Category Archives: Culture

A letter to Private Eye

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(I’ll copy the offending article below the fold, for those who are interested. And for non-UK readers who don’t know what Private Eye is, it’s the UK’s best satirical political magazine – and also one of the few publications to still bother with proper investigative journalism. I’ve been reading it pretty much every issue since the early 90s, and can safely say that it’s far and away my favourite magazine, and probably the prime thing that inspired me to start blogging.)

Come on, Strobes – your EU coverage is becoming laughably bad. In Brussels Sprouts in Eye 1227 you quote the “director” of “The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre” (later just “the EU Research Centre”), who has supposedly “exposed” yet more devious details of the Lisbon Treaty as Ireland looks set to vote again on the damned thing.

Aside from the fact that what is supposedly “exposed” is actually just re-hashed, unproven speculative analysis that did the rounds of the Euroblogs well over a year ago, what’s most shocking is that had you bothered to look it up on Google you’d find that the impressive-sounding National Platform EU Research and Information Centre is actually nothing more than one man and his blog, most of the content of which consists of cut and pasted newspaper reports. Not only that, but judging by blog search engine Technorati, it’s a singularly unknown blog (only six inbound links) – probably why I’d never heard of it.

I’ve been running a well-regarded blog on EU affairs for nearly six years now (shortlisted for Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards and given the Jury’s Commendation in the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Awards 2008, among various other accolades). But now I see where I’m going wrong – I should start referring to myself as the director of some grandiose-sounding institute and start spamming people with “press releases” to make people assume that I’m from a thinktank.

Seriously – if you need a fact-checker for your EU stuff, let me know. Brussels Sprouts has always had a tendency to believe the worst of the eurosceptic conspiracy theories, but now it’s getting silly.

As for the rest, keep up the (mostly) good work!

Yours,

J Clive Matthews (aka Nosemonkey)
Nosemonkey’s EUtopia
(henceforward to be known as The European Institute for EU Insight and Objectivity – E.I.E.I.O.)
www.jcm.org.uk/blog

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The Economist, the EU and online media strategies

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The EconomistI’ve been rather busy this week, so have only just realised that The Economist’s superb EU-focussed blog Certain Ideas of Europe is – for reasons unknown – being cancelled.

Public Affairs 2.0 asks a few questions. Has the writer left? I doubt it – I’m pretty certain it was produced by more than one staffer. Has The Economist given up on blogs? Well, it doesn’t seem to be cancelling its other blogs – Free Exchange, Democracy in America, Gulliver or The World in 2009.

So, is it that The Economist has run out of ideas on Europe, as Public Affairs 2.0 asks, or is it something else? With the Summer’s European Parliamentary elections fast approaching, with Ireland likely to hold another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, with the European Commission soon to change over, surely interest in EU affairs is likely to rise? Surely now, more than ever, is the time that regular daily analysis of EU affairs is vital?

Well, yes. But The Economist is a business, not a public service organisation. I for one would be astounded if Certain Ideas of Europe ever got anywhere near the traffic of the other Economist blogs – not due to any lack of quality (I often used to cite it as one of the best), but purely thanks to the subject-matter. Producing any kind of commercial publication – even a blog – about the EU simply will not make you much cash. Unless, that is, you target the obsessives. And that, generally speaking, means targeting the eurosceptics. Certain Ideas of Europe, aiming for balanced and restrained coverage, simply wasn’t angry or sensational enough to draw in the crowds.

EU affairs remain a specialist interest. Providing free information is not worthwhile, because there are so few people who care. This is why The Economist’s EU-focussed spin-off European Voice keeps so much of its content locked behind a subscription wall. By my calculations, I get a similar monthly readership to the print version of the European Voice (based on their paid-for sales – more likely to be read than the vast number of comp copies they put out). And that’s in a month when I’ve not been posting much.

Of course, the way European Voice survives is the complimentary copies that make up a good 89% of its 18,500 print run. Because as these are sent to so many EU bigwigs, free of charge, it enables the European Voice sales team to claim that 7,398 individuals in the European Commission, 505 in the European Parliament and 433 in the Council of Ministers are subscribers. “Ooooh!”, think the advertisers, “that means we can get our message in front of people who really matter!” It’s the same loss-leading advertising strategy used by fellow EU news weekly The Parliament Magazine, as well as UK-centred ones like The House Magazine and Total Politics, among others.

It’s a perfectly valid ad sales technique, and been going on for years. As long as you’ve got a decent sales team, you can pull it off. It doesn’t matter whether every single one of those complimentary copies is put in the recycling bin by some beleaguered secretary as soon as they arrive without even entering the same room as the political bigwig whose name is on the subscriber list – the fact that it *might* be read by them is usually enough for the advertisers.

Not so online. Online, statistics can be padded (using visitors rather than unique visitors, page loads rather than visitors, hits rather than page loads, etc.), but they are much harder to bluff completely. If an advertiser asks outright how many people visit your website and you give them low number, why would they bother advertising with you? You can’t possibly get away with “well, we may only get 200 visitors a day, but every single one of them is really important, honest” in the same way that you can with print.

What does this all mean? Well, by the European Voice’s own media pack’s figures (warning – PDF), fewer than 2,000 people a week are willing to pay money for that publication. That’s significantly less than most paid-for local newspapers in the UK. It could never survive on subscriptions alone – there simply isn’t enough interest.

Likewise, the lack of interest in EU matters means that online readership would be similarly dire even if they did put all of their content up for free, and this would not be enough to attract any advertising whatsoever. (Case in point – I’ve recently started a BlogActiv mirror for some of the content on this site. Even on days when I’ve been featured as Editor’s Choice on their front page and in the daily EurActiv email bulletins, it’s got less traffic than this place. Both BlogActiv and EurActiv survive off grants and sponsorship, not traditional advertising.)

So the European Voice survives purely through the advertising attracted by all those comp copies to the bigwigs – something almost impossible to pull off with an online-only publication. (Well, I could pull the same trick with this place if I wanted – I’d just have to enter the email addresses of everyone who works in the Commission and EP into my email subscriber list. 99% of them would mark all my emails as spam, but, by the same logic as works with complimentary print publications, who cares? They’re on the list – that’s what matters.)

Certain Ideas of Europe, of course, was online only. Without a print presence, it had no advertising potential – just as most individual blogs have no advertising potential (hence the plethora of blog advertising networks like BlogAds and its imitators that use strength in numbers approaches, grouping dozens of blogs together to offer a combined readership that might be of interest to advertisers).

As a commercial publisher trying to make money, for The Economist to continue publishing a blog about EU affairs evidently does not make any business sense. Because it is all but impossible to make money out of writing about the EU. No one is interested. No one cares. This place is one of the longest-running and better-known English-language EU-centred blogs, and it’s not even in the top 100 UK political blogs by inbound links or readership. And of those top 100 UK political blogs, only about five or six have enough traffic, capital and business know-how behind them to even approach being viable commercial concerns.

Last week media blogger Gary Andrews asked whether the current credit crisis might see local newspapers shift to online only publishing. As I noted in the comments, I can’t see it. Local newspapers may fold as the web removes traditional sources of advertising revenue (largely by offering alternatives to local newspaper small ads for free on sites like Craigslist and its clones) – but without a print presence to give the potential of at least some big buck adverts, I can’t see how special-interest websites (be they local newspapers or EU-centred) will ever be able to generate enough money to survive.

Online ads are still pretty much restricted to banner, skyscraper, MPU and text-based (either links or advertorials), with only a few other options for sound- and video- based sites. None of these have any hope of having as much impact as a full-page newspaper advert, even if they can be seen by many times more people. And for all of them, advertisers are canny enough to demand exact viewing/readership figures – something that will always be impossible for print. And all of this means that online adverts will always be restricted in the amount of revenue they can generate – because most advertising rates are based on little more than what the ad salesperson can get away with. Online, they can get away with far less.

All this, of course, means not just the slow death of proper scrutiny of borough and county councillors as local newspapers begin to die out, but also the continued lack of serious scrutiny of EU-level politics, and the continued lack of that kind of European public sphere or demos we’re always told is a precondition for genuine democracy.

Because if you can’t make money out of publishing something, no commercial publisher with any sense is going to try. This applies to the EU just as it applies to local newspapers or magazines specialising in knitting scarves out of human hair.*

And so it is that we are losing one of the best EU blogs just as we approach a crunch year for EU affairs. Unless you’re like the BBC, and forced to cover events that are deemed “in the public interest” (even though the public remains singularly uninterested), writing about the EU is never going to make you any money. Not until it becomes more interesting to the public at large, at any rate – and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

* There are (almost) always business models that will work for special-interest publications – but they will rarely involve much expenditure on either editorial content or publicity, being produced at minimal cost and very, very carefully targeted. There are several magazines devoted solely to alpaca farming, for instance – but when was the last time you saw a copy at a newsagent?

With a minimal editorial team and a skilled couple of ad sales people, it would be possible to turn a decent profit from a magazine devoted to EU affairs – if anyone’s interested in launching one, get in touch. But in the present climate it’d only be possible in one language – two at a push. Try to do a genuinely EU-wide magazine published in several languages? Not a hope in hell that there’d be enough interest to justify the expense of all the translators and language-specific subs. Just as it wouldn’t be worthwhile producing a magazine on alpaca farming with a 20-strong editorial team.

Intriguing European history initiative

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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?

“Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing”

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Interesting report over at Kosmopolito on a recent lecture by frequently controversial Slovenian lefty intellectual Slavoj Zizek. For followers of the post-Marxian philosopher, there’s probably not much new – but some of his ideas are well worth pondering at greater length, not least for those of us interested in the future of Europe. As Kosmopolito’s Tanchi notes Zizek as commenting,

“Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing.”

These borders need not be the traditional lines on maps – they can be cultural as much as any kind of arbitrary physical boundary. Indeed, Zizek has much pondered the concept of multiculturalism, now gradually falling out of favour, as in this interview from back in August. Anti-multicultural right-wingers may be surprised at just how much they find themselves agreeing with this self-professed communist:

I think here we had enough of this multicultural ideology, which for me at least is often an inverted racism – namely for example when people come here – typically multiculturalists would say: “Oh I want to understand how you are different.” No… We need today codes of discretion, not more understanding. I think we should totally object to this liberal blackmail; we should understand each other – no the world is too complex we can not – I hate people, I don’t want to understand people. I want to have a certain code where I don’t understand your way of life and you don’t understand mine but we still can coexist.

Yet it’s not just a racial or national lack of understanding or rivalry that can be the problem – it can also be political. When the people become alienated from the political class, resentment can arise just as much (if not more so) than when fear or mistrust of “the other” leads to rising ethnic/cultural tensions. And it all stems from a lack of understanding on both sides – often coupled with a patronising tone from one or the other. The same tone that tells us that British National Party supporters join through resentment at lack of opportunity and personal failure is used to explain away the “No” votes to the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands (and subsequently the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland). As Zizek noted three years ago, after the French referendum,

The elite proposed to the people a choice that was effectively no choice at all. People were called to ratify the inevitable. Both the media and the political elite presented the choice as one between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology…

Patronise the people – even if they deserve it – and they will turn on you. Witness the recent kerfuffle in the UK on reality TV show Strictly Come Dancing, where the most useless contestant was repeatedly kept on by the public vote seemingly just to spite the expert judges.

Perhaps thanks to the weapons of mass destruction that never were, though the trend started long before that (Watergate, perhaps?) the world has become a more cynical, distrustful place – and politicians are among the least trusted of the lot. If a politician tells us that something is the case, we the people tend to believe the precise opposite. If a politician – sitting comfortably in their plush houses on their vast, taxpayer-funded salaries – tells us that they understand our concerns, our first reaction is to snort in derision.

And so the borders go up between the political elites and the people. Turnouts at elections drop year after year. More votes are cast for the winner of Big Brother than in general elections. Party membership tails off as even the most politically engaged lose faith and interest. Resentment grows along with populism, as politicians desperately try to re-engage with the public to the extent that Cabinet ministers feel the need to comment on The X Factor in parliament, or simply follow whatever mindless witch-hunt the tabloid press are up to this week.

If we’re alienated from our national politicians, what hope for those EU level politicians, about whom we know nothing?

And then, of course, there’s the psychological borders rising between the people themselves as opinions and resentments become entrenched and no amount of debate can change minds. Non-geographical borders along the purple America model, where resentment grows, and two ideologically wildly different nations live – literally – side by side in the same geographical territory.

Ignore the obvious race and religion based forms of multiculturalism – what happens when mutually-exclusive political cultures begin to arise within a democratic society?

But this post is already overlong and rambling, so perhaps that’s one for another day…

EU initiative in “overwhelmingly popular” shocker!

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Europeana holding pageThat’d be Europeana, the EU’s digital cultural history portal, whose purpose is “bringing you digitised books, films, paintings, newspapers, sounds and archives from Europe’s greatest collections” (with more info on the development site).

The project went live yesterday – and, as you’ll already know if you’ve clicked the first of those links, attracted so much interest that it immediately broke under the strain of visitors (the holding page on the site currently claiming “10 million visitors an hour”, which by my reckoning would either make it the most popular website launch in history, or be somewhat of an exaggeration…)

I’ve long been of the opinion that the EU’s best bet for getting people on board is to give them things they can actually appreciate – be it movies and film festivals via the little-known MEDIA Plus programme, music festivals or sporting events. To put it cynically, follow the old Roman tradition of giving the people circuses and spectacle to get their support. This should, in theory, be a relatively cost-effective alternative – and as such should be applauded (probably – it’s hard to tell as the site’s down…). The fact that it has apparently been so popular on its first day is a heartening sign – not least because projects with a focus on the arts rarely appear to attract that much attention these days. (But perhaps it’s because of all the porn?)

(The anti-EU alternate version of this post, by the way, is headed “EU so rubbish it can’t even launch a website” and goes on to rant about Brussels bureaucrats wasting our taxes on projects that are a) designed to culturally brainwash us all, and b) wouldn’t be able to survive commercially. There’s a surprisingly large cross-over between anti-EU types and those who argue that there should be no public funding for the arts, you’ll find. Which in my books means that there’s a surprisingly large cross-over between anti-EU types and philistines…)

The state of EU debate

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A subject worth another look every year or so – especially with EU elections looming in 2009 – is what sort of discussion (if any) the European Union is inspiring among its citizens. After all, I remain top Google result for “EU debate” (and second only to the EU’s own Debate Europe forum without the inverted commas), and the nature of political discourse surrounding the EU was one of the reasons I first started blogging about the whole thing. (Largely to slag off some of the nuttier anti-EU types, at first, but I’ve expanded a bit since then…)

I last had a look at EU debate nine months ago, which provides a fairly handy overview of how nothing much has changed during the time I’ve been blogging (Don’t believe me? Here’s a post on the subject from four years ago) – and that followed an intensive series of posts on the possibilities for building a genuine European demos that I did for openDemocracy (that’s the thing that I got shortlisted for that Reuters award for).

As such, for me to do another post on the subject is largely redundant. Thankfully, however, the newly revamped Kosmopolito (at an all new address and with an extra vowel) has had a stab, and brings a different, yet complimentary, take to the whole thing. One point in particular that stands out, however:

It is still cumbersome for non-experts to monitor the EU decision making process. Especially the internet and new online tools have the potential to make it easier to monitor and control EU decision making processes. Even though the europa.eu portal contains most of the information, it needs a serious relaunch. A new EU portal needs to be transparent, with a focus on policy processes that makes it easy to follow documents, combined with some interactive elements.

This cannot be stressed enough. I’m actively interested in the EU. I’ve been blogging about it for five years. I know my way around most of the sources of EU information available online, and I know (roughly) where to start looking to delve deeper into particular subjects. Yet even I still find it difficult to find what I’m looking for sometimes. (Where is an EU equivalent of TheyWorkForYou or The Public Whip? The only thing similar is Brussel Stemt, a Dutch-language site tracking the votes of Dutch MEPs – as far as I’m aware there’s nothing else out there.) The Europa portal has a near impossible task in trying to provide so much information in so many different languages, certainly, but it remains one of the most confusing, unintuitive sites on the web.

One of the major reasons why Euromyths spread so quickly – and also why the Lisbon Treaty has sparked so much opposition – is that the people find it impossible to find out information about the EU for themselves. (As noted the other day, to argue against the classic straight bananas Euromyth necessitates hunting down an obscure EU regulation and then trawling through and attempting to understand seven pages of legal jargon. Far easier just to believe what your newspaper tells you.)

If information is hard to come by or hard to understand, the power of the press and other self-professed experts to influence public opinion is massively increased. When the experts and the press are themselves ill-informed (as most journalists writing about the EU and many national politicians commenting on it sadly are) or biased (as is certainly often the case in the UK), the public is – intentionally or otherwise – going to be misled and misinformed. A misled and misinformed public in turn leads to misinformed debate, and that to an ineffective democracy. (Indeed, it’s arguable that part of the reason the public are so uninterested in the EU is that they’ve been consistently misinformed about just how important it is to their daily lives – if only they knew, claim some eurosceptics, they’d be up in arms.)

I’m afraid I can’t see this situation changing any time soon. EU debates outside the Brussels beltway remain largely non-existent, dominated by lack of solid factual knowledge and understanding (by both sides) and a lack of interest from anyone bar obsessives (as Jon Worth noted is still the case as recently as June, and as I’ve been saying for years). Hell, sometimes even the obsessives aren’t that interested.

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EU democracy from an unlikely source

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And from the most unlikely of sources – Britain’s leading terrestrial commercial television channel ITV. The self-same ITV that’s been kicking up a fuss over it’s obligation to provide “public service” programmes for the last year or more.

So, following Euronews, EUX.TV and the European Parliament’s own EuroparlTV, we now get a version aimed exclusively at the UK, aiming to promote knowledge and understanding of the EU and MEPs in the run-up to next year’s European Parliament elections: ITV Local’s MyEurope.

It may suffer from the perennial problem of these sorts of attempts to make the EU accessible (namely misguided efforts to target younger audiences via “trendy” music and over-excitable presenters), the promised Video profiles of MEPs are currently missing (at least for London), and their links section fails to mention this place or Fistful under EU blogs while finding time for the long-defunct Voice of Europe and a blog I’ve never heard of with barely any EU coverage, but still – who’d have thought it? A UK-focussed initiative to increase knowledge of EU affairs and encourage participation in EU democracy launched by a commercial organisation that’s previously shown barely a smidgeon of interest in Brussels. Whatever next?

Note to ITV – if you want a hand sorting out some of the niggles and expanding some of the written content, get in touch. I offer competitive rates and I’m fairly certain that a certain Mr Worth may be able to help you and all…

Still, MyEurope – a good initiative. MEPs have long been some of the least well-known of all public servants in the UK, an it’s long overdue that they were made a bit more accessible. Hopefully this should help.

EuroparlTV

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It’s about time, but the European Parliament just got that little bit more accessible to us members of the great unwashed with today’s launch of EuroparlTV. With subtitles and voiceovers in 23 languages, initial impressions are good, though I can’t pretend to have played with it enough to have worked out the bugs as of yet.

It’s produced by the same company that are responsible for Sky TV’s braindead quiz Are You Smarter Than A 10 Year Old?, so they should know how simple these things need to be – nothing too fancy, nothing too complicated. Time will tell if their back-end is up to scratch, and whether the search function is intelligent enough to serve up the videos and information we need, but still – good effort (and props to blogging London Labour MEP Mary Honeyball for campaigning for something like this to come about

The reported annual budget of nine million euros is no doubt enough to get the anti-EU crowd up in arms, but considering the logistics of the thing and the general tendency towards massively inflated costs for governmental IT projects (the recent UK parliament redesign apparently setting us taxpayers back more than £3 million, and 10 Downing Street’s recent move to same free blogging software that runs this site setting us back £100k), that’s peanuts. And, though we’ll have to wait and see what the spin is and just how much unfiltered video will find its way online, though this may well be pro-EU propaganda (again, it’s too early to say for certain) it also can’t be denied that greater accessibility to information about the EU is good for all sides, pro or anti.

Sorry for the extended absence, by the way. Busy. Switzerland was aces, though, even if the weather was a little British:

Saint Saphorin, Switzerland

Humoristische Karte von Europa

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Via Erkan, this truly is a superb collection. A couple were familiar, but figurative mapmaking was a popular genre from the 18th through to the early 20th century, so little wonder a number from this exclusively First World War set were new. The real sell are the descriptions – so often satirists’ points can be lost over time, and even more so when the images are reproduced a tad too small. Anyway, my favourite, by Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers – hard to believe from the style that this was drawn in 1915 (and I do love the Russian giant, too big to fit fully on the map…):

Het Gekkenhuis (Oud Liedje, Nieuwe Wijs)

The Russian Ozymandias

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (image leeched from Wikipedia)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead, another of the giants of 20th century literature gone, his works already diminished from handy anti-Soviet conversation pieces for the dinner party set to dusty history source books.

The Gulag Archipelago remains his best-known book, though most people will only have read the expurgated version rather than as three chunky volumes. They may have tinkered with Cancer Ward. But, let’s face it, most people who’ve read any Solzhenitsyn will only have read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – an easy hundred or so pages of Soviet horror. Quick to read, quick to be forgotten.

While The Gulag Archipelago will be foisted on reluctant history students for decades, if not centuries to come, its catalogue of horrors becomes so vast as to be overwhelming, desensitising. This is why Ivan Denisovich is more familiar – the crimes committed by the likes of Stalin were just too vast to comprehend other than through the stories of individuals. Yes, all those mentioned in The Gulag Archipelago were individuals too, but by their sheer number they become faceless. Statistics. They blur into one, the easier to forget – as Robert Conquest noted in his (400+ page) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-famine, “We may perhaps put this in perspective… by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

It’s something Martin Amis tried to get across in his stab at writing about the crimes of the Soviets in Koba the Dread (worth a read even if you don’t like Amis or his hectoring tone), having opened with the above quote from Conquest: “We cannot understand it… It takes a significant effort of imagination…”

The Soviet gulags, like their cousins the Nazi concentration camps, are indeed all but impossible to comprehend. Without Solzhenitsyn, we couldn’t have the first chance of even trying to imagine what they were like, let alone of understanding. And yet what he tried to describe in The Gulag Archipelago still remains impossible to comprehend – the sheer vastness and hostility of Siberia, for one, remains a struggle for me to grasp even now that I’ve endured the long flight gazing down on its featureless whiteness on several trips to Japan.

Meanwhile, his best book, the work that best shows off his literary genius – August 1914 – languishes largely unread, currently up for grabs on Amazon.co.uk for just 1p. Yes, that’s one English penny. It is at once the best book about the First World War I’ve ever read and the real perfect symbol of Solzhenitsyn – vast in size, detailed in its research, beautiful in its language, able somehow to bring to life events impossible to imagine in that first month of the war, yet also marred by early censorship (pick up Lenin in Zurich – also currently going for a penny – for some of the missing bits), more known of than read, and somehow incomplete. For August 1914, all 600+ pages of it (1000+ with the restoration of the missing bits) was but the first in an intended series – The Red Wheel – covering Russia’s road to revolution and its subsequent repression.

Of this series, he completed just four books over a twenty-year period, of which I believe only August 1914 and November 1916 has so far been translated into English. It’s a masterpiece, but a difficult and ultimately disappointing one – because now he is dead and it will never be completed, destined to become, in the memorable phrase of Nina Khrushcheva (writing in The Nation on Solzhenitsyn’s 80th birthday back in 1999),

“little more than a crank’s mausoleum within which his Nobel Prize-worthy talent has been interred.”

And so, thanks in part to the sheer length of time it took him to write them, in part thanks to his unshakable public image as the guy who writes about gulags, these works that Solzhenitsyn himself seemingly hoped to make his true literary legacy languish mostly unread and, in some cases, unpublished outside his native tongue. Where his books were once unread through censorship, they now gather dust through lack of interest – and with his death, Solzhenitsyn himself is doubtless destined to join Ozymandias – a symbol of something great, yet increasingly forgotten.

We cannot comprehend the horrors of the 20th century – not the slow march into death of the Somme, not the cattle-truck convoys to the gas chambers of Belsen, and not the icy nothingness of Siberian exile – but we also cannot forget them. Even if Solzhenitsyn did, in the last decades of his life, become obsolete with the fall of Communism – a symbol of rebellion and independence so powerful that he was quickly moulded by the canny Putin to be wheeled out as a propaganda tool – and even though his works may increasingly be unread these days, he is one of the few twentieth century writers whose works we already know are important enough to be taught as history.

Yet few want to read “important” books. Better, then, to remember Solzhenitsyn the man as something separate from his actual works. The Gulag Archipelago was “important” when it first came out – since the fall of the Soviet Union it is no longer, yet it remains a truly great work of history and of literature. August 1914 was overshadowed by the earlier, “important” works on life under the Soviets when it came out. Now, finally, it can perhaps emerge from the shadows. Solzhenitsyn himself will forever be associated with the Soviet era, but perhaps now we can finally start to read his books not just for their insight into incomprehensible times, but for the beauty of their language, the knife-edge sharpness of their descriptions, and the all-pervading feeling of muffled hope amid hopelessness that is, above all, the true legacy of the twentieth century. That his final masterpiece, the Red Wheel series, will now remain unfinished seems strangely apt for a man who has come to symbolise a period in which all too many lives were ended too soon.

And still, his books remain to remind us of the horrors of war and repression, hopefully to prevent future leaders making the same mistakes, though we all know such lessons are rarely learned:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Solzhenitsyn, I hope, would be in agreement:

SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of death?

Solzhenitsyn: No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me — he died at the age of 27 — and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.

SPIEGEL: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.

Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don’t. It’s enough.

UK political blogs just aren’t profitable

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And so another attempt to make money out of someone blathering on about politics has failed, with the closure of Westmonster.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so…

Note to any other wannabe online publishers thinking of starting a UK politics blog: don’t bother. The audience figures even for the biggest aren’t sufficiently high (certainly in terms of uniques) to warrant any advertiser forking out anywhere near enough money to make such ventures profitable. The only way to make money via British blogging is adapting the long tail model, stealing some ideas out of AdSense’s book, and setting up an advertising platform across numerous blogs. Only Blogads has already done that – and the UK version, MessageSpace, is backed by some of those self-same big boys of the UK blog world.

Or, of course, you could lobby for funding and sponsorship – seems to work for places like EurActiv, that’d never (that I can see) be able to survive on advertising revenue alone. But the thing to remember is this: if newspapers only had political news in them, they’d swiftly go bankrupt.

A shift in focus: History and Culture

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You may have noticed that over the last few months the rate of posting here has declined. It’s a combination of over-work and lack of interest in the current political goings-on, and has inspired a slight shift in focus in an attempt to get me posting more frequently.

In the UK, we’re in that dull mud-slinging period prior to an election almost certain to see a change of government (that may not arrive for another two years), much like the interminable years of party fervour of 1990-97. The Labour v Tory rivalry always bores me – especially when everyone gets so het up about it all. But sadly the golden age of cross-party unity over a hatred of Tony Blair has ended, and petty squabbles are again on the rise.

When it comes to the EU, we’re in yet another period of stagnation caused by the rejection of yet another tedious and uninspiring treaty, much like the interminable last seven years (or more) since the Treaty of Nice singularly failed to achieve what it was meant to. I’ve already written so much on the Lisbon Treaty and Constitution that I’m not sure if I can handle churning out any more attempts at constructive criticism, soothsaying or analysis. At least, not for a while.

Elsewhere in Europe, there’s not a great deal of excitement among the domestic politics of the various states at the moment either, from what I can tell. Even Berlusconi’s being entirely predictable since his return to power (engineering a grant of immunity from prosecution and spurting out broad, brainless populist nonsense at every opportunity). The only thing that does spark an interest is the ongoing threat of Russian energy dominance, a new phase of which was hinted at over the weekend with suggestions that the Kremlin might be using oil supply to the Czech Republic to try and force the Czech government to backtrack over the proposed US missile defence shield.

But this is not meant to be one of those semi-regular “blogger announces he/she’s going to quit blogging in an attempt to garner praise from readers before swiftly posting more than ever” posts.

Clio, The Muse Of History And Song, 1758 - Francois BoucherInstead, I’ve decided to start writing about things that still interest me when the political goings on are getting tedious. Keeping in with the general theme of this place – and giving an excuse to make that little piece of paper with “MA Modern History (Dist.)” and those three years working on a history magazine seem worthwhile – what better than European history and culture? After all, I know my stuff moderately well, am always reading to find out more, and in recent months have most enjoyed writing posts like the Eurovision liveblog and overview of wannabe European states – the political ones have more often been a chore. Blogging should be fun, not dull.

I’ve been pondering this shift in focus ever since the last redesign, but decided for certain this weekend, while browsing through a couple of books. First, Tony Judt’s excellent Postwar, from the Preface:

“The whole of Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey) comprises just five and a half million square kilometers: less than two thirds the area of Brazil, not much more than half the size of China or the US. It is dwarfed by Russia, which covers seventeen million square kilometers. But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique.”

Swiftly followed by this, from the Prologue to Geert Mak’s gloriously engaging In Europe:

“Do we Europeans have a common history? Of course, everyone can rattle their way down the list: Roman Empire, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, 1914, 1945, 1989. But then one need only look at the enormous differences in the way that history has been experienced by individual Europeans: the older Polish truck driver I spoke to, who had been forced four times in his life to learn a new language; the German couple, bombed out of their home and then endlessly driven from place to place throughout Eastern Europe; the Basque family that fell apart one Christmas Eve arguing about the Spanish Civil War, and never spoke to each other again; the serene satisfaction of the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes, who have usually avoided catching the full brunt of History. Put a group of Russians, Germans, Britons, Czechs and Spaniards at one table and have them recite their family histories: they are worlds unto themselves. Yet, even so, it is all Europe.”

Because, of course, though Europe has more than its fair share of diversity in history and culture it still has plenty of common ground – be it Saint George acting as patron saint of England, Moscow, Portugal and more, the similarities in old myths and legends (like Zeus and Odin, Tristan and Lancelot), or the flow of artistic motifs (from the use of the eagle in heraldry Europe-wide to the symbolism of the star in art, architecture and the EU flag). Perhaps by focussing more on these areas I’ll be able to track down that elusive, impossible to define quality of what it means to be “European” – the thing that unites us all, from Ulster to the Urals, Nordkapp to Nicosia.

It may turn out that Bismarck was right, and all we have in common is geography. But I prefer to turn to Churchill – a fine historian (if not so fine a politician), with a strong (if frequently misunderstood) idea of Europe:

“I wish to speak about the tragedy of Europe, this noble continent, the home of all the great parent races of the Western world, the foundation of Christian faith and ethics, the origin of most of the culture, arts, philosophy and science both of ancient and modern times. If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance there would be no limit to the happiness, prosperity and glory which its 300 million or 400 million people would enjoy.”

But the major reason is just to have fun with blogging again – so don’t expect a structure or a plan to emerge for a while. This will be more a miscellany. Slices of little-known or forgotten history. Profiles of persons of interest. The occasional book review. Overviews of key events and ideas. Quotations. In other words, random bits and pieces that interest me – sometimes tied to the overriding theme of European identity or current affairs, sometimes just curios. And all the while heeding Hegel:

“Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it… Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past.”

When it comes to politics, history is both ignored and useless. What could be a more perfect focus for a political blog, that most ignored and useless of all contributions to the public sphere?