Loomnie

I’d been waiting for the first major newspaper columnist to write something about this. Here it is, from Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph:

John Lanchester in LRB:

If European monetary policy is run according to German national interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances, or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German national interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can’t survive. It’s hard to tell exactly what Merkel thinks about all this. She is nobody’s idea of a caricature spendthrift, happily chucking money in the direction of the undeserving poor. Whenever the question of bailouts is mentioned, Merkel acts out an elaborate pantomime of reluctance to dish out more cash. It’s hard to tell whether she is really-o, truly-o this reluctant, or whether she’s hamming up her unwillingness for a domestic audience which strongly dislikes the idea of bailing out work-shy Southern Europeans. The fact is, though, that they are going to have to continue to do that, if the euro is going to continue to exist in its current form. Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast. This, if you think about it from a broad historical perspective, is quite a reversal. During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany’s sense of its special destiny. During the 21st century, the greatest danger to European stability is Germany’s reluctance to accept its special destiny. If the German taxpayer manages, however grudgingly, to accept that it’s her duty to shoulder the burden, the euro will muddle through. But it won’t be pretty.

Here.

From a four part article in Der Spiegel:

… now those who in the past showed very little interest for the European Commission, the Parliament and the bureaucracy in Brussels — because they assumed that they weren’t expected to be interested in these things — are reading daily about the strange things European statesmen have done with the European idea: things like circumventing their own regulations, falsifying statistics and breaking promises. They are responsible for an impressive number of rule breaches and untruths. Can anyone blame Europeans who, in the last few months, have learned more about Europe than they ever wanted to know, for being distraught — to put it mildly — over what their governments have done in their names and with their money?

The real paradox is that it is precisely those young Europeans in Lisbon, Barcelona, Lyon, Dublin and Athens who need a strong European Union. They need a union that redistributes work in Europe; that monitors the banks and speculators in different ways than national governments can; that regulates the handling of nuclear power, nuclear waste and energy policies on a European level; and that coordinates climate protection for the countries. In short, they need a union that exists not because political romantics from the postwar generation want to keep it alive. They need a union that exists because the Europeans of tomorrow see it as their greatest opportunity.

In other words, what has happend to the idea of Europe that François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, among others, had?

The whole piece is here.

If you’ve ever crossed borders in most of Europe – at the airport, by ferry or by road – you know that you don’t get ‘controlled’ as you enter the next country. That is about to change. To blame, claim France and Italy, is the Arab Spring. So many people are fleeing North Africa to Europe that countries need to be able to control entry nationally, instead of as a region.

Denmark is the other story. They introduced border control unilaterally, even before Schengen countries reached the agreement on national border control. Their reason? Cross-border crime. But scratch the surface and you find the handiwork of the right-wing, populist Danish People’s Party, which is allied to the centre-right government. The party is the third largest in the parliament, meaning that it can push for tougher immigration laws, with the threat to block key legislation if they are not introduced. The remark of Pia Kjaersgaard, leader of the party after border control was reintroduced: “I have worked hard for this.”

As you probably know, right-wing, populist parties are on the rise in Europe. For more on them, see this BBC piece.

• Cynicism and the Nigerian state – NigeriansTalk
• The Un-Shock Doctrine: A defense of communism - Slavoj Žižek
• The Political Relevance of the Internet in Developing Countries – The Monkey Cage
• Time to avoid the dictatorship v democracy debate in Africa – David Booth
• Eurozone and the Greek debt – “Overindebted countries with their own currencies inflate. But countries that borrow in foreign currencies default. By joining the eurozone, members have moved from the former state to the latter.” - Martin Wolf

• My years as Gaddafi’s nurse - Oksana Balinskaya
• ‘…what will ultimately replace today’s dollar-centric international monetary and financial system is a tripolar system organized around the dollar, the euro, and the Chinese renminbi’ - Barry Eichengreen
• ‘The left love being provoked by me … they think I’m a reactionary imperialist scumbag’ Niall Ferguson
• Why about 75% of Iceland’s voters reject the government’s proposal to pay $5.2 billion to the British and Dutch bank insurance agencies - Michael Hudson
• Has NGO advertising gone too far? – Alanna Shaikh

The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), originally signed in 1994, gave developing countries until 2005 to bring their IP laws in line with the new legislation. With respect to drugs, Indian, Brazilian, and Thai pharmaceutical firms could no longer copy drugs that American and European firms had created. Before 2005, however, these generic drug firms pursued a strategy of finding cheaper ways to produce anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), and selling them to purchasers for a fraction of the price. A first-line treatment of drugs combining Stavudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine decreased from $10,439 per person per year in 2000, to $99 in 2007. This burst open the oligopolistic market in the pharmaceutical sector, which due to the high barriers of entry had only seven firms producing all the ARVs supplied until 2000. This also forced originator firms to embark on discounting programs for developing countries, albeit to protect their brand images. This price drop was a significant factor in extending coverage in sub-Saharan Africa by 800% in the two years to 2005, as reported by the WHO. However, toxicity, severe adverse effects and resistance to first-line treatments require a switch to a second-line regimen. This second line, covered by the post-2005 TRIPS regime, means firms cannot copy the drug, and countries in need are prevented from importing generics. Second-line medicines are four times more expensive than first line, and in countries that come under the Organisation Africaine de la Propriete Intellectuelle – altogether, 16 francophone countries – 10% of patients need to change treatment every year. Thus drug expenditure will increase by 250% just to maintain current access programmes. Without rapid price reduction for second line drugs, health programmes will have to choose between treating new or current patients. It is no surprise that patent-holding pharmaceutical companies are seen as saboteurs in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

Go to the original piece on Think Africa Press for more detailed discussion of the issues.

Also, see this British Medical Journal’s editorial on how India is currently negotiating away its production of generic drugs. According to the editorial, “In exchange for market access in other areas of the economy, the EU wants India, a country with very low per capita incomes, to embrace tough new rules on ownership and enforcement of intellectual property for medical inventions.”

1. Why is Hosni Mubarak clinging to power? Maybe because the life of an exiled dictator isn’t what it used to be – FP

2. Ms Merkel: Eurozone nations would have to agree on retirement age, tax and spending rules – Guardian

3. German companies great and small are making the most of globalisation. Their success owes more to judgment than to luck – The Economist

4. “If Marx were alive today he would be 193 years old. Keynes would be 128. Discussions of what they would think today implicitly assume that they would have retained the intellect of their prime and adjusted their thinking to later events. How can anyone know how they would have done this?” – FT

5. “Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.” – Brought to you by Google

6. The Oscar Curse (or, Why It Stinks to Be a Successful Woman) – Economix

By keith Hart. The conclusion:

The euro is the most tangible symbol of the European Union, but not co-extensive with it. For the last century or more, member states had supplied their citizens with a monopoly currency that served both as the reification of the national economy and as their principle link to the world market. The move towards political and monetary union in Europe is the most striking example of a general trend. Everywhere nation-states are coming together into regional trading blocs as one kind of response to globalization: NAFTA, Mercosul, ASEAN, ECOWAS etc. At the same time, many states have hitched their waggon to the sinking dollar. In the meantime, the sheer size and volatility of global money markets and internet commerce undermine the credibility of existing national polities as an effective bridge to world society. The international settlement after 1945 looks increasingly inadequate. Before long, calls for a world currency will become louder than at present… .

Money is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity…. Money links us imaginatively and practically to the widest reaches of society, while lending precision to the fulfillment of our most concrete desires and obligations. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative.

One of anthropology’s objects might be to explore those features of humanity that are most conducive to the making of world society. If so, the substantial intellectual gains made by ethnography in the twentieth century must be married somehow to humanistic, historical and philosophical inquiries adequate to the task. The study of money offers one strategic focus for this, since money, more than most institutions, links each of us directly with the contemporary world as a whole.

It is fairly long, but every bit of it is worth your time.

1. Ignoring Africa’s present or the West’s past? – Wronging Rights

2. London faces battle to stop trading shift to eurozone – Financial Times

3. Europe agrees on Greek safety net with IMF role – Reuters

4. Scouring blogs for useful information – The Economist

5. Winner of the world’s oddest book title award – Guardian

6. What is the world’s most bizarre terror threat? – FP Passport