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How the world sees Greece
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Switzerland shuts the door on EU migrants: A new 'us vs. them' in Europe?
The anti-immigration class across Europe has found many new adherents as of late, especially in the most economically devastated countries, like Greece and Italy. But now these Europeans might themselves become the unwelcome migrants, at least in Switzerland.
Greek PM Antonis Samaras to travel to China
 Kathimerini | Greek PM Antonis Samaras to travel to China Kathimerini Meanwhile Chinese state television is reportedly planning to launch a new television series called “Glamorous Greece,” promoting Greek archaeological sites and other destinations which, it is hoped, will boost the crucial tourism sector. On Thursday ... Greek Government Rejects Sales Tax Relief Call - Tax-News.com Samaras Says Economy On Road Back Morning news in bite-sized chunks to go with your coffee and koulouri |
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The European dream is in dire need of a reality check | Simon Jenkins
The EU has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens, yet its leaders won't wake up. It's time for a sceptics' vision of Europe
Voter trust in the EU falls to record low. So proclaimed the front page of today's Guardian. In every one of the big European states, trust has gone into "a vertiginous decline". Five years ago, no country, not even Britain, showed more than half its voters hostile to Europe, and most were strongly supportive. Now, according to the EU's own Eurobarometer, distrust runs at 53% in Italy, 56% in France, 59% in Germany, 69% in the UK and 72% in Spain. The EU has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens. Does it matter?
Nothing brings out the tribe in all of us like the issue of Europe. Voters reach deep into their political psyche to find comfort or aversion in the idea of European union. Any piece of news is adapted to fit. EU apologists regard this week's news as inevitable given the politics of austerity, widely seen as punishing ordinary people for the profligacy of recent European leaders. In time of trouble, voters take refuge in nation and locality. It will not last.
To sceptics this will not wash. Majorities should matter to democrats, however inconvenient. "Anti-Europeanism" was growing across Europe even before the credit crunch – witness the Lisbon treaty referendums. It is reflected in the rise of nationalist parties and is rampant even among such one-time EU loyalists as Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany. As the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations, José Ignacio Torreblanca, said of yesterday's poll, "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor or debtor country … citizens now think their national democracy is being subverted."
Even the EU president, José Manuel Barroso, knows he has a problem. He complained this week of a "lack of understanding", both of the politics of austerity and of "who does what, who decides what, who controls whom … And where are we heading to?" A resulting "resurgence of populism and nationalism" was threatening his "European dream". Yet he remains in denial that his dream is just that.
Dreams make dangerous politics, and when they require the imposition of "yet more Europe" against the run of public opinion, they are badly in need of a reality check. The new requirement that the EU (in this case Germany) imposes budgets on indebted states goes far beyond anything domestic voters seem likely to tolerate.
Barroso's dream is becoming the vision espoused by the Columbia professor of European history István Deák, who demanded last year in the New York Times "a new imperial construct" as the only alternative to save the continent from a "revival of tribalism". To Deák this new empire was "a sacred task … an almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church".
This sort of talk has always led Europe down the road to catastrophe. It was the dream of the Inquisition, the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon's viceroys and Hitler's gauleiters. Today it cloaks the meddling regulations and unaudited fraud of the ever-burgeoning EU. The idea that such an empire can orchestrate the disciplines of the euro and still win the consent of Europe's peoples is absurd. Democratic deficits cannot last long before lapsing into dictatorship or mob rule. The history of Europe proves that people will not tolerate conquest, whether by bullet or bureaucrat.
Angela Merkel's bankers may be powerful, but the eurozone's "troika" of inspectors cannot hope to rule for ever. Imagine if they had their hands on France and Spain. This German proto-empire may have been acquired, like Britain's 18th-century one, "in a fit of absence of mind", but if there is one achievement on which modern Europe can surely rest its case, it is that of national democracy. There is no way the EU can supplant it through consent.
Europe is not a seamless democratic state. It is the construct of a treaty between disparate sovereign states, all in varying degrees of revolt against it. As Merkel's careful courtship of David Cameron shows, his domestic travails over Europe are not his alone. Every European government is looking over its shoulder at a soaring scepticism, some sincere, some undeniably sinister. Even a majority of Germans are now anti-EU, and a third want the deutschmark back.
Only a constitutional illiterate could imagine a fancy European institution calling Brussels to account. The present EU parliament has no ministerial responsibility, no governing party discipline and reflects no identifiable interest, culture or "demos". MEPs represent an agglomeration of greed, voting always for more spending. EU accountability is only to the council of ministers and, through them, to domestic voters. We once wondered how. Now we know, from public opinion galvanised by the toxicity of the euro – the EU's very own "poll tax".
That said, leaders such as Cameron, Merkel and the new rulers of France and Italy are still obliged to lead. The introduction of the euro may have led to a true parting of ways, between more Europe and less Europe. But even less Europe means some Europe. If and when Barroso wakes from his dream, there must be some reality.
Treaties are not for ever, but nation states are. Those that are part of Europe must deal with each other. They must discipline their commerce in the widest sense, or they will lapse back into tit-for-tat duties, retaliatory embargos, cod wars, border controls and beggar-thy-neighbourliness. Brussels may be a parody of the Tower of Babel, but a trading bloc still needs a tower if it is to retain competitive potency in the world.
Cameron and the sceptics therefore need to be constructive to be plausible. They need to argue for a European Bretton Woods, to write off bad debts and recalibrate regional economies by returning to revalued regional currencies. They need to propose European institutions that respect national politics and character, not just grab more power to the centre. There needs to be a sceptics' vision of Europe.
Closer European union was an answer to war. After that it offered an answer to communist dictatorship. In both it could claim success. Finally, at Maastricht in 1992, it flew too near the sun. It pretended that one currency traded within a single politico-economic space could overcome economic diversity and yield a common wealth. It overreached itself. In refusing to recognise this failure, Barroso and his colleagues now risk jeopardising even Europe's earlier successes.
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Kollatos Cleared Of Defacing Greek Flag
 Greek Reporter | Kollatos Cleared Of Defacing Greek Flag Greek Reporter SIMAIA-KOLLATOS A Greek court has acquitted film director Dimitris Kollatos of charges of insulting state symbols after he erected two banners on the balcony of his home depicting defaced Greek flags. One banner showed a Greek flag with a jackboot in ... |
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Racism increases in Greece
The recent attack on foreign seasonal workers in Greece shocked the country. It was one incident in a series of attacks on migrants and refugees that has caught the attention of Human Rights organizations.
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Official: Greeks pull nudes from Qatar art exhibit
Official: Greeks pull nudes from Qatar art exhibit MiamiHerald.com ATHENS, Greece -- Greece has pulled two ancient statues of nude males from an Olympic exhibition in Doha after Qatari authorities insisted on veiling them. A Culture Ministry official says exhibition organizers wanted to avoid scandalizing female visitors. |
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UK GDP: Osborne hails triple-dip escape as sign of 'healing economy'
But Labour and economists insist the figures don't add up to a recovery
George Osborne has hailed news that the UK escaped a triple-dip recession in the first quarter of 2013 as evidence that the coalition's policies are helping to "build an economy fit for the future".
After a challenging week, in which the International Monetary Fund urged him to ease up on his austerity policies, and Fitch became the second agency to strip the UK of its AAA credit rating, the chancellor welcomed the 0.3% growth in GDP announced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday.
"Today's figures are an encouraging sign the economy is healing," he said. "Despite a tough economic backdrop, we are making progress. We all know there are no easy answers to problems built up over many years, and I can't promise the road ahead will always be smooth but, by continuing to confront our problems head on, Britain is recovering and we are building an economy fit for the future."
A second quarter of contraction, after the 0.3% decline in the final three months of 2012, would have met economists' standard definition of a recession, fuelling Labour's argument that the coalition's cutbacks have choked off recovery.
But despite the unexpectedly strong growth figure, shadow chancellor Ed Balls pointed out that GDP remained at the same level as it had been six months earlier. The ONS said the economy had been "broadly flat" over the past 18 months.
"If we're to have a strong and sustained recovery and catch up all the ground we have lost over the last few years, we need urgent action to kickstart our economy and strengthen it for the long term – as Labour and the IMF have warned," Balls said.
According to the detail of the ONS's figures, the upturn in GDP was driven by growth of 0.6% in the key services sector, which includes retail and transport and makes up more than three quarters of the economy.
Industrial production also expanded, by 0.2% – though much of that was accounted for by rising North Sea oil and gas production. Activity in the hard-hit construction sector declined by 2.5%.
The business secretary, Vince Cable, said: "Today's figures are modestly encouraging and, taken alongside other indicators such as employment figures, suggest that things are going in the right direction."
Sterling hit its highest level against the dollar in two months after the news, rising by a cent and a half to $1.5450, amid speculation that the Bank of England will be less likely to expand its emergency quantitative easing programme against the background of a healthier economy.
"From a policy point of view, the signs that the UK economy may be growing, albeit weakly, are probably enough to put to rest any chance that the Bank of England would expand QE in May," said David Tinsley at BNP Paribas. Three of the nine members of the Bank's monetary policy committee voted for an expansion of QE at its April meeting.
A return to modest growth may also help to strengthen Osborne's hand in the tough negotiations with ministers over individual departmental spending plans, to be announced in June's spending review.
"Today's figure should provide some cover for the chancellor to continue on the path of fiscal austerity; we do not expect any major changes in the deficit reduction plan, at least this side of the general election," said George Buckley of Deutsche Bank.
However, Tony Dolphin, chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said the big picture revealed by yesterday's figures was one of an economy that was "stuck in a rut". The ONS said GDP was 2.6% below its pre-crisis peak in 2008, making the recovery weaker than that from any recession since the 1930s.
"Normally, we would expect the economy to grow by around 12% over any five-year period," said Dolphin. "The fact that it has contracted by 2.6% instead means almost 15% of potential output has been lost, along with the employment opportunities and tax revenues that would have accompanied it."
David Brown of New View Economics said: "The government have been very, very lucky. They have avoided a third dip into recession by the skin of their teeth. There is nothing to celebrate over as the UK economy is not out of the woods yet."
IMF officials are due to arrive in London next month to scrutinise the government's tax-and-spending policies, as part of its annual health check of the economy, after chief economist Olivier Blanchard accused Osborne of "playing with fire".
Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research said the government's continued commitment to austerity was in contrast to the shift in approach from the eurozone countries, with Greece, Spain and Portugal being given extra time to reach their deficit-reduction targets. He argued that planned cuts would depress growth more dramatically in the UK between 2012 and 2015 than in crisis-hit Italy or Spain. "Just like the UK, the monetary union's third- and fourth-largest economies have been in extended, austerity-caused economic stagnations. But for Italy and Spain, peak austerity is now over," he said. "The UK government shows no sign of budging from its plan A, while euro area policymakers are signalling a shift away from aggressive fiscal consolidation."
Despite the snow and unusually cold weather in the first three months of the year, the ONS denied that the weather had had much impact on the figures. While retailers suffered in January and March, that was partly offset by increased demand for energy from householders turning up their heating.
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Official: Greeks pull nudes from Qatar art exhibit
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece has pulled two ancient statues of nude males from an Olympic exhibition in Doha after Qatari authorities insisted on veiling them.
Greek Deputy Culture Minister Costas Tzavaras, who visited the Muslim country last month for the exhibition opening, objected, saying the works should be displayed as they were or shipped home.
Greek Deputy Culture Minister Costas Tzavaras, who visited the Muslim country last month for the exhibition opening, objected, saying the works should be displayed as they were or shipped home.
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Greek school teachers to work two more hours a week to reduce new hires
 Kathimerini | Greek school teachers to work two more hours a week to reduce new hires Kathimerini Greece is going to make its school teachers work an extra two hours every week from September in order to cut down on substitute educators and save money, it emerged on Thursday. According to the Education Ministry's plans, making school staff teach an ... |
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Greek organizations must be more cautious about behavior
 Examiner.com | Greek organizations must be more cautious about behavior The Hullabaloo Online Apparently, Rebecca Martinson, the social chair of the Delta Gamma sorority at the University of Maryland College Park, was having a bad Greek week, because the new pledge class did not meet her standards. In her opinion, it needed some harsh discipline. UCM Student Receives Greek Scholarship - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sorority girl email: 'Greek Week activities' rant goes viral I Was In A Sorority & I'm Not A Psycho |
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EU issues warning to Greece over fluorinated greenhouse gases
 EU News | EU issues warning to Greece over fluorinated greenhouse gases EnetEnglish (file photo) Greece will be referred to the EU Court of Justice if it fails to comply with EU laws on fluorinated greenhouse gases, the European Commission said on Thursday. Fluorinated gases (F-gases) are powerful greenhouse gases with a high global ... Animal Welfare: Commission refers Greece and Italy to Court for failure to ... Italy and Greece referred to EU Court over battery cage ban Greece, Italy in trouble for mistreating hens - GlobalPost |
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GDP growth figures get George Osborne off the hook – for now
Analysis: the fact the UK achieved first-quarter growth of 0.3% matters little economically but a great deal politically
In every way bar one, news that the economy grew by 0.3% in the first three months of 2013 was no big deal.
The increase was small by historical standards, still leaves the level of output well below where it was when the recession began, and offered scant evidence of the rebalancing towards manufacturing and exports that is integral to the government's plan.
In economic terms, it does not matter that much whether the economy grew a bit or shrank a bit since the big picture is of a country still bumping along the bottom after a deep and prolonged downturn.
Other countries, such as the US and Germany, have recouped all the ground lost in the slump of 2008-09 and then some. Britain's output is still 2.6% below where it was when the recession began in early 2008 – a slower recovery than in the aftermath of the Great Recession of the 1930s.
Politically, though, the first quarter growth numbers mattered a lot. After a sticky couple of weeks that has included a second credit downgrade, a wigging from the International Monetary Fund and a setback for the labour market, George Osborne could ill afford Britain plunging into its first triple-dip recession.
The chancellor did not really care about the size of the increase in gross domestic product between January and March just so long as there was one. Equally, the days when the Treasury fretted about which bit of the economy the growth comes from are long gone. The new mantra is better unbalanced growth than no growth at all.
As it happens, the jump of 0.3% was slightly higher than economists had predicted, and would have been close to the UK's long-term trend had the construction sector not continued to suffer so badly.
The service sector – which accounts for three-quarters of the economy – expanded by 0.6% while a bounce back in North Sea output also boosted growth. Manufacturing continued to struggle and, on past form, London and the south east will have accounted for the lion's share of the growth..
Assessing what the figures mean for Osborne can best be judged by looking at the counter-factual: how it would have looked had the figure been negative.
In those circumstances, the chancellor would have carried the can for the losses the government is certain to suffer in next week's local elections, and with the next few months dominated by concerns that there might be a third successive quarter of falling output, he would have looked a lot more politically vulnerable than he does today.
The better news for Osborne may not keep on coming, not least because the economy faces three significant headwinds: falling real incomes, the coalition's deficit reduction programme and the dire state of the eurozone economy.
There is no obvious reason to imagine that growth will accelerate in the second quarter, let alone generate the "escape velocity" sought by Mark Carney, the next governor of the Bank of England.
What's more, it is possible that the first estimate of gross domestic product will be revised down, since the Office for National Statistics had only limited data for March when it came up with the number for the first quarter of 2013.
High street spending appears to have been depressed last month by the coldest March in 50 years, and the ONS will have more information about that when it updates the growth figures next month.
But for now, at least, Osborne is off the hook. He can say, as he did on Thursday, that the economy is gradually on the mend and that the government is gradually cleaning up the mess it inherited from the last Labour government.
This is a selective interpretation of the recent past. It ignores, for example that growth was relatively strong in the last six months of Gordon Brown's premiership.
It airbrushes out the impact on confidence of Osborne's ill-judged comparisons between Britain and Greece.
It fails to take account of the effects on spending of coalition tax increases and deep cuts in infrastructure programmes.
But political success is often determined by which practitioner of the dark arts comes up with the more plausible story. Osborne now has one to tell.
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Increased racism in Greece
The recent attack on foreign seasonal workers in Greece shocked the country. It was one incident in a series of attacks on migrants and refugees that has caught the attention of Human Rights organizations.
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Athens Wants Island Link With Luxury Cruises
 New Europe | Athens Wants Island Link With Luxury Cruises New Europe AEGINA, Greece - Captain Vassilis Skourlis looked out of the yacht's bridge windows at the calm, blue sea, reflecting the bright sunlight and sighed. “If people who led this country capitalised more on tourism, there could be enough jobs for everyone ... |
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Greek NBG aims for 12 pct share take-up by private investors
Greek NBG aims for 12 pct share take-up by private investors Reuters UK Greek NBG aims for 12 pct share take-up by private investors. Tweet · Link this · Share this · ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's largest lender National Bank (NBG) (NBGr.AT) will aim to sell 12 percent of its 9.75 billion euros ($12.67 billion) share ... |
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Greece says it would seek payment of WWII reparations from Germany
Greece says it would seek payment of WWII reparations from Germany The Voice of Russia Greece has officially confirmed its intension to demand that Germany should pay reparations dating back to the Nazi occupation during World War II. According to rough estimates, the final amount could exceed €100 billion. Germany reacted negatively and ... |
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