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.

Europe View nr 171: Ashton to Ukraine

Europe.view

Turn east, Lady Ashton
Feb 11th 2010
From Economist.com


The EU could make a real difference in Ukraine

PIGEONHOLING and false analogies are not part of formal international relations studies. But from the way that diplomats, policymakers and analysts talk about Ukraine, you would think they were compulsory courses.

Take the optimistic point that Ukraine’s elections are now unlike Russia’s. True, Ukrainian voters had a real choice in that country’s recent presidential poll. The incumbent, Viktor Yushchenko, gave up power peacefully. (In Russia, he might have handed power over to an ex-spook, amid bogus terrorist attacks to panic the public into accepting authoritarian rule). The vote count was fair. Ukraine’s media is far more pluralist than Russia’s. And so on. All this is fine. But Ukraine’s election was also unlike Kazakhstan’s. It is easy to make something look good by choosing a dismal comparator.

It is also tempting but wrong to compare Ukraine now with Russia in the 1990s. True, oligarchs rule the roost in both countries, with politicians as their puppets. True, Western money keeps Ukraine afloat, as it did in 1990s Russia. There, the West hoped to avert nuclear anarchy or a Communist revanche. In Ukraine the money is intended to stave off take-over by Russia.

But there is no sign of, or appetite for, a Ukrainian version of Vladimir Putin, not least because the West has not (yet) incinerated its credibility in Ukraine the way it did in Russia in the 1990s. Ukrainian politicians of all stripes, and the public, continue to want European values and European integration.

Brussels has yet to respond to that desire. European leaders missed the chance presented by the orange revolution (though to be fair, Mr Yushchenko and other Ukrainian politicians botched their opportunities even more badly). The European Union’s leaders also failed to make much of the recent election. Ukraine is a long way from Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s nominal foreign-policy chief, seems distracted, to put it mildly. The EU is treating Ukraine like Turkey—too big, too poor, and destined to wait indefinitely for membership. (That’s a false comparison too, but never mind).

Yet Ukraine is perhaps the one place where Lady Ashton and her new External Action Service could make a real difference. Ukraine badly needs attention, and unlike America or China it is not a place over which other EU leaders will be jostling for influence. Done properly, the gains from renewed EU involvement could be huge.

The European policy so far has been engagement with Ukraine’s political class. This has proved expensive, and mostly fruitless. Attention should now move to the citizenry. Imagine the effect if the EU opened 50 “Europe Houses” in the main towns and cities of Ukraine. The excellent new House of Europe in Tbilisi should be the model. That project aims to be the Georgian centre for all sorts of Europe-related cultural events, as well as debates and lectures, with a library and internet café as added attractions (readers with spare cash please note: it needs donors). It will have far more impact than the piecemeal efforts of individual European countries’ cultural institutes.

In the tense Ukrainian region of Crimea, a big EU presence would make it harder for Russia to hide its mischief-making (that should be a lesson from Georgia, where the EU’s absence was a lethal element in the run up to the 2008 war). More generally, the new policy will focus the EU’s biggest asset: its soft power. The EU’s military capability is meagre; its ability to stand up to Russian divide-and-rule tactics in energy security is feeble. But the EU does have something that the Kremlin doesn’t: attractiveness. Projecting that into Ukraine will give Lady Ashton and her staff something worthwhile to do. It could even work.

Asmus book review

Georgia and Russia

Ungodly suffering
Jan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition


An American take on a war that fed conspiracies throughout Europe

A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West. By Ronald Asmus. Palgrave Macmillan; 250 pages; $27 and £20.

TWO points about the war in Georgia in 2008 have stuck in outsiders’ memories. One is that it was quite unexpected. The other is that Georgia started it. Both, in Ronald Asmus’s view, are wrong.

The real cause of the war, he argues, was Russia’s determination to block Georgia’s American-educated and America-loving president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He had embarked on “a crash course to turn Georgia from a semi-failed state into a reform tiger that could become the catalyst for creating a democratic pro-Western corridor in the southern Caucasus…it was a breathtaking vision.”

Mr Asmus’s metaphors may be breathtakingly mixed, but his big point is right. Situated on the most promising east-west route for oil and gas, Georgia was becoming an economic and political success story under Mr Saakashvili, who took power in the “Rose revolution” of 2003. Its pluralism was a profound challenge to the authoritarian crony capitalism taking root in Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Mr Saakashvili’s growing sway in two Russian-backed breakaway regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was also an increasing nuisance for the Kremlin. He had restored Georgian control over a corner of Abkhazia and set up a loyalist administration inside South Ossetia—an untidy place with villages of varying ethnic and political make-up.

For Russia, that was intolerable, Mr Asmus argues. The Kremlin, therefore, deliberately provoked the Georgian leader into starting a war that he was bound to lose. Humiliating Georgia was also a way of paying back NATO for the recognition of Kosovo, a breakaway province of Serbia. And it signalled the limits of America’s role in Russia’s back yard.

Mr Asmus writes with authority. He is a former American official who masterminded the first enlargement of NATO to the ex-communist east. In his office, now at a Brussels think-tank, souvenirs include a commemorative sword given by the “grateful nation of Poland”. He has lobbied hard for new candidates, including the Baltic states, which joined NATO in 2004, and most recently for Georgia.

His book lays bare the dilemma facing Mr Saakashvili in the summer of 2008. Russian provocations against Georgia had been escalating for months, with a mixture of economic pressure, subversion and military attacks, chiefly by air. The West’s response was feeble. It made anodyne pleas to both sides to refrain from using force. It was not prepared to say unequivocally to Russia that destabilising Georgia would have serious inevitable consequences.

On July 29th 2008, Russia’s proxies in South Ossetia started shelling pro-Georgian villages there. What was Mr Saakashvili supposed to do? If he ignored the shelling, leaving his supporters to flee or be killed, the loss of prestige would be catastrophic. His pleas to the outside world to intervene were ignored. Moreover, Mr Saakashvili received intelligence (probably exaggerated) that large numbers of Russian troops were crossing into South Ossetia, perhaps as reinforcements, perhaps as a prelude to a full-scale invasion.

Mr Saakashvili decided to act at once, ordering troops into South Ossetia to stop the shelling but not to fight the Russian troops there. As Mr Asmus recounts with painful clarity, that decision was a disaster. The Georgian army lacked plans, troops, equipment, training and communications. All it had was hopes of a quick victory, of Russian hesitancy and of Western support. In fact, huge Russian reinforcements poured in, and within a few days were poised to take Tbilisi.

America stood back, though Mr Asmus gives an intriguing hint that at least some officials were arguing, albeit tentatively and unsuccessfully, for a military response to defend Georgia. That could have ended the war quickly—or led to a terrifying escalation. In the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, on behalf of the European Union, brokered a messy ceasefire.

The book’s detailed inside accounts of Georgian and Western manoeuvring before, during and after the war are gripping. Mr Asmus is caustic about the outside world’s failure to forestall the conflict. Hundreds of people died and many thousands of people lost their homes because of that. In particular he highlights the weakness of NATO (crippled by feuding over the Iraq war) and of the self-centred and complacent EU.

He is rather kinder—too kind, many might feel—to the Georgians. Many decisions and actions may have been mistaken and deserve scrutiny, he concedes. But the author flinches from condemning even the most lamentable mistakes outright. In particular, the heavy-handed crackdown on opposition demonstrators and media in November 2007 played a big role in tarnishing Georgia’s image abroad. This deserves more than the couple of sentences Mr Asmus devotes to it here. Mr Saakashvili’s exasperating habits were similarly damaging: disorganisation, self-indulgence, verbosity, favouritism and vindictiveness are just a few. Mr Asmus also ignores how far the Georgian leadership’s American cheerleaders, especially in some corners of the Republican Party, may have made it overconfident.

Insights from the Russian side are also missing (because officials in Moscow declined to talk to him, says Mr Asmus). What were the Kremlin’s real war aims? How badly did Russia’s military forces do? What conclusions did Russian leaders draw? The definitive book on that is still to come, but Mr Asmus’s work sets a high standard.

Europe View 170--Prickly Poles

The furious reaction to the earlier piece on the Polish blogosphere provoked this exasperated response


Europe.view

Better say nothing
Feb 4th 2010
From Economist.com


The minefield of writing about Poland

POLAND is the largest and most successful of the eastern European countries. A safe enough statement? Probably not. Someone will immediately start quibbling that “eastern” Europe doesn’t exist. That will start a long argument about whether “east central Europe” or “central Europe” is the best way of describing the ex-communist region (at which point someone else will chip in and say that the term “ex-communist” is anachronistic). “Largest” is dodgy too—not least because it may prompt a discussion about the fragile and tragic foundations of Poland’s eastern and western frontiers. Ukrainians and Russians will be quick to ask, justifiably, why they have been excluded from this notional category.

Most dangerous of all is to praise the achievements of Poland’s current government, as this newspaper did recently (see article). Clearly, some readers said, the author of such an article has never been to Poland. Otherwise he would know that a small and coincidental spurt of economic growth does not make up for pervasive corruption, ineffective administration of justice, two-tier public services and a cartel-like political system in which insiders feast (literally) and outsiders starve (metaphorically). Any possibly praiseworthy reforms are either superficial and belated, or else were introduced by the previous government.Alamy

The same applies to foreign policy. If Poland is friends with its neighbours, has sorted out its relations with America and is seen as a constructive heavyweight inside the European Union, that does not mean success. It means that the sneaky traitors running the country have sacrificed national interest in order to feather their own nests. In truth, runs this argument, poor Poland is yet again being misruled, betrayed and looted. Any claim to the contrary is either the result of pitiful ignorance, or has been ordered into print by the powerful hidden interests that control the world media.

The outsider who dares to voice such criticisms himself, however, will be met with an opposing but equally incensed strain of argument. Clearly, the author of such an article has never been to Poland. Otherwise he would know that Poland is still struggling with the consequences of centuries of tragic history. Any discussion of Poland’s poor public administration, for example, must acknowledge the role of the missing middle class, eviscerated by foreign occupation, mass murder and emigration. And who are these outsiders to criticise, anyway? The author should write about Greece or Italy if he wants to highlight problems in European countries. Why pick on Poland? Ill-will rather than ignorance surely lies behind the writing of such an article. It must have been ordered into print by the powerful hidden interests that control the world media.

Both those allergic to praise and the foes of criticism agree on one thing. The article’s greatest failing is that it does not include every salient point from Polish history, and a book-length analysis of all features of the country’s contemporary political, economic and social development. If the author pleads lack of space, he should demand more from his editors. Writing about a country as important as Poland in an article the size of a postage stamp is an insult in itself.

And so on and so forth. For the record, your columnist was a student in Poland in the mid-1980s, speaks Polish, has relatives in the country and visits regularly. He normally counts as a Polonophile, especially when arguing with other journalists who use phrases such as “Polish death camps” and a “vicious history of anti-Semitism”. He notes that writing about the other 20-odd countries on his beat does not arouse quite the same neurotic reaction. Why is that? Better, perhaps, to leave that question to the Poles.

Sikorski for President?

(when I wrote this, it seemed a bit outlandish. Now the WSJ describes Radek as the "Polish Obama")

Poland's strong economy

Horse power to horsepower
Jan 28th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Economic growth and a strong, stable government to boot: time to rethink old notions about Poland

OUTSIDERS often have fixed ideas of Poland: a big, poor country with shambolic governments, dreadful roads and eccentric habits. Old stereotypes die hard, but the facts paint an increasingly different picture. By the grim standards of recent centuries, Poland has never been more secure, richer or better-run. 

It was the only country in the European Union to register economic growth last year, at 1.2%. As Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s finance minister, likes to point out, GDP per head rose from 50% to 56% of the EU average in 2009—a record jump. By the same (somewhat flattering) measure, which adjusts for the greater purchasing power arising from lower prices, Poland now has Europe’s sixth-biggest economy.

Foreign investors like what they see. Whereas supposedly “west” European countries such as Greece flounder, ex-communist Poland is borrowing cheaply, for example with a $4.3 billion (€3 billion) Eurobond issue this month. Lenders’ generosity allowed the government to run a budget deficit of 7% of GDP in 2009 (though officials promise that a new public-finance law will cut spending growth sharply in the years ahead).

These good results owe much to luck. Poland’s stodgy banks came late to the wild foreign-currency lending that proved so disastrous in such countries as Latvia and Hungary. Poland’s big internal market has cushioned demand. Stimulus measures in Germany have spilled across the border. But the country has also benefited from some canny political leadership. Poland has something rare in the EU and all but unique in its ex-communist east: a sensible centre-right government with a majority in parliament.

Many criticise the government for its caution, and more recently for sleaze (a scandal about lobbying by the gambling industry is outraging Poland’s puritanical media). Some long-term problems are unsolved, such as a low rate of participation in the workforce and patchy public services. As many as 2m Poles have voted with their feet by working abroad. 

Even so, by the standards of Poland’s governments in the past, and of the rest of Europe now, the present lot look pretty good. The government has made inroads into some of Poland’s worst problems, notably with a tough, if partial, pension reform. It has belatedly started a programme to modernise roads and railways (2,000km of new fast roads will be built by 2012, when Poland and Ukraine co-host the European football championships).

It has also made some badly needed changes in the country’s stifling bureaucracy. Poland ranks low on most indices for friendliness towards business. A recent study by the World Bank put the Polish tax system at 151st out of the 183 countries it surveyed. But some improvements are under way, including online tax filing and faster customs clearance. A new law has liberalised the housing market, allowing short-hold tenancies. That should encourage Poland’s workers to move within the country in search of work, rather than emigrating. It can be easier to make a weekly commute to Britain by air than between Polish cities by road.

A big symbolic and practical change is that citizens can increasingly use a simple signed declaration (an oswiadczenia) instead of a costly, time-consuming notarised one (a zaswiadczenia) in their dealings with the state. “We assume that citizens are telling the truth unless there is evidence to the contrary. In the past, the reverse applied,” says Mr Rostowski. Sceptical Poles, scarred by their dealings with suspicious, nit-picking bureaucrats, may take some convincing of this.

A new Polish foreign policy has been a success, after a spell when the aim seemed to be to lose friends and alienate people. Under Radek Sikorski as foreign minister, Poland has managed to improve relations with all its neighbours and, despite some hiccups, won a favourable security deal from America under Barack Obama. After much haggling, a battery of American Patriot missiles will arrive in Poland in March.

Germany now claims that it wants its relations with Poland to be as close as they are with France. Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s new foreign minister, chose Warsaw for his first foreign visit. Poland’s relations with Russia, once equally neurotic, have calmed down. Even the unearthing of a Russian spy, who had been living for many years under a false identity in Poland, has caused only a ripple.

Some talk of Mr Sikorski as a future president. If he ran this autumn, it would solve a problem for the prime minister, Donald Tusk. Until he ruled himself out on January 28th, Mr Tusk had been dithering about whether to run himself against the incumbent, Lech Kaczynski.

Mr Kaczynski’s record is dire (his popularity rises only when he makes no public statements). His main role has been destructive, vetoing laws and blocking appointments. He is widely believed not to want a second term, but to have been pushed into it by his bossy twin brother, Jaroslaw, who leads the main opposition party, Law and Justice.

Mr Tusk wants to unseat Mr Kaczynski as part of a long-term plan to break up Law and Justice and absorb bits of it into his own Civic Platform party. But he was uneasy about relinquishing the prime minister’s job, especially as he hopes to trim the president’s power in future. Mr Sikorski is electable. He is Poland’s most popular politician and also something of an outsider (he was educated at Oxford; his wife is American; he has worked at a Washington think-tank). So he is no threat to Mr Tusk. As president, he might even help to dispel more of those tiresome stereotypes.

Europe View 169-- RIP Roman Kupchinsky

Say not the struggle naught availeth
Jan 28th 2010
From Economist.com


Roman Kupchinsky, a scourge of communists and post-communist kleptocrats alike

IN THEIR freedom they had no homeland. And in their homeland they had no freedom. Roman Kupchinsky, a warrior in and out of uniform, who died on January 19th aged 65, was one of the most remarkable of those who fought a seemingly hopeless but ultimately triumphant struggle against the Soviet seizure of power in the eastern half of Europe.

Much of what he did in the cold war is still secret. The son of Ukrainian émigrés to the United States, he served with the American army in Vietnam*. Then he worked “for the government”. He campaigned for political prisoners and fought hard in the information war against Soviet rule in Ukraine. RFE/RL







But unlike many of his fellow cold-warriors, he did not declare victory and retire in 1991. He turned his fire on a new, more insidious enemy: the overlap between organised crime and ex-Soviet intelligence services, and in particular the staggering corruption of the oil and gas industry. He edited a gripping fortnightly digest on crime and corruption in the ex-Soviet region for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (For readers who know that outfit only in its pale modern incarnation, a trip into the archives is recommended.)

Those who read his reports there, and later for the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank, found them eye-poppingly well-informed and insightful. Yet they were only dilute versions of what he really knew. Western energy companies and governments took him into their confidence, using him as a consultant to explain the monstrous menagerie of cronyism, spookery and greed that they encountered in the wild east. He kept their secrets.

Many people enjoy the title of a “walking encyclopedia”. Mr Kupchinsky deserved it. But that was only part of it. His companionship was uproarious; his determination to outwit the bad guys inspirational. Your columnist once needed urgent help against a seemingly unbeatable enemy from that world. “Romko’s” salty humour calmed my nerves; his deep knowledge helped win the battle.

Mr Kupchinsky was emblematic of a generation that had escaped totalitarianism and found new homes in the west. Others of the same ilk can be found all over the region: Valdas Adamkus and Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former presidents of Lithuania and Latvia respectively, or Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s serving head of state. From the past 20 years you could find plenty more, of all ages, in and around public life in the ex-captive nations.

Their great asset was binocular vision. Having lived in the west, they understood far better than most of their compatriots at home how life in the rich, free world, for good or for ill, really works. But they also enjoyed a deep knowledge of their own countries’ history and traditions—more so, in some cases, than those who lived under Soviet rule. It didn’t always work: after 1991 some returning émigrés proved to be patronising, bombastic and outright flaky. Some of them died too early: Stasys Lozoraitis, Lithuania’s top diplomat in the West, was struck down by liver cancer in 1994, aged 70, robbing his country of his integrity, charm and vision. But the best and luckiest of them have played a huge role in securing their countries’ future after the collapse of communism.

Mr Kupchinsky was one of the most formidable: equally at home in dealing with troubled bureaucracies such as the FBI and CIA or with Ukraine’s also ill-run intelligence bureaucracies, as well as the private sector, the media and think-tanks. He continued reading, writing and talking—fuelled by a prodigious intake of nicotine and alcohol—right up to his death.

What will we do without him?

Europe View nr 168 -- Europe's borderlands

Europe.view 

The centre cannot hold
Jan 21st 2010
From Economist.com


The borderlands of Europe should not be left behind

PLENTY of places have a claim to be Europe’s geographical centre. French geographers calculated in 1989 that it lies on a hill near Purnuškės in Lithuania. Belarusian cartographers think it is near the town that Russians call Vitebsk (Vitsyebsk in Belarusian). In 1887 in the then Austro-Hungarian empire, geographers erected a monument at Dilove, in what is now the Ukrainian province of Transcarpathia, marking what they reckoned was Europe’s real mid-point.

None of these claims can be definitive; finding Europe’s middle depends on what you count as its edge—the Azores? Iceland? The Ural mountains? The methodology of some claims is unclear. The more exotic ones bear as little relation to geography as the Loch Ness Monster does to aquatic biology. In other words, their purpose is to attract tourists. But at least for the Ukrainians visiting Dilove to be photographed by the monument, this is as far west as they can get.


“Where Europe Ends”, a powerful new film by Alina Mungiu Pippidi, a Romanian scholar and activist, shows the effect of the European Union’s expansion in dividing Europe. The combination of physical decay and human dislocation is poignant. The footage of disintegrating churches, ruined public buildings, shabby homes and bumpy roads leaves the viewer in no doubt of both the region’s rich heritage and its dirt-poor present.

Many of the people interviewed in the film have first-hand experience of the atrocities of the past century. Their grasp of the geopolitics is sometimes hazy, but their memories of shootings and deportations are sharp. Lines on the map drawn by outsiders have divided families and farms, bumping them around like shuttlecocks between different countries and political systems. The creation of a solid eastern frontier to the EU hardly matches the horrific consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but the victims are the same people.

People left behind by history are often those who find coping with the present day most difficult. Humble farmworkers in rural areas find it hard enough getting Ukrainian or Moldovan officials even to issue a travel document. Getting a visa to cross the border is even harder. The film shows the humiliating crowded queues outside EU member states’ consulates and the dismal life of illegal labour and squalid living that awaits those who make it across.

The film is partly paid for by the EU. It should be compulsory viewing for anyone who works in a consulate or visa office dealing with people from what one might call “left-behind” Europe. Some of the local staff there seem to have been hand-picked for their rudeness. Corruption is still troublingly prevalent. The system for visa applicants often appears to have been designed to deter, rather than enable, travel to the west. It may be unrealistic to expect a big liberalisation of visas in the short term. But it is hard to see any arguments against being polite, honest and efficient.

Enlargement has brought huge benefits for those on the inside, while putting the harshest costs on outsiders, particularly those least able to bear it, such as the citizens of Moldova, Europe’s poorest and most neglected country.

The mantra of EU and NATO expansion has been “Europe whole and free”. That may have now outstripped the willingness of voters in the luckier and richer parts of Europe to pay the taxes and accept the dislocation of further expansion.

But opportunities are opening up in Belarus (wriggling away from Russia), Moldova (with its reformist, pro-European, pro-American government) and even post-election Ukraine, assuming that the political paralysis of recent years ends. Treating the centre of Europe as a hopeless and irrelevant borderland cannot be right.

contingency plans for the Baltics (!)

Europe.view

Border controls

Jan 14th 2010​
​From Economist.com

Thanks to Poland, the alliance will defend the Baltics

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IN A crunch, would NATO stand by its weakest members—the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania? After five years of dithering , the answer now seems to be yes, with a decision in principle by the alliance to develop formal contingency plans to defend them.

The shift comes after hard-fought negotiations, in which, at American insistence, Germany and other countries dropped their opposition.

This is a big change. Since the three Baltic states joined NATO in 2004, defence planners have tried to sidestep the question of what their membership means in practice. If Russia is a friendly NATO partner, not an adversary, then defence plans for the new member states from the ex-communist part of Europe should not be necessary. Indeed, until late 2008 NATO’s threat assessment—the basis for its military planning—explicitly discounted any threat from Russia. That seemed to send a dangerous signal that north-eastern Europe was a security soft spot, open to mischief-making and meddling from outside.

The main push came from Poland, a big American ally in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the first to gain contingency plans—initially only against a putative (and implausible) attack from Belarus, a country barely a quarter of its size. When the war in Georgia highlighted NATO’s wobbliness on Russia, Poland accelerated its push for a bilateral security relationship with America, including the stationing of Patriot anti-missile rockets on Polish soil in return for hosting a missile-defence base.

Meanwhile military officials in NATO began low-key but wide-ranging efforts, called “prudent planning”. Under the authority of the American supreme allied commander in Europe, these did not require the formal consent of NATO’s governing body, the North Atlantic Council, where they risked being blocked by countries such as Germany.

Speaking in Prague in April 2009, President Barack Obama publicly demanded that NATO develop plans for all of its members, which put the Baltic case squarely on the alliance’s agenda. But in the months that followed, inattention and disorganisation in his administration brought no visible follow-up. Instead, snubs and missteps, particularly on the missile defence plans, deepened gloom about how seriously America took the safety concerns of its allies in Europe’s ex-communist east. An open letter by security bigwigs from Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states and other countries publicly bemoaned the decline in transatlantic relations.

A muted NATO response to extensive Russian military exercises on the Baltic and Polish borders last autumn sharpened the worries further. Many feared that NATO’s intense focus on Afghanistan was leading it to neglect its core mission, of territorial defence of its members. That risked undermining the alliance’s credibility.

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Now that seems to have changed. Formal approval is still pending and the countries concerned have been urged to keep it under wraps. But sources close to the talks say the deal is done: the Baltic states will get their plans, probably approved by NATO’s military side rather than its political wing. They will be presented as an annex to existing plans regarding Poland, but with an added regional dimension. That leaves room for Sweden and Finland (not members of the alliance but increasingly close to it) to take a role in the planning too. A big bilateral American exercise already planned for the Baltic this summer is likely to widen to include other countries.

Assuming the plans prove specific and credible, politicians in the Baltic states should now have plenty of time to address their countries’ far more pressing economic, political and social problems.

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.

War memorials

Europe.view

Respect for the dead
Jan 7th 2010
From Economist.com


The messy politics of war memorials

WAR cemeteries are poignant places, better suited for reflection than controversy. In Vilnius, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and others, all fierce foes in their day, rest in the same hallowed ground. In the British war cemetery in Berlin, aircrews lie in the earth that their bombs once churned. In Bitola in Macedonia, a huge German war memorial-cum-cemetery dating from the first world war glowers over the town from a nearby hill. Rebecca West, a Germanophobe British writer of the interwar period, called it “monstrous”. Local authorities have been more generous-spirited, leaving it untouched for nearly 90 years.

Some war memorials make no political statement. The Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, designed by Edwin Lutyens, bears the names of 72,000 fallen British soldiers from the 1914-18 war. It does not try to say anything about the origins of the war or who won it. British memorials usually bear an epitaph on the lines of this: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘for their tomorrow, we gave our today’.” That may strike the modern eye as a bit maudlin, but nobody could find it offensive.

The Soviet war memorials in Vienna and Berlin, in contrast, are built in the hearts of each city with demonstrative and meticulous attention to Stalinist iconography and cliché. “Eternal Glory to the Heroes of the Red Army, fallen in the fight against the German-fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of Europe” reads the inscription on the Viennese one, in Schwarzenbergplatz.

Given what actually happened in the Soviet-occupied part of Europe after 1945, views may differ on the merits of that inscription. Some Austrians, ungratefully, nicknamed it the “Looter’s memorial” or the “Unknown rapist”. Some have tried to blow it up or otherwise vandalise it. But it is protected by law, dating from the 1955 treaty in which Austria regained its independence from the liberator-occupiers.



When the Soviet Union collapsed, the former Soviet republics were under no such legal requirement to preserve or protect war memorials. That gives them more freedom of manoeuvre, though whether they use it wisely is another matter. In 2007 Estonia abruptly moved a Soviet war memorial from a conspicuous position in the centre of Tallinn to the military cemetery on the capital’s outskirts, provoking riots among local Russians who saw the move as blasphemy towards past generations’ sacrifice and heroism. Though the government’s tactics and timing were indeed questionable, the motivation was understandable—for Estonians the statue epitomised their country’s 50-year occupation, during which its own military memorials had been obliterated.

In December Georgia took things a step further when it demolished a colossal 46m-high Soviet war memorial in Kutaisi, the country’s second city. Bungled use of explosives killed two bystanders, a mother and child. The official, somewhat contradictory, explanation was that the monument needed restoration and in any case stood on a site needed for a new building to house the country’s parliament.

It is easy to see why Soviet monuments are resented in places that see themselves as former captive nations of the evil empire. Railing against them may win votes. But vindictiveness is not a good policy. Relocating monuments to neutral locations, preferably with proper consultation, no haste, and all due decency, is one thing. Cheerfully destroying them is another.

Respecting different approaches to the past is a hallmark of a free plural society just as forcibly rewriting it is a hallmark of totalitarianism. That does not make monuments sacrosanct (you will search in vain for a German military cemetery with a swastika). But the dead deserve to be treated with respect, however flawed or horrible the cause in which they died.

"Eastern Europe" doesn't exist

[writes our Eastern Europe correspondent...]

“Eastern Europe”

Wrongly labelled

Jan 7th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The economic downturn has made it harder to speak sensibly of a region called “eastern Europe”

IT WAS never a very coherent idea and it is becoming a damaging one. “Eastern Europe” is a geographical oddity that includes the Czech Republic (in the middle of the continent) but not Greece or Cyprus (supposedly “western” Europe but in the far south-east). It makes little sense historically either: it includes countries (like Ukraine) that were under the heel of the Soviet empire for decades and those (Albania, say) that only brushed it. Some of those countries had harsh planned economies; others had their own version of “goulash communism” (Hungary) or “self-managed socialism” (Yugoslavia).

Already unreliable in 1989, the label has stretched to meaninglessness as those countries’ fortunes have diverged since the collapse of communism. The nearly 30 states that once, either under their own names or as part of somewhere else, bore the label “communist” now have more differences than similarities. Yet calling them “eastern Europe” suggests not only a common fate under totalitarian rule, but a host of ills that go with it: a troubled history then; bad government and economic misery now.

The economic downturn has shown how misleading this is. Worries about “contagion” from the banking crisis in Latvia raised risk premiums in otherwise solid economies such as Poland and the Czech Republic—a nonsense based on outsiders’ perceptions of other outsiders’ fears. In fact, the continent’s biggest financial upheaval is in Iceland (see article, article), and the biggest forecast budget deficits in the European Union next year will not be in some basket-cases from the ex-communist “east” but in Britain and in Greece. The new government in Athens is grappling with a budget deficit of at least 12.7% of GDP and possibly as much as 14.5%. European Commission officials are discussing that in Greece this week.

None of the ten “eastern” countries that joined the EU is in so bad a mess. They include hotshots and slowcoaches, places that feel thoroughly modern and those where the air still bears a rancid tang from past misrule. Slovenia and the Czech Republic, for example, have overhauled living standards in Portugal, the poorest country in the “western” camp. Neither was badly hit by the economic downturn. Some of the ex-communist countries now have better credit ratings than old EU members and can borrow more cheaply. Together with Slovakia, Slovenia has joined the euro, which Sweden, Denmark and Britain have not. Estonia—at least in outsiders’ eyes—is one of the least corrupt countries in Europe, easily beating founder members of the EU such as Italy.

Three sub-categories do make sense. One is the five autocratic ’stans of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). They scarcely count as “Europe”, though a hefty Britain-sized tenth of Kazakhstani territory (some 200,000 square kilometres) lies unambiguously in Europe. Kazakhstan also this year chairs the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a Vienna-based post-cold-war talking shop. But none of the ’stans has become a member of the Council of Europe (another talking shop and human-rights guardian, based in Strasbourg). That shows the problem. The definition of “Europe” is as unreliable as the word “eastern”.

The ’stans vary (Tajikistan is poor, Kazakhstan go-getting). But all have slim prospects of joining the EU in the lifetime of anyone reading this article. That creates a second useful category: potential members of the union. It starts with sure-fire bets such as Croatia, and other small digestible countries in the western Balkans such as Macedonia. It includes big problematic cases such as Turkey and Ukraine and even—in another optimistic couple of decades—four other ex-Soviet republics, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan (the last, maybe, one day, on Turkey’s coat-tails).

The third and trickiest category is the ten countries that joined in the big enlargement of 2004 and in the later expansion of 2007. They are a mixed bunch, ranging from model EU citizens such as Estonia (recently smitten by a property bust, but all set to gain permission this year to join the euro) to Romania and Bulgaria, which have become bywords in Brussels for corruption and organised crime respectively. Eight of them (Romania and Bulgaria are the exceptions) have already joined Europe’s Schengen passportless travel zone. Most (Poland is a big, rankling exception) also have visa-free travel to America. All (unlike EU members Austria, Cyprus, Ireland and Malta) are in NATO.

Some worries remain constant, mild in the countries in or near the EU, more troubling in those in the waiting room and beyond. Exclusion and missed opportunity from the communist years still causes anger, as does near-exclusion from top jobs in international organisations (another consequence of the damaging “eastern Europe” label, some say). Toxic waste from that era, such as over-mighty spooks and miles of secret-police files, create openings for blackmail and other mischief-making, especially where institutions are weak. Lithuania’s powerful security service, the VSD, is in the centre of a political storm, but worries about lawlessness and foreign penetration ripple from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Four countries—Poland and the three Baltic states—worry a lot about Russian revisionism (or revanchism). Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are concerned too, but more about energy and economic security than military sabre-rattling. Yet elsewhere, in the former Yugoslavia for example, such fears seem mystifying and even paranoid.

The new and future members also share capital-thirstiness. All need lots of outside money (from the EU’s coffers, from the capital markets and from foreign bank-lending) to modernise their economies to the standards of the rest of the continent.

But the usefulness of the “new member state” category is clearly declining as the years go by. Oxford University still has a “New College” which was a good label in 1379 to distinguish it from existing bits of the university. It seems a bit quaint now. Poles, Czechs, Estonians and others hope that they will drop the “new” label rather sooner, so that they can be judged on their merits rather than on their past.

Berlin Airlift review

e Berlin airlift

Flying coal
Dec 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition


A human history of the allies’ airlift that saved West Berlin



Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift, June 1948-May 1949. By Richard Reeves. Simon & Schuster; 304 pages; $28 and £16.99.

HEROISM, geopolitics and new technology make an ideal mixture for a popular historian. The story of the Berlin airlift in 1948-49 has all that and more. The Anglo-American decision to circumvent the arbitrary Soviet closure of road and rail routes to the German capital marked the start of the cold war. For the first time, the Western allies were signalling their willingness to resist the creeping Soviet takeover of the eastern half of Europe. The airlift’s end, with Soviet acceptance of a new West German currency in West Berlin, was a stalemate that remained in place in Europe until the collapse of communism 40 years later.

By the end of the airlift, an astonishing 2.25m tonnes of cargo had flown in and out of the city, more than three-quarters of it on American planes. Among the fatalities, the proportions were rather different: 39 British citizens and 32 Americans.

The airlift was not just the only time in history when large quantities of coal have been delivered by air. It also brought leaps in air-traffic control and cargo handling. It even featured a primitive but effective electronic data interchange, jury-rigged from telex machines.

But as the book’s title suggests, Richard Reeves’s main emphasis is on the human side. At centre-stage are General Lucius Clay, the iron-willed military governor of the American sector of Berlin, and the workaholic logistics chief William Tunner, who during the war had supervised a trans-Himalayan military airlift. Behind them stands the figure of Harry Truman, the American president who overruled his entire military, diplomatic and security staff to insist that Berlin be saved.

The veterans’ stark descriptions of flying in foul weather, the exhaustion and danger, the rickety under-maintained aircraft and the newly wed brides stranded on the other side of the world, are undimmed by time. (Indeed, in some cases, a sceptical reader might wonder if memory has honed the wisecracks and dialogues, transcribed verbatim after 60 years.)

In Berlin and the other Western-occupied parts of Germany, the airlift marked the start of a shift from life as a defeated and distrusted adversary to one as an inseparable friend and American ally. At the beginning of the blockade, Berliners were still a brutalised and resentful subject people, expected to doff their caps to the occupying forces. A year later, they were still cold and hungry and living in bombed-out cellars—but cheering the airmen who had saved them from starvation and slavery. Had the airlift failed, the revenge of the communist authorities on those contaminated by contact with the Western allies would have been ruthless. In passing, Mr Reeves mentions some hapless policemen from West Berlin arrested at the city’s town hall (in the Soviet sector); most were never seen again.

In one of the many compelling vignettes the author describes how the allies hired German mechanics and loading hands. Only three years earlier, American or British pilots shot down over Germany risked being lynched. Now they were trusting their lives to the Germans who maintained their planes and stacked the cargo.

Although highly readable, the book includes no groundbreaking historical research. It mentions no German-language sources. A prolific American author, Mr Reeves is writing for a home audience. But he gamely tries to widen his focus to include at least a bit of the British viewpoint. Few Americans will know that rationing in Britain was worse after the war than during it, making the cost of the airlift sharply greater. American pilots liked to drop sweets in little parachutes as a personal gift to the hungry children waiting at the airport’s edge. Their British counterparts had no sweets.

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. 

europe view no 163

Europe view has now come out without a break for 163 weeks, for those who like statistics. That may make it the longest-running column dealing with CEE in the mainstream media, but it's Christmas so who's counting

Looking to the stars
Dec 17th 2009
From Economist.com


A little seasonal wisdom for the east
THE reindeer are straining at the harness, the sledge is packed and snow is falling softly all over central and eastern Europe. So what should Santa bring the region?




A wishlist is easily drafted. A quick return to economic growth; a louder voice in the councils of international organisations such as the European Union (and better decisions by them); more attention from the American administration; a neighbourly Russia. But such a list belongs in the same category as childish scrawls in crayon, asking Father Christmas to bring a magic rabbit and an invisibility cloak.



In the real world, the best that the region can hope for is rather more limited. The top priority is to hope that western Europe—the main export market for the region—does not plunge into another, deeper recession. The financial tsunami of the past 12 months has receded, leaving the basic structure of economics and politics in the region covered in seaweed and shabby, but intact. No government has fallen to the temptations of economic autarky and political populism: those messages are preached on the sidelines by the likes of Hungary’s Jobbik, but the political mainstream remains untouched.

That is cause for relief—and also gratitude. Some politicians have put national interest above their own short-term popularity. Outsiders deserve thanks too, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Commission, which together with the IMF and some national governments cobbled together deals that kept the western-owned banks in the region from pulling the plug on their stricken local subsidiaries. Santa should reward them, just as he delivers lumps of coal to those who have been less helpful.

Any presents from the new European Commission are likely to be ill-chosen and disappointing. But one big and practical offering would be a beefed-up EU presence in Crimea. An EU-sponsored higher education institution, cultural centre and visa office would be a powerful counterweight to Russia's “soft power” efforts and would signal EU commitment to Ukraine, even while the question of membership is on hold.

NATO may not send anything, barring some exercises in the Baltic next summer. It is transfixed by the needs of Afghanistan, devoting its spare moments to examining its own navel. The best that can be hoped for is that it does not weaken its collective security guarantee by discussing it to death.

What the region really needs—and only it can provide—is a new account of itself. The great story of the past 20 years needs a new chapter. Many ex-communist countries have joined what were once “western” clubs such as the EU and NATO. But “enlargement fatigue” means that the next lap of EU expansion is likely to be slow. And being in the club does not mean that you get taken seriously: almost every top job in the EU, NATO and other big outfits is held by westerners.

The virtuous circle of low labour costs, foreign investment and export-led growth is outdated too. The region has lost some of its competitiveness. And it should not aim to stay only as a low-cost provider of goods and services for the rich west.

The best way to be taken seriously is to have something new and interesting to say. The ex-communist countries need to show that their brainpower, creativity and innovation deserve a place at the top table. A big asset is that people in the region are used to radical change in a way that the old, tired countries of western Europe can hardly imagine.

Europe needs that dynamism, innovation and flexibility more than ever. Please Santa, bring sharp pencils for the Christmas thinkfest.

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.