20 reasons living in Delhi is awesome

Pack your bags, sell your house: It's better in Delhi, India.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - February 3, 2014

1. Fast food comes to you

(Eileen Delhi/Flickr)

It's not just the ice cream man. Even in Delhi's most residential neighborhoods, hawkers selling roasted corn on the cob, tender coconut juice, and local favorites like the deep-fried mashed-potato patty known as “aloo tikki” troll the streets, calling out their wares in sing-song voices. Listen for the aloo tikki wallah clanging his ladle against his wok and chase him down. You won't regret it.

2. Shopping experiences that absolutely cannot be beat

(Vikram Aiyappa/Flickr Commons)

An outdoor market with stalls selling food and handicrafts from India's many states, Dilli Haat offers a great shopping experience — no touts, no beggars — and only high-quality merchandise. Don't be a stupid farang, though: Tibetan momos and chowmin (i.e. friedChinese noodles) is not the way to go here. Try the Fish Fry and Egg Roast at the Kerala stall or the Uttaranchal Thali.

 

3. Kebabs are everywhere. And they're delicious.

(Sajjad Hussain/AFP Getty Images)

Whether it's a catered party or a drive-up restaurant like Colonel's Kebabs in Defence Colony Market (DefCol to locals) or Qureshi's in Alaknanda, Delhi's fried and tandoori-roasted kebabs are amazing. The chicken tikka kebab (boneless chicken) and mutton seekh kebab (ground goat mixed with green chiles) are the tandoori standbys. But pan-fried goat kebabs — such as the mutton shaami kebab, which melts like butter in your mouth — are the real gems.

 

4. The bustling wholesale market Chandni Chowk is a dystopian paradise

(AFP/Getty Images)

Built in the 17th century by the same Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Chandni Chowk is today a teeming wholesale market, selling everything from glass bangles to bulk spices. My go-to itinerary here includes a lot of street food — deep-fried dough at Old & Famous Jalebiwallah, fried crisps and potatoes topped with yoghurt (papdi chaat) at Natraj Dahi Bhalle Wallah, for instance. Then take a wander through the winding lanes to the Wedding Market or climb to the roof of the chili powder factory for a view of the city.

 

5. There are endless incredible and ancient monuments that tourists don't even know exist

(Varun Shiv Kapur/Flickr Commons)

Some of them are beautiful. Some are falling down. Others now serve as home to itinerant laborers. Delhi's medieval ruins are all over the city — not only in recognized “sites.” The government is sitting on a tourism gold mine. But for now, you get the joy of discovery, without the pesky guards and ticket takers.

 

6. Delhi, despite its reputation, is actually pretty leafy

(AFP/Getty Images)

Believe it or not, Delhi is one of the leafiest cities in Asia. It's strewn with big, forested parks — some of them, like Jamali Kamali, featuring stunning medieval ruins. Beat the heat in the early morning at Jahanpanah City Forest, which features paved two-kilometer, five-kilometer and seven-kilometer jogging paths. Birdsong beats your iPod any day.

 

7. This place is the perfect locale for an afternoon of quiet reading

(Stephen & Claire Farnsworth/Flickr Commons)

The tomb of India's second Mughal emperor — who ruled what is today Afghanistan, Pakistanand northern India in the 16th Century — is a stunning, red sandstone mausoleum reminiscent of the white marble Taj Mahal. Named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1993, it's one of the few architectural marvels in India that has been lovingly restored. And it's quiet enough to dip into a book like William Dalrymple's “The Last Mughal” or Khushwant Singh's “Delhi.”

 

8. The Delhi Metro actually works

( Raveendran/AFP Getty Images)

There's no better equalizer than public transport. But the Delhi Metro has done more than get middle-class Indians rubbing shoulders with migrant laborers. One of India's few successful infrastructure projects, it's provided a glimpse of the struggling country's possible future. A great antidote to the pessimism that creeps in during the daily skirmishes on the street.

 

9. The street dogs are really cute and friendly

(Sajjad Hussain/AFP Getty Images)

There's no better testimony to the soft heart beating under Delhi's tough exterior than its huge population of street dogs — most of which are friendly and well fed. Thanks to the Punjabi penchant for exotic purebreds, there's a healthy variety of sizes, shapes and colors. But they all seem to be evolving toward the same khaki colored, short-haired uberdog. (Now and then people complain about biters, but my suspicion is that only happens to those who deserve it).

 

10. Jama Masjid will help correct your misunderstandings about Islam

(Emmanuel Dunand/ AFP Getty Images)

The main mosque of Old Delhi — the city's medieval core — Jama Masjid was built in the 17th Century. Outside, destitute children and crippled crones beg for alms amid the teeming frenzy of a market selling second-hand auto parts and the like. Slip off your shoes and step through the gates and silence descends. There's no better place to recalibrate your misconceptions about Islam.

 

11. Hauz Khas Village, or HKV, has (finally) brought the pub crawl to Delhi

(abrinsky/Flickr Commons)

The dozens of bars, bakeries and boutiques of this bohemian enclave sit smack dab in the center of an ancient village — absorbed into the city as Delhi expanded. Work up an appetite — or a thirst — by touring the medieval madrassa and tomb of Feroz Shah Tuglaq (1351-88), which now serves as a makeout spot for young couples. Then from the open-air terrace of the ultra-boho Gunpowder, which offers the city's best Kerala curries, you can look down on the medieval lake that once supplied the water to the Tuglaq's Delhi Sultanate in the 1300s.

 

12. Delhi is the seat of government, which for regular folks means great regional food at rock-bottom prices

(mycameraspeaks/Flickr Commons)

Goa, Kerala, Sikkim and (especially) Maharashtra all serve up some terrific grub. But Andhra Pradesh Bhavan is the real standout. On Sundays, Delhiwallahs from all walks of life push and shove and clamor at the door to get a crack at the chicken biryani. Don't worry, though, the canteen's patented number system — and the manager's booming voice calling out ticket numbers like a metronome — make AP Bhavan one of the most efficient establishments in the country.

 

13. The auto rickshaws combine the convenience of economical transportation with the pleasures of a roller coaster and the catharsis of a fistfight

(Andrea Kirkby/Flickr Commons)

It's the easiest way to get around the city, though you can find yourself spending 20 minutes haggling over $0.25 if you lose perspective.

 

14. There's a thing called jugaad, and when used for good, it's awesome

(Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP Getty Images)

Jugaad — which means everything from fixing your car with a wire coathanger to fixing the bid for a lucrative cement contract with a well-orchestrated bribe — doesn't really translate. But it's what makes Delhi tick. See the positive side of jugaad in action on any street corner, where you can get your shoes fixed or your coffee maker repaired, most of the time for less than a dollar.

 

15. The greatest weddings in the world are held here, and crashing them is practically encouraged

(Praksh Singh/AFP Getty Images)

Here Comes the Bride is great and all. But let's face it: All weddings would be better if the groom turned up riding a white horse, surrounded by a bunch of drunken, dancing maniacs. And that's not even the best thing about a Delhi wedding. The best thing is that there's kind of no real guest list. A 600-person turnout is small, and crashing is almost mandatory.

 

16. Jalebis are better than cronuts

(Rajesh_India/Flickr Commons)

Cronuts schmonuts. You want something decadent? Try jalebis. Here's what you do: Squeeze pastry dough from an cake-icing tube into a deep-frier filled with clarified butter and sugar syrup, carefully squiggling it into the shape of a pretzel. Repeat for 100 years, occasionally washing the deep-frier. Yep, this place in Chandni Chowk has been around since 1905.

 

17. There's the Paranthewallah Gully

(Yelp Inc./Flickr Commons)

Around the corner from Old & Famous Jalebiwallah, this is a narrow lane filled with century-old restaurants specializing in the stuffed north Indian flatbreads called “parathas.” Parathas stuffed with potatoes are a staple of every restaurant in India. But here you can get them stuffed with virtually anything — from bitter gourd (my favorite) to papadum. Better still, they dispense with the griddle and deep-fry the suckers.

 

18. The Old Fort is both stunning and charming

(Matt King/Getty Images)

The Old Fort or “Purana Qila” is a stunning medieval fortress built in the 16th Century. In the afternoons, couples splash around the moat in pedal boats — pleasant in Delhi's brief, sunny winter. And year round, there's a campy but fun sound and light show every night after sundown with a blaring recorded history of the “Seven Cities of Delhi.”

 

19. This gorgeous park in the middle of the city

(Bertram Ng/Flickr Commons)

A sprawling, manicured park, Raj Ghat proves that Indians can keep public spaces clean when they really, really want to. Raj Ghat itself is a memorial to Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi — the leader of India's freedom struggle. The park also features a memorial to India's first prime minister and greatest statesman, Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as a memorial to his daughter, Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas).

20. India Gate is the ideal place for people watching

(rajkumar1220/Flickr Commons)

The national monument of India, this L'Arc de Triomphe-esque structure was designed by Raj-era architect Edward Lutyens as a memorial for the 90,000 Indian soldiers killed fighting for Britain in World War I. After independence, India removed the statue of George V from beneath the arch, making it a modern symbol of India's freedom struggle. It's a brilliant place to see tourists from all over the country — many of them of modest means — enjoying an ice cream and snapping photos.

• > CONTINUE READING

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130819/20-reasons-love-delhi

So here's why Germany is struggling to ban neo-Nazis

A series of hate crimes has prompted the authorities’ bid to disband the far-right National Democratic Party. But it won’t be easy.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 29, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — Reeling from revelations that a neo-Nazi cell allegedly robbed banks and murdered immigrants with impunity for more than a decade, the authorities have been at pains to show they’re acting against extremism.

Leading the effort is a drive to ban the far-right National Democratic Party, which is alleged to have neo-Nazi links.

All 16 German states filed a motion in the federal constitutional court to ban the NPD in December, arguing that it propagates racism and aims to overthrow the democratic government. But the court's dismissal of a similar case in 2003 suggests the going won't be easy, especially when neither Angela Merkel's government in Berlin nor parliament has joined the fight.

More than that, critics say, the move will do little to stop hardcore neo-Nazi street fighters even as it galvanizes support for a political organization that was already about to self-destruct.

Germany has tough laws to prevent the resurgence of Nazism, such as a ban on displaying the swastika and an edict that makes it illegal to deny the Holocaust.

However, constitutional protections for free speech have made it difficult to ban the NPD just because its ideology bears some similarity to Adolph Hitler's. To do that, the plaintiffs must show the party is actually working to overthrow the state through violence.

Experts say that may be very difficult to prove.

“There are some similarities between today's neo-Nazis and the Nazi Party of the 1920s and '30s,” says Bernd Wagner, a longtime veteran of the anti-extremist unit of the German police. However, he adds, the party lacks a formal structure with a leader at the top. “There are countless cells and networks with separate activities and projects and horizontal, vertical and diagonal connections.”

The danger those informal networks pose hit home in 2011, when police allegedly connected a string of bank robberies and murders to a terrorist cell that called itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

Among the group's alleged crimes are the murders of nine immigrants between 2000 and 2006, the bombing of an immigrant-owned barbershop in Cologne in 2004 and the murder of a policewoman and attempted murder of her partner in 2007.

Police initially failed to link the crimes to an ideological motive and insisted at first that the Cologne bombing couldn’t have been a terrorist attack.

It soon surfaced that the earlier effort to ban the NPD may have aided the terrorist group.

In 2012, the Interior Ministry announced it was investigating suspicions that an NPD official named Ralf Wohlleben — who had acted as a confidential informant for the authorities seeking to ban the party — had during the same period supplied the terror cell with the gun allegedly used in the murders of the nine immigrants.

The development gave ominous new meaning to the constitutional court's 2003 dismissal of the case against the NPD.

Back then, the court ruled that the authorities had flooded the party with so many undercover agents and informants that it was impossible to ascertain whether its alleged plotting to overthrow the government had actually been hatched in the minds of the police.

Now it looked as if they had also indirectly supplied the weapons.

“Wohlleben and other functionaries of the NPD were also active in this terror network,” says Wagner, who now heads a group that helps neo-Nazis who want to leave the movement.

“Even though in public they presented themselves as a non-violent democratic party, at the same time they were providing support and logisitics for violent activities.”

Prompted toward new vigilance by the revelations, the Interior Ministry reopened investigations into some 3,300 unsolved murders and attempted murders committed between 1990 and 2011. As a result, nearly 750 cases were added to the 60 killings previously attributed to right-wing extremists.

The 16 state governments now seeking to ban the NPD argue that the party gives the network real political power. They allege that as many as 1 out of 3 party members is a convicted criminal or faces police investigation, according to a copy of the complaint leaked to a German newspaper.

By providing the NPD with the state funding afforded to all German political parties, German taxpayers are essentially paying for the neo-Nazi groups' propaganda, the interior minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued.

“We can't be the shoemaker who continually resoles their combat boots with this party financing,” Ralf Jäger told German media after the case was lodged.

However, police say it will be difficult to establish the existence of a command structure or a money trail from allegations that the membership rosters of the NPD and informal Kameradschaften, or “fellowships” of neo-Nazis, share some common names.

There's little or no direct proof to suggest that the NPD operates like the political wing of a broader, militant neo-Nazi movement — as Sinn Fein acted for the IRA in Ireland, says Oliver Stepien of the Berlin police.

“The inland intelligence service and our own information suggests that the neo-Nazi action groups try to use the NPD structure to advance their own goals,” he says.

“But there's no general rule that the NPD pays for the lawyers when a right-wing activist is accused of a crime. In fact, the party distances itself from the action groups when they break the law.”

More from GlobalPost: How western Ukraine is driving a revolution

Some worry that the renewed effort to ban the NPD will galvanize its supporters and bolster its credibility with the hard-core street fighters just as it's about to fade away on its own.

The NPD has seats in only two state parliaments and no presence whatsoever in the Bundestag. In recent elections, it won a paltry 1.3 percent of the popular vote, although that total is much higher than the support it earned between 1990 and 2005.

The party is also practically broke. Its 300,000 euro ($410,000) annual government subsidy has already been frozen due to an outstanding fine of 1.27 million euros ($1.7 million) for accounting irregularities.

And it was thrown into disarray in December when former party chairman Holger Apfel was drummed out following allegations of a “homosexual assault.”

Bringing the full might of the German court system to bear now could grant the party new legitimacy in the minds of potential supporters as well as stoke long-held resentment toward the liberal state's supposed persecution of “patriotic” Germans.

And it would do nothing to eliminate the neo-Nazi “fellowships” and other informal networks that keep the underground movement alive, Wagner says.

“Some might say,” he says, “that the federal government is just trying to silence its critics.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140128/germany-neo-nazis-npd

Russia muscles into European nuclear industry

A new deal with Hungary is set to boost Moscow's influence as its grip on oil and gas wanes.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 23, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — A leading Hungarian official has said an agreement last week to give Russia a foothold in his country's nuclear future is Budapest's best deal in 40 years.

Hungary granted Russia's state energy company Rosatom a $14-billion contractto double the capacity of the country's sole nuclear power plant, a 2000-megawatt reactor in the Danube River city of Paks.

The funds would be offered as a 30-year loan package to be extended at below-market rates.

“These new reactors will surely enhance Hungary's energy independence and security,” Russian President VladimirPutin told reporters.

But one person's bargain is another's Faustian deal — in this case at least. Critics say the sweetheart deal may as well have been written by Mephistopheles, the demon of German folklore.

They say the project was never tendered for competitive bids despite an earlier expression of interest from the French energy company Areva. Skeptics worry it represents an effort by Putin to add nuclear energy to the oil and gas monopoly he's used so effectively to cement Russia's influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

“What are Hungarians to make of the fact that Prime Minister Viktor Orban has committed them to invest [billions] building two new nuclear reactors without consulting his own cabinet let alone parliament, industry experts, or the Hungarian people?” asked a pointed editorial in the English-language Budapest Beacon.

Orban maintains that the deal meets European Union regulations. But the opposition has demanded an extraordinary session of parliament be convened to discuss its terms and implications.

The prime minister has already been forced to retract an earlier statement he made claiming that the European Commission had approved the deal, amending it to say that the regulatory body has made no objections to the pact.


“It is too early to say [whether the agreement meets EU regulations],” a spokeswoman for the commission told GlobalPost in an email. “We are looking at the issue now and will let you know when the legal analysis has been completed.”

The EU's 2004 “Public Sector Directive” mandates that public works projects in the energy sector must be open to competitive bids, and Hungary's own laws on government procurement require open tenders unless there are reasons why the project can only be carried out by a specific contractor.

However, Orban has suggested that as the expansion of an existing facility, rather than a new project, the Paks contract isn't subject to the regulation. Moreover, Rosatom was said to be the only company to offer financing in discussions with companies ahead of the decision not to open a bid, Hungarian media reported.

The European Commission's decision about the agreement's compliance could have far-reaching implications.

In 2012, allegations of corruption surrounded the Russian bid to expand the Czech Republic's Temelin nuclear reactor due to the involvement of a Czech firm under investigation for insider trading and breach of trust in connection with previous deals. Now it looks doubtful that project will go forward at all, according to Czech media.

Similarly, a Russian project to build a 2000-MW nuclear plant in Belene, Bulgaria, was excoriated as “a corrupt and completely illegitimate business project, aimed at producing abundant and expensive electricity in a country with excess capacity in a region of declining electricity demand,” in the words of Ognyan Minchev, a research fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Balkan Trust for Democracy. The Bulgarian parliament voted to scrap plans for the reactor in February last year following a protracted debate over its environmental impact and a new investigation into the projected costs.

Specific allegations of corruption have yet to be leveled at the Rosatom deal, and a spokesman for anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International's office in Hungary said his organization lacks sufficient information to make a judgment. However, corruption is a generalized concern in both countries: Hungary already ranks a mediocre 47 out of 176 countries on the watchdog's Corruption Perception Index and Russia an abysmal 130.

Russia already enjoys a near-monopoly over Central European gas supplies, providing three-quarters of the gas used by Hungary and the Czech Republic and two-thirds of Ukraine's.

Putin has made no bones about using that dominance for commercial leverage or as a weapon of foreign policy. In 2006 and 2009, for instance, Russia cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine in the middle of winter during disputes over prices, leaving customers across Europe to freezeuntil their countries coughed up more cash.

In March last year, critics argued that Russia purposefully drove up energy prices in Bulgariato engineer the fall of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov's government after he terminated the controversial Russian-run nuclear power plant in Belene.

And any possibility that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych may cave to the ongoing protests in his country for greater integration with Europe has been all but eliminated by Russia's energy monopoly, says Jonathan Stern, an oil and gas expert at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

“What Putin said, as far as I can see, was not 'we'll turn off the gas,' but 'if you want to align yourself to the EU, then you will be paying the price that the EU pays,'”he said.

“The reason Russia is able to do this is that these countries have not made sufficient efforts to diversify their imports.”

If history is any guide, Russia will make sure that nuclear power doesn't change that.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140123/russia-nuclear-deal-hungary-power-influence

Obama's NSA promises fail to quell European fears

NSA critics see little substance and few practical measures in Obama's pledge to restrict spying abroad.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 18, 2014


BERLIN, Germany — Germany's foreign minister welcomed President Obama's official pledge to curb the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) on Friday. But a quiet unease lingers across Berlin and many other European capitals.

“President Obama outlined a process for restricting the agency that will include both Congress and the public,” German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeiersaid.

Now the balance between America's security needs and the protection of civil liberties must be adjusted in the right way, the foreign minister added.

Ah, there's the rub.

As Obama himself phrased it, “It is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect.” In Europe, questions remain regarding whether the measures Obama announced Friday go far enough in including America's allies in the oversight and restriction of the NSA.

More from GlobalPost: 16 disturbing things we've learned from Snowden (so far)

“He's a very good speaker, but the substance of his message was not very ambitious,” said Peter Schaar, Germany's former commissioner for data protection and freedom of information.

“He said that US secret services will respect privacy, but there are very few additional guarantees and safeguards and most of them are limited to US persons,” Schaar told GlobalPost.

As a result, the pledges are unlikely to silence the president's critics across the Atlantic.


"Only when we have signed a legally binding treaty that protects all [European] citizens will the lost trust be won back," said German Justice Minister Heiko Maas.

“Almost all the NSA's integral freedom of action was preserved, and only a handful of the 46 proposals submitted by a committee of experts in December were endorsed,” concluded France's Le Monde newspaper.

“Obama did not announce any new protections for non-Americans abroad, instead punting the issue to his top officials for further consideration. Nor did he address the NSA’s secret weakening of encryption standards,” wrote the UK's Guardian newspaper, referring to its own report that American and British intelligence agencies are able to bypass codes that supposedly allow internet users to protect their personal data, online transactions and emails.

“For me, limiting the use of metadata [from phone contacts] to only two steps is the only real news,” said Schaar, the former German data protection commissioner. But those rules for collecting and analyzing phone call information would still be illegal under German law, which limits the examination of a suspect's phone contacts to only one step, he said.

From Europe's perspective, Obama's speech focused on reassuring American citizens that new measures will protect their privacy. But beginning with a nod to “totalitarian states like East Germany,” the US president repeatedly offered concessions to NSA critics abroad.

He promised to make public more of the decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which provides judicial review of America's intelligence activities, including the Section 702 program targeting foreign individuals overseas, and the Section 215 telephone metadata program.

He announced new, but as yet unspecified, limitations on the government's right to retain, search, and use that information in criminal cases.

He revealed that he has directed the US attorney general to limit the scope of the so-called “national security letters” that the FBI uses to order companies to provide information about their customers so that they are only valid for a fixed period, instead of remaining in force indefinitely.

And he announced that effective immediately the NSA would limit its efforts to collect data to telephone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of the previous three.

“The president for the first time ... acknowledged that non-US persons have privacy rights in the context of our overseas collection. It is very hard to overstate the sort of spiritual importance of that statement,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

But Europe is looking for practical measures, not spiritual ones. And that means critics like Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German member of the European Parliament's committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, will continue to fight for a tough anti-surveillance law in Europe — which could make companies like Google and Facebook subject to a 100 million euro fine if they turn over EU citizens' data to US spies.

Albrecht continues to believe European countries should stop the transfer of banking information and details about airline passengers until the US agrees to legally enforceable measures to prevent the NSA from spying on European citizens.

“Each day that passes with no agreement leads to the further erosion of European citizens' data protection rights,” Albrecht said.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/140118/obamas-nsa-promises-fail-quell-european-fears

Gays face backlash in Germany

Conservatives campaign to stop gay sex education amid celebrations for a gay soccer player's coming out.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 16, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — German athletes will sport rainbow-colored uniforms at the Winter Olympics in Sochi next month in a move widely interpreted as a protest against Russia’s crackdown against gay rights.

Although some see it as part of the country’s redoubled efforts to be perceived as a leader in gay rights following Moscow’s recent enactment of an anti-gay law, the recent coming-out of a gay German soccer player has drawn new attention to problems that still face gays and lesbians at home, which suggest the real picture is more complex.

When former professional player Thomas Hitzelsperger announced that he was gay last week, he was almost universally celebrated in the German press.

But rumors persisted that his coach dissuaded him from making the announcement until he retired — while the European championships were underway — suggesting that German soccer fans, at least, haven’t fully accepted the idea of gay players.

“The rejoicing sounded suspiciously self-serving and smug,” Der Spiegel observed. “'We are so amazingly liberal that we can even get excited about a gay professional football player,' the message seemed to be.”

James Gardner, a gay American living in Berlin with his German husband, sees cynical politics in the new enthusiasm for gay rights.

“The whole issue of homosexuality is so politicized right now,” he says. "We have this Cold War happening on the gay front," he says, referring to the unspoken divides in Germany on homosexuality, "this Cold Gay War.”

Moves by the Catholic Church in the state of Baden-Würtenburg to ban sex-education classes from teaching students about homosexuality — even though there’s no sign the public school system will be teaching anything of the kind — suggest that in Germany, as in the US, ordinary people remain deeply divided over the issue, says Carolyn Gammon, a Canadianlesbian married to a German woman.

“I'd like to say that it's two steps forward, one step back,” she says. “But it's more like 1.1 steps forward, one step back.”

Recent polls suggest 65 percent of Germans favor full equality for homosexuals, according to Renate Rampf, spokeswoman for the Lesbian and Gay Federation of Germany, the country's largest non-profit gay rights organization.

That means one in every three Germans believes gays and lesbians aren’t entitled to equal treatment, which leaves fertile ground for evangelical Christians and Catholics who vehemently oppose certain rights for homosexuals.

“Even Chancellor [Merkel] has said that she has a bad feeling when it comes to the issue of gays adopting children,” Rampf said in an email.

Germany recognized domestic partnerships for gays and lesbians in 2001. Three years later, gay and lesbian couples in legal partnerships were allowed to adopt children.

But some less contentious rights — such as tax equality for same-sex partnerships and heterosexual marriages — have been slow in coming. And numerous attempts to legalize gay marriage have failed to pass in successive parliaments led by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union.

Gays and lesbians confront similar contradictions in daily life.

When Gardner was an openly gay student at an elite private school, he says, his peers accepted his sexuality.

But Gammon says even in her liberal Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, “schwule” or “gay” is the most common insult in her son's schoolyard.

“Our child is now going through this system,” she says, “and he's never had a single thing that's gay-positive.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140115/gays-backlash-berlin-germany

Germany: America lied to us about ‘no spy’ pact

Washington’s reluctance to rein in the NSA continues to harm relations.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost - January 15, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — On Facebook, lying is an unfriending offense. Geopolitics may be slightly more complicated.

So after the news that the United States is backtracking on a promise not to spy on its ally by the National Security Agency (NSA), will Germany just suck it up?

Not if peer pressure has anything to do with it.

“America lied to us,” the German-language Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted a high-ranking official as saying in a report claiming that a “no spy” pact between the two countries is dying a slow death in negotiation committees. “We've got nothing.”

The process began late last year, when Washington made four promises to Berlin in an effort to quash resentment over revelations that the NSA and President Barack Obama had listened in on Chancellor Angela Merkel's private phone conversations on top of perusing the personal data of millions of ordinary Germans.

The US vowed that the NSA wouldn’t violate Germany's national interests. It agreed it would not spy on German government officials. It promised not to engage in industrial espionage involving German companies. And it said it would never again violate German laws to collect private data.

But as their US counterparts fight tooth and nail to avoid measures that would make any of those promises legally binding, German negotiators say crossing your fingers doesn't count in international relations.

The result may prompt new calls from the German media and opposition politicians for Berlin to play hardball on other issues, such as a proposed free-trade agreement between the US and European Union, Germany's former data protection commissioner suggests.

“The US will act only if we give them real arguments that it is in their own interest,” says Peter Schaar, former Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

“We have to combine different issues like the free-trade agreement, the safe-harbor regime on the protection of personal data, the question of financial data related to SWIFT bank transfers [with the issue of spying]. Then perhaps these arguments would be heard by the US officials.”

It's not clear whether Germany’s new coalition government, which formally took power only at the beginning of the year, will be prepared to undertake tougher actions than the previous one, Schaar added.

More from GlobalPost: Sochi Olympics: Triumph or nightmare?

Acting government officials have so far declined to comment on the record about the ongoing “no spy” pact negotiations.

But pressure appears to be mounting despite Merkel's repeated attempts to downplay the issue in order to protect US-German trade relations.

The US “will not honor its verbal agreement,” Die Welt reported Wednesday. “America remains at the listening post.”

“I think the US needs to see the damage all this activity has done, and how much trust has been lost in Germany,” Deutsche Welle quoted Philipp Missfelder, Germany's new coordinator for Transatlantic cooperation, as saying.

“Let's not deceive ourselves: even if a no-spy agreement were to be signed, there would still be many unanswered questions.”

“If Germany goes on endlessly without a deal or accepts a completely meaningless agreement,” a columnist for Tagespiegel added, “it will have disgraced itself thoroughly.”

Although he US and Germany will almost certainly remain “frenemies,” their spat may nevertheless have broad implications.

Public pressure could spur action in the European Union parliament, where an effort to rewrite privacy laws and empower regulators to fine companies such as Google and Facebook as much as 100 million euros for handing over private information to the NSA risks running out of time before new elections in May.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140115/us-germany-nsa-no-spy-pact

Early divisions augur hard going for Germany’s grand coalition

Disagreements over migration are already exposing rifts between Merkel's allies.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 10, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — Angela Merkel's fractured hip may be the least of her worries.

The German chancellor’s holiday skiing accident has stuck her with as much as three weeks of bed rest.

But a spat between her conservative and liberal allies that’s threatening to derail her “grand coalition” before it even gets rolling is surely more troubling.

Immigration has been the first flash point.

Bulgarians and Romanians gained the right to settle freely in Germany from Jan. 1, when they finally received the full rights of mobility granted by their countries’ accession to the European Union in 2007.

Even before the new laws came into effect, however, some of Merkel's conservative allies were already stealing a march on their left-leaning coalition partners.

Stoking fears about a wave of “welfare tourists,” the Bavarian leader Horst Seehofer called for new laws that would limit migrants' rights to social benefits, which aren’t guaranteed under EU rules.

Seehofer's Christian Socialist Union (CSU), the sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), wants to ban migrants who defraud the welfare system from re-entering Germany and bar new arrivals from receiving benefits during the first three months of their stays.

The proposal strikes at one of the EU’s founding principles: equality for its citizens.

Experts believe it may be the opening salvo in a battle over the coalition’s future direction.

“This is a political game and a reaction to feelings in the parts of the population,” says Klaus Zimmerman, director of the Institute for the Study of Labor at the University of Bonn. “And also a game between the parties of the new government, who seek to find their roles and positions.”

In fact, Germany needs more immigrants, having achieved record levels of employment in 2013, when the economy created some 232,000 jobs despite the euro crisis.

With one of the EU's lowest birth rates, the population is aging and shrinking.

There's already a shortage of skilled laborers. While the rest of Europe suffers lingering record unemployment, some German cities are seeing jobless rates dip below 5 percent.

Earlier this year, Merkel warned that the working population could fall by as many as 6 million people by 2030, with the result that Britain could surpass Germany as Europe's largest economy.

Immigration would help address the problem, not only by providing skilled labor but also helping maintain the low wage levels that have provided the foundation for Germany's economic revival since the 1990s.

That may help explain why Merkel held out for a coalition with her social democratic rivals after the country’s elections in September, instead of cobbling together a minority government with the CSU, says James W. Davis of Switzerland's University of St. Gallen.

If she'd opted for a minority government, she'd have been hostage to Seehofer's demands even though the CSU holds merely 45 seats in the 631-member parliament. By forming a “grand coalition” with the center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, however, she can play its members against the conservatives in order to advance her more moderate agenda.

That's where Seehofer's loose-cannon status comes in handy, Davis says.

“Having a 'crazy man' rocking the boat gives Merkel the cover she needs to resist further compromises,” he says.

But Seehofer’s calls for a clampdown on “welfare tourists,” a toll on foreigners who drive on the autobahn, and other such measures may cause broader problems.

As right-wing extremism grows across the EU, the CSU's populism may help advance the cause of extremists inside Germany, too, says Andreas Pott, director of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrueck University.

More from GlobalPost: Not funny in France

To stop the new anti-euro Alternative for Germany Party from stealing its conservative voters, for example, the CSU recently adopted slogans such as “Fraudsters will be chucked out” that normalize xenophobic stances previously held only by the extremist National Democratic Party, he says.

In Britain, such anti-immigrant sentiment is fueling the popularity of right-wing parties that are widely believed to have prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to announce a referendum on leaving the EU and restrict migrants' access to social benefits.

“Germany is neither anti-migrant nor racist,” Zimmerman says. “But the public is misused by political strategists who use the topic for political games, as we’ve seen in the United Kingdom.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140109/germany-grand-coalition-faces-rifts

Can US carmakers compete with the Germans?

With the European auto market in decline, American companies can expect to be squeezed from all sides.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 10, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — Opening with a gala this weekend in bankrupt Detroit, the North American International Auto show will be all glitz and glamour as ultra-expensive luxury sedans and high-performance sports cars compete against fashion models for media attention.

But the real news will be in the boring old bread-and-butter “value segment,” where the competition promises to be stiffer than ever thanks to developments across the Atlantic in Munich, Stuttgart and Wolfsburg.

American automakers have never sold many cars in Europe. But the steep decline of the car market here nevertheless spells trouble for them partly because the ongoing euro crisis is accelerating German auto companies’ expansion drive in the US, industry analysts say.

“They're not just being squeezed by the huge advances that companies like Kia, Skoda and those kind of brands have made,” says Tim Urquhart of the global research firm IHS, “but also all the big premium players are moving down market into their traditional territory.”

A spike in December sales in France, Italy, Belgium and Spain has raised hope of a modest recovery.

But overall European sales last year were down 25 percent compared with the pre-crisis level in 2007, and many remain skeptical that buyers will ever come back in those numbers, Urquhart says.

“There are all kinds of debates about changing demographics — older populations, young people who are less interested in buying cars — because the car isn't the great status symbol it once was,” he says.

“Whatever recovery there will be will be very weak and fragile. That's the general consensus.”

Matters look better elsewhere.

New car sales in the US last year were a whopping 50 percent higher than during the depths of the recession.

And the consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. forecasts that carmakers’ global profits will rise another 50 percent over the next five years.

As the world market continues to change, will US companies be able to keep up?

More from GlobalPost: Early divisions augur hard going for Germany’s grand coalition

In December, GM announced it would stop selling Chevrolets in Europe in order to marshal its resources around its Opel brand — sold only in Europe and virtually unknown in the US — in a move that would be comparable to Coca-Cola scrapping Coke to focus on Fanta.

The same month, both Ford and GM announced they would shut their plants in Australia — where the strength of the Aussie dollar made paying workers too costly — even though GM's Holden is the country's second-most popular brand.

In China and India, meanwhile, Ford and GM continue to lag far behind Volkswagen, Hyundai and Suzuki, even as the threat from upstart Chinese brands grows.

And in the resurgent US market, Americans can expect more and more competition not only from Volkswagen — which aims to surpass Toyota as the world's largest carmaker — but also from Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche.

The downturn in Europe has prompted German companies to push sales of luxury cars more aggressively, making it increasingly difficult for Cadillac, Lincoln and other American brands to claw their way back into the game.

At the same time, the Germans are threatening to carve a big slice from the middle of the American market — the most profitable segment — by introducing lower-priced cars that can compete head to head with successful American models such as the Chrysler 300.

Last year, Daimler launched the four-door, sub-$30,000 Mercedes CLA with a 60-second advertisement during the Superbowl, starting an assault that helped Daimler beat out BMW and Lexus in the US for the first time in a decade, Bloomberg reported.

Volkswagen, whose drive to become the world's largest carmaker was set back by flagging US sales last year, is expected to fight back by announcing plans to open an SUV plant in America in Detroit next week.

“Volkswagen doesn't really have the right models for the US market,” German automotive journalist Dietmar Stanka says. “They need a different product policy for the US.”

And while Lamborghinis and fashion models will be grabbing all the attention in Detroit this weekend, Audi, BMW and Mercedes will all be showcasing sedans and so-called “crossover” SUVs in the $30,000-range.

All that could add up to a bigger headache for US companies.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140110/us-carmakers-auto-industry-detroit-germany

Germany: It's good to be the king

Meet the former video store owner who claims to be a monarch.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - January 6, 2014

LUTHERSTADT-WITTENBERG, Germany — The leader of the Fourth Reich is in trouble with the law. Again.

Meet Peter Fitzek, the 48-year-old self-proclaimed monarch of the so-called Königsreich Deutschland, or kingdom of Germany.

Dressed in tight-fitting black pants and a black fitted shirt with the Königsreich coat of arms on its breast pocket, with his shoulder-length hair combed straight back in a pony tail, Fitzek looks more like a nightclub impresario than polo-playing royalty.

He has no hereditary claim to royalty and little hope of getting his kingdom to secede from the federal republic.

But with his own currency, “state-run” health care scheme, some 3,500 subjects and even a driving license issued by the Königsreich, he's become a notorious nuisance for the authorities.

That's just the way he likes it.

More hippie than Nazi, Fitzek's ideology is hard to pin down.

He chose to use “reich” not out of any enthusiasm for Fascism, he says, but to inspire Germans to question why they can never be allowed to forget the past.

His kingdom — a 22 acre plot where his purported 3,500 subjects reside rent-free — in the former East Germany is more like a commune.

“I've purposefully driven over the speed limit — radically over the speed limit — so someone will finally take me to court,” he says.

“The court must decide whether I have this authority or not.”

Fitzek has been nabbed for moving violations as many as 24 times and written up for driving without a license eight times before a judge in Lower Saxony sentenced him to three monthsin prison in October.

“You have built a fantasy world with a fanciful political worldview,” Judge Thorsten Steufert told the self-proclaimed monarch.

Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) has ruled that his Reichsbank and health fund violate the law and repeatedly ordered him to repay all depositors.

“BaFin has prohibited Peter Fitzek several activities in insurance business as well as his unauthorized banking business,” BaFin spokesman Ben Fischer said in an email.

It would also be very surprising if the king avoids a run in with the Federal Central Tax Office, given his attitude toward that institution.

“I don't pay taxes just like I don't pay speeding tickets,” he says.

Fitzek has vowed to fight his legal cases all the way to the Supreme Court in a bid to force the nation to recognize his sovereignty.

Although he may be just having a lark, he says he’s starting an alternative to the financial system that plunged Europe into its ongoing economic crisis.

“Collapses of the monetary system have always been accompanied by conflict," he says. "Then they start building the same system all over again."

“It's important there be an alternative.”

Citing Germany's Basic Law and the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Fitzek carved out a territory outside the medieval city of Wittenberg and declared it a sovereign state last year.

Previously, the commune operated under the name “Neudeutschland,” or “New Germany.”

The king argues that under Montevideo, the only requirements for his claim are a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with the other states. But he's gone further than that.

Working with a company Fitzek says also supplies paper to the mint, the Königsreich launched its own currency, the “Engel,” or Angel, complete with invisible fluorescent markings that appear only under a black light. On the downside, it's not freely convertible to euros and can be used only for goods and services sold by other Königsreich subjects.

More recently, the kingdom launched inflation-proof silver coins named Neue Deutsch Marks.

“How many wish for the good old Deutschmark back?” reads an announcement on the kingdom's website.

In September, Fitzek launched the Königsliche Reichbank, a central bank that also offers free customer accounts. Promising refuge from a possible collapse of the euro and investment returns of 2 to 9 percent, it's purportedly “safer than any other bank” because it’s not required to conform to any European Union or German law.

But its claim to legal status — to which German regulators continue to object — depends on aclause that says it's not obligated to give depositors’ money back when they want it.

Fitzek says a similar clause means the kingdom's alternative health scheme, which was launched in 2009 and took in more than $40,000 per month in premiums in 2012, is also immune to regulatory interference from BaFin.

Called the Health Checkout, it's a “holistic alternative to the health insurance system” that doesn’t actually guarantee its members the right to any benefits.

It does offer seminars on healthy lifestyles to help members beat ailments that are “90 percent psychosomatic.”

“The authorities don't appreciate that we've been able to heal a lot of people,” Fitzek says. “We haven't had a single incident of cancer since the health system was set up among more than 200 members.”

Whether Fitzek is a visionary, fantasist or conman, it’s hard not to enjoy the show.

In the tomb-silent lobby of the Reichsbank — an ordinary-looking bank branch on one of Wittenberg's cobblestone streets — the fast-talking Fitzek reels off his grievances with the authorities.

Citing legal cases he claims to have memorized with the aid of a photographic memory, he says Hitler’s Third Reich was never officially dissolved after World War II. Therefore, Germany has no constitution and no legitimate authority over its citizens.

At least two post-war elections have violated the government's own regulations, he says.

“This indicates it's only criminals who are in power, and they are not obeying their own laws,” Fitzek says.

Born in the former East Germany before the fall of the Iron Curtain, he belongs to the “lost” generation of Germans whose upbringing in the communist east left them ill-prepared for life after reunification.

Many of his peers never adjusted. A 2010 poll conducted by Stern magazine, for instance, found that two-thirds of Germans from the former East felt they were still isolated from the “unified” country.

More than two decades after the Berlin Wall came down, unemployment remains about a third higher in the east than in the west despite a mass exodus following reunification.

Fitzek, who wanted to be a teacher, never got the education he wanted. Trained as a cook, he worked in various restaurants and hotels before opening a video store then a bar — without finding a way to fit in.

With the Königsreich, he's finally found an answer of sorts. As long as he has the energy to keep all the balls he's juggling in the air, apparently so have his followers.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131223/germany-king-peter-fitzek-wittenberg

Germany: How Christmas survived communism

East German woodcarvers who helped keep the Christmas market tradition alive are still in demand.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - December 25, 2013

BERLIN, Germany — Once upon a time, when there was a communist East Germany, a real-life Grinch stole Christmas and turned it into a “socialist festival for peace.”

However, the old tradition of Christmas markets continued behind the Berlin Wall.

Neither Jesus nor Santa was welcome in the atheist, anti-materialist East. And the authorities tried their best to decimate one of the region's long-thriving industries: the Christmas woodcarvers of Erzgebirge, the eastern Ore Mountains.

But the carvers kept their craft alive, continuing to produce nutcrackers, angels and even nativity scenes, albeit with new names.

Angels, for instance, were renamed “Jahresendflügelfigur,” or "winged year-end figurines."

“The names were rubbish,” says Dieter Uhlmann, who heads the Association of Erzgebirger Artisans and Toy Manufacturers.

But they enabled the trade to survive.

More from GlobalPost: British Atheists celebrate Christmas

Today, in Berlin's central Gendarmenmarkt Christmas market, Bavarian woodcarver Ernst Kraus slowly chips away at a life-sized and lifelike carving of a ram as throngs of holiday shoppers pass by. He says East German officials tried to turn Erzebirge's artists into factory workers who would make Christmas figures on lathes instead of carving them by hand.

“They wanted only industrial products for export,” he says.

But the communists failed to end Christmas and couldn't kill Erzgebirg, either.

The region’s woodcarving dates to the Middle Ages, when workmen flocked to its thriving silver and tin mines. They took to woodcarving to while away the long winter nights.

When the mines petered out in the 18th century, carving took over as the main industry.

Later, under communism, when the rest of East Germany raced toward industrialization with no eye to whether markets existed for factory goods, Erzebirg stuck to tradition.

“Business was good even in the GDR,” Uhlmann says of the German Democratic Republic, East Germany’s official name.

“There was a substantial export to the Federal Republic,” or West Germany, he says. “There were no restrictions because there was a clear demand.”

After Germany's reunification in 1990, management consultants brought in to evaluate East German state-owned industries found few of their products able to compete.

There was a two-stroke engine car made out of Bakelite, padlocks made from aluminum, and chicken hatcheries with more employees than birds.

Most of those factories were simply closed down and others forced to fire as many as half the employees from their bloated rosters.

But Erzebirg's wood carving business was an exception.

“After reunification, the state-owned carving units were reprivatized, but the scale of the industry remained the same,” Uhlmann says.

More from GlobalPost: Human rights: Is the EU failing one of its main missions?

Today, however, Germans from both sides of the former wall say Christmas faces a new threat: unfettered commercialization.

So much that the director of Rothenburg’s Christmas museum this year felt compelled to file an application to protect Germany's Father Christmas, or “Weinachtsmann,” from being overtaken by the American-style Santa Claus.

Across German cities these days, Christmas markets are more likely to feature plastic toysand amusement park-style rides than once-ubiquitous handicrafts.

But you wouldn't know that from a visit to posh Gendarmenmarkt, where there’s a steady flow of tourists and locals lining up to wind their way through a shop selling traditional Christmas handicrafts, a full display dedicated to carvings from Erzgebirg.

With a retail market of more than $150 million, Uhlmann says, “we're unable to meet the demand.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131220/germany-christmas-markets-woodcarving

Human rights: Is the EU failing one of its main missions?

Although the EU’s recent expansion into Central Europe was partly meant to improve human rights there, new members have been thumbing their noses at the old boys' club.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - December 20, 2013

BERLIN, Germany — When the Croatian soccer player Josip Simunic celebrated his team's victory over Iceland last month with a nationalist slogan from the country's World War II pro-Nazi puppet regime, thousands of fans roared in approval.

It sent a deafening wake-up call directly to the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels.

When the European Union expanded to include former Soviet bloc countries in Central Europe a decade ago, one of the motives was to speed the march of free Europe's ideas on citizens' fundamental rights into formerly repressive states once trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Veronika Szente Goldston, of Human Rights Watch, says the accession process was the “single most important engine for change in those countries” at the time.

But a gathering storm of racial discrimination and ethnic nationalism suggests it may be failing.

The European Commission’s Vice President Viviane Reding admitted as much last year. Speaking at a conference on human rights, she said the EU was “very strict” when it came to criteria for joining the union.

“But once this member state has joined the European Union, we appear not to have any instrument to see whether the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary still command respect.”

Experts say that one reason is that the European Commission can’t be seen as a separate entity from the member states, meaning violators must effectively monitor and punish themselves.

As a result, the EU’s infringement proceedings — through which the commission can take member states to the European Court for violations — haven’t been implemented as often or as effectively as they could have been.

Article 7 of the EU’s recent Lisbon treaty enables the commission to enact sanctions against members or revoke their voting rights for serious human rights violations. But the rule’s widespread interpretation as a “nuclear” option of last resort has robbed the commission of one of its only enforcement tools.

“It’s never been used and it most likely never will be used because it’s formulated in such a way that the bar is set so high,” Goldston says. “Everyone’s shying away from it because they feel it’s too much. But there really isn't anything else.”

It's not just soccer hooligans causing headaches in Brussels.

Less than three months after joining the EU in July, Croatia faced the threat of sanctions — empty, it turned out — for refusing to change extradition laws that protected alleged war criminals who committed atrocities during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Serbia alleges that anti-Serb incidents are on the increase in Croatia following a ban on Serbian-language signs in the border town of Vukovar in November.

Croatia also banned gay marriages after a controversial referendum revealed that the public was keen on only the narrowest definition of the EU's “right to marry and found a family.”

Last year, Hungary repeatedly clashed with the EU over new laws that threatened the country’s judicial independence and freedom of religion in a battle many expect will resurface.

And new member states across Central Europe continue to draw fire for segregation and violent attacks against Roma. Amnesty International reported more than 120 beatings, shootings and stabbings over the past four years in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, where the authorities in one town built a wall to separate the Roma community in August.

Across the EU, social polarization, extremist rhetoric and ethnic tensions have increased both within and between member states, according to Blanca Tapia, spokeswoman for the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).

“Hate crime is a daily reality in the European Union,” Tapia said in an email. “No states are perfect.”

Rights watchdogs also warn that despite the headlines, rising extremism and discrimination and violence against minority groups can’t be ascribed only to new member states in Central Europe.

More from GlobalPost: EU seeks to overcome banking disunion

The focus of attention on their performance has obscured shortcomings in the EU's internal monitoring system and the cultural biases of its older, western members.

In 2010, France forcibly evicted more than 1,000 Roma immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria and demolished more than 100 of their camps, drawing the European Commission’s ire for violating EU laws allowing freedom of movement throughout member states.

Greece, Italy and other older members have also drawn criticism for violations as the euro crisis has deepened resentment against immigrants and refugees from war-torn states in Africa and the Middle East.

“The EU seems to take human rights seriously only when it comes to candidate countries,” Goldston says. “I see it less as an issue about new member states than something that brings hypocrisy to light.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/131218/eu-human-rights-failing-mission

Germans worry Berlin is becoming too wealthy for its own good

A ban on Airbnb-style vacation apartment rentals is exposing differences over rising real estate prices and changing cultures.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 15, 2013)

BERLIN, Germany — Just like elsewhere around the world, internet sites for vacation apartment rentals such as Airbnb were booming here — until last month.

That’s when the city passed a new law banning the trade after residents complained that a spike in vacation rentals was exacerbating a housing shortage that has pushed up rents in a city famous for its relatively affordable real estate.

They also objected to what they said was an influx of rowdy tourists attracted by the city's famous, and famously cheap, nightclubs.

"We are creating the law so that the uncontrolled growth on the housing market is no longer possible," Michael Müller, the city senator in charge of urban development, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

That decision is raising objections from critics who say it will have little effect on rental prices, which they say are really rising because of the government's failure to encourage new construction.

But the issue reflects a wider debate about the kind of place Berlin is becoming.

Economically challenged since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 reunited the city’s two halves, the capital is finally getting rich.

This year, the economy grew faster than the national average for the first time.

The city that Mayor Klaus Wowereit famously called “poor but sexy” in 2004 may even soon work its way out of debt.

Those who oppose the ban on vacation rentals say it’s wrongheaded because it will put a brake on two of the main engines for economic recovery: the booming tourism industry and vibrant startup scene, which helped create some 30,000 new jobs this year.

Overnight stays by tourists rose to a record 26 million this year, and entrepreneurs founded some 32,400 new businesses, according to the Tagespiegel.

Airbnb — which has demanded clarification about how the law will affect residents who use the site to rent their own apartments when they’re traveling — says its guests alone generated more than $130 million for the city over a one-year period.

But others say that by raising prices, the boom is threatening to change the face of a city that has recently attracted a population of bohemian, creative types that have made it into one of the world’s most vibrant places to live.

Living here has been so cheap because when Berlin was divided, the former West Germany more or less paid people to live here. Even after reunification, the lagging economy and a glut of buildings east of the Wall kept rents so low that for 20-odd years, artists, musicians and leftists didn't really need jobs to survive.

This year, however, rents rose by a stiff 8 percent, steeper than in any other German city, according to the German Institute for Economic Research.

Despite the increases, the cost per square meter for a Berlin apartment remains about a third of wealthier cities such as Hamburg and Munich.

But like music fans who rebel when their favorite indie bands makes it big, no one seems particularly happy about the city's new wealth or its hip international profile, which old-timers blame for driving up the rents and attracting legions of American poseurs.

The ban on vacation apartment rentals is part of a growing backlash that has seen protesters attack investors at a business convention and anti-gentrification activists vandalize a newly opened hotel.

Set to be phased in over two years, the law will push as many as 12,000 apartments back onto the rental market, the government says.

That's not enough to influence housing prices, while the potential blow to the economy could be much more significant, says David Eberhart, spokesman for the Association of Berlin-Brandenburg Housing Companies.

“In Berlin, you have 1.9 million apartments, 1.6 million of which are used for rentals,” Eberhart says. “Compared to that, 12,000 is nothing.”

Critics of those battling to stop the city from changing say they’re almost certainly fighting a losing battle.

Among them, a Canadian architect named Matthew Griffin bought a derelict building in 1999 and converted it into a vacation rental property.

“Holiday apartments,” he says, “have been totally scapegoated.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131213/germany-berlin-tourists-airbnb-economy

The world's best engineers are losing their mojo

Well-publicized public project failures may be threatening Germany's reputation for excellence.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 9, 2013)

HAMBURG, Germany — The Elbe Philharmonic Hall may become an architectural marvel that will revive this city’s fading glory — or go down in history as one of the country’s colossal engineering failures.

Sipping espresso in a cafe opposite the building site in Hamburg harbor, Josephine, a 28-year-old banker, says Europe’s second-largest port needs “something special” to attract big ships such as the Queen Mary.

“But I'm very disappointed about the problems and the cost — which has exploded,” she says.

Builders now expect the Elbe Philharmonic Hall — once budgeted to cost around $325 million and expected to be finished by 2010 — to tip past $1 billion even if all goes well and open in the spring of 2017.

Renowned for companies like BMW and Daimler-Benz, Germany has thrived for decades on an export-oriented economy founded on the clockwork precision of its engineering. Infrastructure-related products and machinery account for half the country’s exports.

Even during the euro crisis, German firms have capitalized on oil-rich countries' appetite for superlatives and maintained a coveted trade surplus with China.

But a series of high-profile failures are threatening Germany's longstanding reputation for speed and efficiency.

"It's bad for our good image," Walter Boerman, spokesman for a German engineering association, told AFP earlier this year.

Hamburg isn’t alone.

Once forecast to cost a mere $1.6 billion and be finished as early as 2007, the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport has already cost more than $4.3 billion, and there’s still no opening date in sight because no one seems to be able to unsnarl failures in the fire safety system.

In Stuttgart, estimated costs for a new, high-speed railway station deep beneath the city have ballooned to $8.8 billion from $6 billion. Entrenched local opposition and unprecedented engineering challenges make it impossible to predict the final bill or when the project will be completed.

Back in Hamburg, Heinrich, a 63-year-old businessman, calls the philharmonic hall’s cost “unbelievable.”

Perhaps, but not inexplicable — and not actually the fault of Germany's engineers, many believe. Observers say politicians and bureaucrats are really to blame.

In all three cases, city and state officials slashed budgets and moved up deadlines to get projects approved and win points with voters. In the process, they set their engineers impossible tasks, then ensured their failure by rushing the projects along.

For the Berlin airport, project planners scrapped a privatization deal that would have put a private contractor in charge of construction, liable for all the financial risk, in favor of creating a management structure that made it virtually impossible for the builders to succeed, says transportation and infrastructure expert Dieter Schneiderbauer of ECM Ventures.

“I'm positive that if they’d signed the general contractor agreement, the airport would have been opened in 2011 and would have run smoothly.”

Instead, a screwball contract structure put an inexperienced team of bureaucrats in charge of the builder and architecture firm.

Experts say the government set an arbitrary completion deadline for political reasons that had everyone scrambling.

When inspectors showed up to test the smoke alarms and ventilation system, no one could produce the right documentation or even demonstrate it actually worked.

“It was politicians mingling with contractors and putting demands on them,” Schneiderbauer said. “It was simply poor management rather than poor engineering.”

The Elbe Philharmonic Hall faced similar problems.

A storied commercial and financial center since the Middle Ages, Hamburg remains one of Germany’s wealthiest cities. Confronted with the fading importance of its port, however, the authorities launched one of Europe's largest redevelopment projects — dubbed the HafenCity— in 2000.

The original scheme was to convert a forest of cranes and warehouses into a media hub that would employ some 40,000 people along with other businesses. But as the media business began to decline, the city targeted tourism instead, and plans for a simple shoebox were shelved in favor of a concert hall designed to do for Hamburg what the Opera House did for Sydney.

“We decided the HafenCity couldn't work without culture,” city cultural department spokesman Enno Isermann said.

First imagined as a modest cultural project, it was given a bargain-basement budget and assigned to the city's culture department rather than an agency more experienced in infrastructure projects.

As the blueprints expanded to incorporate a high-rise hotel, 45 multi-million-dollar apartments and three concert halls that would present an unprecedented engineering challenge, Hamburg put bureaucrats schooled in scheduling festivals sandwiched between one of the world's most renowned architecture firms and Germany's largest construction company, Hochtief.

With a new contract that makes clear that Hochtief is running the show, the company and the city say the project is now weeks ahead of its revised schedule and slated for rapid completion.

Still, the original plan has already cost the city millions of dollars in legal fees and years of delays as a spat between the architect and builder inched through the courts.

“This was the main problem for the whole project,” said Bernd Pütter, head of corporate communications for Hochtief. “It's so complex, not only in terms of the technical equipment but also in terms of the contract.”

Inside the construction site, observers can already see signs of breathtaking results in the bare bones of the steep-sided main concert hall and penthouse apartments, where peaked ceilings follow the contours of the building's tent-like roof and reflective, bubbled glass walls offer a panoramic view of the harbor and steeples of the city's many churches.

The entire 12,500-ton main concert hall rests on giant spring assemblies to insulate it from the vibrations of passing ships. And renowned acoustics expert Yasuhita Toyota had to design and redesign a special new material for the “white skin” of the walls due to the especially steep seating: The audience will surround and loom over the orchestra in another first-of-its-kind design.

“It's like an acoustic panic room,” said Joachim Mischke, chief culture reporter for the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper.

But setting the bar so high created serious problems, both in terms of project execution and public perception.

At nearly a billion dollars, the price tag is ten times the then-controversial $100 million bill for the Sydney Opera House, completed in 1973, and the $89 million bill for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, finished in 1997.

Despite the obstacles, there’s optimism the price will be worth it. More than a million people attend events at the Sydney Opera House and another seven million tourists show up to gawk at the building each year.

Hamburg arguably has both a larger audience to draw from and a more compelling claim to status as a center of musical culture.

Both Felix Mendelsohn and Johannes Brahms were born in Hamburg. Gustav Mahler was its opera director before he moved to Vienna to make his name.

Even the Beatles got their start in clubs on the Reeperbahn in the city's mammoth red light district. “I might have been born in Liverpool,” John Lennon once said, “but I grew up in Hamburg.”

“No other German city has such a large tradition and history,” Mischke says.

If all goes well, the Elbe Philharmonic Hall could be the next chapter.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131205/germany-hamburg-engineers-elbe-philharmonic-hall