EU: A Question of Priorities

 December 21, 2010

After hearing daily about the problems experienced by the EU’s common currency, austerity measures and the like, one might be forgiven for being inclined to believe that the crisis and its ugly aftermath are the most important issues confronting us all. In fact, the most disquieting development, as suggested by a recent poll published by The Economist, is our lack of optimism in our collective future. Whilst a majority of Chinese, Brazilians or Indians, for example, are listed in the poll as optimistic about their future, only about a third of industrialised countries’ inhabitants express similar views.

One reason for this is, of course, the gap in economic performance. The Chinese, Brazilian or Indian economies are growing, on average, at a respectable rate of 8 percent per annum, as compared to a sluggish 2.5 percent for the US or 2 percent for the EU. Furthermore, within the Western group of nations, countries like Ireland and Greece are now experiencing their third year of negative growth, while Spain’s economic growth goes neither north, nor south. Ill-conceived or too drastic austerity measures are compounding the economic woes of many nations, with no end in sight for cutbacks in the provision of public services, however vital some of these are.

Optimism and the strong economic performance displayed by the 3 heavyweights of emerging countries should, however, come as no surprise. The same Economist statistics mention the fact that whilst US students’ performance is below the OECD average, the Chinese score consistently higher in maths, physics and most other subjects. Moreover, as the working population in the US, Japan and the EU is ageing, the BRIC countries with the exception of Russia have a youthful, dynamic and growing workforce. The number of college students in China has quadrupled lately and in order to avoid unemployment among them, the country’s leadership has been sending thousands of newly-qualified job-seekers to further their studies abroad at the state’s expense…

The EU could have avoided most of these problems as well, as the 12 recent entrants are known to have a young, well-qualified workforce. The education systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland or Romania, to mention but a few, consistently produced high achievers in maths, physics, chemistry, biology – areas where some of the EU’s education establishments are weak. Unfortunately, the main potential beneficiaries of their talents and skills – countries like Germany, Britain or France – have made it hard for applicants from Central and Southeast Europe to fill available positions, by protecting their job markets even as they are experiencing serious skill gaps.

To add insult to injury, the newly-adopted austerity packages are also targeted at the education systems of EU countries, big or small. Last summer, the UK’s conservatives have decided to treble university admission fees. At the other end of Europe, a Romanian conservative government has cut 40 percent of the health budget and froze the already inadequate sums allocated to education, while leaving untouched the budgets of the country’s seven secret services. This comes on top of the 25 percent cuts to doctors’ and teachers’ salaries voted this summer. Teacher-bashing on public television has become president Basescu’s sport of choice, as if the country’s economic problems are expected to vanish regardless of how much Romania spends on educating its workforce.

To be sure, any politician worth this name should have avoided proposing or voting for cutbacks in health and education. No civilised society, East or West, can hope to function, let alone prosper, in the absence of a decent health system or by depriving itself of the benefits normally associated with a quality education system. This is a point that both the IMF and EU officials should have emphasized when they mandated member countries to reduce public spending and adopt austerity packages. As matters now stand, however, teachers and doctors are lumped together with perennial tyre kickers and spongers who bloat the payrolls of many EU member countries. By looking the other way and getting their priorities wrong, the same officials are as guilty as the national politicians that were directly responsible for such cuts. (sources: The Economist, The Guardian, EVZ, Capital.ro)

Other People's Secrets

 December 7, 2010

The secret US intelligence files and diplomatic correspondence released by WikiLeaks have not stirred my interest enough to read them in detail. To me, most of them are other people’s secrets. Important as some of these might be, I find it somewhat indelicate to take advantage of the opportunity of studying them this way.

At this point in time, I cannot say for sure whether the military intelligence official who leaked the files is a hero or a villain. I guess it all depends on where one stands on these issues. From the point of view of the Washington establishment the man is, understandably enough, the scourge of the earth. For political leaders around the world and even for the public at large, the revelations contained in the leaked documents are an eye-opener, when they aren’t downright shocking.

What is more interesting is Washington’s official reaction to the publishing of the documents. For a number of years now, American intelligence officials and their people around the world have been involved in the massive gathering of all sorts of information. Billions of dollars are being spent to enable organisations such as the NSA, CIA and others to peek at the private lives of ordinary citizens of allied countries, without their knowledge or consent.

Take, for example, Sweden’s case. This fall, Swedish intelligence officials have discovered that the US embassy in Stockholm has installed electronic devices that allows it to monitor the phone conversations of locals, all in the name of US national security. A few years back, a Greek employee of Vodafone from Athens committed suicide, after being required by his company to illegally tap the phone conversations of Greek ministers. Every day, millions of emails, faxes, calls and harmless transactions are being monitored by the Echelon system. The privacy of electronic correspondence in the Western world has ceased to be sacrosanct for a long time now, and this is but a small part of US intelligence gathering operations squarely directed against ordinary citizens of allied countries or their governments…

Intelligence gathering operations against countries outside the Western world are even more intense. Some time ago, China’s former president Jiang Zemin had sent his presidential Boeing to be serviced in the United States, only to find it packed full with hidden listening devices on arrival. Social networks like Twitter or Facebook are extensively used to destabilise less-than-friendly regimes like the one in Iran. Satellite surveillance of phone calls and sensitive installations in such countries have become routine, resulting in driving many such activities underground in order to avoid detection.

These are but a few reasons why I consider the US’ official attitude to the leaks as highly hypocritical. When a country, superpower or not, is prepared to go to such lengths and expense to spy on citizens’ lives, correspondence and phones, it should expect to get a taste of its own medicine in return.

Worse still, the documents portray the US as a paranoid superpower, one whose officials trust no-one, friend or foe. Mrs Clinton instructs her personnel to gather biometric data, phone numbers, credit card details and miscellaneous dirt on foreign leaders and diplomats. Her actions bring to mind Elena Ceausescu’s bugging of ministers’ houses and her sick interest in their sex lives, private conversations and bank accounts. In true American style, Ceausescu himself invested huge amounts of badly-needed cash to install sophisticated telephone exchanges in every county, capable of monitoring the phone conversations of all Romania’s citizens. (Meanwhile, the country’s economy was going to the dogs…) Indeed, what’s the difference between the dictator’s paranoid hunger for other people’s secrets and the United States’ insatiable appetite for similar kind of data ? By the look of it, the difference is only one of scale.

In this poisoned atmosphere, I, for one, have largely given up using the phone to communicate with friends and family for some time now. If one can’t have a private conversation, why have one at all ? I’ve been through this absurd situation only once before – during the Ceausescu years. I had never expected,however, that this time around the people responsible for trampling upon our collective rights to privacy would be the officials of a country calling itself “the beacon of freedom and democracy”.