The Week in Bloggingportal: Help! The British are Invading!

This week, British EU geeks all got very excited by our political leaders going on TV for a live debate about foreign policy. Charlemagne of The Economist put it like this:

This was our night, the night for saddos like Charlemagne who have no idea which football teams are leading the British premiership, but who got really excited about the opposition takeover in Kyrgyzstan.

And if foreign policy is like football for EU geeks, then this was our World Cup. In fact, Jon Worth tweeted exactly that:

The leaders debate has a build up similar to a World Cup Final on BBC. Euphoria about politics. It’s very odd.

Notice that "Europe" is not a common word in the party manifestos- CC / Flickr

One distinguished German EU geek (who did actually know which football team was leading in the British premiership) was a bit put out by all the Brits invading his Twitter stream for the night. Why were we all so excited? Well – probably because there is rarely so much mainstream public attention in Britain being paid to the EU and foreign affairs. There was definitely something euphoric about being part of so large a crowd all watching the same event together; it really did feel like football or an X-Factor final. When Nick Clegg argued that the EU facilitates co-operation between police forces in tackling things like transnational paedophile rings, I twittered something vaguely pithy and saw it re-tweeted by 41 people. That’s not much by “X-Factor” standards – but it’s great stuff when we’re talking about EU politics.

It was also exciting to know that the issues we love to blog about were finally getting a bit of serious mainstream media attention. Sticking to my experience on Twittter (because Twitter really has changed the way you watch events like this) at the first debate one of my tweets was even shown on BBC Newsnight. Unfortunately, it was this rather vapid tweet they chose, and their point was that public reaction to the debate started somewhat superficially (in my defence, my tweet was no more superficial than the debate itself. And Nosemonkey’s tweet was worse).

There was a lot of build-up to the second TV live debate for other reasons. Jason O’Mahoney points out that the Liberal Democrats had done so well in the first debate that they now had a lot to lose. Yet, despite the “X-Factor” level of excitement (or perhaps because of it) the foreign policy debate was a damp squib. It’s difficult to shake off accusations of a “Little Britain” mentality when discussions around UK foreign policy amount to a shallow 15-minute “debate” on the EU, 15 minutes on climate change, 15 minutes on the war in Afghanistan and 15 minutes on a visit from the pope. Kosmopolito certainly didn’t need more than 140 characters on Twitter to deliver his withering critique.

If you want an excellent summary of the night, then read Gulf Stream Blues‘ take on the debate. There’s also some interesting (if, again, slightly shallow) “Photo Analysis” of the first debate on Flickr.

I don’t want to dwell on the UK too much, but it was St. George’s Day this week. Now, in England, a lot of people don’t really celebrate St. George’s Day (the patron-saint-day of England). It’s not a public holiday, and if you do celebrate it publically then you risk being thought of as either slightly odd or a racist. That’s a shame, because St. George certainly wasn’t a racist – and he might even make a good patron saint of Europe.

Speaking of Europe, most Europeans probably don’t even know “Europe Day” exists (it doesn’t help that there isn’t one “Europe Day” but two… can’t we harmonise that?). Stephen Spillane (a Bloggingportal editor) has had a brilliant idea to get people thinking about the EU on Europe Day. Mathew Lowry (another Bloggingportal editor) has also written about this here. The idea is for bloggers across Europe to write about what sort of future Europe they would like to see. You don’t have to be an EU geek (or, indeed, a blogger) to take part – in fact, your future Europe might have nothing to do with the EU. Visit the My Europe Week website for more details.

What's that, boy? You hate Europe? CC / Flickr

While we’re on the subject of what a future Europe might look like… To think: Ireland might have lost its commissioner had it voted ‘No’ for the Lisbon Treaty. Under the previous Nice Treaty rules, the number of commissioners was reduced to less than one per country. One of the changes made to the Lisbon Treaty is that (when Croatia joins) the number of commissioners will be restored to one-per-country again. A lot of EU geeks (this geek included) think one commissioner per-country will be too many cooks spoiling the broth – and the result will be a bloated, gassy Commission emitting nothing but hot air and foul odours [Chief Editor: That joke was a bit weird, and it didn't justify you writing such a geeky paragraph about technical treaty details]. Nonetheless, the current commissioner from Ireland,  Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, is certainly doing interesting things. Gary Finnegan has a great post about Geoghegan-Quinn’s rising star.

Speaking of hot air and foul odours – Iceland’s volcanic belching is still causing trouble for Europe. This time, however, the hot air and foul odours aren’t coming from the volcano – but from UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party). They’ve sent out a press release in which they blame the EU for the recent chaos in Europe’s airspace. Unfortunately, as Charlemagne bluntly puts it:

Out of four factual assertions in the UKIP press release, four are incorrect.

Jon Worth (a Bloggingportal editor) adds some helpful tips of his own for rail travellers stranded in Europe, and he’s launching a social media campaign to stop European transport companies ripping off consumers.

Greece could certainly do with some helpful tips right now. Jean Quatremer, the (recently award-winning) blogger/journo of the left-wing French daily Libération, has written an excellent post (Google Translation here for those of you that don’t read French) about the Greek decision to activate the EU/IMF financial intervention mechanism. In other words: the guys with baseball bats had started to knock at Papandreou‘s door, and the EU/IMF made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Quatremer makes a good point that German Chancellor Angela Merkel must accept some of the blame for the Greek crisis. The reason Greece has come begging to the EU/IMF is because the markets are currently charging it insane interest-rates on its debt. In other words: the markets do not believe that Greece will not default.  And Merkel has not been helping by being so slow to show German support for Greece. Is it possible that, by dragging her feet and kicking up such a fuss, Merkel has actually made EU/IMF intervention more likely?

That’s all this week, folks.

But join us next Sunday for another Week in Bloggingportal!

The Week in Bloggingportal was written by Joe Litobarski this week.