Chatty book commentary: for a concentric, fuzzy, and differently democratic European Union

2007, to which we are now saying good-by, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of the European Union.

2007 was a year of crisis for the EU: it needed to find a way out of the impasse created by Dutch and French no-votes to the Constitutional treaty back in 2005. With the entry of very poor and still deeply corrupt Romania and Bulgaria in the same year 2007, this foreign-policy-bureaucratic, foreign-investment-economic-convergence machinery called Enlargement has been called into question. Enlargement fatigue is prevailing…. But now, in December 2007, the gloom slowly starts dissipating.

High oil prices have upsides. A positive outlook on climate, the future of Porsches and energy policies for Christmas

Climate change and energy were the major topics this year. The grand Mass under spiritual guidance by a Nobel Prize Winner Albert Gore - whose carbon footprint is an inconvenient truth - in Bali did the political feel-good job. Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan, Sudanese and other oil country politics were the feel-bad factor in headlines this year. How will 2008 be in this regard?

Let me start with a provocative statement: the current excessively high oil prices are a good, a very good thing.

Follow-up on EU-African trade matters

Since I am not a specialist on these issues, I prefer others to speak:

- FT had an in-depth analysis on where the EU African relationship was going. A little extract below on the regional dimension of EPAs:

“Deals agreed so far between the European Union and former colonies are a long way from the neat pattern it envisaged of regional trading blocs liberalising among themselves and then opening up gradually to Europe. The blocs have splintered and the EU has instead scrambled to sign deals with small groups of countries – which will retain trade barriers against one another – and with individual governments.

The complexity reflects the fact that, as well as negotiating en bloc with the EU, the ACP countries in each region also have to decide how much they want to liberalise with each other. Because their economies are often similar, dropping trade barriers will create losers as well as winners, with the weakest companies going to the wall. Conflicting interests over trade with Europe have also created divisions between and within countries.

In west Africa, for example, Nigeria – one of the most recalcitrant negotiating partners – has little interest in making concessions to retain EU market access since most of its exports are oil and gas, for which there are no shortage of customers. Similarly other nations in the grouping, such as Benin and Mali, are “least-developed countries” that have little to lose as their more generous EU trade privileges will not expire on December 31. The few non-LDC nations in west Africa – Ghana is one – have had to scramble to sign bilateral pacts with the EU ahead of the year-end deadline.

In southern Africa, plans were thrown into confusion when the Southern African Customs Union, itself part of the wider regional grouping, divided. While some of its members – Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Namibia – have signed, South Africa has not.

One African ambassador to the EU says the Commission has been following “divide and rule” tactics. “All along, the EU has been claiming that EPAs [economic partnership agreements] have to encourage regional integration but in the last two weeks it has been pulling apart, dividing regions,” he says. “It is regional disintegration.”

- ECIPE’s Senior Fellow Peter Draper was asked three basic questions after the EU-African summit last week-end: What prospects for EPAs? Will there be higher tariffs for African exporters from early next year? Are there any alternatives to the current EPA conundrum? Here his answers.

What do Russians actually think about democracy?

It is election time in Russia - rigged parliamentary ones recently, Presidential elections to come. We are even almost sure who is going to be the next president. But the government still worries about what people think. And Russian pollsters - most under some form of control by the Kremlin, found out a few interesting things. My source is http://www.businessneweurope.eu (requires subscription):

A “poll conducted by the Levada Center reported that 68% of people prefer order to democracy, while only 18% said that they believe democracy is the most important factor. A poll by the VTsIOM research agency said that 52% of people favor an economy based on state planning and distribution; this is in contrast to 41% asked the same question in 1997 when 67% of people polled said they believed that maintaining order is paramount, even if democracy and personal freedom become of secondary importance.

(…) At the same time, 66% of people (according to a Levada poll) said they believe that the authorities must be controlled by civil society. This is up from 55% in a poll conducted two years ago. There is also a lot of uncertainty as to exactly what democracy actually is. The Levada poll reported - in a multiple choice questionnaire - that 44% of people thought it means freedom of expression, 30% said it represented order and stability, 26% said it stands for economic prosperity, and 21% said it is law and order. Finally, 11% of respondents said they believed democracy was empty talk.”

Humanity on the move: figures on migration

Sussex University launched a new global database on international migrant stocks. Just announced at Vox.EU

Diplomatic “win-wins”

ECIPE will do a presentation at the Chinese Mission to the EU tomorrow. On browsing through various documents to prepare for it, two paragraphs of the Joint Statement released after the recent EU-Chinese Summit struck me in particular for their, well, very diplomatic content:

EU-African trade conundrum

It’s all so terribly fraught, that for a non-specialist like me venturing into EU-African trade relations is a very risky matter.

But here an attempt at a few comments on the EU-African Summit held in Lisbon this week-end. Here an overview. The EU and African nations agreed to engage in a “strategic partnership” -

Slave Trade and African Underdevelopment

Vox EU just posted a stunning piece by Nathan Nunn on The historical Origins of African Underdevelopment

His findings:

“According to my calculations, if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist.”

Annual Christmas presents

Christmas is coming soon, like every year. The pre-Christmas period November and December brings with it its serial release of Annual Reports or Surveys relevant to this blog. Please find below a few presents:

So, is it the End of History for the former Soviet bloc?

It is now almost twenty years since the Berlin Wall was torn down and Francis Fukuyama announced the End of History, a world full of democratic capitalist countries and boring Western-style normality…. So, is the former Soviet bloc there now?

In an authoritative book already mentioned in my recent posts, Anders Aslund from the Peterson Institute undertook a first systematic stocktaking of Transition in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. The former Soviet bloc has known a great number of convoluted developments since then. The uncertainties surrounding Russia’s future and place in the world, as well as the controversies raised by the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union make this book a timely contribution to the debate on what went right, and what went wrong. Certainly, Aslund’s book makes a few points that will raise some controversies.

As one cannot be too long in a blog post, I will try to be short on the main conclusion drawn by Aslund on reform: the quicker and more systematic the better.