costs for the infrastructure (part of me figures that it’s fine for the state to eat the cost regardless). However, if the TGV group can make over a $1 billion a year, then there’s hope for t.

And, if you’re interested, here are some takes on the California high speed rail proposal. First, a government funded video, complete with soothing female voice:

Check out those garish blue and yellow paint schemes! I think Tyler Brûlé needs to turn his attention to the trains’ design. I like one of the YouTube comments for the video:

The only problem, why would you want to go to Sacramento?

=)
Of course, there are also the haters. Some say the rail system will destroy wildlife, some think costs will balloon out of control, and some love the idea but don’t thinking it’ll ever be built. That may be true, as the main bond issue keeps getting pushed back as the state has financial problems.

Apple sizes up Europe’s movie-rental market - International Herald Tribune:

After introducing a new online film rental service for American consumers last week, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, said he was “dying” to expand the program to international markets, adding that this would happen later this year.

Such an extreme sacrifice will probably not be necessary; but in trying to establish European versions of the iTunes movie rental service, which allows users to rent films over the Internet and stream them to their computers or televisions, Jobs at times might feel as though he were banging his head against a brick wall.

Apple will have to confront legal and regulatory hurdles, copyright challenges, scheduling conflicts and technological issues that demonstrate that the European media landscape remains a patchwork of several dozen individual countries - not the single “internal market” that the European Commission envisions.

It might be a funny question to ask, but will Apple (and Commission push-back) be the one responsible for creating a true single market in media in the EU?

200,000 people protested at the EU summit in Lisbon but basically no one reported about it. Very strange.

Standards are very useful and deviations from them can be very important. Take, for instance, the EU personnel data I am going through right now for my job. When there were only six states they were coded as F, D, I, B, NL, and L. Unfortunately, many states begin with D and I, for example. So when Ireland joined they were IRL, while Denmark was DK. But the 2004 made this home-grown naming convention fall apart and the EU has switched to the standard two letter ISO codes. They had to, as there are now three countries starting with E (EE, EL, ES) and with L (LT, LV, LU). If only they had done this in the beginnning, it would have made my life a lot simpler.

Timothy Garton Ash has another good entry in his Guardian column, this time about the similarities and differences between the EU and Canada. As he notes, both could use to address their “arrogance of impotence.”

I believe the EU is a good thing, I really do, but I keep seeing things such as the following: a 2001 paper on the Eastern enlargement of the EU says, “In this perspective, it might become desirable to orient labour markets and social policy institutions in such a way as to promote, rather than oppose, internal labour mobility in the EU.” That’s nice. Except the free movement of people has been a fundamental freedom of the Single Market for years! I’m not blaming the authors, for the simple fact they’re right, EU member states have been opposing the free movement of workers and it would be a good idea to change their practices to be in line with their rhetoric.

I just discovered that the European Commission released a press release in 2005 saying:

Under the watchword: “The more languages you know, the more of a person you are,” the European Commission reaffirms its own commitment to multilingualism in adopting today its first ever Communication on this issue.

Probably not a good slogan, eh? But if I learn another language, that must make me twice the man I used to be, which could be quite exciting! But in all fairness the French version is « Plus tu connais de langues, plus tu es humain », which sounds perfectly fine. This is probably a case of a French document poorly (ie directly) translated into English. Oh well. The EU translators are normally better… maybe this was one of the documents an outside contractor did. (Can you tell that I’ve been studying the EU’s language practices a lot recently?)