Resolving this crisis has taken years, and there’s a reason: a debt crisis has never really been solved this way before.  Here’s Zoe Chace of NPR’s Planet Money team.

[...]

CHACE: Usually, it’s like this: the countries default on their loans – then we talk.

It struck me upon hearing this that yes, that’s true.  The immediate example to me was Mexico in the early 1980s (and then several other Latin American cases that followed suit):  the countries in question basically came out and said one day:  we are suspending loan repayments because we cannot afford to keep paying.  This led to economic crisis (locally and regionally).  Then came the scramble to fix the problem which eventually led to structural adjustment of economies under the auspices of international lending institutions.

The Greek case is different:  instead of going off the cliff and then sending in the rescue crews, the goal here is to find a way to stop form going over the cliff.

Of course, this approach is driven by the fact that Greece is not only in the EU, but part of the Eurozone.   Its partners have every reason to avoid being dragged off the cliff too.

Greece’s parliament has passed a controversial package of austerity measures, demanded by the eurozone and IMF in return for a 130bn-euro ($170bn; £110bn) bailout to avoid default.

[...]

The austerity measures include:

• 15,000 public-sector job cuts
• liberalisation of labour laws
• lowering the minimum wage by 20% from 751 euros a month to 600 euros
• negotiating a debt write-off with banks.

Meanwhile,

The vote came amid some of the worst violence seen in Greece in years.

Protesters outside parliament threw stones and petrol bombs, and police fired tear gas. Several people were injured and buildings were set on fire.

Not only was their rebellion in the streets, but also inside parliament:  “Coalition parties expelled over 40 deputies for failing to back the bill.”

Greek PM Lucas Papademos has failed to secure the support of his coalition for a raft of new austerity measures, after more than seven hours of talks.

[...]

A statement issued by the prime minister’s office said the aim of the meeting with the troika – representatives from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – was to "conclude the agreement" before Thursday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers.

This is all part of the ongoing Greek crisis and the ball is now moving to the EU level.

The proximate cause of the current attempts at action is a pending March 20th debt payment deadline.

More on the subject here:  Why Greece won’t go away.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti admitted publicly what many have been whispering about: the fight over the eurozone crisis is opening some old wounds. Essentially, Northern Europeans, led by Germany, are angry at what they perceive as sloth in the South while Southern Europeans, particularly those Greece, Italy, and Spain, are resentful of being told what to do by those in the North.

Monti says, “the euro zone crisis has indeed brought about quite a bit of misunderstandings and the re-emergence of old phantoms about prejudices between the North, the South of Europe, and a lot of mutual resentment.” Taking this to its logical conclusion, he observed, “And it is very, very important that we all take this with great attention in order to avoid that something that was meant to be the culminating point of the European construction — namely, the single currency — turns out to be, through psychological negative effects, a factor of disintegration of Europe.”

In my New Atlanticist piece, “Italian PM Warns of European Disintegration From Mutual Resentments,” I commend Monti for speaking the truth. I close:

On the one hand, “Europe” will remain a fantasy so long as differences in cultures which have existed independently for centuries can not be accommodated. On the other, the common currency and deeper political integration can not work if Europeans don’t all play by the same basic sets of rules.

More at the link.

Photo credit: Reuters Pictures.

The jobless rate in the 17 countries that use the single currency was 10.4% in December, unchanged from November’s figure which was revised up from 10.3%.

Some 16.5 million people were out of work in the eurozone in December, up 751,000 on the year before.

The highest unemployment rate remains in Spain (22.9%), while the lowest is in Austria (4.1%).

Unemployment has been rising throughout 2011, as the debt crisis in the region has continued. In December 2010, the unemployment rate in the euro area was 10%.

Unfortunately, the trend is currently in the wrong direction.

Overall EU unemployment (27 countries) is 9.9% in December.

CNNMoney (“Apple is worth more than Greece“):

Apple’s value on the stock market briefly rose to $400 billion on Thursday, a record high for what was already the world’s most valuable technology company.

The company’s market cap slipped below the $400 billion mark by midday as Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) stock fell back from the all-time high of $431.37 it set earlier in the morning. Shares ended the day slightly down, leaving Apple with a $398 billion market value.

Still, that puts Apple in some pretty exclusive territory. Only Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) has a higher valuation, at about $420 billion. PetroChina (PTR) is Apple’s closest competitor, at $270 billion, and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) follows at $235 billion.

Apple’s market cap is higher than the gross domestic product of Greece, Austria, Argentina, or South Africa. (For more comparisons, check out this excellent blog: Things Apple is Worth More Than.)

Despite its size, Apple is still one of the fastest growing technology companies. The company will report its finances for the past quarter next week, and analysts expect Apple to announce that its sales grew by 45% compared to last year, according to a survey conducted by Thomson Reuters.

Sometimes, stock valuations create some odd comparisons. There was a time during the dotcom boom where Priceline.com was valued higher than Delta Airlines, for example. My strong sense is that Greece will not only rebound at some point to overtake Apple but that Greece will be around long after Apple fades away. But, if you’re making an investment for the near team, I’d bet on Apple.

UPDATE: John Personna points out below that this is a false comparison, since “Apple’s capitalization is a valuation. Greece’s GDP is a yearly cash flow.”

It isn’t often when a Presidential primary debate causes an international incident, but Rick Perry managed to do it last night when he asserted that Turkey was now ruled by “Islamic terrorists” and that it should be kicked out of NATO:

BAIR: Governor Perry, since the Islamist-oriented party took over in Turkey, the murder rate of women has increased 1,400 percent there. Press freedom has declined to the level of Russia. The prime minister of Turkey has embraced Hamas and Turkey has threatened military force against both Israel and Cypress. Given Turkey’s turn, do you believe Turkey still belongs in NATO?

PERRY: Well, obviously when you have a country that is being ruled by, what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists, when you start seeing that type of activity against their own citizens, then yes. Not only is it time for us to have a conversation about whether or not they belong to be in NATO, but it’s time for the United States, when we look at their foreign aid, to go to zero with it.

And you go to zero with foreign aid for all of those countries. And it doesn’t make any difference who they are. You go to zero with that foreign aid and then you have the conversation about, do they have America’s best interest in mind? And when you have countries like Turkey that are moving far away from the country that I lived in back in the 1970′s as a pilot in the United States Air Force that was our ally, that worked with us, but today we don’t see that. Our — our — our president, has a foreign policy that makes our allies very nervous and emboldens our enemies. And we have to have a president of the United States that clearly sends the message, whether it’s to Israel, our friend and there should be no space between the United States and Israel, period.

PERRY: And we need to send a powerful message to countries like Iran, and Syria and Turkey that the United States is serious and that we’re going to have to be dealt with.

Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over very well in Turkey itself:

Turkey’s foreign ministry condemned Texas Gov. Rick Perry Tuesday for saying that Turkey was a “country that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists.”

Perry made the statement during a spirited debated between Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina Monday night.

Most of Turkey was fast asleep during the live broadcast, and Turkish newspapers had already gone to print by the time Perry declared that Turkey had moved “far away from the country I lived in back in the 1970s United States Air Force. That was our ally that worked with us, but today we don’t see that.”

The Texas governor also argued that it was time for Washington to cut foreign aid to Ankara.

A spokesman for Turkey’s foreign ministry fired back Tuesday, accusing Perry of making “baseless and improper claims.”

In a statement e-mailed to CNN, Selcuk Unal said presidential candidates should “be more informed about the world and be more careful their statements.”

“The unfortunate views of Perry are not shared in any case by Republican party supporters, considering the weak support he has received in public polls and primary elections,” Unal concluded.

Top Turkish government officials were unavailable for comment Tuesday, with many of them in Northern Cyprus for the funeral of veteran Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktas, but the country’s largely-tabloid press wasted no time in responding to the comments on websites early Tuesday morning.

“The debate that the Republican candidate Rick Perry attended on American Fox TV turned into a scandal that contained very ugly statements about Turkey,” announced TRT state television.

“Rick Perry: what an idiot,” tweeted Mustafa Akyol, a columnist with the English-language Hurriyet Daily news. The Hurriyet newspaper also posted a video on its website of Perry drawing a blank in the middle of a prior debate, forgetting in mid-sentence which was the third of three government departments he would cut if elected president.

Perhaps this is why the Perry campaign quickly began trying to backpedal on Perry’s comments after the debate

Victoria Coates, foreign policy advisor to Perry, further explained the governor’s remarks, saying that some view the leaders of Turkey as Islamic terrorists due to their support of Hamas and the flotilla against Israel.

“The governor was responding to the questioners references to violence against women and to association with Hamas, I think both of which are things that many people do associate as he said with Islamic terrorists,” Coates told reporters in the spin room. “He was referring to those things, and while he would welcome the opportunity to work with Turkey on regional issues like Syria or Iraq, this kind of behavior on the part of that country is disturbing and I think we should concerned about it.”

Asked if the leaders of Turkey have performed any actions which place them in the category of Islamic terrorists, Coates responded: What he said was that many people associate that kind of behavior with that of Islamic terrorists. I think also their support for the flotilla against Israel this fall. It’s deeply concerning, and I think it’s something any future American president needs to be aware of.”

It’s certainly true that Turkey’s new government has raised some concerns in the West to the extent it has drifted away from the traditional secularism of the Turkish State, but to suggest that the country is ruled by terrorists is the kind of simplistic idiocy one expects from someone who gets their news from Rush Limbaugh and World Net Daily, not someone running for President of the United States. Moreover, Perry’s comment completely overlooks the extent to which Ankara has been working with the United States on important regional issues:

Analysts said Mr. Perry’s musings were all the more curious since Washington and Ankara’s alliance has been bolstered in recent months by Turkey’s strong backing of pro-democracy movements during Arab Spring uprisings.

“Ankara and Washington are now walking in lockstep… The essence of the new relationship is one where Turkey is more empowered, and more crucial to the U.S. because of its leverage,” said Atilla Yesilada, of Istanbul Analytics, an Istanbul-based political risk consultancy.

Turkish and U.S. diplomats say they cannot remember a time when cooperation between Ankara and Washington was closer, citing that President Barack Obama called Turkey’s prime minister more than any other leader except Britain’s prime minister in 2011.

What analysts call an increasing symmetry of Washington and Ankara’s policies has formed after a period of significant strain in 2009-2010, when Turkey moved closer to Iran and tensions with Israel were at boiling point over the killing of seven Turkish nationals by Israeli commandos on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara flotilla.

In a crucial shift, Turkey agreed last fall to host a North Atlantic Treaty Organization missile-defense system, which was designed by the U.S. to contain Iran.

I guess they left that out of Perry’s debate preparation. There’s one other thing they forgot to tell him, Turkey doesn’t get any foreign aid from the United States:

As for foreign aid, Turkey is a wealthy country that already gets virtually no foreign aid from the United States. The State Department this year made a request for about $5 million, which was earmarked for peace-keeping and security operations — not what one could consider traditional “foreign aid.”

Facts are stubborn things, Governor.

A testament to the state of the banking industry in Italy and the resilience of a criminal network declared dead many times over the years

(Reuters) – Organized crime has tightened its grip on the Italian economy during the economic crisis, making the Mafia the country’s biggest “bank” and squeezing the life out of thousands of small firms, according to a report on Tuesday.

Extortionate lending by criminal groups had become a “national emergency,” said the report by anti-crime group SOS Impresa.

Organized crime now generated annual turnover of about 140 billion euros ($178.89 billion) and profits of more than 100 billion euros, it added.

“With 65 billion euros in liquidity, the Mafia is Italy’s number one bank,” said a statement from the group, which was set up in Palermo a decade ago to oppose extortion rackets against small business.

Organized crime groups like the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Naples Camorra or the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta have long had a stranglehold on the Italian economy, generating profits equivalent to about 7 percent of national output.

Extortionate lending had become an increasingly sophisticated and lucrative source of income, alongside drug trafficking, arms smuggling, prostitution, gambling and racketeering, the report said.

“The classic neighborhood or street loan shark is on the way out, giving way to organized loan-sharking that is well connected with professional circles and operates with the connivance of high-level professionals,” the report said.

It estimated about 200,000 businesses were tied to extortionate lenders and tens of thousands of jobs had been lost as a result.

I don’t imagine collecting on the loans is a problem, though.

At the very least, something tells me this is a really stupid thing to do when you are running a country that has no money:

The Greek government is being denounced by the National Confederation of Disabled People after it added pedophiles, exhibitionists, and kleptomaniacs to the list of disabled people entitled to state benefits. They have joined pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists as persons entitled to ask for government assistance.

For example, a pyromaniac or pedophiles is now entitled to disability pay up to 35 percent while a diabetic is entitled to only 10 percent disability. Presumably, a diabetic pedophiles could received 45 percent disability, so it might be useful for diabetics to claim an interest in child or fires or both.

As Greece struggles with demands to reduce its bloated state funding, this is not a useful step.

To say the very least.

Update: As noted in the comments, there’s a correction to the story worth noting:

In a story Jan. 9 about definitions of disability in Greece, The Associated Press reported erroneously that the addition of groups such as pedophiles and kleptomaniacs to a list of the disabled could be used to grant them disability benefits. Their inclusion on the list will not be used to provide benefits.

So, it’s a disability, but not necessarily one that will entitle one to benefits. Pedophilia. A disability. Let’s think about that one for a second.

At the risk of finding myself sounding like Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum when they discuss Palestinians, I find myself largely agreeing with Gareth Harding’s assertion that Europe as a united entity of any kind has always been largely a myth:

The European Union was built on the myth that we are one people with one common destiny — an “ever closer union,” in the words of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that founded what was then called the European Economic Community. We are now discovering that regional and national differences are not dissolving and that Europeans think and act very differently from one another. The British view of the state’s role is very different from the French view. The Greek or Italian concept of law is very different from that of Sweden or Denmark. Latvians have a very different view of Russia from Germans. What an Irishman is prepared to pay in taxes is very different from what a Dane or Belgian will allow.

This lack of unity is Europe’s third and most profound crisis, one that underlies the continent’s economic and political woes. Most Europeans have little idea what the EU stands for in the world, what binds its people together, where it has come from in the past, and where it is going in the future. After more than 60 years of EU integration, 200,000 pages of legislation, and a hefty (and still growing) stack of treaties, we have succeeded in building a European Union without European

Harding goes on to note that he came to this realization in part because of his inability to answer what would seem to be a rather simple question from one of his students – “What is a European?” If that question were posed to an American, it wouldn’t be that hard to come up with. The answer might vary depending on whether you’re asking a college professor or a businessman, or whether the person lived in the urban metropolises of the Northeast or a small town in the Midwest, but I think it’s fair to say that there is at least a general agreement about what it means to be an American, even among people who disagree politically. Harding, however, discovered an ability to do the same thing:

The question from one of my students should have been easy enough for me to answer. After all, I was born in Wales and have lived in continental Europe — Oslo, Prague, and Brussels — for most of the last 25 years. I’ve traveled to every EU country except Malta. I speak a handful of European languages and studied European history and politics at university. I have worked in the European Commission and European Parliament. My best friends are Dutch, German, Slovak, and Swedish. My partner is French, and my children are bilingual. Unlike some recent U.S. presidents, I know the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia. If anyone should be European, or at least know what constitutes one, I should.

Yet I found myself stuttering and stammering as I searched for an answer. I waffled for a bit about European values — freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law — but didn’t convince myself, let alone the class.

“European fundamental values are sacred,” Jan Peter Balkenende, then Dutch prime minister, said in 2004. When it came to actually defining those values, however, he was fuzzier, admitting, “We have been discussing the idea of Europe for the last 1,200 years, but we cannot grasp what it means.” That’s the problem: Values matter because they are the glue that binds countries and peoples together. They help define what a society stands for and against.

American values are clearly and succinctly defined in the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution, which most American schoolchildren have to study and some senators carry in their back pockets. The European Union, on the other hand, has no constitution, and its Charter of Fundamental Rights only became legally binding in 2009. The nearest thing the EU has to a founding document is an almost impenetrable legalistic treaty that has been amended six times since the 1957 signing of the Treaty of Rome. The latest incarnation of the EU’s rule book, the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, commits the union to values such as free speech, democracy, and sustainable development. No wonder it is hard to disagree with American journalist Christopher Caldwell, who wrote in his provocative 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, “There is no consensus, not even the beginning of a consensus, about what European values are.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that it’s not at all easy to erase national identity, or the differences between peoples of various nations, and replace them with some kind of new transnational identity, especially when those national and ethnic identities have existed for thousands of years. In the United States, it took roughly a century for a true national identity to overcome regional loyalties that had only begun to develop in the late 17th Century at the earliest and even today there remain real cultural differences between north and south, east and west. In Europe, the Soviets and the Nazis discovered that even brutal force wasn’t enough to wipe out national identities, including those that had been repressed by the Russian Empire for centuries. If force couldn’t do it, is it really all that surprising that a legalistic treaty and a ‘government’ dominated by bureaucrats can’t do it either?

As Harding points out, there were many in Europe who speculated that the increased integration that the introduction of the Euro would bring about would lead to the creation of a new European nationalism, especially among younger generations. It seems hard to believe, though, that something as mundane as a currency unit could create the kind of common culture that they were dreaming of, and recent surveys seem to indicate it hasn’t happened yet:

In opinion polls, however, voters today consistently identify much more with their nation-states than with Europe. As Chris Patten, former European commissioner for external affairs, has said, “The nation is alive and well — more potent than ever in some respects…. It is the largest unit, perhaps, to which people will willingly accord emotional allegiance.” In fact, even the nation-state is too much for many Europeans. Europe has 16 more countries today than it had in 1988, thanks to the shattering of artificial states — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. In Belgium, a country smaller than Maryland, there is such a vicious division between Flanders and Wallonia that until December there had been no government for well over 500 days — a world record.

The travails through which Europe is going are at least somewhat reminiscent of the early history of the United States, although the analogy if far from perfect and is subject to being stretched to far. Like Europe, however, the United States faced several crises in its early years that threatened to tear the nation apart, and nearly did on more than one occasions. The Articles of Confederation, for example, made the nation as a whole largely ungovernable and it’s hard to see how it would have stayed united for much longer had it not been for the 1787 Convention in Philadelphia producing the Constitution. Even after that, though, the birth pangs continued to produce divisions that could have led to danger from the birth of our political party system, to the divisions over the French Revolution, to the beginnings of the divisions between the mercantilist North and the agricultural South. During the War of 1812, opposition to the war in New England reached a point where secession was openly discussed, although rejected. And, of course, after the war, the disputes continued as trade policy and slavery became the issues on which the nation would divide itself for four more decades until a war had to be fought. And all of this happened in a country, as I’ve said, where regional identities had only begun to form a century or two before.

Comparing that history to the present day, we see Europe going through yet another crisis and it’s not an easy one. Fixing it is likely to require unified action by a number of parties acting in the interests of a common Europe. The problem may well be, though, that people don’t really think there’s a common Europe at the moment.

Harding closes his must-read piece with the argument that the crisis in the Euro Zone isn’t really just about money and debt, it’s about whether there really is a European identity anymore, or if there ever was:

Shortly before the launch of euro coins and notes in January 2002, Duisenberg, the European Central Bank president, mused, “The euro is much more than just a currency; it is a symbol of European integration in every sense of the word.” He was right, but not in the way he might have hoped. A decade on, the plight of the embattled euro seems to encapsulate a broader breakdown of Europe’s dreams of a united future. Rather than bringing the European Union closer to its citizens, the currency has widened the gap between rulers and ruled. Instead of ushering in a new era of prosperity, the euro has condemned millions of Europeans to decades of penury. And far from bringing together the peoples of Europe, it is on the verge of tearing them apart.

If there is no European identity, then the question of what Germany is willing to do to save the PIIG countries, for example, is more of an accounting exercise and a question of what is in Germany’s interests than about helping to save “Europe,” whatever it is that might be at this point. Similarly, for the Greeks, it seems as the Europe is increasingly seen as a far away place that is forcing decades of austerity upon them while the Eurocrats live the high life in Brussels. That’s not exactly a recipe for unity. In the end, it may be that Europe is discovering that you cannot create a national identity out of whole cloth and graft it on top of  more than a thousand years of history.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

UK defense secretary Philip Hammond addressed the Atlantic Council this morning in advance of a meeting with his US counterpart, Leon Panetta. I’ve written two longish posts on his speech at the New Atlanticist blog, which I’ll highlight for you here.

UK Defense Secretary: No Preemptive Strike on Iran

While declaring “We would not be in favor of a preemptive strike on Iran,” UK defense secretary Philip Hammond vowed that any attempt to disrupt the flow of oil through Straits of Hormuz “would be illegal and unsuccessful.”

Speaking at the Atlantic Council on NATO and the Case for Collective Defense in the 21st Century, Hammond reinforced transatlantic doctrine dating back to the Carter administration when he stated, “It is in all our interests that the arteries of global trade are kept free, open and running. Disruption to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz would threaten regional and global economic growth.”

So, while his government would prefer to avoid the use of force, it would do so if necessary.

He observed, “Our joint naval presence in the Arabian Gulf, something our regional partners appreciate, is key to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for international trade” and added, “The Royal Navy will continue to play a substantial role as part of the Combined Maritime Forces, both at the headquarters in Bahrain, and through our mine counter-measure vessels which help maintain freedom of navigation in the Gulf.”

Of course, the reason Iran is threatening to close off the Strait of Hormuz is because the regime is feeling squeezed by tightening US and European sanctions in response to intransigence on its nuclear program. Asked about that in Q&A, Hammond was blunt: “My working assumption is that they are working flat out” on building a nuclear weapon.

UK Defense Secretary: Europe Failing to Meet Responsibilities

Philip Hammond blasted his fellow Europeans for “failing to meet their financial responsibilities to NATO, and so failing to maintain appropriate and proportionate capabilities.”

Hammond declared, “Without strong economies and stable public finances it is impossible to build and sustain, in the long-term, the military capability required to project power and maintain defense.” Echoing former US Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, he added, “That is why today the debt crisis should be considered the greatest strategic threat to the future security of our nations. The fact is, in this era of austerity not even the United States can afford the astronomical resource commitment required to deal with every threat from every source.”

[...]
Yet, despite the obviousness of this fact, many allies are not following through. “Libya and Afghanistan have highlighted the significant difficulties we face in ensuring NATO continues to serve the needs of collective security,” Hammond observed. Then, echoing former US defense secretary Bob Gates, he charged, “Too many countries are failing to meet their financial responsibilities to NATO, and so failing to maintain appropriate and proportionate capabilities. Too many are opting out of operations, or contributing but a fraction of what they should be capable of.”

Cutting to the chase, he pointed out, “This is a European problem, not an American one. And it is a political problem, not a military one.”

It was a very powerful speech. I offer substantial commentary in both posts, especially the latter. Highlights:

It would seem obviously in the interests of all concerned to avoid war in Iran. Despite a lot of saber rattling and talk about a nuclear Iran being “unacceptable,” the military option has been only theoretically on the table during the years of tensions over the issue.

One hopes that the Iranian regime receives Hammond’s message that this forbearance has its limits. A standoff over the Strait of Hormuz would almost certainly lead to shots being fired. Containment becomes quite difficult, indeed, once that happens.

And:

There was surely little disagreement with any of that in an Atlantic Council audience. The frustrations of NATO allies not pulling their weight, even to the point of meeting the minimum two percent of GDP spending level that all agree to as a condition of Alliance membership, are so long standing that mentioning them amounts to throat clearing.

Yes, the problem is primarily political. But it appears absolutely entrenched. Simply put, most Europeans see little real threat to their security on the horizon; meanwhile, their economies are in dire trouble and the cradle to grave government support system most have become accustomed to is in danger of collapsing.

I’m thus left in the odd position of quoting Donald Rumsfeld in successive posts—or, in this case, Rumsfeld quoting Shimon Peres: “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.” The bottom line is that, whatever cathartic benefit comes from lambasting the Germans and others for not doing as much as we would like on the security front, it’s simply a fact that we are going to have to cope with over time.

More at the links.

Vaclav Havel, who spent the 70s and 80s as a playwright-turned-dissident protesting in his own way against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and then became leader of the country in the 1990s, has died at the age of 75:

PRAGUE — Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who wove theater into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, has died. He was 75.

Mr. Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic, his assistant Sabina Tancecova said said.

Mr. Havel was his country’s first democratically elected president after the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” that ended four decades of repression by a regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan.”

As president, he oversaw the country’s bumpy transition to democracy and a free-market economy, as well its peaceful 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Even out of office, he remained a world figure. He was part of the “new Europe” — in the coinage of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — of ex-communist countries that stood up for the United States when the democracies of “old Europe” opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion.

A former chain-smoker, Mr. Havel had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating to his years in communist jails. He was hospitalized in Prague on Jan. 12, 2009, with an unspecified inflammation, and had developed breathing difficulties after undergoing minor throat surgery.

Mr. Havel left office in 2003, 10 years after Czechoslovakia broke up and a few months before both nations joined the European Union. He was credited with laying the groundwork that brought his Czech Republic into the 27-nation bloc, and was president when it joined NATO in 1999.

Shy and bookish, with wispy mustache and unkempt hair, Mr. Havel came to symbolize the power of the people to peacefully overcome totalitarian rule.

“Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred,” He famously said. It became his revolutionary motto which he said he strove to live by.

Mr. Havel was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and collected dozens of accolades worldwide for his efforts as a global ambassador of conscience, defended the downtrodden from Darfur to Myanmar.

Among his many honors were Sweden’s prestigious Olof Palme Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest United States civilian award, bestowed on him by President George W. Bush for being “one of liberty’s great heroes.”

An avowed peacenik whose heroes included rockers like Frank Zappa, he never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a small heart as a flourish.

Mr. Havel first made a name for himself after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reforms of Alexander Dubcek and other liberally minded communists in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Mr. Havel’s plays were banned as hard-liners installed by Moscow snuffed out every whiff of rebellion. But he continued to write, producing a series of underground essays that stand with the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as the most incisive and eloquent analyses of what communism did to society and the individual.

One of his best-known essays, “The Power and the Powerless” written in 1978, borrowed slyly from the immortal opening line of the mid-19th century Communist Manifesto, writing: “A specter is haunting eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.”‘

In the essay, he dissected what he called the “dictatorship of ritual” — the ossified Soviet bloc system under Leonid Brezhnev — and imagined what happens when an ordinary greengrocer stops displaying communist slogans and begins “living in truth,” rediscovering “his suppressed identity and dignity.”

He knew that suppression firsthand.

Born Oct. 5, 1936, in Prague, the child of a wealthy family which lost extensive property to communist nationalization in 1948, Havel was denied a formal education, eventually earning a degree at night school and starting out in theater as a stagehand.

His political activism began in earnest in January 1977, when he co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and the cause drew widening attention in the West.

Mr. Havel was detained countless times and spent four years in communist jails. His letters from prison to his wife became one of his best-known works. “Letters to Olga” blended philosophy with a stream of stern advice to the spouse he saw as his mentor and best friend, and who tolerated his reputed philandering and other foibles.

The events of August 1988 — the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion — first suggested that Mr. Havel and his friends might one day replace the faceless apparatchiks who jailed them.

Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling his name and that of the playwright’s hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia’s first president after it was founded in 1918.

Mr. Havel’s arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong that the communists released him again in May.

That fall, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days later, communist police brutally broke up a demonstration by thousands of Prague students.

By December 1989, Havel was named President of Czechoslovakia, a position to which he was elected in 1990 in the first free elections in that country since the Germans arrived in 1938. He served in that position until 1992, when the Czech Republic and Slovaka mutually decided to dissolve a nation that had been haphazardly put together at the end of World War One. Havel served as President of the Czech Republic from 1993 until 2003.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie links this morning to a 2003 piece in the magazine written by Matt Welch at the time Havel was leaving office:

Vaclav Havel, the 66-year-old former Czech president who was term-limited out of office on February 2, built his reputation in the 1970s by being to eyewitness fact what George Orwell was to dystopian fiction. In other words, he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time.

Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay. Both men, in self-described sentiment, were of “the left,” yet both men infuriated the left with their stinging criticism and ornery independence. Both were haunted by the Death of God, delighted by the idiosyncratic habits of their countrymen, and physically diminished as a direct result of their confrontation with totalitarians (not to mention their love of tobacco). As essentially neurotic men with weak mustaches, both have given generations of normal citizens hope that, with discipline and effort, they too can shake propaganda from everyday language and stand up to the foulest dictatorships.

Unlike Orwell, Havel lived long enough to enjoy a robust third act, and his last six months in office demonstrated the same kind of restless, iconoclastic activism that has made him an enemy of ideologues and ally of freedom lovers for nearly five decades.

(…)

Three successive United States presidents have fallen under Havel’s spell, and he in turn has used his access to cajole them into taking military action against Slobodan Milosevic, expanding NATO, and minding the lessons of Munich. Clinton and George W. Bush in particular seem tongue-tied and awe-struck in the presence of someone who actually fought communism and lived to tell about it; Havel returns the favor by flattering America’s role in taking down the Evil Empire. His open, though qualified, flattery of the U.S. is one reason Noam Chomsky considers him “morally repugnant” and on an “intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks.”

Chomsky’s insults aside, Havel has enabled Czechs to punch above their weight in international affairs for 13 years; this will likely end as the extraordinary geopolitical circumstances that created him fade and are replaced by more provincial Czech political concerns. Havel himself sees his career as a massive historical accident, even a joke. But as he walks off the global stage, Czechs and the rest of the world can be thankful that someone like him was essentially in the wrong place at the right time. He remains a figure from whom not just insight but inspiration can be drawn.

“The most important thing,” Havel said in his final New Year’s address as president, “is that new generations are maturing, generations of people who grew up free and are not deformed by life under Communist rule. These are the first Czechs of our times who inherently consider freedom normal and natural. It would be great if the breaking through of these people into various parts of public life leads to our society more factually, thoroughly and impartially examining its past, without whose reflection we cannot be ourselves. I also hope it will lead to our successfully parting with many ill consequences of the work of destruction the Communist regime wreaked upon our souls.”

Sitting here twenty years after the collapse not just of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, but of the Soviet Union itself, it’s easy to forget that men like Havel existed, why they had to exist, and the risks they took to keep the flame of freedom burning in the darkness.

A gun and grenade attack in the centre of the Belgian city of Liege has killed at least two people and wounded about 25, Belgian media say.

They say several men threw grenades and fired on a crowd at a bus stop in Place Saint Lambert, a busy square.

The very brief report states that one attacker has been reported dead and another is in custody, but that gunfire had not yet ceased.

The who and the why of the attack are unclear at the moment.

A bit more from the NYT:  Reports: 2 Dead in Hand Grenade Attack in Belgium.

Paul Krugman‘s latest column, “Depression and Democracy,” is simply bizarre.

He begins with this assertion:

It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high.

Now, Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist whose claim to fame is research on the Great Depression. I have neither of those credentials. Still, words mean things and depression is not simply a period of high unemployment. Indeed, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research–the US government agency that officially declares these things–the recent recession lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. So, not only are we not in a depression, we’re not even in a recession but rather in a period of slow expansion that’s lasted more than two years.

From there, Krugman correctly assesses that “the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony” and continues his long-running theme, which I find persuasive, that the transatlantic elite consensus that “austerity” is the solution to the current stagnation is dangerously wrongheaded.

Next, though, he goes off the deep end in declaring a crisis in European democracy on the basis that some fringe parties are getting votes in some countries with electoral rules that promote large numbers of parties and that Hungary is showing troubling signs.

A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.

I’m not pleased, either, that the economic crisis is fueling resentments and giving rise to fringe parties and a man on horseback mentality. But that’s hardly unusual and seldom a recipe from long-term damage. And the notion that Hungary is somehow “the heart of Europe” is laughable. It has spent almost all its history under one dictator or another.

Things are undeniably bad. The failure of leadership in Europe could well send us into another economic spiral. The failure of leadership in Washington, too, is deeply concerning. And, yes, all of this has led to a poisonous political climate. But we don’t need wild hyperbole from respected voices like Krugman.