Two interesting developments this week have prompted some ponderings…

1) The European Court of Human Rights has ruled the UK police’s stop and search tactics illegal

This creates a serious dilemma for anti-EU libertarians, as shown by the response of anti-EU blogger 13th Spitfire in the (fascinating) comments thread on law blog Charon QC’s coverage of the ruling (via the rather good Jack of Kent). As 13th Spitfire puts it:

Though I sincerely disagree with the Stop and Search laws, it just leaves a very bad taste in the mouth that we have to be told by a foreign court that our domestic proceedings, and by extension our parliament, is illegal.

2) The EU-withdrawalist UK Independence Party has announced that it favours a ban on the burka. This despite UKIP long having portrayed itself as a more or less libertarian party.

Libertarians are a hugely over-represented breed among the political blogosphere. There’s hundreds of them, on both sides of the Atlantic – but in real world politics there’s barely a handful, and they rarely even retain their deposits in elections. They are, however, so vocal on the web that few online political discussions can pass without a libertarian of some stripe cropping up to make their case. As such, libertarian arguments increasinly need to be addressed, even while libertarianism remains decidedly fringe.

The prime unifying belief that they share is that individual liberty is paramount, and that the role of the state should be kept as minimal as feasibly possible. A libertarian, as a rule, opposes bans and restrictions – taking John Stuart Mill’s laudable harm principle as the starting point for pretty much all their approaches to the world, but taking this idea far further than Mill himself (or his fellow small-”L” liberals) ever did.

The libertarian argument against European integration in general – and the European Union specifically – is usually that it implies the imposition of a new layer of government above the national. As libertarians believe small government to be the best form, this is an understandable approach. After all, if you already have a national ministry dealing with policy area X, where’s the need for an additional European-level administration which deals with the same area?

What happens next, however, is that the majority of libertarians seem to take this entirely reasonable argument against the repetition/overlap of governmental/administrative layers, and from it extrapolate that it is the super-national, European-level layer of government/administration which is the unnecessary one.

If the smallest amount of governmental/state interference in the life of the individual – and the maximum level of individual liberty – is the key aim, then surely it is the *national* layer which is superfluous?

If we agree that there are a few basic fundamentals for individual liberty – the right to trial, to vote, to be free from persecution, to free speech, etc. etc. (read Mill and the US declaration of independence for more) – then why, in the case of the EU, have these asserted 27 times in 27 countries, when once should be enough?

If we agree, as most libertarians do, that some laws and regulations are necessary for the smooth functioning of society – agreed systems of weights and measures (to prevent fraud), some level of health and safety guarantees, product standards, environmental/pollution restrictions (all taking Mill’s dictum that as individuals we shouldn’t harm others and applying it to corporations and government bodies), etc. etc. – why have 27 different variants of these laws and regulations, when what’s good for one of us is surely good for all?

This is the fundamental reason why libertarians should be in favour of European integration (note: not necessarily the current nature of European integration or current European bodies, both EU and non-EU, but the general principle) – for an individual in country X to have to abide by different laws than an individual in country Y implies a strong likelihood that the two are experiencing different levels of individual freedom. Plus, most importantly, if individual X goes to country Y, then he/she will have to abide by country Y’s laws – a potential restriction on that individual’s liberty of movement. (Case study: In Germany and Austria, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust; it is not in the UK. When British citizen David Irving went to Austria, having denied the Holocaust, he was arrested and imprisoned.)

Of course, restricting this to a mere continent (and not even all of that) is not ideal. The true libertarian would agree that liberty is universal – for true liberty to exist, what applies to one individual should apply to us all – and therefore we should be pushing for world government, where everyone on the planet has the same rights as everyone else.

But this still doesn’t take away from the fact that if you want small government for maximum individual liberty, the higher the level at which the basic laws and regulations are imposed, the better. Universal is the ideal (hence the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but if that proves impossible for now then you surely go for as broad an area as you can? The best part of a continent is not a bad starting point, and is certainly better than a mere individual country. Especially when, as the European Court of Human Rights ruling demonstrates, individual countries cannot be relied upon to safeguard the liberties of their citizens.

I have long stated this to be one of my prime motivations for supporting European integration: the ability of super-national bodies to restrict the power that nation states can hold over the individual. Case in point: if you are British, you have obligations but few rights – we remain, technically, subjects, not citizens. As I have argued before (in some detail), it was only with the introduction of EU citizenship that

“for the first time in Britain’s history, British citizens/subjects have the right to vote, to free movement, and so on, rather than just the privilege – we are no longer dependant upon the whim of parliament.”

And yet still we find self-professed libertarians clinging to the old, liberty-restricting national apparatus, rather than the new, liberty-granting super-national bodies of the EU and Council of Europe. Supposedly state-hating libertarians who cling to the state.

It genuinely baffles me. Can any libertarian provide me with a libertarian case for this apparent nationalism? Because the way I see it, nationalism and libertarianism are mutually exclusive – one being a collective idea focussed around the concept of a geographically and legally-restrictive state, the other focussed around the ideas of individualism and freedom.

We’ve seen all the intra-European arguments about Lisbon (now in force for a full fortnight) – what we really need is some expert extra-European opinion. So ta very much to Philip H Gordon, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the US State Department, for his handy overview.

Key points?

- “the role of Member States in decision-making is undiminished”

- “The treaty… allows for some EU states which are at the forefront of defense cooperation to pursue greater harmonization of their defense apparatus without the limitations of those states who do not wish to participate”

- “the Lisbon Treaty represents a serious effort by our EU partners to streamline their policymaking process. We understand that, as with all efforts to reform complex institutions, this is a work in progress, and that it may take time for the new institutions to demonstrate their impact. Nevertheless, we hope that the changes brought by Lisbon will make the EU a stronger partner for the United States, and increase the role of Europe on the world’s stage. We want the EU to be that stronger partner and we certainly intend to do our part to engage closely with the new institutions, but in the end their ultimate effectiveness will be determined by the will of EU Member States to invest in them.”

Well would you look at that? The United States doesn’t seem to think that Lisbon has brought about a superstate (as some of our more hysterical anti-EU friends seem to believe), but rather that it continues to allow EU member states a great deal of individual power and flexibility. And the United States also seems to believe that – as its supporters have consistently maintained – the Lisbon Treaty is primarily aimed at streamlining the union’s working methods.

Oh, and just to add to what anyone with half a brain and the ability to read has been saying about the thing, Assistant Secretary Gordon also notes the increased powers that are going to the European Parliament – that’d be the increased democracy bit that we’ve been going on about for the last few years.

So, what’s the conspiracy that explains the US State Department echoing the EU’s own line on Lisbon – a line that’s supposedly dishonest propaganda designed to hide the true sinister intent of the treaty? Anyone?

(Sorry for the blogging silence here of late, by the way – very, very busy for the last few weeks…)

A few vague thoughts towards predicting a new global geopolitics:

Globalisation has been the undeniable trend of the last half century.

As transportation and communication technologies have advanced, the world has got smaller. You can now get from London to Australia in a day where, two hundred years ago – at the height of the nation state – it would have taken several times that to travel from London to Edinburgh. A century ago, most goods in your local shop would have been local to your (more or less) immediate area – even with the expansion of 19th century Empires and the arrival in Europe of affordably-priced exotic fruits and out-of-season vegetables, delivered via early refrigerated ships. Now we have to go to specialist shops to get local produce – and local today often means little more than “from the same country”. As for the interconnectedness of the global economy, we have had the ultimate proof over the last year as recession has spread around the world.

Communities arise due to a combination of proximity and common interest – the latter more often than not following the former.

Up until the dawn of the steam age, most modern nation states were highly fragmented, with much autonomy among the further-flung regions. The steam train – and later, the telegraph – enabled more effective administration over longer distances, and so nation states became more coherent as entities.

The proximity of most peoples on Earth has, over the last half century – since the advent of the Jet engine and, more recently, the virtual proximity made possible by the internet – likewise become ever closer. The ability to administrate over far larger areas has similarly increased. Where two centuries ago – as the French national identity was beginning to solidify post-Revolution and under the auspices of Napoleon – it would have taken a week to travel from Paris to Marseilles, there is now nowhere on Earth that you cannot get to in a week, no matter your starting point. Two centuries ago it took six days to travel from London to Edinburgh; a century ago it took six hours; now you can get from London to New York in six hours.

At the same time, with the globalisation of the world economy, previously disparate communities – separated by many hundreds of miles as well as by language and culture – are now economically interconnected via the a combination of the complexities of global finance and the fact that their local shops are full of goods from other countries.

New technologies lead to new identities.

It is possible over the last few centuries to demonstrate that advances in travel and communication technologies have led to consolidation and centralisation of governance structures, as it has become ever easier to manage large areas from a central capital. At the same time, shared identities have arisen, as previously disparate communities (sometimes nominally already under the same administration, but usually for all practical purposes largely independent of each other) have suddenly found themselves in the same boat. Scottish and Cornish become British; Normans and Savoyards become French; Milanese and Sicilians become Italians. Old identities are retained, but the new proximity provided by innovative technologies allows a top-down governmental and bottom-up social coming together.

The EU was, at its birth, backward-looking – yet accidentally stumbled upon an idea far ahead of its time.

The EEC was formed in the 1950s not as a reaction to new technology, but as a means of preventing the violence that so often ensued from the clashing interests of nation states. It was the dawn of the jet age, the year (1957) that Sputnik’s launch heralded the even more advanced era of the space age – yet the advances in transportation and communication that the jet engine and satellite were in the process of bringing about were barely on the radar of the EU’s founding fathers.

Nonetheless, the coming together of the previously competing states of a continent to pursue shared interests was to be made far easier by these new technologies. In 1920, to travel from London to Athens took days. By 1960 it was a matter of hours. Europe had shrunk. The EEC was formed just on the cusp of this new shrinkage, and so was in an ideal position to capitalise on the possibilities that the new technologies provided.

Approaching the present.

With the arrival of the internet, the world has shrunk yet again – only this time only socially/culturally, as we can chat away to people of any nation from the comfort of our front rooms. But as long as the physical transportation of goods over the internet remains impossible, for physical commerce we remain reliant on 20th (and even 19th) century technologies.

This places a geographical limit on effective economic interaction – at least when it comes to the exchange of day-to-day goods. If it takes more than a few hours to transport your goods from A to B it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth, especially with rising fuel prices. Large organisations may be able to trade over far larger distances – using economies of scale to make sending a refrigerated container ship packed with New Zealand lamb halfway round the globe make financial sense – but for the small business (as most businesses are), local trade remains the most effective. The arrival of the railway and the aeroplane expanded the geographical limits of the small business’s economic potential, but we have yet to advance much beyond these limits, set now for more than half a century.

The geographical limitations of (economic) communities.

In practical terms, if a journey of more than a few hours is too long to be economically viable for small businesses, then the geographical limit of most small businesses is more or less continental. At the same time, the EU has done a good job of continuing the work of postwar reconstruction and improving Europe’s transportation and communications infrastructure, ensuring that the EU area is one of the most effectively interconnected on earth – rivalled only by the United States of America, which has the added advantage of a) having been a coherent nation state for 90 years before the EEC came into being, and b) working with a pretty much blank canvas.

But this is a minor issue – there is a far more compelling reason why socio-economic communities today still have geographical limits: time zones. It may well be possible to travel to the west coast of America in half a day, and to speak to someone in Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco at any time. But we still cannot get over the fact that there is an eight hour time difference between London and LA.

With office hours generally running from 9am to 6pm, we have a nine-hour window for normal economic activity. Working with a company on America’s east coast while based in London is feasible – the five-hour time difference allows a four-hour overlap, with the Americans starting work around 2pm London time – but working with a company based in Seattle presents problems, with only a one-hour shared office window. For effective working, you need to be able to communicate with colleagues pretty much all the time – losing more than about four hours every day from the nine hour working day will lead to growing inefficiencies. The technology exists to communicate with people on the other side of the world – but the fact remains that when you contact them, they may well be asleep.*

The continental United States is spread over four timezones. From the Atlantic to the Urals, Europe is also spread over four timezones. The same goes for Latin America. Africa is spread over five. Asia and Australasia are rather more spread out – yet if you take South East Asia through to eastern Australia, the time difference is only four hours again, yet covers Australia, Japan, the Phillippines, Indonesia, Thailand and most of China.

These are, geographically-speaking, all entirely practical economic units. Any small businessman on the east coast of America can easily trade with one on the west without needing anything much in the way of complicated planning. A shopkeeper in Portugal can phone a supplier in Turkey, and know he will be able to sort out his orders that same day – possibly even take delivery the same day, if he phones in the morning. But for someone in London to order a vital part from Japan, there remain serious practical difficulties – the nine-hour time difference compounded by a 12-hour flight time. By the time the Japanese supplier has got the message and sent the part, two days might well have passed – which in business terms can prove disastrous.

Today.

So now, by accident at least as much as design, Europe (or, at least, Western Europe) is, in terms of its infrastructure and and geography, about as coherent and sensible a socio-economic unit as most nation states were two centuries ago, before the arrival of the railways and telegraph – if not more so.

Having been working on coming together for longer than other parts of the world, the EU’s institutions, procedures and structures are further advanced. Yet they were not originally planned with the aim of taking advantage of new technologies – but of preventing the conflicts of earlier ages. The overriding feature of the way the EU currently works is the perennial clash between the institutional attempts to find compromises between conflicting national interests (the need for unanimity on substantial changes), and structural fluff designed to flatter the national egos (the hang-on of old school diplomacy that is the veto).

The big fear of the old developed (national) economies over the last decade has been the rise of the new economies of China, India and – to a lesser extent – Brazil. These nationally-focussed concerns have been passed on to the EU – the organisation’s member states have been trying to use the EU as a way of maintaining strength through numbers against the newcomers on the global scene. Technology has allowed for greater pooling of resources and more efficient ways of working, enabling the EU’s member states to maintain the hope that they can compete against the vast potential of India and China – a potential based largely upon those two countries’ huge populations and geographical areas, which on both counts rival those of continents.

Looking to a continental future?

Yet now there are signs of yet more new developments. In the last couple of weeks, two potentially hugely significant events took place – both of which took their inspiration from the European Union, and both of which recognise that continental-scale organisation (or, at least, organisation across several – but not more than four or five – timezones) is both desirable and practical.

First, in Latin America, the members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) decided to adopt a single currency – the SUCRE – explicitly modelled upon the euro. (And before you dismiss ALBA as made up of piddlingly insignificant countries, let’s not forget that the EU started out with just six member states, all still recovering from a devastating war, and three of which were tiny. Let’s also not forget ALBA’s more significant neighbours, who will be watching developments with interest.)

This was swiftly followed by fresh moves by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create a regional bloc – including an EU-style common market and, potentially, a euro-style single currency.

Yes, ASEAN can also be dismissed as being made up of a bunch of relative lightweights – its most significant members probably being Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, hardly global major players. But this new move shows far greater ambition – having been proposed by Japan, backed by China, and potentially including Australia, New Zealand and even the United States down the line. Any economic bloc including China and Japan among its members is a force to be reckoned with.

A new age?

And so we may be on the cusp of a major shift in global geopolitics and the structuring of the global economy. If these two new continental blocs get off the ground, the EU will have continental competitors for the first time. And the member states of the EU, until now using the benefits of membership to give themselves an economic advantage on the world stage, will find it even harder to compete as individuals.

Of course, timezone practicalities as well as national egos could still prevent the ASEAN plan from ever coing to fruition, but even a smaller-scale version of an Asia-Pacific version of the European Union would herald a major shift in the way the world works.

The upshot? The EU could well be about to shift from being a nice idea to being an absolute necessity.

* Yes, larger organisations can work on a 24-hour basis – but most businesses are not larger organisations. And for an economic community to benefit the most people within it, its advantages must be accessible to everyone without having to stay up all night.

There’s a big row going on about President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms in the US at the moment. It’s US politics, so holds little interest for me.

But then the Republicans – taking hyperbole and wilful disinformation to whole new levels – started bringing the British National Health Service into the debate (despite the NHS being nothing like what Obama’s proposing for the US). Sarah Palin (remember her?) has described the health service that my grandfather helped set up – turning down a very lucrative job in the private sector in the process – as “evil”. Various US right-wing rabble-rousers have repeated her hyperbolic description of the decision-making process of what drugs and treatments to offer on the NHS as being “death panels”, implying that the NHS is little more than a National Euthanasia Service – all in the name of smearing Obama’s planned reforms. It’s all sparked a major internet outcry from Brits disgusted at the sheer ignorance of some of these comments, slagging off a service that is, in more ways than one, a national institution.

I still didn’t really care, to be honest. It’s America. They do things differently there, and what they do has been up to them pretty much ever since that incident with the tea in Boston Harbour. (Well, bar us burning down the White House in 1814, but sssshhh…)

But then up stepped our old favourite Dan Hannan, blogging Tory MEP for South East England, and one of the most Eurosceptic (and, seemingly, out-of-touch) Conservative politicians going. He’s repeatedly been going on Fox News to slate the NHS in the most ridiculous terms – revealing either a complete ignorance of its services and functions or a desire to fellate the American right’s prejudices in a desperate attempt to revive his surprise YouTube success of earlier this year, which went down a storm in the States.

And so I got interested – because I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that Hannan (whom I previously regarded as intelligent and articulate, though with a disappointing tendency to play to the gallery) is a dangerous moron.

I’ve always slagged off the NHS as being wasteful, over-managed and unreliable – while still, please note, never for a moment thinking that it would be a good idea to get rid of it. But Hannan’s hyperbole, backed up with hugely out-of-date statistics, was just ridiculous – even more so than his bullshit claim that 84% of laws come from the EU.

So, over at Liberal Conspiracy, I’ve done a post in the only language right-wingers seem to understand: a US healthcare vs UK NHS cost/benefit analysis.

The results surprised me enough that I’m considering revising my previous preference for part-privatisation of the NHS…

If you haven’t, read the liveblog from the day, have a look at the one year on post, much of which still stands (though, thankfully, this country seems to be rather less hysterical about terrorism these days), and flick through the London Terror Attacks archive.

It’s important not to forget those that died. But although a memorial is being unveiled later today, the thing about terrorism remains that it exists to terrorise.

Four years on, the level of fear in London is back to what it was on 6th July 2005. People carry on their lives quite happily. The underground is packed with people not even giving a thought to the possibility of being blown up on the way to work. The majority of commuters this morning will not even remember that today is the anniversary of those deeply unpleasant events.

This is the best memorial.

Despite the best efforts of the terrorists – and the tabloid-whipped politicians scrabbling around in their wake with plans for detention without trial, stifling protest, DNA databases and countless other pointless draconian measures – our way of life has not been changed.

We, the people of London, were attacked – not the politicians, and not the innumerable armchair warmongers from around the world. The politicians and sabre-rattlers could do well to learn from our response – we dusted ourselves down, had a quick look around, and carried on with our lives.

The terrorists, hoping to have a major impact on the lives of everyone in this country, managed merely to kill and maim a few score innocents. They hoped to become heroes – they ended up little better than animals. And, four years on, they have been all but forgotten.

This is how it should be. If terrorists attack us to scare us and make us change our way of life, what better response is there than to carry on as if nothing has happened?

Via the Convention on Modern Liberty’s Twitter feed and following yesterday’s post on German concerns about the EU being used as a democratic bypass comes news of a worrying development for the freedom of every EU citizen:

People may be aware of the debate in the UK over access to communications data… but are less familiar with the role the UK government has played in the EU, where it first proposed mandatory data retention, backed by France, Ireland and Sweden, in April 2004. The final stages of its passage through the EU came under the UK presidency of the council, and their officials crawled all over the European parliament to get it passed. Despite widespread opposition from more than 200 civil society groups, the EU data protection commissioners and many in the parliament organised an alliance of the PSE (Socialist group, of which they are part) and the centre-right PPE (Conservative group) to steamroller it through in December 2005…

We have good reason to be very critical of the authoritarian direction the government has taken at home, but we should be equally vigilant of what the UK government gets up to in the EU – and at the same time wake up to the fact that many of the threats to our freedoms and liberties now originate from the EU. Indeed, the surveillance society, which makes suspects of us all, is to be the centrepiece of the next five-year plan for EU justice and home affairs to be adopted later this year (pdf).

As the Convention on Modern Liberty tweet noted, “EU law is now a major threat to privacy… And it’s not eurosceptic to say that”.

But, of course, this in nothing new. I noted the Blair government’s attempts to use the EU to force through unpopular changes a few years back, and was disgusted [on ID cards] and outraged [over internet regulation proposals - the first hints of this current unpleasant legislation] at the time. The real problem is, as ever, the governments of the member states and their ability to wrap up such deals behind closed doors at meetings of the Council – combined with a lack of reporting on the EU in the mainstream press that allows major national newspapers like the Guardian to fail to notice such distasteful legislation until it has already been passed, challenged in court, and passed again.

Give the people of Europe more say in how the EU is run, give the European Parliament more power to halt such unpleasantness, then press reporting on EU affairs would become more attentive, such moves by member state governments to abuse both the EU and its citizens would be spotted sooner, and effective pan-European opposition could be mobilised. As it is, everyone only finds out after it’s too late – no amount of attempts to highlight dodgy legislation from a mere small blog such as this one will ever reach enough people in time.

Meanwhile, let’s just sit back and marvel at how it is the UK – that last European bastion against the forces of totalitarian repression during the 1940s – that has been the driving force behind EU legislation that would not look out of place in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal or Vichy France.

Come on, EU – you’re meant to be better than this.

Update: Oh, the irony – the European Commission’s now complaining about people trying to steal its confidential data. What out OUR confidential data, Commission types?

Well, that could be one way of diffusing the ongoing EU/CIS standoff over EUropean energy supplies that recently saw death and destruction in Georgia and much of southern/eastern Europe lose gas supplies in the middle of winter. EurActiv reports that “Lawmakers in the European Parliament are considering inviting Russia to join the Union’s Nabucco gas pipeline project, to avoid competition with rival projects sponsored by Moscow in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute.”

The thing is, though, that Nabucco was designed almost exclusively to cut out Russia’s dominant role in European energy transit, as pointed out (with maps) back in August last year, plus July 2008, February 2008, January 2008, July 2007, and doubtless several dozen other posts.

Could giving Russia a share in the pipeline’s running (and, no doubt, profits) be a sensible solution? Well, yes. Sod the new dawn in EU-US relations that so many have been hoping for with the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House – Europe’s most vital extra-European relationship is not with America, but with Russia (counting Russia as outside Europe solely for the purpose of this post). We may have had a few bitchy slanging matches with the US during the Bush years, but the deterioration in European/Russian relations (and yes, I do mean the whole of Europe, not just EU member states) over the same period has been far more damaging for both parties.

With Putin – seemingly still obsessed with macho nationalistic posturing and apparently unable to stomach entering into genuine partnerships with the West – still pulling the strings, it’s likely going to be another few years before a true rapprochement between Europe and Russia can occur (which still seems odd, Putin having grown up in Russia’s most European city, St Petersburg, and having spent several years working for the KGB in Berlin). But appeals to Russian self-interest and self-esteem are certainly going to be the way to break down the barriers – played right, a Nabucco team-up with Russia could give the Kremlin just the kind of ego-boost it seems to run on. Europe on her knees, begging “Oh, won’t you help us, dear Russia? We can’t do it without you! is guaranteed to give plenty of good propaganda value back home, so has a moderate chance of succeeding.

(Warning – lots of short posts likely to follow on various topics as I continue to catch up on what I’ve missed over the last couple of weeks…)

Nothing changes, it seems. Just like 2008, 2009 promises to bring yet more Russian sabre-rattling and European fears about the continent’s long-term energy security.

Also time to welcome in the Czech EU presidency. With the Czech Republic currently being run by the neoliberal, eurosceptic Civic Democratic Party of President Václav Klaus and Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek – a party that’s already begun to align itself with Declan Ganley’s new anti-Lisbon Treaty Libertas movement – it could prove an interesting six months.

With the EU still stuck in a deadlock until the Irish question is sorted, will Klaus – increasingly a hero of the eurosceptic right EU-wide thanks to his repeated anti-EU pronouncements (even calling for the EU to be scrapped altogether back in 2005) – be able to use his elevated position over the next six months to advance the eurosceptic cause?

Substantive posts soon, honest. I’ve got a real-world deadline for the 5th, though, so need to prioritise.

Sounds promising, from Russian human rights organisation (yes, there are such things) Memorial – recently raided by armed police. These guys are still on the frontline of history, while those of use sitting comfortably in Western Europe can, bar the odd credit crisis, often feel as if Fukuyama may have had a point.

In any case, at its most basic the fun of history was always – for me – the competing accounts of what happened, and the sheer inability of pretty much any source to be free of bias. It’s invaluable journalistic training, history – if more journalists did history at university, the quality of the press would be vastly improved. You come, Rashomon-like, to distrust every account, and so hunt for as many different primary sources as possible to get the full picture. Accept one version of history, and you risk ending up like the blind men and the elephant. (Which is why, of course, Holocaust deniers shouldn’t be outlawed. Theirs is an alternate take on history, and can – despite being just about as categorically, demonstrably wrong as it is possible for an historical theory to be – merely by existing prompt new research and new approaches that may be able to cast light on one of the murkiest episodes of human history. Flawed hypotheses need to be disproved, not banned.)

So the new Memorial European history initiative reported by Eurozine strikes me as well worth supporting:

The twentieth century left deep and unhealed wounds in the memory of almost all nations in eastern and central Europe. Often, the memory of one nation contradicts that of another. If these disparities are recognised and understood, the historical awareness of each society is enriched. If not, they can be exploited for political ends.

Some of the specifics given in the article raise some vital issues about the ongoing post-WWII, post-Soviet recovery of Central and Eastern Europe that it’s all too easy to forget in the West – with many more older Eurozine articles well worth another look in the boxout on the right, such as Isolde Charim’s Historical Myths Old and New (very good on the EU’s “foundation myth” and failure to reconcile East and West).

Europe needs to confront its bloody past openly and honestly if it is ever going to move forward as one. Yet so much of our history we fail to understand – or even learn about. Too many historical myths continue largely unchallenged in the national consciousness of every country, from the old one of Magna Carta in the UK to the newer one of the Resistance in France. Yet without an honest, open understanding of our pasts – both individual and collective – how can we possibly hope to build a better future?

In a sign that everyone’s begun to realise that we’ve already hit the limit of economically-viable countries (if there is such a thing in the current climate) to join the EU, and following the lead of Sarkozy with his Mediterranean Union, it looks like Brussels is finally taking a more realistic attitude towards the old Soviet sphere.

Because, let’s face it, Armenia, Azerbaijan, (especially) Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have very little of benefit to offer the EU in economic terms bar their strategic importance for the transportation energy supplies. They need to be kept sweet, certainly – but it seems that lessons have finally been learned: if you make promises you have no intention of honouring, resentment will build (cf. the growing euroscepticism of Turkey, repeatedly rebuffed since the carrot of membership was first dangled). Worst case scenario, you may end up having to make good with the promises and hand membership to countries – like Romania and Bulgaria – that simply aren’t ready for it.

This newly revamped Eastern Partnership is an overdue heir to the old Phare scheme, which did so much to prepare the 2004 Central and Eastern European accession countries for membership. If done right, it could bolster goodwill towards the EU among these near neighbours. It may, if we’re lucky, help bolster their flagging economies and strengthen their nascent democracies (or even help make democracy more likely in the dictatorship of Belarus). If done badly, it will breed only resentment – not just among the countries themselves (annoyed at being denied the chance for full membership), nor even in Russia (irritated at her old sphere of influence being infiltrated once again), but also among current EU member states (thanks to fears of a sudden influx of migrants from these regions).

It’s hard not to think that Bulgaria and Romania got rather lucky. They’ve only been in the club for a couple of years, and arguably fail to live up to a number of the Copenhagen criteria for membership. If this apparent new tendency to look to “partnership” arrangements as an alternative to full membership had been devised back when Romania and Bulgaria were first being considered as applicants, a lot of fuss could have been saved.

We’re also, perhaps, beginning to see signs of future EU ambition. The EU’s already expanded its partnerships beyond the scope of Roman Empire. These new models of relationships – the Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership – could yet spread further: to Central Asia, further south in Africa, perhaps to South America via the EU enclave of French Guyana, possibly even to the Middle East and South East Asia.

For those who dream of a future of global free trade agreements, these moves – with their suggestions of trade partnerships and opening up of markets – are surely a promising sign that the EU is beginning to head in the right direction? Such partnerships could never have been negotiated (arguably imposed) by just one nation acting alone – but the collective bargaining power that the EU’s vast market has brought has given the organisation a genuinely powerful ability to broker such deals that should, in the long term, benefit everybody concerned.

I’ve never bought in to the idea that the ultimate goal of the EU is that mythical superstate. Instead, if you believe that global free(ish) trade is desirable – and if you’re going to go really utopian and over the top – it’s surely aiming for something along the lines of Star Trek’s Federation? Why, after all, aim for a common market on just one continent? If a common market is a good thing, surely it should be expanded globally?

Overly ambitious? Probably. But this sort of partnership agreement formed (or forced through?) by a pre-existing coalition is certainly a rather more realistic route to such an end goal than individual nations all bickering among themselves. If you want to see just how effective that sort of system can be, just have a gander at the increasingly ineffective United Nations or its League of Nations predecessor.

I was up all night, drinking vast quantities of beer and vodka, finally getting to bed around 11am UK time. It was certainly worth it – even though it was all over by 4:30 (CNN called it for Obama at 4am, with McCain’s concession speech starting just 20 minutes later) and even though I now have the kind of hangover I haven’t experienced since my student days after grabbing about 4 hours sleep.

Obama’s victory speech was pretty much note perfect (while McCain’s concession speech was of the kind that reminded me why I always used to like the guy) – referencing past epoch-making speeches from everyone from Martin Luther King through Kennedy, Lincoln and Disraeli. It was so good I had to listen to it again, and again, and again to try and pick holes in it, without a great deal of success. He’s a hugely impressive public speaker of the kind I thought we might never see again. An almost 19th century feel to his seemingly effortless delivery.

But, though a little bit of excitement and hyperbole is more than permissible on such an undeniably historic day, us non-Americans – perhaps especially us Europeans – shouldn’t get too excited by President Obama.

He’s got a massive challenge ahead of him – and though I hate the exaggeration over the current credit crisis as much as the next man (exaggeration that Obama himself succumbed to in his speech, referencing the worst financial crisis in a century, when it’s simply not) it’s not over-the-top to say that Obama faces the most serious domestic challenge since FDR in 1932.

If Obama is to do his best for his country – and for the world – he must fix America’s domestic woes before he starts to look overseas. He needs to be sensible and not try to do too much, caught up in all this talk of history and destiny, when every African-American from Spike Lee to Condoleezza Rice has been cropping up on the telly with tears in their eyes. And us non-Americans need to be patient and always remember that he’s THEIR president, elected to serve HIS country first, not ours. Relations with the US will almost certainly improve – they would have done no matter who was elected this time around – but though the image of America has shifted dramatically overnight, we cannot expect a change in American foreign policy anywhere near as swift.

- As that all-important US election looms ever closer, EU foreign ministers are meeting today to discuss how to rebuild those battered ties between Europe and America that conventional wisdom sees as having been so badly damaged during the Bush years. Across Europe – hell, across the world – everyone is waiting for Wednesday’s result. But pretty much every prediction is just speculation.

- Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, is Barack Obama (a half-Kenyan, half-American born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia) just too European? Well, according to (some) Americans, perhaps.

- For Europeans there are a number of signs that Obama may not be quite as sympathetic to this continent as his famous trip here a few months ago might suggest. These are also hardly new concerns – and despite some promising signs that Obama realises the EU’s potential importance, there remains much we don’t know. So why is Barack Obama so popular in Europe?

- Shifting off to random bits and bobs, via Pubic Affairs 2.0, a long-overdue and most welcome addition to the European Parliament website: a handy range of RSS feeds. (Ignore the podcasts for now, though – they don’t seem to be overly regular…)

- The old straight bananas row seems to be back:

A leading supermarket has been forced to ditch a healthy eating campaign at the eleventh hour after discovering its staff could be individually prosecuted under EU regulations.

This, methinks, is worth looking into in more detail, especially as the Commission is set to rethink various fruit and veg regulations later this month.

- Will the credit crisis see the Eurozone expand, rather than contract? It may look attractive at the moment – but is the single currency a sensible option?

Two articles well worth a gander, both trying to work out the “new post-Cold War world order” that increasing numbers are identifying in the wake of the Georgia crisis, and slowly trying to define.

First up, from The Economist, this week’s Charlemagne:

Never has the European Union enjoyed such diplomatic prominence… Seen from Brussels, the Georgian crisis has exposed a tectonic shift in the global balance of power. It is not just that Russia is back. The crisis has also confirmed Europe’s sense of an America in relative decline…

A previous generation of EU leaders, such as Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schröder, dreamt of a multipolar world, in which several powers would wield clout. Now something like it may have arrived. Yet today’s European leaders are not crowing. Talk to ministers and officials in private, and they admit that the new world order is making them anxious.

Next, a similar take from a more Russian perspective over at Eurozine:

The general mood in Moscow these days is that “Russia is up, America is down, and Europe is out. Russia, previously a Pluto in the Western solar system, has spun out of its orbit, powered by the determination to find its own system.”

…mutual suspicion, misperception, frustration, and paranoia are starting to determine the dynamics of the relationship between Russia and the European Union… In the eyes of the West, Russia has turned from a partner-in-the-making into an adversary-in-the-making. The mixture of mercantilism and messianism that is at the core of the Kremlin’s new foreign policy frightens Europe.

We’re in the midst of a new wave of historical revisionism, another period of reassessment of the shifts in world power following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is nothing new – Fukuyama’s The End of History was published way back in 1992, and has been repeatedly attacked pretty much from the day it appeared for its claims that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. What does appear to be a new trend, however, is the emphasis on the role the EU may play in this new analysis – largely because its potential is seen as so great, yet its current impact on world events perceived as so minimal.

The one thing that does seem agreed upon is that the hesitancy of the EU is one of its defining characteristics. While Russia and America are reverting to Cold War rhetoric and tit for tat retaliation (”You invade Georgia? We’ll invest vast amounts of money there.” ; “You site missile defence systems in eastern Europe? We’ll point nukes at you.” etc.), the EU is sitting back and prevaricating. Cunning strategy, or just the inevitable consequence of the EU’s ongoing inability to work out its path following the failure of Nice, the constitution and Lisbon?

The US, Russia and the EU are all passing through identity crises – the US finding it’s neither as loved nor as powerful as it once thought, Russia shaking off the embarrassment of defeat through a resurgent sense of national pride, the EU going round and round in circles through indecision and a lack of clear purpose. How they will resolve these, we will have to wait and see. One thing that does seem clear, however, is that our current decade will be written about and analysed for decades to come – the new century bringing not just the US shift of The War Against Terror but also the emergence of Putin in Russia and EU stagnation following the failure of the Treaty of Nice back in 2001, all three developments whose long-term impact has yet to be resolved, yet which could well be immense. We are living in interesting times.

This will bear close analysis, even with the imminent change of regime in Washington. Running, as it does, to nearly 6,000 words, I don’t have the time just now, but will hopefully return to this on the morrow. For now, read for yourselves the statement made by the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (apparently from the 9th, though it has only just gone online):

Russia’s intensified pressure and provocations against Georgia – combined with a serious Georgian miscalculation – have resulted not only in armed conflict, but in an ongoing Russian attempt to dismember that country.

The causes of this conflict – particularly the dispute between Georgia and its breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – are complex, and all sides made mistakes and miscalculations. But key facts are clear: Russia sent its army across an internationally recognized boundary, to attempt to change by force the borders of a country with a democratically-elected government and, if possible, overthrow that government – not to relieve humanitarian pressures on Russian citizens, as it claimed.

This is the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union that Moscow has sent its military across an international frontier in such circumstances, and this is Moscow’s first attempt to change the borders that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union. This is a troubling and dangerous act.

Today I will seek to explain how we got here, how we’re responding, and the implications for our relationship with Russia.

Needless to say, any shift in American attitudes towards Moscow will have some significant implications for Europe. What those will be we shall have to wait and see over the coming months – November’s election is getting increasingly crucial for Europe. I’d been intending to avoid commenting on US politics, but perhaps it’s time to look in more detail at what we might expect from McCain and Obama when it comes to Europe – as it seems that their attitudes towards Russia are going to be crucial.