This is the most amusing thing I've seen for a long time

Have you ever wondered how the history of the 20th century would look if represented on Facebook? Well, look at this

what's happened to axisglobe?

For several years I have been reading with enjoyment and some puzzlement a site called www.axisglobe.com/ It is a rum mixture of assiduously collected press cuttings and spin, mainly to do with the activities of security and intelligence services in the ex-communist world. The authors are all pseudonymous (at least as far as I have been able to determine).

Michel Elbaz – general coordinator. Specialization – regional security in Eurasia, in particular in what concerns regional activity of local and international terrorist organizations.
Allister Maunk – administrator and editor of the Eurasian secret services daily reviews. Specialization – Eurasian states' relations with the states of South Asian region.
Can Karpat – Turkish and Balkan section coordinator. Specialization – interior and foreign policy in the states of Balkan region.
Simon Araloff – European section coordinator. Specialization – East European states' regional policy, and the East European policy of the West European states (particularly, Germany) and Russia.
Anders Asmus – European section writer. Specialization – regional and international politics of Baltic States.
Pavel Simonov – Russian section coordinator. Specialization – Russia's foreign policy and secret services.
Ulugbek Djuraev – Central-Asian section coordinator. Specialization – geopolitics of Central-Asian region.
Asim Oku – Turkish section writer. Specialization – Turkey's policy towards Eurasian states; the Southern Caucasus' regional policy.
Sami Rosen – Israeli section coordinator. Specialization – Eurasia – Middle East relations (with emphasis on Israel).
Alexander Petrov – webmaster.

I had the strong feeling that the site was part of some "information warfare" effort but I could not quite see from which quarter. 

But since late December, nothing new has been added (as far as I can see) to the axisglobe site. The Russian version of the site has completely expired. I have tried a whois search and found only that the axisglobe registration runs out shortly. 

Does anyone have any idea who is (or was) behind it, and why it has suddenly stopped? Those wanting to be discreet can email me at edwardlucas(at)economist.com or skype me at edwardlucas

Political writing at its best

Most politicians today talk like robots (I've just been watching Gordon Brown at the Chilcott inquiry) and when they write it's even worse. Even Barack Obama's "rhetoric" is more about delivery than real literary style. So (thanks Guistino) here is an example of a political document that is inspirational, elegant and brief.

Ambassador Habsburgshvili

The Habsburgs' new empire

The princess and the bear
Feb 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Europe’s aristocracy, alive and kicking

GEORGIA struggles to make its case in Germany, which sees trade ties with Russia as vital and the ex-Soviet Caucasian republic as troublesome. So who better to burnish Georgia’s image there than a German-educated Habsburg? Georgia’s new ambassador to Berlin, once she presents her credentials to the president next month, will be Gabriela Maria Charlotte Felicitas Elisabeth Antonia von Habsburg-Lothringen, princess Imperial and Archduchess of Austria, Princess Royal of Hungary and Bohemia. A name like that, says Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili, should open doors.

The towering figure on the Berlin diplomatic scene is the Russian ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Kotenev, an indefatigable socialite who runs what is probably the biggest embassy in Europe. Ms von Habsburg (the name she prefers) will not, despite her titles, have the cash to match his efforts. But she may still help Germans think again about Georgia’s European roots and future. Born in Luxembourg, brought up in Germany and Austria, the polyglot Ms von Habsburg is an avant-garde sculptor, specialising in large steel outdoor works. She has lived in Georgia since 2001, has become a Georgian citizen and gained a command of the language (it is “improving every day”, says Mr Saakashvili).

By the standards of her family, a spot of diplomacy in Berlin is not particularly exotic. The heirs to the Habsburg emperors helped speed the downfall of the Soviet empire, particularly by arranging the cross-border exodus from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989 that punched the first big hole in the iron curtain. Among Ms von Habsburg’s six siblings, her younger sister Walpurga is a leading conservative politician in Sweden; her brother Georg is an ambassador-at-large for Hungary. Another used to be in the European Parliament.

Her father, Otto von Habsburg, now aged 97, is one of very few who can remember the Austro-Hungarian empire (his father, Karl, was its last emperor and it collapsed when Otto was six). He does not mourn the demise of that world: liberated from court etiquette, he says, he can call someone an “idiot” if he wants, instead of “your excellency”. His daughter may find German diplomatic protocol rather more constraining.

Europe view nr 172

Europe.view

Stay off the potash
Feb 18th 2010
From Economist.com


Eastern Europe-friendly boycotts are difficult to pull off

VOTING with your wallet is a tempting substitute for real politics. Time was when the British left demonstratively boycotted South African oranges. The same people usually regarded Israel as no better than the apartheid regime. They also ruled out “fascist” Spain and Portugal, and Greece under military dictatorship. Barring the odd shipment from Costa Rica or Cuba, progressive politics was bad for the fruit bowl.

Much the same dilemma now faces those who care about the security of the ex-communist region. In Tallinn last week, your columnist, wining and dining one of the country’s top foreign-policy thinkers, learned a new Estonian phrase: “Palun tooge eesti kraanivett jääga” [Estonian tap water with ice, please]. The only bottled water available at the otherwise admirable Ö restaurant was Vittel or Perrier, both French brands. Paris has just agreed to sell some formidable amphibious-warfare ships to the Russian navy, with potentially dire consequences for the security of the Baltic states. French foodstuffs are encountering a certain froideur across the region as a result.

Finding alternative brands of drinking water is easy (and tap water is better on ecological grounds anyway). Dealing with the wine list is more difficult. Most European wine-producing countries are unsound on security questions: as well as France, the list includes Italy (Berlusconi, Russia's biggest chum in the EU), Germany (the Russia-sponsored Nordstream pipeline) and Austria (almost everything). Georgian, Moldovan, Croatian or Macedonian wines would be ideal but are hard to come by, so new world vineyards have to fill the gap. Champagne creates an even bigger problem. The Crimean labels are rare and usually too sweet. Your columnist likes an English sparkling wine called “Nutty”; his friends and family are unconvinced.

The choice is hardest when it comes to cheese. It is difficult to find anywhere that produces tasty soft cheese and is not subject to unhealthy Russian influence. Even the kind of conspiracy theorist who wears a tinfoil hat to protect his brain from being zapped by Kremlin mind-rays would have to accept that this is a coincidence. But it is certainly an annoying one for Atlanticist cheese lovers.



Penalising weak-kneed European countries is hard enough. It is even more difficult when trying to put pressure on the source of the problem. If you want to boycott Belarussian goods, say, because of that government’s persecution of its Polish minority, you are unlikely to change your lifestyle much, unless you use industrial quantities of potash or need a lot of cheap tractors. Similarly, unless your consumption pattern includes weapons and vodka, giving up Russian goods is easy but pointless.

But the real problem with personalised sanctions regimes is conceptual. For a start, they risk seeming silly. Why punish a hapless French cheese-maker or Italian vineyard for the sins of their governments? The thinking is that plunging export sales might create pressure for a change in foreign policy. But this seldom happens in practice.

For countries like Belarus, a trade boycott is outright counterproductive. The more Belarus trades with the rich industrialised world, the weaker will become the ties binding it to Russia. It may be reasonable to try to take custom away from companies that owe their existence to commercial ties with sleazy politicians. But such bodies tend not to sell anything that a normal consumer in the outside world is likely to buy directly. You may not like the fact that some pennies from your fuel bills eventually trickle into the coffers of Kremlin cronies, but there is not much you can do about it.

The occasional flourish, especially with the wine list, is fine. But systematic sanctions are self-defeating. Trade opens borders and minds; protectionism closes them. That principle is worth fighting for too.

Murder and spies

Assassinations and technology

Hitmen old and new
Feb 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Modern technology makes killing easier—but harder to get away with

ONLY a decade ago the assassins who killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh would have disappeared into oblivion. Now that is much harder, and not merely for the obvious reason that lenses are ubiquitous. Modern cameras capture more than blurred images: they record the precise bone structure of people’s faces. Digitised and interpreted by an algorithm, this information is fed to police computers all over the world.

The net is closing around old-fashioned secret-service methods. Biometric passports are already the norm in most European countries. Their chips hold easily checkable data such as retina scans, which are both unique and unfakeable. The thought of an easily disproved false identity fills spymasters with horror. They remember the fate of western agents, in the Soviet Union after the second world war, whose painstakingly forged identity documents had a fatal flaw: they used stainless steel staples, rather than the soft iron fastenings found in authentic Soviet documents. The tell-tale absence of rust allowed Stalin’s secret police to spot them.

The age of Facebook creates another problem. Creating a false identity used to be simply a matter of forging a few documents and finding a plausible life story. Nowadays, leaving an internet trail of convincing evidence for a fake identity is increasingly difficult—and a phoney detail is worse than none at all.



Even poisoning, for a long time the best way to hide a killing, may have become more difficult. The Soviet Union developed formidable expertise in the art of assassination, and (as a by-product of its germ-war and poison-gas efforts) in making toxins. A book published in Britain last year and written by Boris Volodarsky, described as a former Russian military-intelligence officer, provided a glimpse into “The KGB’s Poison Factory” from 1917 until the present day. Its “successes” included the killing of a Soviet defector in Frankfurt with thallium in 1957, and that of a Bulgarian dissident, Georgy Markov, in 1978, in London with a ricin-tipped umbrella.

Toxin analysis has improved but sometimes it is only luck that reveals ingeniously administered substances. Alexander Litvinenko, a renegade Russian security officer living in London, was killed by poisoning with polonium, a rare radioactive substance, in 2006. His assassins—said by British officials to have had help from Russia’s security service—nearly got away with it. Had their victim died sooner, nobody would have tried the highly unusual test for that kind of radiation poisoning.

As another sign that sending hit squads to distant lands can go wrong, consider the tale of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen ex-president killed in 2004 by a car-bomb in Qatar. The Qatari authorities, using well-honed surveillance, arrested three Russian officials; one had diplomatic immunity, but the other two were sentenced to jail. Only after a messy row between Russia and Qatar, and much damage to Russia’s ties with Islam, did the pair return to Moscow—and a hero’s welcome.

Leader on labels

Labels and categories

A menagerie of monikers
Jan 7th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Most labels are misleading, sometimes grossly so. Find new ones in 2010

REMEMBER the Levant? Or the Old Dominions, the Trucial States and the Far East? If so, speak softly. Labels are handy ways of sorting out countries by history or geography. But lazily conceived and out-of-date ones are offensive and misleading.

Some reek of colonialism (“Black Africa”) or lingering imperialism (“the near abroad”, Russians’ term for the former Soviet empire). Sheer diversity makes “Eastern Europe” an unhelpful way of talking about the ex-communist countries (see article). Donald Rumsfeld’s description of anti-American “Old Europe” and pro-American “New Europe” was vivid but equally wide of the mark: Atlanticism and opposition to it are present on both sides of the old Iron Curtain.

The “Far East”, as East Asia used to be called, is indeed far away from Europe but quite nearby for people who live there. “Near East” is still used in American diplomatic parlance, and the “Middle East” is a quotidian term, perhaps because people like to be central. The “Muslim world” and the “Arab world” are sometimes used as near-synonyms. But not all Arabs are Muslims, and most Muslims are not Arabs: Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country; Russia’s 9m-odd Muslims outnumber Lebanese and Libyans combined.

The “White Commonwealth” used to mean Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. But their original inhabitants were not white, and their populations are increasingly multicoloured. English-speakers in India outnumber the combined total in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, which we were recently upbraided for calling the “English-speaking Commonwealth”. “Latin” America is another colonial invention, one that is disdained by Brazil, the regional power today.

It makes even less sense to speak of the “south” as shorthand for the planet’s poor countries (what about Australia or Singapore?) or of the “West” as synonymous with industrialisation and political freedom—what’s “western” about Japan? “Third World” dates from the Cold War, when the planet had capitalist “First” and communist “Second” compartments. Its most recent replacement, “emerging economies”, already seems out of date, as some erstwhile star performers, such as Argentina, submerge. And the term unhelpfully lumps together hardworking manufacturers (Vietnam, say) and service-based economies (Dubai) with those blessed—or perhaps cursed—by natural resources (Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Russia). Nor do the countries of the “rich world” have much in common: Canada and Kuwait, with similar income levels, could hardly be more different.



Not wanted on voyage

Still, old labels have their uses, and new ones don’t seem to work much better. “Chimerica” for a Chinese-American power duopoly proved as illusory as the creature that inspired it; and what on earth can bankers mean when they talk of the “N11”? But others have worked better. The “Anglosphere” and the BRICs have caught on; George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” was punchily effective. The G20 (large economies) versus the G77 (poor-but-pushy countries) have proved their mettle in financial negotiations, though the latter fell out over climate talks. All those Gs are helpful, but a little dull. We prefer the animal kingdom. “Tiger” economies were instantly recognisable in the 1980s as in these straitened times are Portugal, Italy and Greece, Europe’s vulnerable PIGs. Time to add to the menagerie by naming the planet’s sloths and skunks.

Europe view no 164

Europe.view

A supermarket in Estonia
Dec 23rd 2009
From Economist.com


The best sort of eastward expansion

FOOD in Europe’s ex-communist countries has an undeservedly bad reputation: stodgy peasant fare ruined by the culinary commissars of the planned economy. Your columnist has long disagreed, but proof is needed. So, on a recent visit to a supermarket in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, he set out to construct a winter picnic entirely from local ingredients.

The basis was easy: black bread, pungent and tasty. It makes loaves from the west and south of Europe seem bland and boring. So into the shopping basket went four or five different varieties, with different features: seeds, rye, crunchy and chewy by turns. Alamy



Aisle be there



The mainstay of the picnic was pricey at €15 ($22), but succulent—a smoked salami from Lithuania. Accompanying it in the shopping basket were a gourmet smoked cheese from Estonia, a tin of smoked sprats (Latvia), Polish pickled mushrooms, plus Czech horseradish and Hungarian hot peppers. Who says eastern Europe is a vitamin-free zone? For dessert, Polish “chocolate plums” from the Solidarność confectionery works are a fine offering. So were crispy, crunchy gingerbread biscuits (Estonian) and a packet of dried apple rings (Polish).

The shopper wanting alcoholic drinks is spoiled for choice. Estonia is the country that pioneered the vodka box—a five-litre freezer-filler much favoured by Finnish tourists dodging their own country’s punitive duties on alcohol. Your columnist is partial to Żubrówka, which should have a stem of bison grass in every bottle and gives the whiff of a summer meadow even in the depths of winter. Poland is the main source, though you can also find it in Belarus and Ukraine.

But drinking vodka at a picnic is not to everyone’s taste. Wine works better. Your columnist always tries to use his budget to punish protectionism and support freedom-lovers, which can lead to some conflict with wine snobs. The supermarket had a range of cut-price offerings from the Balkans, including Macedonia and Moldova. But the intelligent consumer should encourage those who are trying to move upmarket, as opposed to those competing at the bottom end. Pricey bottles from Ukraine and Russia were on offer too, but only sweet wines: a big headache in every bottle, at least in your columnist’s experience.

A good range of Georgian wine was more tempting: the basket was soon laden by a promising-looking upmarket Saperavi, for the equivalent of €12. But Georgian wine can be a bit inconsistent. For safety, a few beers never go amiss, especially if a sauna is in the offing. Estonia’s Saku and Le Coq are both good lagers, but the final choice was a brace of real Czech Budweiser (so much better than the fizzy, insipid American version) and some Polish Żywiec.

For a post-prandial snifter, Armenian brandy was a strong contender. But throwing caution to the winds, your columnist plumped for a bottle of Estonian dessert wine. Grapes do grow even in northerly Estonia, and wine-growers have been known to make something drinkable from them. But this bottle was from the Põltsamaa winery, which uses apples and berries.

Soft drinks are more distinctive. Western-style juices and fizzy drinks are ubiquitous, but more interesting local concoctions are on the shelves too. A carton of Ukrainian birch sap was irresistible, along with one of the greatest treats in the northern part of eastern Europe: sea-buckthornberry juice. This is bright orange, more like a puree than a juice, and has an incomparable astringent and invigorating kick.

The taste requires some acquiring; your columnist drinks it neat, but it also makes a useful ingredient for other cocktails—mixed with birch sap, for example. The toast at the picnic was to free trade in food: who needs protectionism when you have stuff that consumers really want?

Europe view no 165

Europe.view

Steamy scenes
Dec 30th 2009
From Economist.com


Bracing northern habits reach south-west London

YOUR columnist has recently moved house. Although his new garden is small, it does have enough room for a small hut, painted black and concealed by a trellis. It is a rarity in this part of the world. Most visitors assume it is a garden shed. Others know better. For Latvians, it is a “pirts”; for Lithuanians, a “pirtis”. Russian guests are thrilled by the prospect of a “banya”. Finns and Estonians are already stripping their clothes off as soon as they hear the word—the same in both languages—“sauna”. [actually, it's "saun" in Estonian--EL]


Such visitors are tactful about its shortcomings. The real thing should be home-built and fuelled by hand-chopped logs gathered from a nearby forest. It also should be near a river or lake for the cooling-off sessions. None of that is possible in Chelsea.

But even your columnist’s electric version (it costs around £1,500 or $2,000 for the smallest, two-seater outdoor model; an indoor version is a bit cheaper) does the trick. As sweat pours from your pores, worries trickle away too. It is hard to be tense when you feel that you are melting. Inside the sauna you can talk (if you must), read (if you can) or—best of all—just think. You can listen to the “singing stones” (sounding like an Arvo Pärt symphony as they exhale steam). You can beat yourself or a friend with a whisk, made from a birch, oak or lime branch (it improves the circulation).

In between, you drink, nibble and take cold baths (or use the garden hose for an impromptu shower). In the morning, it prepares you for work; in the evening, it gets you ready for bed. The endorphins linger, delightfully, for hours afterwards.

Such treats are lost on visitors from the benighted lands with no sauna culture. English guests view the “saw-na” (as they call it: the real pronunciation is closer to “sow-na”) with great suspicion. They stare unhappily at the kit: the wooden bucket and ladle, the strange mushroom-like hats, the linen loincloths, the small bottles of birch-bark oil, dark brown and pungent. The canister of salty sauna honey (for rubbing on the skin) and the birch-branch whisks (shrink-wrapped, imported from Estonia and stored in the freezer) arouse horror. They look with trepidation at the temperature gauge, which reaches 120°C (248°F).

They are deeply uneasy about nudity, even among close friends. They would like to try it, one day, maybe, perhaps, but with the temperature right down, in strict privacy and certainly with a swimsuit on. They worry about what the neighbours may think.

To be fair, sauna etiquette varies hugely between countries. In Russia, mixed-sex banyas are rare and have a somewhat sleazy connotation. In other north European countries such as Germany, Estonia and Finland, nobody finds nudity a big deal. In some cultures, chucking water on the hot rocks is mandatory: in others it is close to hooliganism. Attitudes to children vary sharply too: your columnist’s sons, veterans of the magnificent Sandunovskaya baths in Moscow (our favourite hangout during the family's years there) were forcibly ejected from a hotel sauna in Britain on the grounds that it was “too dangerous” for the under-16s.

It is easy to get into arguments about the history, technique and merits of saunas. Is a “smoke sauna” (where the logs are burnt in a chimney-less hut, giving plenty of atmosphere but also rather a lot of soot) the ultimate experience or a primitive aberration? As with vodka, strong views on the whys and wherefores abound. But unlike vodka, saunas usually resolve arguments rather than worsening them. Try one in 2010.

Making an Estonian hat famous (in the Daily Mail)

Cold? Try Siberian winters like I did!

By Edward Lucas

05th January 2010

Timidly shivering in their badly insulated houses, or tottering along unswept pavements in unsuitable footwear and inadequate clothes, the British present a pathetic sight in winter. Not just incompetent in the face of the challenge of a cold snap - but too often joyless to boot.

What a contrast to Russia and other East European countries where I have spent most of my adult life. Supposedly these countries are the continent's poor relations. But when it comes to dealing with General Winter - the deadly foe of all invaders from the West - they are streets ahead.

During my years in Moscow, the first sign of a night-time snowfall was that the incessant traffic rumble softened.But within minutes, the grating, grinding noise of snow ploughs filled the air. Russia may have dreadful roads, but unlike in Britain, the authorities know that keeping them clear of snow in winter is a national priority.

Russians are famously bad drivers: Rude and risky. But they know how to deal with snow - cornering cautiously and leaving plenty of space for braking. Even the humblest Lada car carries a shovel for emergencies, and usually a sack of grit or salt too. In a country where being stuck in a car overnight means death by frostbite, people take the matter with proper seriousness.

Unlike us, our fellow Europeans in the east know how to dress properly too. My most treasured possession is an Estonian 'lunt', a supple lambskin cap. With the flaps turned down, it keeps me warm even in temperatures of -50c (my record, encountered in the eastern Siberian mining town of Kemerovo).

I once hosted a glamorous English couple in the depths of an Eastern winter. As the wind howled and their ears turned blue, both refused even to fasten their coats, let alone accept the hats, gloves and scarves I tried to lend them, during a brief walk. 'I would look silly in a hat,' said my friend. 'Nobody in my family has ever worn anything like that,' said his haughty wife. The locals were scandalised at the sight of anyone treating the weather with such disrespect.

Life indoors is different too. In my first winter in the Soviet Union, I watched entranced as my landlady appeared in my flat to plug every gap in our leaky old windows with strips of paper and a paste made of soap.

Draughts, in Russian eyes, are the work of the devil. In England, they seem to be a matter of national pride, especially among the upper classes (who also shun central heating on the grounds that it is bad for their antique furniture).

If the British are over-thrifty when it comes to heating, the Russians are magnificently extravagant. When I first lived in the Soviet Union, I searched in vain for valves to turn down the furnace-like temperature of the radiators. My friends laughed at me. 'When it gets too hot, we just open the window,' they explained.

But winter in the East is not just a matter of survival. It is also great fun. English children are encouraged by overcautious parents to stay indoors, hunched over their computer games. In Russia, children can't wait to get outside.

Cold means fun. I will never forget the delight in my sons' eyes when we built our first garden igloo. It was tiny, more of a hollow snowman than a proper house. But in the years that followed we built magnificent creations, even one with an entrance chamber and a chimney. One year, the snow at our house outside Moscow was a metre deep. We honeycombed it with tunnels and bunkers.

That was good exercise. So was cross-country skiing, a low-key sport requiring none of the expense and paraphernalia of the down-hill version. You just strap long thin skis to your boots, grab the sticks and head off into the forest.

Skating takes on a new meaning too. Forget the pathetic pocket-handkerchief rinks of Britain, where people hobble at crawling speed in cautious circles. On a frozen windswept lake you can skate as fast and as far as you like, giving an unbeatable feeling of speed and freedom.

Best of all was the sauna culture - a world away from the feeble version of British spas and health clubs filled with thin-lipped women desperate to sweat out a few pounds. The real thing is a hut, preferably self-built and fuelled by logs you have chopped yourself.

You sit in silence, letting your worries pour out through your pores. You beat yourself or your friends with a sauna whisk, made from a birch branch. And then you jump in the coldest water you can find.

I used to visit Moscow's Sandunovskaya baths, the oldest and grandest in the city, with two British friends. It was a fascinating experience-not least because of the overheard conversations, often conducted in gangster argot, among the rich and powerful Russians who made up most of the clientele.

Russians think Westerners are wimps. They usually are, but we wanted to show we were different. So the three of us plunged into the ice-bath - and started a rather jerky rendition of 'Rule Britannia'. A gaggle of heftily built and tattooed men gathered, incredulous that we were breaking sauna etiquette by staying in the icy water, rather than emerging gasping after a few seconds.'There'll be nothing left of you,' one of them said, anxiously, worried that frostbite might be attacking our most precious body parts. We emerged to cheers and handshakes, and toasted our new friends in vodka and tea.

I cannot recreate those beloved Russian winters in Britain. But I have installed (against the strenuous objections of my wife) what must be one of the very few outdoor saunas in Chelsea. She looks in dismay at the kit: The wooden bucket and ladle, the strange mushroom-like hats, the linen loin-cloths, the small bottles of birchbark oil, dark brown and pungent (for scenting the steam), the canister of salty sauna honey (for rubbing on the skin) and the birch-branch whisks (imported from Estonia and stored in the freezer). Today, though, I'll scarcely hear her objections: I'll be too busy looking for snow to roll in. 

at last--the politeness story

Politeness



Hi there

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism

Illustration by Madamesange

A PRIVATE visit to the castle of Vaduz in Liechtenstein is a treat for many reasons. One is to see a fine private art collection. Another is a chance to use an otherwise unusable German word. As the only German-speaking feudal country in the world, Liechtenstein is the last refuge of that language’s traditional forms of aristocratic address. The reigning prince, Hans Adam II, whose splendiferous full name in German is Johannes (Hans)-Adam II. Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d’Aviano Pius Fürst von und zu Liechtenstein, Herzog von Troppau und Jägerndorf, Graf zu Rietberg, is the only person in the world who can seriously be addressed as Durchlaucht (Serenity).

Like much foreign formality, it sounds odd in English. So does “Je vous prie de bien vouloir agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués” which is how you might end a business letter in French (it means, more or less, “I ask you kindly to accept, Sir, the assurance of my highest consideration”). In English a “yours sincerely” or even a simple “regards” would suffice; French-style floridity survives, just, only in the context of diplomatic correspondence. For the most part, and in most places, the era of “Serene Highnesses” and “Your Excellencies” is over. This is part of a big shift away from clear, detailed conventions about politeness of the past and towards a blurred but largely egalitarian world that prizes phoney friendliness over formality.

One of the main reasons is the spread of English. Compared with other languages, it is sadly limited in the range of possible forms of politeness it offers. A few thousand people have titles, either inherited or awarded for political reasons, such as the new European foreign minister, Lady (Catherine) Ashton. Members of the established church have handles such as “Your Grace” (for an archbishop) or “Very Reverend” (for a dean). But for the vast majority of commoners and lay people, English has since the middle ages had no formal honorific speech beyond sparse choices such as “Mr”, “Dr” or “Professor”.

Other cultures are far more elaborate. In former Habsburg countries visiting cards habitually bear titles such as JUDr. (Doctor of Law), Ing. (Engineer) or Dipl.-Kfm. (a degree in business). A visit to an Austrian cemetery offers a landscape engraved with even grander titles such as Dr. theol., k. k. Hofrat (“Doctor of Divinity, Imperial and Royal Court Counsellor”).

Nothing like that has ever really existed in English, which also offers no gradation of respect via conjugation or personal pronoun: with “thou” and “ye” gone since the 17th century, everyone is just “you”. English also has few of the diminutives that add subtlety to Slavic social interchange. In languages like Czech, the move from Jana to Janka and then Janicka signals a subtle increase in intimacy each time. In English, that may happen if you are called William (and your friends call you Bill and your close family Willy) but it is the exception, not the rule. Unlike, say, Japanese, English has no special verb forms for politeness, humility and respect. What it does have is useful social lubricants such as please (absent or rarely used in some other languages). That has long made it possible to have a polite conversation in English, without worrying too much about what you actually call the other person.

If you sign all your e-mails with “love and vibes”, how do you show true affection and intimacy?

And over the past 30 years, the narrow options in English have shrunk further. First names have become the standard form of address between English-speaking adults. They once signified a great deal but now mean almost nothing. Old films show how the system used to work. In “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951), two middle-class men are celebrating a seemingly perfect bullion robbery, during which they have addressed each other only by their surnames. In what would now be called a moment of male bonding the renegade bank clerk, Henry Holland (played by Alec Guinness), tenderly asks his co-conspirator, “May I call you Alfred?”

That surname code had governed social intercourse in the English-speaking world for centuries. Male social equals called each other by their surnames, sometimes (but certainly not always) moving on to first names when the moment warranted it. A touch of intimacy could be added with a prefix. When Winston Churchill returned to the government in September 1939, Franklin Roosevelt, for example, wrote him a personal note addressing him fondly as “My dear Churchill”. Inferiors could use “Mr” or an American-style “Sir” when addressing their betters.

Rules for women were slightly different, which was to prove important when social changes brought more women into the workplace: Miss or Mrs (but never Ms) was the rule between equals. First names were for close relatives, intimate friends and for when addressing subordinates. Occasionally (in girls’ schools for example) unadorned male-style surnames were used. “Madam”, usually contracted to “Ma’am” was for high superiors.

Such rules softened only slightly in subsequent years. In “Fawlty Towers”, a British television comedy series set in a mismanaged hotel in Torquay in south-west England, the proprietor (played by John Cleese) is called “Mr Fawlty” by tradesmen, strangers and his employees. He mostly uses “Mr” in return, though he calls his staff, such as the long-suffering housemaid, Polly, by their first names. Those who know him better, such as his longtime guest, Major Gowen (whose first name is never divulged), call him “Fawlty”. Only his termagant wife and her friends call him “Basil”.

Gordon Brown this year scandalised Americans by referring to their president as “Barack”

But shortly after “Fawlty Towers” finished its short run in 1975, that social code crumbled. Across professional and business life, lawyers, business people, army officers, academics, doctors and diplomats began using Christian names; the use of the surname among adults shrivelled (though old-fashioned schools retain it).

Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, already called her ministers mostly by their Christian names except in cabinet meetings, where formal titles were used (as in “Yes, Prime Minister”). But under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, all pretence of formality has gone. Mr Brown, on a trip to Washington this year, scandalised Americans by referring to the president as “Barack”, rather than the “Mr President” that convention dictates. Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were on “Ronnie” and “Margaret” terms—but only during their most private chats.

Yo Blair!

The use of surnames now even looks demeaning. George Bush liked using them—but when in July 2006 he was caught addressing the British prime minister as “Yo Blair” many thought it epitomised Britain’s servile role in the transatlantic relationship. That started decades earlier. Dick Allen, a former White House adviser, remembers President Richard Nixon’s habit of using unadorned surnames, sometimes with belittling intent. Reagan usually called his staff by their first names in their presence.

Illustration by Madamesange

The intimate use of the surname has almost disappeared. Over a year, your correspondent found only one example of an adult relationship where surnames are still used unaffectedly. A septuagenarian pensioner living in the epitome of English respectability, Tunbridge Wells, Michael Larsen, has a friend who since school has addressed him as “Larsen”. It is not that unusual in Tunbridge Wells, he says, though on his daily trip to Starbucks the youthful staff call him “Michael”. “I find it rather refreshing,” he says.

One reason, at least in the English-speaking world, is feminism. The arrival of significant numbers of women in previously mostly male institutions created a problem for the old code of mutual surname use. “I refused to address a man as ‘Dear Bloggins’, as I hadn’t been to public [ie, private] school with him. And I would have been offended at being addressed as ‘Gunn’,” recalls Janet Gunn, a Sovietologist who joined Britain’s Foreign Office in 1970. At a time of wider social change, few wanted more formality rather than less. So the rules soon changed to first names all round, though ambassadors, at least in public, may be called “Your Excellency” by other diplomats and “Sir” or, particularly if female, “Ambassador” by their own staff.

This shift, the biggest in the English politeness code since “thee” and “thou” fell into disuse, has accelerated. “Mrs” and “Miss”, once important (if unfair) social distinctions, have given way to a ubiquitous “Ms”, even for the most wifely of women. And even these vestigial titles, along with “Mr” are vanishing too, shed within minutes of the first meeting. That trend is particularly pronounced in Britain and the English-speaking Commonwealth. America is a bit more formal, and countries such as India even more so. But when English and foreign politeness codes overlap, it is usually the English one that wins.

Businesses from countries where formality is still strong have to adjust to that. “When we go on a road show to meet investors in New York and London, we are on first name terms while we speak English. But as soon as we are speaking German again, it is Dr Schmidt and Herr Braun,” says the public relations chief for one of Germany’s best-known firms.

But even outside English, the shift towards informality seems inexorable. The use of the informal forms of speech such as tu (French), ty (Slavic languages) and du (German and Swedish) grew sharply in continental Europe after the social upheavals of the late 1960s. Stuffiness in social interaction was a symbol of the despised elder generation’s cultural hegemony. The collapse of authoritarian regimes gave the process another heave.Usted (a third-person form of address in Spain) went out of fashion among all but the elderly after the end of the Franco regime. Third-party forms are on the retreat elsewhere too. In Poland, where the use of Pan [Sir] and Pani [Madam] was once a sign of resistance to communist-era efforts to strip the language of its feudal past, things are changing too. The plural form now sounds unfriendly, says Mateusz Cygnarowski, a translator. Even the singular form is now often modified with the use of a first name—which older Poles find disconcertingly chummy in the mouths of strangers.

The counter-culture was one stimulus. Another was convenience. The Swedish reform, for example, binned a three-tier system in which du signalled intimacy and ni meant distance while a polite third-person form, using the equivalents of “Sir” and “Madam”, often coupled with job titles, was used for politeness and in public.

The first big change in that came in 1967 when Bror Rexed, the head of a state medical agency, issued a formal decree that he wished to be addressed with his first name and du, and expected the rest of his staff to do likewise. In 1969 the Swedish Social Democrat prime minister, Olof Palme, instructed reporters to use du when asking him questions. Though some nostalgic Swedes have tried to revive the ni form, for example in advertisements stressing ultra-courteous customer service, du and its equivalents are now all but universal across the Nordic countries, to the lingering dismay of the well brought-up. The third-person form survives only in rare cases, such as in addressing royalty and in public sessions of the Swedish parliament.

Formal address forms do still survive strongly elsewhere in Europe, sometimes to a surprising extent. In posh families in France, children are still expected to address their parents as vous. Martin Dewhirst, a British scholar, uses the informal ty when speaking Russian to his Lithuanian-Ukrainian daughter-in-law. But even after ten years, she still uses the formal vy to him and his (Russian) wife. “We suspect that this is because she has been well brought up in Kyiv,” he says, referring to the Ukrainian capital.

America, like the Indian subcontinent, remains a bastion of formal politeness in the English-speaking world, especially in public encounters. India has developed formulations such as “Good Sir”. Even unmodified, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are useful ways of addressing strangers in public, where the British code now allows only a feeble “Excuse me!” or a rude “Hey you”. In countries such as Japan and China, the use of first names is restricted to the very closest family members—spouses and parents. Foreigners hoping to cement their relationship with Japanese or Chinese counterparts by shifting to first-name terms are often unaware of the consternation—akin to public nose-blowing—they are causing.

Ping me an e-mail

Another powerful force for change is technology. Being formal in a snail-mail letter is only a minor extra inconvenience on top of finding pen, paper and envelope, writing it, and then folding, stuffing, addressing, stamping and posting the missive. But in an e-mail that takes only seconds to write, formality is a burden. E-mail’s immediacy also erodes the sense of personal distance. In the early days of e-mail, business letters were sent as attachments, properly formatted and even with the senders’ signature scanned and positioned at the end. Modern e-mails are much simpler. The opening salutation, with the unsatisfactory choice of “Dear Mr” or “Dear Joe Smith” may give way to an anodyne “Greetings”, “Hello” or even the dreaded “Hi there”.

Hand-held devices such as mobile phones and BlackBerrys have accelerated the effect. Typing a formal salutation or sign-off with one’s thumbs strains even the starchiest correspondent. Nowadays in English-language instant messaging, the opening salvo of politeness, however mandatory in other languages and cultures, can be omitted all together; the first line of the missive appears in the subject line, while the signoffs can be as brief as “brgds”, followed by a single initial. An automated message at the end of the e-mail, apologising for terseness and blaming the tiny keyboard, signals to the reader that no offence is intended.

Illustration by Madamesange

Although technology has compressed the spectrum of formality, it has not abolished it altogether. Using initials to sign an e-mail avoids the suggestion of excessive intimacy that comes with a first name, or the deliberate distance signalled by a full one. In French, Bien à vous is short and polite. In German, Gruss does the trick. In Polish, e-mails can start with Witam (literally “Welcome”) and end with Pozdrawiam (literally: “I greet”). Emoticons (facial expressions made up of punctuation marks) allow writers to convey feelings concisely ]:)

Though English is flattening politeness in speech, in some other respects the traffic is the other way. Handshaking is now a commonplace greeting; in England 50 years ago it was unusual at social gatherings and restricted even in the workplace. So is the reluctance (once entrenched among the English upper classes) to give presents at social occasions. Bringing a bottle of wine used to imply that your host’s cellar was empty; flowers were a slur on the hostess’s gardening skills. Now it is all but de rigueur not to arrive empty-handed. Hats and gloves are out. Kissing is all over the place, twice in Paris, thrice in Polish, four times in the south of France. But in Poland hand-kissing, once a flamboyant and ubiquitous way of greeting ladies, is declining. It is, says Pawel Dobrowolski, a Warsaw-based commentator, now usually deemed to be “a provincial attempt at appearing to be cultured”.

All this is grist to the mill of those who study politeness, formality and other branches of sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics. “Politeness studies” is a growing academic discipline; a summer school at Lancaster University in northern England this summer even developed a sub-branch, “Rudeness studies”. A “Journal of Politeness Research” was founded in 2005. Its most-downloaded article is by Miranda Stewart, a scholar based in Scotland. It is called “Protecting speaker’s face in impolite exchanges: The negotiation of face-wants in workplace interaction”.

Students of politeness explore many aspects of social behaviour: how status relates to language, the use of calculated rudeness in broadcast media interviews and the use of the intimate/formal forms of address (called the T-V divide after the French forms tuand vous). One of the big discoveries in the subject’s early days, says Ms Stewart, was that left-wing people, regardless of culture, tend to prefer intimate forms of address; more conservative speakers like formality. These days, the most contentious issue is the idea that politeness studies has been too Eurocentric. Chinese and other east Asian scholars argue vigorously (but politely) that the discipline is too heavily based on individualistic western concepts and takes too little account of collective norms.

At least to outsiders, the biggest question is what politeness actually is, and how it relates to other vital but slippery concepts such as deference, friendliness and formality. From one point of view, politeness is about being nice: easing social interaction by taking account of other people’s needs. Academics call this the “Grand Strategy of Politeness” (GSP). Geoffrey Leech of Lancaster University describes it thus: “the performance of polite speech acts such as requests, offers, compliments, apologies, thanks, and responses to these.” According to the GSP “a speaker communicates meanings which place (a) a high value on what relates to the other person (typically the addressee), and (b) a low value on what relates to the speaker”.

But plenty of so-called polite behaviour in real life is anything but. Being polite does not stop you being freezingly rude, or warmheartedly friendly. Similarly, politeness does not necessarily equate with formality, though it is hard to imagine someone being exceedingly polite but also utterly informal.

So what seems to be happening is that formal politeness, at least in spoken and written exchanges, is on the decline, thanks to globalisation (meaning the rise of flat, nuance-less English as a means of international communication), to social changes and to technology. Replacing it is a kind of neutral friendliness, where human encounters take place devoid of the signifiers of emotional and status differences that past generations found so essential.

That may lubricate business meetings. But it makes life outside the workplace less interesting. If you use first names everywhere at work, how do you signify to a colleague that you want to be a real friend? If you sign all e-mails “love and vibes”, how do you show intimacy? Much of the world has an answer to that, at least in their own languages and cultures. English-speakers may have triumphed on one front, but they are struggling on another.

More food

Europe.view

Food for thought

Jul 2nd 2009
From Economist.com

Adding deliberate culinary insult to unintended injury

Last week’s column has aroused offence where none was meant. The aim—perhaps a bit fanciful, but it is summer after all—was to imagine menu items with names that reflect eastern Europe’s history and politics. Münchner Klöße [Munich dumplings], for example, would be a noxious dish cooked by Germans and force-fed to Czechoslovaks by Brits.

But readers saw it as a patronising outsider’s attack on east European cuisine in general. How dare a newspaper published in a country that invented the chip butty and the deep-fried Mars Bar mock the rich and varied cuisine of half a continent?

Vincents

Not your father's peasant food

At the risk of adding deliberate insult to unintended injury, the complaints do provide a peg to look at the region’s culinary highs and lows. Two big tests of national cuisine are whether the locals like it, and whether it exports. A simple way of measuring that is the incidence in a Google search of phrases such as “Albanian culinary classics” and “Estonian gourmet recipes” (zero in each case). That gives a rough guide to the level of interest in the English-speaking world in those countries’ national kitchens. Another Google test is compare the profile of each kind of ethnic restaurant in a big international city such as New York. So “italian restaurant” + “new york” brings up a mighty 2m hits, against 20,000 hits for “russian restaurant”, 33,500 for “polish”, 7,500 for “Hungarian” and so on. (Just for the record, “British restaurant” gets only 5,860.)

The presence of immigrant populations has an effect (you can find Lithuanian restaurants in Chicago, if rarely anywhere else). But the undeniable fact is that Italian (and French, Chinese, Indian, Tex-Mex, etc) cuisine has established itself as part of the global culinary landscape whereas the offerings from east European countries largely have not.

One reason is the isolation caused by 50 years of communism. (That also may explain the popularity of Georgian food within the Soviet Union, where it was the most exotic and tasty ethnic cuisine available.) Another is most countries’ recent roots in peasant farming. This created a need for cheap food that could support arduous manual labour: plenty of calories, fat and protein where possible, but not so well suited for a modern diner in search of taste sensations and a healthy diet.

A partial exception is Hungarian cuisine, which is not for those following a low-fat diet, yet still redolent of Hapsburg-era sophistication. But even that suffers from the biggest hole in the region's traditional repertoire: the summer menu. Hearty and delicious soups and stews are all very well when the wind is howling outside. But in the sweltering heat, a cold cabbage salad doesn’t quite do the trick. Two delicious summer soups, the Lithuanian/Polish cold borscht and Hungarian wild cherry soup, both require dollops of sour cream—a no-no for the cholesterolly challenged. Estonia’s kama (a mixture of ground and roasted grains, including pea flour) added to chilled buttermilk or kefir is healthier and a taste well worth acquiring.

The best summer option is probably fish: during a recent visit to Vincents in Riga, one of the priciest (and best) restaurants in the entire region, your columnist enjoyed an exquisitely presented starter of smoked and fresh halibut, salmon, trout, salmon caviar and herring. Sashimi, Baltic-style.

Even more striking was the dessert, concocted out of the lurid and astringent juice of the sea-buckthorn berry. This costly and vitamin-packed elixir was mixed before our eyes with liquid nitrogen, creating an instant sorbet with explosive effects on the tongue. Did someone say that east European food was boring?

The Ottoman Yolk/ Europe View #138

Judging from the comments on the Economist website, some people have failed to see the joke in this article. It is NOT meant to be an attack on east European cuisine.


Europe.view

Ottoman Yolk
Jun 25th 2009
From Economist.com


What would a politicised east European menu look like?
“What’s “Cutlet Carpathian Style?”, your columnist asked innocently in a restaurant in Budapest recently. “You’re halfway through eating it when the Ukrainians take it away and say the rest belongs to them,” came an instant quip in return. The rest of the world may have forgotten, but Hungarians still remember the time when a large chunk of what is now Ukraine (and a lot more besides) was part of their old imperial kingdom.

The encoding of menus is a fascinating byway in gastro-linguistics. Any mention of “Hawaiian” means that chunks of pineapple have been added to the dish. Similarly, “Provençale” signals tomatoes and black olives. “Napolitano” means with basil and mozzarella; “Niçoise” is anchovies and eggs, “Veneziana” means onions. More generally, “traditional” usually means indigestible or overcooked. “Organic” means it costs more.

Alamy

A sprinkle of hope and a dollop of sadness

But rarely if ever do the menu terms have any political meaning. London’s best restaurant for real English cooking, Wilton’s, serves a dessert called “Guards’ Pudding”, invented in the trenches of the first world war (ingredients include breadcrumbs and raspberry jam). The officers who survived the wartime mincing machine apparently longed for the dish in peacetime London. The French “Macedoine” salad could be the big exception: it is a mixed fruit salad that some say was named after the ethnic confusion in Macedonia 100 years ago. But serious scholars have not endorsed that theory.

So it is tempting to try to create a menu with east European historical overtones. The starter might be Ottoman salad. That would be lazily prepared and slovenly served, and crowned with the yellow part of a boiled egg (the Ottoman yolk). Its unlikely ingredients range from sharp Balkan paprikas to gelatinous Levantine sweetmeats. It would stay on the table for ages, and some guests would end up picking bits out in order to create their own dishes (Bulgarian crudités, perhaps). Random offenders would be hauled off to the kitchen to spend a lifetime washing dishes, Janissary style.

The Hapsburger Auflauf (stew: but Hungarians would call it a goulash) would be equally varied but rather more successful, with Czech dumplings nestling quite snugly next to wisps of sauerkraut and paprika.

Romanov rissoles would be raw (and bleeding), prepared with extraordinary incompetence and bashed about by a madman. But they would be delicious compared with “Steak a la Soviet” (often known colloquially as Lenin’s Revenge): this would be a revolting mixture of gristle and animal fodder, enough to keep you alive but wishing that you were dead.

Diners would hastily turn to the more appetising part of the menu. Prague Spring Rolls would be a temptingly modern variation on traditional Czech cuisine, half-baked yet cooked with delightful enthusiasm by a kitchen crew of idealistic youngsters and hard-bitten types who have embraced nouvelle cuisine. Sadly, a jackbooted waiter stamps them to smithereens before you have begun to enjoy them. You then spend the next 20 years cleaning the restaurant windows.

Diners are told that Baltic Surprise is off the menu forever on seemingly dubious health grounds. Old people insist that it used to be delicious, involving herring and fresh herbs, eaten at midsummer with a lot of beer and dancing. Even trying to order it brings the threat that you will be locked in the cellar for life. But diners who persist will find it served with a flourish, having been cooked secretly in the kitchen from a recipe bravely preserved in the attic. Conversely, Kasha Putina (Putin’s porridge) is not on the menu either, though something is clearly cooking. Russians maintain that they love it, but the neighbours find the smell a bit overpowering.

More fun videos about Putin

This is by the Ukrainian band Dress Code. It could be seen as slavish Putinophilia (and perhaps it is) but it could also be a subtle piece of mockery of exactly the same sentiment...

Estonian self-mockery--must watch!

This is a marvellously self-deprecating video about Estonia's peculiar world-view. Enjoy!

Video update

Europe.view

Laughing matters

May 21st 2009
From Economist.com

A gas about gas in Russia and Ukraine

YOUTUBE may not be the most scholarly repository of material about energy security and Russian foreign policy, but it is certainly the most entertaining. This, for example, shows a Russian military choir saying that if Ukraine joins NATO “we’ll cut off the gas”. (And not just Ukraine: it also threatens to use the same means to punish Europe for its alliance with America.) The audience—shown during the broadcast on REN-TV, Russia’s fourth channel—loved it. Others don’t. Your columnist showed it to a senior Ukrainian politician. He flinched. “I hate them”, was his unvarnished response.

Comedy and politics are a combustible mix. Rein Lang, Estonia’s justice minister, was quite unfairly tarred as a Nazi in the Russian media when he hired an actor to perform a one-man satirical play about Hitler at his birthday party.

Berliners are laughing uproariously at Mel Brooks’s play “The Producers” (pictured), which has finally opened in a German-language production in Berlin. It satirises New York theatre-land, telling the story of two producers who want to stage a failure for tax reasons; they put on the grotesque “Springtime for Hitler”, only to find it becomes a raging success.

AP

A bit of angst about enjoying an evening of jolly musical comedy that uses themes from the most dreadful period in their country’s history would be understandable for the German audience. So the director has cast the only outright Nazi, a brown-shirted nostalgic sentimentalist, as a thickly-accented Bavarian wearing Lederhosen. So that’s all right. Presumably when the show transfers to Munich, the villain will be an Austrian, and in Vienna it will be a Prussian.

Given that, it would be wrong to be po-faced about Russian comedy programmes that display taste which some may find questionable. The show on REN-TV clearly had some ironic overtones. It could be seen as poking fun at the Kremlin’s supposed tendency to solve all foreign-policy problems by reaching for the gas tap. But the politicians in south-eastern Europe who have been signing up to the Kremlin-backed South Stream gas pipeline should perhaps watch and reflect on it a little before they ink their signatures.

The sight of a Russian audience laughing appreciatively at the sight of soldiers turning off a large gas valve in time to a mocking song about neighbouring countries also puts lines in the Gazprom propaganda film such as this in a different light. “You’ll never ever have a surer friend than Gazprom”, intones the singer. Inside Russia, at least.

It is worth noting that Russian officialdom is not known for its sense of humour. The best TV show in Russian recent history, of course, is no longer on air: Kukly (Puppets), with its sometimes brilliant caricatures of 1990s Russia, was an early victim of the Putin clampdown. Swedes found this skit tremendously funny, partly for the faux-mafia encounter at the beginning (which mocks Swedish naivety in dealing with Russian gangsters) but also for the glorious pastiche of Russian visual and musical clichés in the second half. It is not Russia’s Eurovision entry, but it almost could have been. The Russian embassy in Stockholm was not amused, denouncing the broadcast and claiming that the people involved must be mentally ill.

English humour is an even bigger minefield. Our best-loved musical comedians, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, once sang a song in favour of “patriotic prejudice”. They maintained that the Scots were stingy, the Welsh were “more like monkey than man” and that the Italians eat garlic in bed. It concluded “The English are moral, the English are good/ and clever and modest and misunderstood.” Who could possibly miss the joke in that?

I hope this is meant to be ironic...

but this Russian military "we'll cut off the gas" song could easily be seen as a bit sinister. Thanks to Roland Freudenstein for pointing it out 

Telex lives on

Telex

A faint ping

Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

An ancestor of e-mail lives on

LIKE slide-rules, steam engines and carbon paper, the telex machine, once ubiquitous and indispensable, has vanished from sight. But not, quite, from existence. As younger readers may need reminding, or informing, the telex was what would nowadays be called a hard-wired, low-bandwidth, point-to-point messaging system.

At speeds of around one-millionth of that of a modern broadband connection, it sent data chugging along dedicated networks to clunky terminals.

In its time, telex was a huge improvement on the international telegram system, which could charge the modern equivalent of several dollars per word. It was often better than making international phone calls, which were cumbersome, crackly and costly. It was on telex systems that today's electronic data interchange developed. Telex starred in the huge logistics effort for the airlift that supplied West Berlin during the Soviet blockade of 1948.

It would be easy to imagine that newer technology puts paid to such systems. But their death throes are oddly slow. Three countries, Japan, Kuwait and Italy, still maintain the old-fashioned international telegrams. And the internet has not yet killed off the telex. It has certainly sent traffic tumbling (see chart). In March Britain's BT will be the latest big company to cease offering telex services. “All good things come to an end,” says a spokesman. Britain will then join around 30 countries including Austria, Germany and Russia that no longer provide telex through their national telecoms operators.

But that clears the way for nimble, low-cost competitors. These have turned round the technology. As well as maintaining the old-fashioned service involving terminals and dedicated lines, they provide telex services both over phone lines and over the internet—in effect, making it a secure and ultra-reliable variant of e-mail. One, SwissTelex, is a spin-off from the Swiss national telecoms operator that offers international telex services and has taken over BT's network. Another is EasyLink, based in America, which provides a service for Dutch, Belgian and Japanese subscribers.

Many of the remaining customers are banks. Telexes, unlike ordinary e-mails, are legally valid documents (being to all intents and purposes impossible to fake). “The telex network is closed—you can't get in unless you are part of the club,” says Peter MacLaverty of SwissTelex.

Small financial institutions not hooked up to the main international money-transfer system, SWIFT, find telexes a cost-effective alternative. And with no server to go down, the telex system is robust. Big banks like that: for them back-up systems are vital, and the cost of keeping a telex is trivial.

Euroclear, the world's largest settlement system for international financial markets, maintains 184 telex accounts for 50 out of its 1,375 clients. It sends up to 800 telexes a day, mostly as confirmation for transactions. The system is overseen by Danny Bogaerts, a communications manager who was told when he joined the company in 1975 not to learn about telexes because they were soon going to be obsolete. “You can laugh about it,” he admits. “It is old-fashioned—but it works.” The second big customer group is at sea. Ocean-going ships are still legally required to have a telex on board—chiefly for SOS messages.

Even its fans do not pretend that telex is a technology with a bright future. Euroclear, for example, will start decommissioning its telex system in 2010 when it introduces new software. “I'm surprised it has lasted as long as it has,” says Mr MacLaverty. “What we aim to do is to be the last man standing,” says Eva Allen of EasyLink. “Who will send the last telex? Possibly me.”