Author Archive for Pim de Kuijer
My friend ideoblogue asked me yesterday whether I thought The Netherlands would have another referendum on the new European treaty, and if so, what the outcome would be. Here, for all those interested, my two pennies’ worth.
So, both of you, be warned. This is going to be an exercise in Dutch Parliamentary tradition. In short (!) the decision on a referendum has to be taken by the Dutch coalition government, which consists of Christian-Democrats, Social-Democrats and the small but important Christian Union. They are however waiting for advice on the matter from the Council of State, a sui generis institution whose titular head is, believe it or not, the Queen. Who is also head of the government. So she is in fact advising herself on what decision to take.
Anyway, the Council is expected to advise against a referendum, because the treaty is stripped of most of it’s ‘constitutional’ elements. Not that it really matters, because in reality the government has already decided. In the ‘ coalition agreement’, the basis for the cooperation between the government parties, a referendum has already been ruled out!
Complicated, you say? But we haven’t even started yet! So the government will most likely say no to a new referendum, thereby all but insuring the ratification of the new treaty in The Netherlands. Or so it would seem. Because the Social-Democratic party, although bound by the coalition agreement, is split on the issue of a referendum. It is very possible that they will side with other parties in the Second (lower) Chamber of Parliament, to create a temporary initiative law calling for a referendum, thereby overruling their own ministers in the cabinet. This initiative procedure is how the previous referendum came about.
So there will be a referendum after all? Eh, not quite. Because this law has to pass through the First Chamber of Parliament, the Senate. And in the Senate, unlike in the Second Chamber, opponents of a referendum are in the majority. So, all in all, a new referendum seems, perhaps not impossible, but at least mathematically highly improbable.
Lost me? Good. Then at least I succeeded in demonstrating one big flaw of the new treaty. Giving more power to national parliaments is not the good idea it might seem at first sight. Can you imagine trying to figure out the parliamentary procedures of 25 or more member states? For what it’s worth, give me Brussels any day. Perhaps less democratic, but a hell of a lot easier to understand. And that’s saying something.
This weekend I attended a debate on new media and the existence of a European public space, organised by the Allianz Kulturstiftung and the Madariaga Foundation. The debate was even hotter than the room itself, and went between one extreme, there is no European public space and the other, the European public space has the future.
The panelists, representatives of new media www.cafebabel.com, www.indigomag.eu, www.eurozine.com, and an EC communications expert started by giving a definition of a European public space or sphere. One called it a public defined by a common historic memory, the second said it consists of a public which has a certain Erasmus lifestyle of traveling and speaking multiple languages in common. The communications expert, the sceptic of the company, said there was no such thing as a public space or if it did exist it was tiny.
The new media representatives had to admit that their readerships were still limited, but claimed this was due to change over time. And, they argued, they did already reach a small European elite and, quoting Margaret Thatcher, if it rains on the rich it trickles down to the poor. The communications expert countered by mentioning a feasibility study for a European TV channel which showed that only between 0.1 and 0.5% of European TV consumers were interested in such a channel. That is as much as an average national shopping channel has as an audience. Someone from the public added to the criticism by pointing to the suscpiciously high level of europhilia in the new media. Those who are enthusiastically and often without compensation putting in time and effort to adress a European audience are bound to have positive feelings about such a European public space.
But in my humble opinion, the advantage of the new media is that it is no longer limited to one way communication. No matter how euro-enthusiastic my contributions to cafebabel or the nEUrosis might be, you can leave your (sceptic) reactions and start a debate. In the new media, articles are no longer the end but the beginning of a debate. So go ahead and show the communications expert wrong. Participate in and help create the European public space. Leave a message, after the beep.
Beep.
Welcome to hell. If you had read your Bible correctly you would have known it is damnation without reprieve, so don’t be surprised if you have to come back month after month after month. Strasbourg, or Stressburg as it is known to the assistants in the European Parliament, is an official seat of the Parliament. Below you find a short description of what it is like to join Europes’s biggest travelling circus.
Hogwarts Express
Hundreds of red-eyed assistants find themselves each month on a very early Monday morning on a platform of the Luxembourg station in Brussels. Whereas most Members of Parliament fly to Strasbourg, their assistants are forced to cram into this Hogwarts Express to hell. Watching grown-ups fight over the few available seats, including pulling and punching, is not a rare sight on the five hour journey to Strasbourg. Cigarette-deprived individuals smoke like posessed during the five minute stop the train makes in Luxembourg. Some never make it back on the train. And of course everyone has the journey home to look forward to.
Under the bridge, second lamppost to the right
But before the exhausted assistants get to go back to Brussels, they first have a couple of grueling days ahead of them. It starts by finding a place to stay. Joseph and Mary had an easier time in Bethlehem than assistants do in Strasbourg. Since all hotels are booked up years in advance for the sessions of Parliament, assistants have to search for days and call many hotels before something opens up. Sleeping in ‘ botels’ (I am sorry sir, you can’t check in yet because your hotel is still on cruise - happened to me), the Foreign Legion or in sleezy hotels which rent rooms for the hour is sometimes all that is left to the assistants. Stories of five assistants to one room, also to save money, or people sleeping in cars can be overheard in the Parliament.
Stressbourg
Stressbourg, is what many assistants call the official seat of Parliament. A very small office, one computer for sometimes up to three people and the fact that most of the voting of Parliament actually takes place in Strasbourg makes stress a permanently present phenomenon. Working days can end anywhere between 21:00 and 24:00 and then you go eat, with your colleagues, and sleep (if you have a hotel) with, or at least in the same hotel as, your colleagues. That is to say, you are surrounded by your colleagues and your boss 24/7. A recipe for disaster.
Always look on the bright side
Is there nothing good to report on Strasbourg? Of course there is. All the interesting debates take place there. In the meetings of the political groups Romanians will explain the dismissal of their President, Polish MEPs expand on the political situation in their home country. If Angela Merkel does not show her face then it is the Indian President who delivers a speech. Stress is accompanied by adrenaline and you, your boss and your colleagues are all in it together, which creates mutual sympathy akin perhaps to the Stockholm syndrom of hostages and hostage takers.
One seat
But as assistant I cannot but support the call for One Seat for the European Parliament. The travelling circus costs around 200 million Euro a year. The pollution it creates on a yearly basis is said to be equal to 13.000 flights between Europe and New York. Apart from all these practical reasons, I beg of you to consider the humanitarian side. Please stop the abuse of poor assistants. Please support the action for one seat of the European Parliament. Our well-being depends on it.
Speaking is silver, silence is gold, the saying goes. But not always. Recently, the BBC reported that in the UK some teachers refrain from talking about the Holocaust for fear of upsetting students. The same happens in other countries as well - in the Netherlands for example. There it is not poitical correctness that makes teachers avoid the subject, but actually fear of their pupils.
Teachers in schools with many children from Arab descent do not dare to talk about the Holocaust, because they are afraid of getting harassed, or worse, by angry parents and students.
Each country has its own policies that are determined by what is socially acceptable, as well as what is the country’s version of history. This is particularly true in the Balkans, where many educational systems still nip and tuck past wars and attrocities, making sure that what goes in textbooks is a patriotic, picturesque view of things past.
This is why several EU members objected to the German proposal of a common European history book for secondary school education. The project, perceived as helping to create a common European identity, caused outcry in Poland and the Netherlands, and was questioned in Finland and Denmark, among others.
Whether there will be a common history textbook or not, I think governments cannot acquiesce to some events being swept under the carpet. School curriculae need to be adapted to children’s needs, not tailored so as not to offend anyone. The Holocaust is a very significant, as well as sad, part of European history and should have a place in today’s classrooms. The Germans managed to do it. So, why could not the rest of European countries?
This is not to say there can be no debate on the issue. As Dutch
journalist and writer Joris Luyendijk who has lived in the Middle East for many years noted, he could never really respond to Arab accusations against Israel or the Jews, because in the West Israeli policies and Jewish history are not a subject of real debate. By teaching dry facts (or the version of facts one’s own country prefers) without the right to debate their significance or meaning, schools rob their students of the opportunity to learn how to argue. So yes, put the Holocaust on the school curriculum, and stimulate debate between students. Schools in the 21 Century are no longer only about teaching skills and stuffing students with facts, they should be places were they learn to have intelligent and informed debates, even about the most controversial of issues. Let that be a lesson too for the powers that be in Poland, where even discussing homosexuality in school can land a teacher on the street, according to a currently debated law. The only word that should not appear on a school’s curriculum as far as I am concerned, is the word taboo.
This can’t be too easy - why wouldn’t Dutch schools enlighten students about the behaviour of their compatriots in Indonesia? Why wouldn’t the Belgians be open about what their predecessors did in the Congo? Would Serbian students ever hear the truth about Srebrenitsa? Should we be open to the end, and debate with our grandparents what they did “during the war”, or, in former Communist countries, ask our parents if they ever worked for the Secret Services?
And if we shouldn’t, then we can’t blame Turkey for refusing to recognise the Armenian genocide, we can’t ask Croatia to be open about the Yugoslavian war, and we can definitely never raise questions about journalists being murdered in Russia.
This weekend the Balkans came to Brussels. In the cultural BOZAR Palace bands such as KAL brought Balkan beats, while go urmets could gorge on Balkan treats in the food and wine section of the Balkan Trafik festival. The place was packed, mostly by twenty-something culture freaks. But in the midst of joint-smoking hippy lookalikes, one figure stood out magnificently. Dressed in golden robes, 64-year-old Esma Redzepova lived up to her nickname of ‘Queen of the gypsies’. But like all queens, she was not easily accessable for the general public. Hers was the only concert sold out before we could get tickets. We threatened, we begged, we offered our bodies but nothing could persuade the bouncers at the doors to let us in. And to imagine that before that evening I had never even heard of Mrs. Redzepova. What you cannot get often becomes very attractive.
Fortunately though, we had among our group of friends a journalist. Angrily waving her press card around she demanded to know why no seat was reserved for her and did they know what kind of review she would write! Before you could say goranbregovic two tickets appeared out of thin air. A clever rotation system ensued enabling almost all of us to use the two (front row!) seats to stare in awe at the legend.
The morale of the story is, be bold and you can go where others without tickets have not gone before. I hope some of that Balkan cheekyness has rubbed off on me this weekend.
By the way, for all those people who could not get in: the concert was nice. Losers 
‘’This is what we all are in the Balkans, wolves in cages and they keep us drunk to keep us calm.’’ These words came from a man with the surname of Vukovic, which means wolf, or so he told me. He was my interpreter when I was in Montenegro as an election observer. In our sparetime we had gone to see a local celebrity, a wolf kept in a cage by the roadside with a pile of empty bottles beside him. As we approached, the sad wolf started wagging his tail (what would you do, said one wolf about the other, if a meal would just walk up to your cage?) and Vukovic started his sad tale. He explained that no matter how good a degree you have, how high your ambitions are and how much you want to ‘get your teeth into something’, poverty, ignorance and a political class fearful of change would keep you down. For those not fortunate enough to get to Western Europe, only the bottle is left.
The story struck me all the more because I had heard it before, although not in the same words. In the Ukraine, again as election observer, I had another interpreter, the elegant Liudmilla. She spoke fluent English, recited Pushkin by heart and as a girl in Communist times she had studied, for free, in Moscow and the US. Now, she was teaching English to the four or five children who were left in the school of her rural town in the Poltava region. She had had to send her two sons into the army, far away, in order to give them something of a chance at an education and a future. She brought me to her school building, a beautiful place built in the early twenties, which reminded me somewhat of the modernist style I have seen in Brussels and Barcelona. The building was half empty and becoming derelict. Liudmilla told me of her plans to convert the building into a cultural centre where local people could study languages and participate in exchange programmes. The local dignitaries had laughed at her plans. Survival was all that counted in a poor agricultural region suffering from a recent Russian boycott on Ukrainian foodstuffs.
I asked Liudmilla whether she thought membership of the EU and NATO, both highly controversial in her country as well as in the West, would make things better for her. She heaved her shoulders in the most Slavic of ways and said that she did not see the point. Funds from either organisation would never trickle down to Poltava. As for the political turmoil in Kiev, again very much topical today, she said it did not matter to her who was in power in the capital. It was all the same to her as long as the same relic from communist times was still running her school and the fight over the local mayorship was being fought between another such relic and a man who had shot one or more of his adversaries and was in fact running the local maffia.
But the most amazing thing about the two stories for me was, that it applied only to my highly educated interpreters. As for the drivers, Zelko in Montenegro and Pjotr in the Ukraine, they seemed happy as could be. Taxi-drivers in everyday life, they earned more than a month’s salary driving me around for four days and as long as they had food on the table and a wife in their beds, all was well according to them.
Living in a land without opportunities is hard. My advice; don’t get an education.
‘’ This is a little ironic song of the people who like to carry arms in my country so let’s start the song with some military action, for fun. One, two, three, four A L’ATTAQUE!’’ The whole Palau de la Musica in Barcelona reverberates to the beats of Kalashnikov, one of the well known songs of Balkan phenomenon Goran Bregovic. Being the son of a Serb mother and a Croat father, Bregovic is often described as the last of the Yugoslavs. Just check out his site, which quite fittingly ends in .yu. But his fans are not only to be found in the south east of Europe. Bregovic is universally loved and sells out theatres in Barcelona, Amsterdam and New York as easily as he does in, say, Sofia. I myself flew from Brussels to Barcelona just to see him perform live. But does loving Bregovic mean you understand the Balkans?
Of course not. But for some Westerners, any opportunity of getting in touch with Balkan culture should not go wasted. All too often we in the West believe that the Balkans are a different place, romantic perhaps, but stuck in a past where nationalism and ethnic rivalry prevail. We invent words like Balkanization, to describe a process so ‘typical’ of the Balkans. This type of thought is dangerous, as is very well described in two books I read recently, Mark Mazower’s The Balkans and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans. For one, this way of thinking does no justice to the inhabitants of the Balkans or the political and historical processes which are at work there. Processes which have often been influenced or interfered with, if not caused by the West. But it is also too easy a defence mechanism to describe what has happened in the Balkans as something that could not happen elsewhere. During all of the Balkan wars westerners would shake their heads and say ‘’this could not ever happen to us’’. This is simply not true. Our past showed us as much, and so does our present. Look at ETA in Spain, Northern Ireland, or even the smouldering banlieux of Paris. People in the Balkans feel love, pride, hate and regret as strongly as western Europeans. To claim otherwise is to shut our eyes to the dark potential we all have, regardless of nationality. Let’s face it, cruelty and barbarism are not Balkan monopolies.
But if we in the West are to stop seeing the people in the south east as ‘the others’, than so should the inhabitants of the Balkans themselves. ‘’You cannot really understand us, you are from the West.’’ I was told when I was there. A reaction to my recent post on Kosovo and Montenegro accused me of “typical Western shortsightedness”. Shortsighted I may be, but there is nothing wrong with my ears. “Kaaaalashnikov, kaaaalashnikov… BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM ….“ I do not need to speak Serbo-Croat or Albanian to know what that means.
