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Malky

Malky

Posté
Posté

 

Le document d'origine n'est à priori pas un faux mais l'interprétation qui en est faite est pour le moins discutable à ce que j'ai entendu.

Malky

Malky

Posté
Posté

Apparemment la partie qui fait buzzer est là :

 

 

The journey of national political reform

 

At the start of the crisis, it was generally assumed that the national legacy problems were economic in nature. But, as the crisis has evolved, it has become apparent that there are deep seated political problems in the periphery, which, in our view, need to change if EMU is going to function properly in the long run.
 
The political systems in the periphery were established in the aftermath of dictatorship, and were defined by that experience. Constitutions tend to show a strong socialist influence, reflecting the political strength that left wing parties gained after the defeat of fascism. Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labor rights; consensus building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. Countries around the periphery have only been partially successful in producing fiscal and economic reform agendas, with governments constrained by constitutions (Portugal), powerful regions (Spain), and the rise of populist parties (Italy and Greece).
 
There is a growing recognition of the extent of this problem, both in the core and in the periphery. Change is beginning to take place. Spain took steps to address some of the contradictions of the post-Franco settlement with last year’s legislation enabling closer fiscal oversight of the regions. But, outside Spain little has happened thus far. The key test in the coming year will be in Italy, where the new government clearly has an opportunity to engage in meaningful political reform. But, in terms of the idea of a journey, the process of political reform has barely begun.

 

 

 

Neuron

Neuron

Posté
Posté

Je ne vois pas comment un libéral pourrait partager les thèses économiques de ce monsieur Asselineau. Il évoque sans arrêt la loi de 1973, seule responsable selon lui de l'endettement de notre pays. Il rejette le libre-échange, souhaite sortir de l'UE pour mettre en place des mesures protectionnistes, combinées à une politique de relance keynésienne. C'est un forcené de l'interventionnisme étatique qui est convaincu que le redressement de l'économie passe par une augmentation massive de la dépense publique... Bref, sa vision de l'économie parait assez effrayante.

Quant au reste de son programme, il contient peut-être des chose intéressantes. Mais je ne le connais pas assez pour me prononcer :icon_wink:

Je suis tout à fait d'accord avec sa vision sur la discorde chronique au sein de l'UE qui serait source de faiblesse.

Là où commence son problème, c'est sa présentation où il a besoin de parler de ses résultats au BAC. À son âge, avoir besoin de parler du BAC c'est ne rien avoir à dire.

Malky

Malky

Posté
Posté

Hou hou les parlementaires qui viennent pointer à 18h pour toucher leurs indemnités journalières et qui n'aiment pas se faire interroger dessus (vers la fin)

poney

poney

Posté
Posté

Y avait déjà une vidéo comme ça il y a quelques années.

poney

poney

Posté
Posté

De Gucht oublie la moitié de sa troisième phrase, bien sur.

free jazz

free jazz

Posté
Posté

C'est le monde à l'envers, pour trouver un article censé et honnête, maintenant il faut lire La Pravda.
 

And now Croatia has walked straight into the Euro-trap. If the Croatian politicians and people do not know what to expect, then let us tell them. For a start, expect a wonderful period of back-slapping and congratulations, welcome parties to the Euro-club as your political elites discover another echelon of jobs for the boys as your hard-earned cash is spent on trips to Malta which could be performed by SKYPE, endless studies and projects ordered from companies whose owners are close to the centre of power, and so on.

Slowly but steadily you will see infra-structure projects popping up like mushrooms across your country and everyone will say wow, how great it is to be a member of the European Union. But slowly, yet steadily, you will see your factories closing, you will see your agriculture reduced to nothing as farmers are paid to sit on their backsides scratching themselves, you will see your fisheries vessels beached, as fisherman are paid to scratch themselves, sitting on their backsides on land.

As these three areas of your economy dry out totally, jobs upstream and downstream will disappear, and you will experience something like 40% youth unemployment within a few years. Your education system will become a business, you will be importing everything from France and Germany, prices will sky-rocket. They will not ask for your opinion on anything and if they do and you dare to vote against what they want, the vote will be repeated ad nauseam until the "no's" give up, probably on a sunny Summer day when everyone goes to the beach.

Then they will prepare you for the Euro. Overnight, your ATM machines will block (on Friday) and when you wake up on the Monday morning, you will be withdrawing crisp little Euro notes. Within days your prices will double or treble and your salaries will remain the same.

Welcome, Croatia, to the European Union!

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/02-07-2013/125002-welcome_eu-0/

kolb

kolb

Posté
Posté

Enfin Pravda en sait quelque chose: en soulignant l'aspect "lent et sur" de l'action européenne ils reconnaissent que chez les soviets cela se serait passé brusquement et imprévisiblement!

Certainement que le pointage dans leur duma aurait constitué un secret dont la divulgation aurait mené un journaliste au Goulag!

kolb

kolb

Posté
Posté

The Holy Roman Empire

European disunion done right

The “old empire” offers surprising lessons for

the European Union today

Dec 22nd 2012 | Berlin |From the print edition

SUMMITS were more fun in those days. When Ferdinand III, the Habsburg monarch of the Holy

Roman Empire, arrived in Regensburg, the Brussels of its time, in late 1652, he brought 60

musicians and three dwarves. There were sleigh rides, fireworks and the first Italian opera ever

performed in Germanic lands. Aside from that, the Reichstag (imperial diet) was much like today’s

European Council, the gathering for leaders of the member states. The emperor arrived with a

retinue of 3,000 people to meet the empire’s princes, bishops, margraves and other assorted VIPs.

They negotiated for more than a year. By the time Ferdinand left again for Vienna, with 164 ships

floating down the Danube, quite a lot had transpired.

Precisely what that was, however, has been a matter of passionate dispute among historians ever

since, with special relevance today. The traditional view is that Central Europe, exhausted by crisis

(the Thirty Years War, which had ended in 1648), yet again failed to get its act together and form a

proper union—ie, a centralised state. For the next 150 years, the “old empire” thus drifted into

fragmentation and geopolitical irrelevance. As the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke

described it in the 19th century, it became “a chaotic mess of rotted imperial forms and unfinished

territories”, until it expired with a barely audible whimper in 1806.

Such a reading would warn leaders of the EU today against repeating history: Thou shalt not let the

euro crisis turn centripetal forces (“ever closer union”) into centrifugal ones, with member countries

exiting from the euro zone or even the EU. For this would lead to a gradual break-up of the EU

similar to the erstwhile dissolution of the empire, and deliver the continent to its old curse of

Kleinstaaterei (small-statism) in a world of giants such as America, China and India. In the worst

case the old nationalist energies would return, just as they metastasised in the century after 1806.

But there is a revisionist view. Originating in Germany in recent decades but increasingly accepted

in academia elsewhere, it also regards the institutional structure of the empire as it emerged from

the 1653 Reichstag as a prototype for the EU today. However, its proponents mean that in a good

way. Peter Claus Hartmann, a historian at the University of Mainz, says that the old empire, though

not powerful politically or militarily, was extraordinarily diverse and free by the standards of

Europe at the time. As one of its subjects, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote, it was a place “in

which, in peacetime, everybody can prosper.”

By this reading, EU leaders today need not fear a “looser union”. They could welcome the crisis as

an opportunity, as in 1653, to refine and fix the EU’s federalist structures. This would mean

embracing the reality of dual (meaning ambiguous) sovereignty, shared between emperor and

princes then, between Brussels and member states now. With the principle of “subsidiarity”, which

organised both the empire and the EU, Europe can remain free and happy, Mr Hartmann thinks.

A brief one-millennium recap

Depending on how one dates it, the old empire lasted a thousand years. Its patriarch was

Charlemagne, a Frankish king who united a geographic area eerily similar to that of the 1952

precursor to the EU, the European Coal and Steel Community of West Germany, France, Belgium,

the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy. Crowned emperor in Rome by the pope in 800,

Charlemagne and his heirs represented the continuation in western Europe of the ancient Caesars,

whence the German word Kaiser (emperor).

This geographic similarity often invites comparisons to the EU (not least by The Economist, which

names its European column after Charlemagne). In truth, Karl, as the Germans call him, ruled rather

too much by decapitation to provide much useful instruction today. And the geographic similarity

ended when his empire broke apart under his heirs until its eastern (mainly Germanic) part was

resurrected under Otto I in 962. It added the title “holy” in the 12th century, when Frederick I

(Barbarossa) wanted to emphasise his independence from the pope. It was still a medieval place,

alien to modern eyes.

That changed around 1500, after the Habsburgs, originally from Switzerland (also part of the

empire), rose to power. The trend, in much of Europe, was toward absolute monarchies. But

absolutism was going to be a harder proposition in the empire. Though the monarchy occasionally

seemed hereditary, it was an elected office. Emperors were chosen by seven (later eight, nine, then

ten) electors, the leading secular and ecclesiastical princes. Then there were another 180 secular and

136 ecclesiastical fiefs and 83 imperial cities, some of them republics, which all considered

themselves “free,” meaning autonomous.

An intermittent tussle began, with several emperors trying and failing to achieve an ever closer

union. Each time, the princes withheld the necessary money or soldiers, says Joachim Whaley at

Cambridge, the author of a two-volume history of the empire. At each Reichstag, power was

renegotiated and usually favoured looser union. Everything pointed to a continuation of dual

sovereignty. On the hot-button issue of religion, in particular, each prince should independently

determine whether his territory was to be Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist.

But then one more Habsburg, Ferdinand II, was tempted to have a good last go at absolutism.

Already king of his hereditary lands and soon to be elected emperor, he was also a strict Catholic

and rather offended when, in 1618, cranky Protestants threw three Catholic bigwigs out of a

window in Prague (though all three survived the plunge). He sent soldiers, and thus ensued a series

of increasingly messy wars.

This so-called Thirty Years War began as an attempt to answer the unresolved question about

sovereignty, then took on the guise of a faith war between Protestants and Catholics, before drawing

in the other European powers in a general free-for-all, with kings, princes and enterprising generals

slaughtering, raping and plundering as they could. The empire lost about a third of its population.

Regions such as Württemberg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania lost as much as 80%. Traumatised, the

continent came together in Westphalia in 1648 to make peace.

The first Eurocrats

The 1653 Reichstag was the first after that treaty. One last time, the empire could have gone either

way, toward a centralised union or a decentralised federation. Ferdinand III would have preferred

the former. But the princes, led by the charismatic elector of Brandenburg, an upstart power in the

east, rejected the emperor’s proposal to make all estates pay imperial taxes authorised by the

Reichstag—ie, what would have been a rudimentary “transfer union” as it is contemplated in the

EU today.

Having settled on a loose union, the empire concentrated on making it irreversible. Starting with the

next congress, in 1663, the Reichstag became a “perpetual diet”, permanently in session. By then

Ferdinand III’s son was emperor. Nicknamed “hogmouth” for his protruding jaw (which ran in the

family due to inbreeding), Leopold I presided over something so similar to the EU that Mr

Hartmann calls it the “construction manual”.

Even the problems sound familiar. Property values had crashed, as the depopulated land vastly

exceeded tenants. And many princes, after years of paying mercenaries, were drowning in debt. As

Mr Whaley explains, these debts were dealt with through a combination of moratoria and debt

commissions. The emperor sent administrators to negotiate restructurings, rather as today’s “troika”

of European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund does. These

bail-outs became a recurring feature, with 57 over the next century.

The bigger idea was the “juridical” principle. It simply said that conflicts were to be resolved by

lawyers rather than soldiers. Whenever disputes arose between territories, the parties had recourse

to two imperial courts, one usually in Speyer and one in Vienna, which are analogous to today’s

European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Even peasants could appeal in the courts.

The Reichstag itself was the other vehicle for conflict resolution. Not only the emperor but any

backwoods abbot or baron could propose legislation, often as banal as the EU’s regulation of

cucumber curvature. Thus a Saxon proposal to ban indigo dyes (to protect the woad industry) failed,

but ribbon-making machinery was successfully banned in 1685 and 1714. Business as usual

included restrictions on duelling, on the movement of vagrants and on the installation of mills when

these impeded river navigation.

The elector of Mainz, the equivalent of today’s rotating president of the Council of Ministers,

“dictated” such legislative proposals into writing and put them before the three chambers. In the

first, the electors met; in the second, the remaining princes; and in the third, the free imperial cities.

Then the haggling started.

The empire faced the same problem as today’s EU, only worse. The EU currently has 27 member

states. During its final 150 years, the empire had more than 300 territories (the number varied).

Should each member get one vote? If so, any hillbilly could block progress. Or should votes be

weighted by territory? If so, big princes could bully little ones. Should decisions be taken by simple

majority, qualified majority or unanimity? The empire answered these questions as the EU does:

with a characteristically decisive it-all-depends.

In matters of religion, which had caused so much bloodshed, the empire adopted special rules, so

that two councils, Catholic and Protestant, had to reach agreement. In other matters the votes were

weighted so that the princes of the larger territories had one ballot each, and the smaller territories

were grouped together. In principle, if not detail, the EU takes the same approach, requiring

unanimity sometimes, other times qualified majorities, reflecting both the number of states and the

populations represented.

When critics want to make fun of either the empire or the EU, this is one area for easy pickings.

Ridiculing EU diplomacy today, Germans often use the expression etwas auf die lange Bank

schieben (to shove something onto the long bench) to mean bloviating endlessly as a delaying

tactic. The idiom originated at the Reichstag, where bureaucrats physically pushed their paperwork

onto a long bench (still visible in Regensburg’s old city hall today).

But the ridicule masks a huge success: both in the empire and the EU, disagreements were and are

resolved peacefully, an achievement for which the EU won this year’s Nobel peace prize. And there

is a healthy balance between protecting the interests of the small states while allowing for action as

a federation.

The similarities extend to practical governance. The EU follows a principle called subsidiarity,

which also had its prototype in the empire, says Mr Hartmann. Then as now, most matters were

handled at the lowest possible level of jurisdiction, starting with the village. For more complicated

subjects, the EU today has blocks—the Schengen area for travel without documents, say, or the euro

zone. The empire also had blocks, called Kreise (circles).

These Kreise, ten of them, were regional associations that implemented the laws of the Reichstag,

regulated tariffs, collected taxes, mobilised troops and so forth. They also dealt with money. In fact,

the Kreise ran currency regimes that look remarkably like the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, the

precursor to the euro.

Princes and cities retained the right to mint their own coins. These usually had the imperial eagle on

one side and the local prince’s coat of arms on the other. Unco-ordinated, this would have led to

chaos in trade. So the various groschen, florins and pfennigs in circulation were pegged to larger

accounting units. The Upper and Lower Saxon Kreise formed the taler zone, for instance, and the

Bavarian, Franconian and Swabian Kreise had the gulden zone. These blocks met at regular

Kreistage, analogous to today’s euro group, the diet of finance ministers from the 17 countries in

the euro zone.

It thus fell to the Kreise to police monetary naughtiness. Typically, a prince tried to inflate away his

own debt or make himself nominally rich by mixing bits of lead or copper into the gold or silver

coins coming out of his mint, so that he could produce more of them. This debased the currency,

until the coins were carefully weighed again at a Kreistag. The results were captured on conversion

charts, in effect the new exchange-rate pegs.

Taken together, the empire’s unwritten constitution became so complex that Samuel Pufendorf, a

17th-century jurist, called it irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile (a somehow irregular body,

similar to a monster). He meant this as a compliment. For the monster allowed a degree of liberty

and diversity that was unimaginable in the neighbouring kingdoms, though matched in the EU

today. Ordinary folk, including women, had far more rights to property than in France or Spain, say.

Although German was the main language, French and Flemish in the west, Italian in the south, and

various Slavic tongues in the east all had equal standing. And whereas it was uncomfortable to be

anything but Catholic in France, Protestant in Sweden or Anglican in England, the empire offered

the whole menu. If a local prince proved benighted, his subjects high-tailed it to the next duchy.

Places such as Fürth, near Nuremberg, became thriving centres of Jewish culture, with seven

synagogues. Mennonites and Huguenots found similar niches.

With religious diversity came the cultural sort. The Catholic areas had very visual and sensual

aesthetics. Hence the flamboyant baroque and rococo churches, chapels, and palaces that still dot

the southern landscapes today. The Protestant territories frowned on pictures and icons so they gave

rise to literary cultures (Goethe, Schiller, Lessing) and to music (Bach). In its ways, the empire was

as varied as the EU, where fun ranges from bull fighting at one end to naked saunas at the other.

Feeling the Prussia

Defenestrated in Prague

Why, then, did the empire fail? The reason was not military weakness per se. Imperial armies

repelled the Ottomans eight times in 300 years, passing more martial tests than the EU ever has. But

in the end the empire was no match for Napoleon, who walked over it, tore it apart, then hinted to

the last emperor that he might as well dissolve it, which Francis II did in 1806.

But the empire had grown weak long before Napoleon, and that development may offer the real

warning to the EU. In the mid-18th century two members, Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia,

outgrew the empire, reducing the other territories to a “third Germany,” says Peter Wilson at the

University of Hull. That was destabilising.

Brandenburg-Prussia had first announced itself on the big stage at the 1653 Reichstag, when

Frederick William, a duke known as the “great elector”, thwarted the emperor’s attempt to levy

imperial taxes by majority vote of the princes. His heir was then upgraded to king. Within a few

generations, this dynasty dominated.

The problem was not so much that Prussia, like Austria, had extensive lands outside the empire.

Such situations were common. George I and his heirs, say, were simultaneously electors of

Hannover (and thus vassals of the emperor) and kings of Britain. Even the EU knows overlapping

commitments—Britain is a full member but also has a Commonwealth.

Rather, the problem was that Prussia became so powerful that the empire could no longer discipline

it. While it cooperated with Austria, as Germany and France have done in the EU, the duo

maintained order. But once Prussia began putting its own interest above the empire’s, even fighting

against Austria, a far-sighted observer could have seen the beginning of the end.

Viewed through this lens, one could see the origins of today’s crisis, and the danger in the much

longer term, in Germany’s rapid growth after reunification with East Germany (which was largely

the old Brandenburg-Prussia, as it happens). Historians are a cautious bunch, but Mr Hartmann

dares make that comparison. The EU, prompted by Germany, in 1997 signed a “stability and growth

pact” to impose fiscal discipline on member countries and to avoid crises. But that pact lost its bite

a decade ago once Germany itself broke it. The EU should have taken Germany to task, but Gerhard

Schröder, the chancellor, got off scot-free. The EU can discipline Ireland or Greece, but probably

not Germany or France.

Where history leaves EU leaders today is debatable. Faced with a similar crisis in the 1780s, a

different confederation seized a “Hamiltonian moment”, assumed the debts of its member states and

had a good run as the United States of America. The empire, by contrast, had settled on a looser

structure without a “transfer union”; though fading by then, it had been around much longer.

Like America, the empire was a great place to live. It was a union with which its subjects identified,

whose loss distressed them greatly. “It is as if we had one funeral after another,” Goethe’s mother

Catherina wrote to her son in August 1806, a few days after the old empire died. “That is how our

joys now look.” Many Europeans would feel the same if the EU followed it to oblivion.

 

 

 

free jazz

free jazz

Posté
Posté

Ainsi, l’Union Européenne a pris de nouvelles mesures anti-tabac. On va faire monter la surface des avertissements sur les paquets de 40 à 65%. Vu la baisse impressionnante de la consommation qu’a entraîné la présence de ces « avertissements », on comprend l’urgence qu’il y a à l’augmenter. Mais ce qui fonda mon ire fut une autre mesure : l’INTERDICTION DES CIGARETTES NENTHOLÉES ! Oui, vous avez bien lu ! Et ceci d’ici trois ans.

 

http://je280950-vudescollines.blogspot.fr/2013/07/a-bas-leurope.html

kolb

kolb

Posté
Posté

Il suffit de voir comment les médecins roumains exercent dans les petites communes pour comprendre que l'immigration est une question de compétences et marché du travail! La préference communautaire me semble un choix raisonnable pour une Union!

 

 

  • 1 month later...
Nick de Cusa

Nick de Cusa

Posté
Posté

Le serpent se mord la queue en nous étouffant dans ses anneaux : un activiste radical obtient une tribune exclusive face aux 28 ministres de l'environnement, représentant une ONG financée par ... la commission européeenne.

http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84278

 

Comment allons nous casser ce système avant qu'il ne nous casse ?

ph11

ph11

Posté
Posté

EU plans to fit all cars with speed limiters

All cars could be fitted with devices that stop them going over 110km/h, under new EU road safety measures which aim to cut deaths from road accidents by a third.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/10278702/EU-plans-to-fit-all-cars-with-speed-limiters.html

 

Au secours, ils veulent encore notre bien !

 

Même les voitures de police, les pompiers et les ambulances ?

Et si on a un gars qui doit aller aux urgences ?

 

La F1 va être encore plus chiante si c'est limité à 110…

poney

poney

Posté
Posté

Ou ceux qui rouleront en voiture de collection.

 

Tu la sens bien ma vielle 964, hein, dis, tu la sens ?

ph11

ph11

Posté
Posté

C'est parfait. Comme ça, plus de radars et le paradis pour ceux qui sauront débrider leur caisse.

 

:)

 

Ça passera pas face au manque à gagner des amendes…

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