Romanian election raises concerns about democracy

As voters head to the polls on Sunday, critics say a victory for Victor Ponta could undermine a nascent fight against corruption.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (November 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — Secret agents, bribery, plagiarism, vote-rigging — on the face of it, the accusations surrounding Romania's presidential election on Sunday are providing more than enough thrills.

Behind the mudslinging, however, observers say the future of democratic institutions in one of Europe’s poorest countries is at stake.

With the frontrunner, the controversial Prime Minister Victor Ponta, now poised to take control of the presidency, critics worry the consolidation of power in the hands of his Social Democratic Party may hamstring a nascent battle against corruption and undermine Romania's commitment to European Union values.

The current president, Traian Basescu, a popular but also controversial former ship's captain, is unable to run for a third term.

A center-right independent, he has accused Ponta, his bitter rival, of illegally working undercover for the country's intelligence agency during his tenure as prosecutor in the late 1990s.

The late entry of former spy chief Teodor Melescanu has increased the atmosphere of intrigue, despite his small chance of winning.

Many voters are taking the spy stories as little more than campaign rhetoric, thanks to the well-known rivalry between Basescu and Ponta.

But the focus on scandal rather than substance is deflecting attention from the risk that Romania's commitment to European integration may decline, says Corina Rebegea of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis.

“In our regional context, the pressure is so high that it's probably a legitimate question to ask,” she says, pointing to other trouble spots, such as the crisis in Ukraine, Bulgaria’s drift toward Russia and the erosion of democratic institutions in Hungary.

“All of Romania's neighbors are somehow sliding in a direction that’s very worrisome,” she says.

Although it may be premature to liken Ponta or any of Romania's other presidential candidates to Hungary's Viktor Orban — who has openly declared he’s seeking to create an “illiberal” state — critics say the indicators don't look good.

Since his election in 2012, Ponta has drawn flak for allegedly politicizing the Romanian Cultural Institute and the country's state-owned television broadcaster.

The prime minister has dismissed EU criticism that he did not appear to respect the rule of law and democratic institutions, and denied allegations that he’s pressured judges.

Romania’s judicial system has been under special EU supervision since the country joined the bloc in 2007.

Ponta’s party is also implicated in an ongoing probe into vote-rigging during a failed 2012 bid to oust President Basescu through a public referendum.

“In the past, the social democrats and Ponta in particular haven't really respected the rule of law,” says Paul Ivan of the Brussels-based European Policy Center.

A savvy horsetrader accused of plagiarizing his doctoral thesis, Ponta is tipped to breeze through the election’s first round on Sunday partly thanks to his successful appeals to Romanian nationalism, says Otilia Dhand of the political risk consultancy firm Teneo.

“It's not necessarily an anti-EU stance, it's more about Romanian nationalist feelings domestically and the return to religion that we have seen during the crisis,” she says. “The EU is an easy scapegoat.”

The merger of the two largest opposition parties gives their compromise candidate, Klaus Iohannis, a fighting chance in the second-round runoff vote scheduled two weeks later. A former justice minister and anti-corruption campaigner, Monica Macovei, also has potential as a dark horse.

Macovei, a Bacescu ally, is running as an independent and Iohannis — a liberal who was until recently the mayor of a tourist town in Transylvania — is a relative neophyte. If either makes it to the runoff, their prospects will hinge on uniting the fractured anti-Ponta vote.

All the main candidates say the most important element of Romania's security and foreign policy is its strategic partnership with the US and its membership in the EU. However, some commentators have expressed concern about Ponta's embrace of China and attempts to deepen Romania's relationship with Russia before Ukraine’s crisis erupted earlier this year.

Critics warn that a victory for Ponta would at the least threaten an ongoing attempt by the National Anti-corruption Directorate, the NAD, to crack down on graft, which they say Russia has exploited in Ukraine and other countries in Eastern and Central Europe in its bid to exert influence.

None of Romania's parties have a reputation for being squeaky clean, to be sure, and some Romanians believe recent high-profile corruption convictions represent little more than score-settling by Basescu instead of a real crackdown.

But Ponta has actively opposed court actions of the sort that have prompted investigations intoallegations that government officials skimmed as much as $20 million from a computer software licensing deal for schools that involved Microsoft and reseller Fujitsu Siemens, his critics say.

By winning control of the presidency as well as the prime minister's office, he would not only weaken the political motivation for such prosecutions, but also gain the power to appoint the chief and deputies of the NAD, as well as the justice minister, says Laura Stefan, a formerofficial in the Justice Ministry.

“The big issue of this campaign is the independence of the justice system and the anti-corruption institutions,” she says. “For me, this is what is at stake.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/141030/romania-presidential-election-ponta-democracy

Are Germans really obsessed with austerity?

As Europe braces for another possible recession, Germany is coming under pressure to allow more spending. A lot of Germans believe that won’t help.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (October 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — Fun-hating German misers have Europe in their grasp and the apocalypse is nigh.

Right?

As southern European countries just beginning to climb out of the euro crisis brace for the possibility of another recession, some are ratcheting up criticism of the continent’s economic engine for its insistence on using austerity to solve the problem.

With a record budget surplus amid worrying signs of a slowing domestic economy,
critics argue, Germany should loosen its purse strings and stimulate growth.

But are Germans really the austerity-obsessed buzzkills that people like French Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg make them out to be?

Yes and no.

“I think there is a kind of psychological fixation, yes,” says University of Mainz political scientist Jurgen Falter. “But even your phobias can be correct.”

The collective memory of the disastrous, runaway inflation after World War I that led to the rise of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s has ingrained in Germans a deep aversion to deficit spending. More recent experience has also taught them to view government plans to spur growth by doling out cash with a jaundiced eye, Falter says.

“We had big spending policies in the '80s and nothing happened,” he says. “It only increased inflation.”

In September, Germany posted its biggest budget surplus since reunification even as other statistics revealed a worrying drop in exports and a plunge in investment in public infrastructure and new businesses.

With government spending already lower than most wealthy nations’ — 17 percent of GDP compared to an average 21 percent — that's adding pressure on Germany to step on the gas and let others do the same.

“The German government should invest money in infrastructure, not worry about balancing its budget,” argues the Economist, angling for a spending increase of at least 0.7 percent of GDP.

"Frugality is good, but austerity is not an end in itself to spur an economy," Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann told reporters this month following his own wrangling with European Union bean-counters.

Even Washington wants Germany to increase spending, freeing up funds to repair its decaying bridges and highways as a start.

Earlier this month, Italy teamed up with France to demand that the EU relax the budgetary rigor imposed in response to the crisis and embark on a more expansionary path.

France can’t align itself with the “excessive obsessions of Germany's conservatives,” warned Montebourg, likening the preoccupation with austerity to “a serious disease, persistent and dangerous.”

Many economists also believe Germany can and should increase its level of investment.

Guntram Wolff, the German economist who heads the Brussels-based Bruegel Institute, advocates a European investment program that would target education and infrastructure in countries like Spain — which has a youth unemployment rate of more than 50 percent — and other countries where deep budget cuts threaten to create a lost generation.

However, sound economic measures don't always make sense politically, he points out.

“Intellectuals and international institutions are quite clear that countries with fiscal resources and borrowing capacity such as Germany should spend more and countries with their back against the wall such as Italy should be very cautious,” he says.

“But on the political level, what you see is that those countries that can spend money don't want to, and those that can’t actually want to.”

The disconnect is once again pitting Germany against the rest of the EU.

France in particular is angling for a free pass to allow deficit spending of 4.3 percent of GDP in 2015, instead of the 3 percent stipulated by the euro zone's financial authorities, prompting many Germans to view calls for their own increased domestic spending as a Trojan horse.

Falter says the battle reminds him of the mammoth spending spree France embarked on after World War I.

“When they were asked who would pay for that, they would say, 'Germany will pay for everything,'” he says.

He's not alone.

While outsiders clamor for more German spending, support for the new pro-austerity Alternative for Germany Party, AfD, has grown from the 4.7 percent of the vote it earned in parliamentary elections last fall to 7.5 percent today, according to a recent poll.

That's enabled it to cut into Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative base.

Even in left-leaning Berlin, it's hard to find a hard-core tax-and-spend liberal on the streets.

Horst, a driver employed by parliament, says he cooks for himself, studies price tags and buys his clothes secondhand, with the exception of shoes.

“People still get very nervous about inflation and being burdened with a lot of debt,” says the 62-year-old, who asked that his last name be withheld.

Michael Daubman, who headed an outplacement firm before he retired, says his recent experience as the executor of an estate in Greece soured him on government spending.

“We should spend a little more money for industry, but we shouldn't spend money all over the world only for goodwill,” he says.

Hans-Joachim Berg, a member of the euroskeptic AfD, agrees.

“I don't quite comprehend how spending German money internally will help foreign economies,” he says.

That's the essence of the problem for many Germans who don’t understand how their spending would stimulate growth elsewhere.

Most observers blame Germany's slowdown on falling demand for German machinery in China. So filling potholes on the Autobahn is unlikely to encourage the Mittelstand — the country’s famed economic backbone of small and medium-sized companies — to ramp up production for non-existent customers, critics say.

Moreover, as an export-oriented economy, they say, Germany grows at the expense of the rest of Europe, at least to some extent. That's why until recently, when Germany's own economic numbers started to look ugly, some of those same voices were calling on Berlin to somehow reduce its trade surplus.

Increasing spending while dampening exports, critics here say, is a feat few if any governments have ever attempted.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/141030/germany-economy-euro-crisis-2.0-austerity

Refugee abuse scandal in Germany is highlighting failing EU policies

As growing numbers flood into Europe, the crisis is straining the continent's ability to cope.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (October 2014)

ESSEN, Germany — Midway through describing his alleged abuse by security guards at a home for asylum seekers here, Badr Abboussi breaks off to answer a call on his cell phone.

After speaking rapidly in Italian, the 21-year-old originally from Morocco hangs up, shrugs his shoulders and says ruefully, “Transfer.”

Ordinarily, that would be good news. Getting transferred from the dormitory-like processing center where he’s been living for the past two months to semi-permanent housing would normally signal that the government has agreed to evaluate his asylum claim.

But with his complaint against the Opti-Park refugee home in this western German city still pending, Abboussi is worried that it represents an effort to shut him up by shuffling him out of sight.

“They treat animals better than they treat us,” he says.

Abboussi says private security guards beat and kicked him so severely that doctors at a nearby hospital wanted to keep him overnight for observation. Dozens of others have recently filed similar complaints about humiliating treatment at homes across the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

As Germans wake up to that and other news of grim conditions in overstretched facilities, cases like Abboussi's are prompting locals to call for other European Union members to help by taking on more refugees.

But with millions of Syrians fleeing to Lebanon and Turkey promising to increase refugee rosters in Europe, a looming crisis is putting pressure on ties already strained between EU members.

Among those calling for change, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is proposing that EU member states accept refugee quotas based on their population sizes or GDP in order to limit the flow into Germany.

Berlin will host an international conference next week to discuss aid to countries hardest hit by the exodus from Syria, including Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

But much-needed reforms of the EU's own refugee policies probably won't make the agenda.

Instead, human rights activists say, Europe remains focused on building border fences and stepping up patrols to keep people out.

“I don't see the EU member states taking a great share with their resettlement programs or humanitarian mission programs,” says Franziska Vilmar of Amnesty International.

Critics of Germany's abuse cases say they highlight the fact that current policies are encouraging people to think of asylum seekers as invaders or lawbreakers.

Nearly 10 days went by before local police turned up to investigate Abboussi's claims. In another case guards took videos and photographs of themselves stepping on the neck of a handcuffed resident.

Those victims are the lucky ones.

For many others, Europe's fortification of its land borders has proven deadly. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch say hundreds of thousands have tried to cross the Mediterranean in flimsy boats this year, resulting in a record death toll of more than 3,000 people.

As EU member countries squabble over the high cost of absorbing the refugees who do make it to Europe, there are signs of an even greater emphasis on policing the borders on the horizon.

The EU has already spent billions of dollars on building fences, installing electronic surveillance and conducting patrols in Bulgaria, Greece and other border states.

But that’s done little to stem the flow.

Next month, Italy will turn over its Mare Nostrum naval search and rescue operation to the EU's comparatively underequipped Frontex border police agency because other member statesaren't willing to share the $8 million-a-month bill.

That’s worrying observers.

“If Mare Nostrum stops and Frontex takes over, we will with open eyes have a large zone in the Mediterranean where people will drown,” Vilmar says.

Germany's own refugee crisis is shining a spotlight on how EU policies are contributing to the problem.

Under an agreement forged in Dublin in 2003, the first EU state to process asylum seekers’ arrival typically assumes responsibility for taking them in and evaluating their claims for refugee status.

The idea was to prevent asylum seekers from being shuttled from country to country in interminable limbo or “asylum shopping” in various states to increase their chances of being accepted.

In practice, the scheme has pitted EU border states against others on the continent — and states that are relatively friendly to refugees against the more refugee-averse — which has both worsened conditions for the refugees themselves and strained EU ties already stretched thin by infighting over austerity measures and other issues.

Many Germans believe the current policy, together with the effects of the euro crisis, have forced a small number of wealthy countries in northern Europe to accept responsibility for around three-quarters of the EU’s asylum seekers.

However, refugee advocates who point to the problems inside Germany say new quotas would only exacerbate poor conditions for asylum seekers.

Germany allots refugees to its states based on local wealth and population, as it hopes the EU will begin doing at the country level.

But critics say restricting people from moving freely within Germany after they've been granted temporary residence has inadvertently encouraged administrators to treat them like criminals.

“Of course the discourse in Germany leads to even more negative and hostile attitudes in large parts of the German population,” says Karl Kopp of Frankfurt-based Pro Asyl.

At the EU level, current policies have even more severe consequences, critics say.

The fact that countries processing asylum seekers are responsible for not only evaluating their claims, but also providing for their well-being if they’re granted refugee status, is creating an incentive for EU border states to pack arrivals onto trains and buses destined for other countries instead of processing them as required under the Dublin convention.

As Europe’s refugee crisis deepens, some say a change that allows refugees a choice in where they land is the only solution.

“The Dublin system is collapsing,” Kopp says. “It’s time for a real alternative which is taking into account the needs of asylum seekers.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/141020/refugee-abuse-scandal-germany-eu-frontex

This celebrity scientist wants Germans to stop recycling. Here's why

Eco-warrior turned chemist Michael Braungart is trying to kickstart a new industrial revolution.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (October 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — Michael Braungart is in a hurry.

A former environmental activist who once scaled smokestacks to fight pollution for Greenpeace, the celebrity chemist has emerged over the past two decades as a dark horse in the race to find solutions for saving the planet.

Braungart wants to end the current drive for people to “reduce, reuse and recycle” goods in order to prompt the next industrial revolution. His core idea is for manufacturers and users to no longer “consume” raw materials that are turned into waste, but “borrow” them, a concept he calls cradle-to-cradle.

“It's really reinventing everything,” he says.

But he's running out of time.

“We're losing our industrial base so fast in Europe that in the end we know what to do, but we cannot do it anymore,” he says, talking as though he's trying to fit two hours of interview into a scheduled one-hour slot.

He points to a television set he helped develop for the Dutch electronics giant Philips. The first TV designed not to spew toxic fumes into your living room, it saved so much electricity the company “could have given it away for free, if you converted the energy savings,” Braungart says.

Three months later, however, Philips sold its TV unit to a company in China.

With an unruly mop of sandy curls, wire-rimmed glasses and a rumpled denim blazer, Braungart looks like a Hollywood casting agent’s idea of a genius — Steve Jobs meets Dr. Who. Like a mad scientist turned gossip columnist, he peppers his nonstop riff with bizarre non-sequiturs and the names of luminaries who have embraced his ideas, from Brad Pitt and Steven Spielberg to Ford Motor Company scion Bill Ford and London Mayor Boris Johnson.

“I don't know your sexual preference,” he begins, seemingly apropos of nothing, eventually coming around to comparing the goal of zero emissions to sadomasochism.

“I talked to Boris ... London wants to be climate neutral,” he says. “How stupid! No tree is climate neutral. We want to be more stupid than a tree?”

“We think it's only organic when my own feces cannot go back [to the soil]?” he adds. “This is sick! This is completely perverse.”

It's a heady mix of ideas. But there's substance, and progress, at its heart.

Working with US architect William McDonough, Braungart aims to transform the world's economy through manufacturing processes that not only do no harm, but actually clean the air, replenish topsoil, and, like trees, turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.

It may sound like pie in the sky. But since first presenting the idea in his bestselling 2002 manifesto “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things,” Braungart has proven the concept’s validity.

He's helped multinationals develop hundreds of products like Desso's EcoBase carpet tiles, designed for the backing to be easily removed and the fabric sent back to the yarn-maker for reuse, and Steelcase's Climatex compostable upholstery fabric, so green that the effluent flowing out of the mill was cleaner than the water coming in.

The best proof that cradle-to-cradle works, according to a recent Desso annual report, is that the company’s market share of commercial carpets in Europe rose from 15 percent to 27 percent in the period the changes were made, 2007 to 2013.

Still, change may not be coming fast enough.

Critics point out that the certification program Braungart and McDonnough started to push companies to adopt cradle-to-cradle manufacturing processes is woefully behind schedule: 353certifications against a targeted 30,000.

In contrast, the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program, begun in 1994, covers more than 50,000 construction projects worldwide.

Meanwhile, as Braungart's experience with Philips suggests, globalization is driving manufacturers to low-cost countries — where environmental issues are only now beginning to gain prominence — far more rapidly.

Decades of research went into the development of non-toxic ink and compostable leather, for example, before the printing and tanning business pulled up stakes and migrated to China and India.

“It took us 18 years to have a leather which we can compost,” Braungart says. “But in that period all the big tanneries closed down in Europe. Now, I can show you a leather sample which is amazingly nice, but we don't have anybody to use it.”

His biggest obstacle may well be some of the world's most popular green ideas — in which his native Germany is an unquestioned leader.

Obsessively sorting their garbage and reusing bathwater since the 1970s, Germans have turned recycling into a religion. But that well-meaning, paper-or-plastic mentality has spawned huge industries predicated on the creation and incineration of waste.

Strange contradictions in so-called sustainability have resulted, Braungart says.

Among them, the construction of high-tech incinerators to dispose of magazines printed in China with ink made from toxic chemicals, and, more remarkably, the import of more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste to fuel those plants.

Citing Germany's ballyhooed energy transition or “Energiewende,” Braungart says dramatic policy changes are needed to shift focus away from minimizing damage, which he says slows our inevitable destruction but also helps ensure it.

First up is encouraging innovation by targeting the elimination of waste incineration by 2030 through converting to the manufacture of products that can be returned to biological cycles.

“Just like socialism was never social, ecologism doesn't help the ecology,” Braungart says about well-meaning but ultimately harmful recycling. “It just keeps us busy.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/141016/germany-braungart-cradle-to-cradle-recycling-environmentalism

The EU has spent billions to improve the lives of Roma. So why are their lives only getting worse?

Hostility and segregation in Central Europe are growing.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (October 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — When Hungary joined the European Union in 2004, Aladar Horvath hoped it would finally put an end to discrimination against the Roma.

The EU soon prioritized eliminating anti-Roma discrimination and segregation. It’s spent billions of dollars since 2007 to encourage integration.

Nevertheless, grassroots groups in Central Europe suggest the efforts may now be failing as festering economic turmoil continues to bolster long-simmering hostility.

A decade after Hungary’s EU accession, Horvath says the Roma’s plight in his country has only deteriorated.

“Even the best program can fail because of the society’s prejudices,” says the veteran civil rights campaigner, who started the Hungarian Roma Party before parliamentary elections in April.

The EU funneled around $100 billion to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia between 2007 and 2013 for economic development programs to benefit the Roma, including investments in low-income housing and school infrastructure.

Under EU policy, however, none of that funding was earmarked for specific schemes, so only a slim fraction was spent directly on the Roma.

Deeply held prejudices and systemic flaws have reduced the effectiveness of even that limited share despite bright spots such as a Hungarian effort to train and employ Roma women, aSlovakian program to fund teacher training and a Czech scheme to certify “ethnic-friendly employers.”

In a typical example, a Hungarian plan to target so-called “least developed micro-regions” resulted in the mushrooming of small towns where local elites captured development funds, Horvath says, while the Roma remained in isolated outlying villages.

“These villages are said to be dead, but they aren’t,” he says. “The cheapest apartments are here, so the Roma moved here, too.”

Broader studies suggest that story isn’t unique.

Social injustice has risen markedly in the majority of EU countries since the economic crisis began in 2008, according to a recent study by the Bertelsmann Foundation. Discrimination and social divisions have increased especially quickly in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, where the Roma face “systemic discrimination.”

In Slovakia and the Czech Republic, enrolling Roma children into classes or separate schools for students with “special needs” remains a significant problem despite recent landmark court rulings against segregation in both countries.

Hungary in particular appears to be moving in the wrong direction. Observers say that’s because the popularity of anti-Roma rhetoric and policies outweigh influence from Brussels.

The number of segregated, Roma-only schools has increased from 128 in 1997 to more than 300 today, Horvath says.

Geographical segregation has also increased as the deteriorating job market and cuts to social spending have combined to drive Roma into isolated “islands of poverty,” says Budapest-based researcher Attila Agh, who worked on the Bertelsmann study.

“There are villages where 90 percent of the population is Roma, and there are more and more of these poverty islands in Hungary in general,” he said in an interview.

Hungary questions such assertions, saying that segregation is decreasing.

Still, the government isn’t satisfied with the current level of Roma integration, says international spokesman Zoltan Kovacs, citing the historical legacy of the fall of communism on top of centuries of discrimination.

“We were the first in the EU to submit a Roma strategy,” he said. “We have been cooperating with the Soros Foundation and charity organizations all over the country. And there has been a series of visible results showing decreasing segregation.”

Kovacs cites Prime Minister Viktor Orban's public works scheme, which he argues has provided jobs for 50,000 Roma and more than 300,000 Hungarians overall. Under the program, participants earn around twice the amount they would receive in welfare benefits for working or attending training programs, he says.

“We are trying to orient these people to have jobs,” he said.

Bertelsmann's Agh disagrees, saying that in practice, welfare reform has worsened conditions by reducing the benefits recipients can receive.

“Now, the only way to get some money is through these public works, which aren’t available for 12 months [of the year],” he says.

Although Orban's Fidesz Party raises the problem of Roma integration at the national level, its message becomes increasingly confused as it filters from Budapest to the countryside.

Meanwhile, the growing popularity of the far-right Jobbik Party is putting more pressure on Fidesz to drift further right.

In municipal elections over the weekend, Jobbik won seats in nine cities, up from just three in 2010.

Pressure to adopt anti-Roma policies is especially strong in tightly contested areas such as Miskolc, Hungary's third largest city, says Dorottya Atol of the European Roma Rights Center.

With Fidesz, Jobbik and a third party all neck and neck, she says, the Roma community “is really scapegoated and used for political reasons.”

Before this weekend's elections, Deputy Mayor Gyula Schweickhardt launched a popular scheme to demolish a Roma-dominated neighborhood characterized as a slum to make way for a soccer stadium. The evicted residents will receive money to buy new homes — but only outside the city, and only if they don't return for five years.

“There's a social and economic interest in providing an ideology that allows the middle class to get rid of the poor,” Horvath says, “starting with the Roma.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/141013/eu-roma-discrimination-hungary-czech-slovakia

Russia could put a deadly freeze on Ukraine this winter

Moscow appears to be slashing gas exports to countries that supply fuel to the war-torn country.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (October 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — It’s shaping up to be a cold winter in Europe — or at least in Ukraine.

As German Chancellor Angela Merkelspearheads a push for peace in Ukraine, reports of reduced natural gas flows to Central Europe indicate that Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t ready to deal, experts say.

With storage facilities nearly full across Western Europe, the European Union’s major economies are unlikely to face a serious energy crisis. But Putin’s moves to slash gas exports to countries supplying fuel to Ukraine through so-called reverse flows threaten the war-torn country with a potentially devastating freeze.

“For the EU states, this winter looks fine even if there’s a week or two weeks of gas cutoffs,” says Michael Labelle, an energy expert at the Central European University in Budapest.

But if the EU can’t broker a deal with Russia and cutoffs block those reverse flows, “it’s really the Ukrainian people who are going to suffer," he adds, "and people are going to die."

Moscow cut gas supplies to Ukraine in June following Russia’s annexing of Crimea, arguing that Kyiv showed no signs of paying off a massive debt owed to Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled fuel behemoth. But unlike past cutoffs, gas has continued to flow through Ukraine to Europe.

Still, Putin’s latest moves are reminders that he can still turn off the tap.

“If the Ukraine crisis is not resolved, the transit route through Ukraine might be distorted so that less gas is delivered to Europe, as happened in 2006 and 2009,” says Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert with the German Institute for Economic Research.

Over the past weeks, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and now Romania have reported reductions of as much as 50 percent in the flow of gas they are contracted to receive from Gazprom. The fuel company claims it’s illegal for those countries to re-export gas to Ukraine.

“The Russian side talks about technical problems, about the necessity of filling up storage for the winter season,” Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico said. “I have used this expression and I will use it again: Gas has become a tool in a political fight.”

So far, the interruptions have been temporary this time — warning shots rather than full-on salvos like those of 2006 and 2009.

The next milestone could be an extension or a deepening of the cuts. If Gazprom reinstitutes supply cuts to Poland and extends them from a few days to a few weeks, or increases the 50 percent reduction in gas for Slovakia to a full-blown cutoff, for example, that would be a grim sign.

“So far it’s been a stepped approach,” Labelle says.

Nevertheless, even the current comparatively minor saber-rattling has put more pressure on the EU to cobble together a deal under which Ukraine would settle its $3 billion debt owed to Gazprom in exchange for a guarantee of receiving at least 5 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia this winter.

Forging such a deal would give Putin a respectable way to back down without losing face, Kemfert says. But Russia is angling to extract a much higher price from Ukraine for gas than it gets from other European countries — $485 per cubic meter, compared with around $300 in Western Europe.

“An agreement is not in sight,” Kemfert adds.

Meanwhile, the deal itself would be like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg, Labelle warns.

“Certainly, if Russia wants to cool things, they will take this deal,” he says. “But the Ukraine is in really dire economic straits. Is the EU or US paying off Ukraine’s gas debt to Russia the solution? What about next year?”

With countries such as Germany, Austria and Hungary relying on Russia for 40 to 80 percent of their gas supplies, Europe has been endeavoring to forge a common energy market. With interconnected grids and pipelines, member states can increasingly buy and sell gas and electricity to each other (or Ukraine). Theoretically, that should allow the EU to negotiate with Russia as a block, using its economic might to counterbalance Russia’s energy politics.

But Moscow’s initial success in stopping reverse gas flows to Ukraine, as well as a broader reluctance to toe the line espoused by Brussels, has exposed weak links in the strategy.

In response to Gazprom’s supply cuts, not only Hungary but also tough-talking Poland — which has taken Europe’s strongest stance on the Ukraine crisis — immediately suspended reverse flows.

At the same time, Austria, Bulgaria and Hungary are forging ahead with plans to build theSouth Stream pipeline from Russia to Europe despite objections from Brussels that it undermines the EU’s negotiating position. Like the earlier Nord Stream pipeline, which pipes gas directly from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, South Stream would allow Gazprom to circumvent Ukraine and supply gas directly to southern Europe.

“When it comes to a common stance against Russia or with Russia [on energy policy], it’s something that comes out of Brussels, and it doesn’t represent any reality,” Labelle says.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/russia/141007/russian-gazprom-gas-ukraine-crisis

Generations after WWII, is Germany ready to fight again?

Germans want a louder voice in global affairs, but their reluctance to take part in military operations is undermining that effort.
By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (October 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — When Chancellor Angela Merkel took office after her re-election last fall, she promised to expand her country's role in world affairs by unshackling its military.

That would reflect the political and economic leadership position Germany has taken in Europe over the last two decades.

But as the fight against the Islamic State, or IS, in Iraq and Syria is showing, that's easier said than done in a society that’s been a perennial conscientious objector since World War II.

Germany’s commitment to send $90 million worth of arms and equipment to Kurdish rebels fighting IS ended a longstanding policy against sending weapons into conflict zones. But the amount and nature of aid isn’t expected to grow.

That’s angering German hawks who are pushing Berlin to join US-led air strikes and dramatically expand efforts to train and equip those fighting IS in Iraq and Syria. But Merkel is constrained by a general unwillingness to take a direct role in the conflict as well as a crisis in the weapons industry.

“There's still great reluctance and resistance to [Germany's] arms sales to the Kurds, and there would be very strong opposition to joining the fight against IS,” defense expert Michael Brzoska of the University of Hamburg said in a telephone interview.

Over the weekend, local newspapers published the first photos of German troops training 32 Kurdish fighters at a military school in Bavaria.

A group of tough-talking ex-generals took that limited involvement as less a PR opportunity than a case of “those who can’t do, teach.”

“Our allies are flying combat missions against IS to protect our common security,” Harald Kujat, former inspector general of Germany’s Federal Defense Forces, told the tabloid Bildzeitung.

“But Europe's largest economy and one of the most important members of NATO is unable to act.”

Former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was more blunt. “We let others do our dirty work in Iraq,” he said.

Some are warning that the reluctance to fight may have broader consequences, especially after two well-publicized breakdowns of military planes ferrying troops to Iraq and aid to West Africa last week, which prompted criticism of Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen.

The breakdowns have been blamed on a reliance on aircraft that have been in service for 50 years.

Germany's unwillingness to fight is spawning an inability to fight, says Rainer Arnold, a Social Democrat member of parliament.

Deep cuts to the defense budget have rendered NATO's would-be leader in Europe unable to meet its military commitments to the alliance, he says.

Germany spends less than $42 billion, or 1.3 percent of GDP, on its military, far below the 2 percent NATO says its members should lay out.

Instead of a lean fighting force, schizophrenic cost-cutting has resulted in an army that's equipped neither for a quick-hitting modern conflict like the fight against IS nor the large Cold War operations for which NATO was originally designed.

Meanwhile, toy-happy decision makers have unwisely slashed the maintenance budget to protect new procurements, Brzoska says.

“If you look at the equipment that the German military has,” he says, “there's no clear line what the armed forces think they're for or clear rationale behind what they're purchasing.”

At the same time, new government policies are targeting customers in other countries.

Germany's reputation for precision engineering has helped its defense industry emerge as the world's third-largest arms exporter, behind the US and Russia.

But last month, Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel unveiled plans that threaten to deliberately strangle Germany's arms makers with strict new limits on exports.

An ongoing shift of those exports from other countries within the European Union to new customers with dubious human rights records in Asia and the Middle East is incompatible with Germany's postwar commitment to peace, Gabriel said on German television.

The restrictions could send the country's weapons makers looking for greener pastures, the head of the German defense industry lobby warned.

"Either we will continue to reduce capacities and thus jobs as well or we'll go abroad," Armin Papperger, president of the Federation of German Security and Defense Industry, said in a recent interview.

Hamburg University's Brzoska doesn’t believe Germany is necessarily hitting a wall in steering from its past to a more influential future.

Taken together, the move to restrict arms exports and decision to arm Kurdish fighters in Iraq represent a shift toward using weapons transfers as a tool for Germany to become a bigger player in foreign affairs, just as Merkel promised, he argues.

Ethical concerns will remain the nominal justification for blacklisting particular countries. But the days of blanket opposition to supplying arms to countries in the middle of conflicts may be over.

Instead, Germany will treat its defense industry like the US, the world's leading arms exporter despite a lengthy list of countries that are banned from receiving American-made weapons.

“If a country is cooperating with the US, they will get lots of arms,” Brzoska says.

“That's what the [German] reform is all about," Brzoska says. “To move away from focusing on making money to focus more on the goals of German foreign policy.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140930/germany-military-arms-exports-is-iraq

Some Germans fear rap music is fueling jihad. Musicians say a wave of sensationalism is stoking latent Islamophobia.
By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (October 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — When hooligans attacked Israeli soccer players in Austria this summer, few paid much attention to the matching sweatshirts they were wearing.

They were emblazoned with an image of crossed scimitars common in Islam together with the German phrase for “I'm staying ghetto,” made famous by a rapper named Kurdo.

For some, it provided new evidence that in Germany and across Europe, a connection is emerging between the hip-hop scene and a radical Islamist movement pushing for Sharia law.

“For a generation that’s growing up with social media, with smart phones, with the internet in general, it's easy for the Islamic State to radicalize young guys,” says Florian Flade, an expert on radicalism.

With new details surfacing almost daily about the growth of the radical Salafist movementhere, news about German jihadis fighting for the Islamic State, or IS, is prompting a renewed debate over the integration of Muslim immigrants. But hip-hop fans and musicians say it’s part of a wave of sensationalism that’s stoking latent Islamophobia in a society still wrestling with the notion of multiculturalism.

Germans have been struggling for years over how to respond to the angry language and glorification of violence prevalent in a strain of hip-hop music originating in Kreuzberg, an immigrant-dominated neighborhood of Berlin that’s sometimes dubbed “Little Istanbul.”

Rappers such as Anis Ferchichi, born in Bonn to a Tunisian father and German mother and better known as Bushido, have drawn criticism for anti-Semitic and homophobic lyrics.

Vulgar slurs have sometimes joined superficial references to Islam or radicalism, including in Bushido's 2009 song “Taliban.”

But now IS is embracing the tools of pop culture to draw recruits. Among its arsenal here is a former rapper named Denis Cuspert, aka Deso Dogg, who in 2013 emerged as the German face of jihad.

After appearing in numerous propaganda videos for Al Qaeda and IS, Cuspert was reportedly killed in April, although IS subsequently denied those reports.

“As a rapper, he had only a little success,” says Freiburg University's Andreas Armborst. “But now he is a household name because his face is splashed across the pages of the [tabloid] Bild Zeitung.”

Together with the attack against Jewish soccer players in Austria, German protests against the Israeli occupation of Gaza this summer exposed a deep current of anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants. Chants included “Jew, Jew, cowardly bastard, come out and fight alone!”

The number of German citizens and residents joining the Salafist movement has tripled from around 1,800 members in 2011 to more than 6,000, according to a recent report by Germany's domestic security agency.

As many as 400 radicals have traveled to the Middle East for combat training and fighting, prompting a police crackdown that this week resulted in raids on homes across Germany and the arrests of several suspects accused of fighting for IS in Syria or funding propaganda videos.

But some Muslims here say public alarm is making it harder to tackle the problem.

They see a stark contrast between the immediate leap to intercede against anti-Semitism during the protests this summer and the official reaction to more than 80 attacks against German mosques since 2012.

Every major news outlet and politician weighed in to express their dismay over the anti-Semitic chants, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, they argue. But when a mosque is set ablaze or when Muslims are attacked and killed — such as in a notorious series of murders allegedly perpetrated by the far-right National Socialist Underground between 2000 and 2007 — the initial official reaction tends to deny prejudice as a motive.

At the same time, hip-hop musicians and fans — as well as German Muslims — caution that sensationalist media reports are creating a climate of hysteria that’s making it more difficult to reach the country's alienated minorities.

News reports about Cuspert — a former Kreuzberg resident born to a Ghanaian father and German mother — made him out to be a big rap star, even though he never achieved much prominence during his short-lived career as Deso Dogg.

After his conversion, Cuspert denounced the music and excoriated his former lifestyle.

That says as much about audience prejudices as it does about hip-hop, says Olad Aden, a social worker who uses rap workshops as a way of reaching Berlin street kids.

“I’m dismayed that several media outlets have highlighted the fact that some of these, for lack of a better term, 'sick' individuals within these terrorist organizations have been 'rappers' in the past,” he says. “Undoubtedly they have been many other things as well.”

The music industry may be partly to blame.

Despite his controversial lyrics and lifestyle, Bushido was awarded Germany's prestigious Bambi award for “successful integration.”

Critics say that reflects the music industry’s glamorization of Muslim alienation.

Iranian-German rapper Kaveh Ahangar says the industry marginalizes moderate rappers “who have a critical text against the US foreign policy, the Israeli occupation or structural racism in Germany.”

Instead, “the only people who get a platform are gangsta or middle-class rappers who rap about issues that are quite banal.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140925/germany-jihadis-gangsta-rap

Cycling the Death Strip: Berlin Wall by bicycle

By Jason Overdorf
(CNN, September 2014)

A lone saxophonist plays in the shadow of an overpass while a horde of cyclists looks down at a set of tangled train tracks.

This outwardly gloomy spot is as good a place as any to begin a cycling tour of the "Berlin Wall Trail," a 160-kilometer (99-mile) path developed to commemorate and transform one of the darkest chapters of the city's past.

Once a popular location for defectors because East German trains cut through a corner of the Western zone, it was here on November 9, 1989, that tens of thousands of people overwhelmed an official checkpoint after a bureaucratic error led to the opening of the border.

Divided by mapmakers into 14 sections that vary from seven to 21 miles in length, the Wall Trail, or "Mauerweg," traces the entire path of the Wall.

Built in 1961, the Wall divided the city by surrounding West Berlin, for decades following the partitioning of Germany after World War II an island of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.

'Culture, politics and nature'

The Wall Trail is a unique combination of tourist attraction and recreational zone, says Michael Cramer, the Green Party politician and cycling enthusiast who conceived the plan in the early 1990s and is now working on a Europe-spanning Iron Curtain Trail, inspired by the Wall route's success.

"It's a ride through history, culture, politics and nature," he says.

That feeling hits home as I pedal across the Mauerpark to the Wall memorial on Bernauer Strasse, where a watchtower and a section of the barren "death strip" have been preserved unchanged.

While Cramer's scheme might seem an obvious venture now, it wasn't easy in the beginning.

The Wall's original Death Strip is visible along the route.

Berliners hated the Wall so much that many people wanted every trace of it obliterated.

In 1989 and 1990, souvenir hunters were carting it away so fast that the government had to shift from demolition to conservation practically overnight.

With experts forecasting an unprecedented population boom, real estate developers were eying the former "death strip" as keenly as East Germany's notorious Stasi security agents ever had.

"At that time, all the politicians and the media said, 'No, no, we want to erase the Wall,'" Cramer says. "But 10 years later, in 2000, we were successful."

Completed in 2009 at a cost of some 10 million euros ($13.4 million), today the trail appeals to all types of cyclists.

MORE: Watching the watchers: Spy's guide to Berlin

Bike-friendly public transport

Every section is accessible by Berlin's bike-friendly public transportation system, so cyclists can pick and choose from various sights and terrain.

It's flat and paved, so it doesn't take an athlete's fitness to hack it, and an ordinary city bike or single-gear, hipster's "fixie" serves as well as something fancier.

Better still, even though it attracts thousands of visitors every year, it never gets crowded, says Martin "Wollo" Wollenberg, who heads a tour company called Berlin-on-Bike.

"As you experience the Wall zig-zagging through the city, you get a feeling for the separation," Wollenberg says. "In a lot of places, the difference between East and West is still quite vivid."

For tourists new to Berlin, about 25 miles of the trail runs through the heart of the city.

Passing not only the Bernauer Strasse documentation center but also the Reichstag, Brandenburger Gate, Checkpoint Charlie and many other important historical sites, it makes an excellent route for a leisurely four-hour guided tour.

Meanwhile, for more committed cyclists, in former western districts such as Kladow and Wannsee, the path doubles as a nature trail, cutting through forests.

Regular rows of plantation pines make the former death strip easy to identify.

At 29 different sites along the path, memorial placards tell the stories of some of the nearly 250 "victims of the Wall," such as Peter Bohme, a 19-year-old cadet in East Germany's National People's Army who was shot trying to escape to West Berlin in 1962.

The Wall Trail is suitable for cyclists of all abilities.

Signposts at regular intervals make it well nigh impossible to get lost, and every section has something to spark the traveler's interest -- the bridge where captured spies were exchanged, a former watchtower now used by the forest brigade or the famous Church of Our Savior whose walls once formed part of the fortifications.

Riders are never more than a mile or two from the nearest beer garden.

MORE: Insider's Guide -- the best of Berlin

How to ride the wall

For do-it-yourselfers, bicycle rental runs about €10 per day, with outlets ubiquitous throughout the city.

Visit Berlin offers free pamphlets with complete maps of the 14 sections of the trail and brief descriptions -- though only the German version was available when I visited. The same material is available online.

Cramer's "Berlin Wall Trail: Cycling Guide" can be picked up for about $10 online or at the souvenir shop at the Berlin Wall Documentation Centre on Bernauer Strasse.

Berlin on Bike's "Wall Tour" covers 15 kilometers of the Wall Trail in about four hours. The company's English- and German-speaking guides provide information about the building and destruction of the Wall and life in East Germany.

At €14 plus €5 for bicycle rental, it's worth considering even for those planning to do the rest of trail solo.

Short on space, Germany is housing refugees in hotels, forests and stadiums

Cities have started rejecting asylum claims as growing violence in Iraq and Syria threatens to make a refugee housing crisis even worse.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, August 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — High atop a Berlin hostel, an unknown asylum seeker believed to be African grips tightly to a steel railing with one hand. Every few minutes, he grins broadly and capers a bit as he calls down to a knot of television journalists on the street — gathered here because of earlier reports that refugees facing expulsion from the capital were threatening to jump.

“Ich bin Berliner!” he shouts, channeling John F. Kennedy. “I want to stay in Berlin!”

The 28 Guertelstrasse hostel was converted into housing for refugees in April as part of a deal to convince asylum seekers to abandon a tented camp in Berlin’s Oranienplatz. They had been living illegally there, in protest against the German government's policies, for more than a year.

But since city authorities ordered 108 mostly African asylum seekers who had claims pending in other German states to vacate their accomodations here, the building has morphed into the latest flashpoint for Germany's refugee problem — with a handful of diehards refusing to leave the rooftop overnight Tuesday.

“In Hamburg, legislators have already proposed building makeshift villages out of shipping containers.”

Historically committed to providing humanitarian relief to the victims of foreign conflicts, Germany has absorbed more refugees from strife in Africa and the Middle East than any other nation in Europe.

But as violence within Iraq and Syria heat up, a housing shortage has prompted new debate over just how many asylum seekers the country can take in, says Claudia Beck, Germany spokeswoman for the Christian aid organization Caritas.

“The situation is already very, very hard for the people, and now there will be much more people trying to come to Europe, and then to Germany,” says Beck, who believes her country must rise to the challenge.

But louder voices are beginning to disagree.

In 2013, Germany was surprised by an unexpected wave of 110,000 requests for asylum — more than five times the number it received in 2006, the low point since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And with the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees now predicting 2014 requests may rise as high as 200,000, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere this week proposed a strict limit on the refugees the country agrees to accept.

“Whoever is not politically persecuted and needs no protection should not be granted asylum and must leave the country,” de Maiziere said in an interview with a German newspaper published Saturday.

Followed closely by this week’s rejection of asylum claims, the statement has sparked fears a deportation wave is coming for refugees like Haki, from Chad, who lived in a tent in Oranienplatz for more than a year.

“They start to deport people house by house, one by one,” says Haki, who declines to give his last name because his asylum application is still pending.

Some of those who arrive in Germany are automatically considered refugees based on the circumstances they have fled. Others aren't officially recognized as refugees until they've been granted asylum.

Public and government support remains strong for those fleeing conflict or political persecution. But the financial burden of the influx has already pushed some Germans to question whether policies should distinguish war refugees from economic migrants, says Said, an asylum seeker from Ghana.

Germans are more than prepared to welcome refugees from Iraq and Syria, he says, declining to give his surname. But they have less sympathy for Africans who flee places like Libya if they hold passports from peaceful, if poverty-stricken, countries.

“I've tried Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark,” he says. “This is my last stop.”

Expulsion of those deemed to be economic migrants may be the only answer, argues de Maiziere, though doing so could prove very difficult.

Already, cash-strapped cities across Germany have been forced to adopt extreme measures to accommodate the stream of refugees making their way here from Italy — where since the beginning of the year the Italian navy has rescued nearly 100,000 people fleeing violence and poverty in countries like Eritrea, Somalia and Syria.

In Hamburg, legislators have already proposed billeting refugees on decommissioned cruise ships moored in the Elbe River and building makeshift villages out of shipping containers, for example.

The city houses about 10,000 refugees in more than 60 locations, and spent around 300 million euros ($396 million) for accommodation and counseling in 2014. But it's struggling to find space for more, says Marcel Schweitzer, spokesman for the Hamburg Department of Labor, Welfare and Integration.

“We believe the refugee policy is a national duty. It’s unbelievable that Hamburg and other cities have to house refugees in containers or tents, while houses are pulled down because of a lack of tenants in other German states,” Schweitzer wrote in an email.

The city of Cologne recently purchased a four-star hotel to convert into semi-permanent housing for its asylum seekers, after being forced to rent rooms for an overflow of some 800 people in 2013.

Other cities like Duisburg, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, have been forced toerect tented camps in forests, stadiums and tennis courts that have drawn criticism for poor conditions.

As of Wednesday afternoon, police were still negotiating with exhausted Berlin rooftop refugees after a 24-hour vigil.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140827/iraq-syria-violence-refugee-housing-crisis-germany

Merkel heads to Ukraine as support builds for tough sanctions against Russia

Not even looming recession appears to be stopping Germany's rethink on Moscow.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, August 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — The last time Angela Merkel visited Kyiv, she was there to explain why she'd opposed a US initiative to put Ukraine on a path to join NATO.

That prospect was provoking fury in Russia, which invaded neighboring Georgia over that country’s aspiration to do the same.

This Saturday, Merkel’s agenda promises to be very different.

A longtime proponent of engagement rather than confrontation with Russia, she will meet with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko on Saturday in a clear sign of Germany's mounting support for his country's European ambitions.

The difference between now and six years ago is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s betrayal of Merkel’s trust by breaking promises to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine, after he annexed Crimea earlier this year and followed with support for pro-Moscow rebels fighting an insurgency in the country’s east.

The chancellor’s talks will focus on Ukraine’s security situation and explore “concrete possibilities to support Ukraine in the current crisis,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel's official spokesman, said Tuesday.

Last week, negotiations in Germany between foreign ministers failed to end the crisis as Russia reportedly refused to stop or even acknowledge its support for rebel fighters in Crimea.

Merkel will travel to Kyiv just days before Poroshenko and other European leaders will meetwith Putin in Minsk on Tuesday.


In that context, the visit is perhaps the strongest signal yet that concerns about Germany’s economy — slowing thanks to European Union sanctions against Russia — won’t derail the dramatic transformation underway in German-Russian relations, says Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

“We are in the process of a fundamental change in how we see Russia,” he said in a telephone interview. “You have to understand the policy of the last 20-25 years has failed.”

That policy, marked by regular personal interactions between Merkel and Putin, was intended to nudge and cajole the former communist state to adopt democratic reforms through ever-greater economic ties.

But as the Ukraine crisis has escalated, especially after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Merkel has steadily taken an ever-stronger stance and now appears to have won support for broad economic sanctions from the once-reluctant German business community.

In May, the chief executives of BASF, Siemens, Volkswagen and Adidas were lobbyingaggressively to prevent stiff sanctions against Russia.

But even as the latest economic data revealed deep cracks in the European recovery last week, the tenor of comments from the business sector, along with public opinion, has begun to change.

The economic data has driven home the idea that stagnation in investment driven by uncertainty in Ukraine is more damaging than any direct blow to trade with Russia, says the Kiel Institute's Klaus-Juergen Gern.

“At the moment, the feeling is that without some kind of sanctions, the Russians would not give in and the crisis will go on for a very long time,” he said.

At the same time, a recent poll conducted by Infratest Dimap on behalf of broadcaster ARD showed that 70 percent of ordinary Germans now favor tougher sanctions, and that 82 percent no longer view Russia as a trustworthy economic partner.

Acting on such views is coming with a price.

Official data show Germany's economy contracted 0.2 percent in the second quarter, which ended June 30.

The Federal Statistics Office warned that the economy was “losing momentum” even before the impact of current sanctions against Russia.

And the German Chambers of Commerce recently said the economy is on “a dangerous path,” with a projected $15-billion shortfall in exports expected to put some 100,000 German jobs at risk.

That makes recession almost inevitable. Ongoing strife in relations with Russia could also do irreparable damage to key sectors of the legendary Mittelstand — the small and medium-sized export firms that drive Germany's export-oriented economy — says Monika Hollacher of the German Engineering Federation.

“The mere threat of sanctions has already led to German companies losing many commissions,” she wrote in a recent article. “Sanctions will only accelerate this negative development. Long-term supply relationships and mutual trust between trading partners will potentially be damaged.”

In the past, German machine companies could stave off cheaper Asian competitors thanks to longstanding business relationships and the sterling reputation of German engineering.

However, now those advantages have been virtually eliminated, says Alexander Loktev, a sales agent for German engineering companies in Russia.

“We've already received inquiries from some customers asking us to look for machines from Asian producers,” he said.

It’s unclear how long Germany’s commitment to sanctions will survive as the economic bite drags on.

But Meister, the foreign relations expert, believes even recession is unlikely to reverse the shift in German policy.

“I think that everybody now understands that Russia changed the European order,” Meister said, “and we need to show them that it is unacceptable.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140821/merkel-poroshenko-putin-ukraine-russia-germany-sanctions

Foley execution boosts European support for intervention in Iraq

A video of the American journalist’s beheading by Islamist militants appears to be having the opposite of its intended effect.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, August 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — European leaders reacted to the execution of an American journalist with shock and horror Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “horrified” by the video depicting James Foley's beheading by members of the militant group Islamic State, or IS, released on YouTube on Tuesday.

Foley was freelancing for GlobalPost and other outlets in Syria when he disappeared nearly two years ago.

The German government extended its “deepest sympathies” to the Foley family, spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.

“This is a barbaric act that plays on fear,” spokesman for the French government Stephane Le Foll told reporters.

Far from intimidating European leaders, however, Foley's beheading appears to be galvanizing support for military intervention in Iraq, with France, Germany and Italy deepening their commitment to supporting Kurdish rebels fighting IS.

"I think we are in the most serious international situation since 2001. ... I will therefore propose an initiative on security in Iraq and the fight against Islamic State, from September," French President Francois Hollande told Le Monde.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany can now “imagine providing further equipment, including weapons” to Kurdish forces — doubling down on a commitment to provide non-lethal military supplies that was already seen as a departure from Germany's usual reluctance to engage in foreign conflicts.


A similar commitment came from Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who made a one-day visit to Iraq on Wednesday.

"Europe must be in places like Iraq where democracy is endangered," he said in Baghdad.

Italy is prepared to provide light arms and ammunition for self-defense, as well as logistical support for weapons supplies, Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti said.

However, Germany’s reaction is perhaps the most significant.

Although Steinmeier and Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen have been pushing for greater involvement in the fight against IS for the past week, a recent poll conducted by the Forsa Institute before Foley's execution suggested that only one in three Germans favored weapons deliveries.

More from GlobalPost: Britain searching for Foley killer

Judging from the emotions expressed by ordinary Germans and in the German media, however, that could be set to change.

“At the moment Germans see ISIS as a barbaric, terroristic warrior tribe, in a way, shedding blood everywhere,” said Alexander Buehler, a German reporter who has covered the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria. He was referring to IS by one of its previous names.

In an uncharacteristic editorial for the German press, the deputy editor of Die Welt calledFoley's execution “a declaration of war on Western civilization,” and called not only for Germany to aid in the fight against IS but also for the institution of sanctions against countries that allegedly provide them with financial support, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140820/foley-execution-boosts-european-support-intervention-iraq

Hungary may be in the EU, but its leader believes his country should be more like Putin’s Russia

Viktor Orban steps up his attacks on liberal democracy.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, August 2014)

BUDAPEST, Hungary — At a beer garden on the campus of Eotvos Lorand University during a lovely summer evening, a group of young graduates grows passionate when the conversation turns to Viktor Orban.

Locked in conflict with the European Union since he took office in 2010, the country's populist right-wing prime minister openly believes Hungary should no longer model itself on the liberal democracies of Western Europe.

It should emulate “illiberal” countries such as Singapore, China and Russia instead, he said late last month. Last week, he condemned EU sanctions against Moscow over its stoking of military conflict in Ukraine.

Such criticism has horrified educated, urban Hungarians like Marcsi, a young blond woman who, like her companions, asked that her surname not be published.

“Now we're mentioned in the same breath with Belarus and Russia,” she says. “If this government did nothing else, it’s ruined our reputation in the rest of the world.”

Orban has capitalized on his Fidesz Party's two-thirds majority in parliament to centralize control over democratic institutions since his first term began in 2010. But some believe his open declaration of war on liberal democracy presages a new level in what they say is a drive to embed cronyism in government and quash dissent.

“This is a programmatic declaration that the government would like to further weaken the system of checks and balances,” says Peter Kreko of the Budapest-based think tank Political Capital.

Orban came under fire during his first term for weakening the independence of the judiciary. Critics alleged he used punitive taxes and other questionable legal measures to target businesses owned by foreign companies and his political opponents.


He also faced international censure for amending the constitution to make it easier for his party to win a second two-thirds majority in April 2014.

He's since continued to move in the same direction.

In June, Orban enacted a tax on advertising revenue — not profit, as is more typical — that the EU criticized as an attack on the free press.

He also launched an investigation into foreign-funded nonprofit organizations. The probe’s targets say it’s designed to threaten their autonomy.

Viktor Szigetvari, a politician who campaigned for the opposition alliance in the recent election, is unequivocal about Orban's inspiration.

“It's Putinism at its best,” he says, referring to Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.

The government denies the accusations, saying none of its measures is malicious.

Officials argue that the constitutional changes were needed to eliminate political gridlock. They say the advertising tax and similar measures are required for filling the country's depleted coffers and protect people from predatory pricing.

And they say the probe of nonprofits stems from allegations that funds were improperly diverted into campaign financing for a small Fidesz rival called “Politics Can Be Different.”

Zoltan Kovacs, Orban's international spokesman, denies there are grounds for comparisons between Orban and Putin, let alone Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

“This is a political game,” he says. “It's very cheap and easy to use terms like these. We never crossed the democratic boundaries with any measure.”

But critics point to what they say is growing evidence to the contrary.

Veronika Mora, who heads the Okotars Foundation, responsible for distributing grants from Norway, says the government office that launched the original probe into NGOs has no jurisdiction over the administration of funds under a bipartisan agreement between Hungary and Norway.

A secondary embezzlement investigation launched by the Orban-controlled public prosecutor's office is little more than harassment, she says.

“If we lived in a country of law and order, we'd have no reason to fear because we've done nothing wrong,” she says.

The anti-corruption advocacy group Transparency International draws a direct line between the removal of checks on government power and an increase in crony capitalism.

Although the extent of corruption may not have grown — preceding governments were no angels, either — tailor-made laws have entrenched and legalized it, says Miklos Ligeti, Transparency’s head of legal affairs in Hungary.

“It's an exaggeration when it's perceived as a dictatorship,” he says of the state. “But the tendencies and trends are very worrying.”

Hungary raised no objections from the EU when it nationalized retail sales of tobacco following a model used in Austria.

A year later, however, franchise licenses were distributed to Fidesz Party loyalists.

In 2013, the government nationalized the country's largest cooperative savings bank only toreprivatize it again a year later through a single-bidder sale to a consortium of investors that included the man appointed to run the nationalization process in the first place.

The system uses punishments as well as rewards, says a Western businessman based in Hungary.

The tax on advertising revenue, for instance, was structured so that only a single media company was hit with a whopping 40 percent tax bill — a channel called RTL Klub owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.

Similarly, a special retail tax on companies with revenues of more than $2.2 million bypassedHungarian-owned CBA — a grocery chain that competes with companies like Britain’s Tesco — because its stores were run as individual franchises.

Sources of persecution can run the gamut from the taxman to the health inspector, according to the businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from officials.

“At one point, a client company had 65 different government investigations going on at one time,” he says.

More from GlobalPost: Amid fears of a Russian invasion, Ukrainians keep pushing for political reform

None of that may be evident to visitors in swish, stylish Budapest, where tequila bars, luxury boutiques and elegant cafes stand among majestic bridges and cathedrals.

But back at the campus beer garden, dismay pervades the jokes about state-owned TV broadcasts, a new degree program for shepherds, rules requiring college graduates to stay in Hungary and other echoes of the order that existed here before communism fell in 1990.

Most here expect Orban’s centralization to continue for the foreseeable future.

Fruzsina, a young woman in a pink, sleeveless blouse who works for a foreign firm, says that gives educated Hungarians a special responsibility: “We can't give up on the idea that we still live in a liberal state.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140815/hungary-eu-viktor-orban-russia

Europe has a puppy mafia problem

Open borders are creating canine refugees.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, August 2014)


BERLIN, Germany — In a sprawling animal shelter on the outskirts of Berlin, Beate Kaminski scoops up a tiny, bug-eyed puppy called Luna and plunks her down on her office table.

Eight inches tall and a foot long from nose to tail, handbag-sized Luna is the kind of “designer dog” flooding into Germany from dodgy puppy mills across Europe.

Like Luna, many are abandoned on the street or dumped at facilities like this one when they fall sick from one of the myriad canine diseases that can usually be prevented by mandatory vaccinations.

Evidence suggests there's an organized “puppy mafia” behind the trade. But Europe's open borders, web-based sales and a reluctance to file criminal charges are making it almost impossible to stop.

“Basically, anyone can breed puppies,” says Kaminski, whose large-framed glasses give her the air of a librarian.

“The puppy mill problem in the US is bigger than here, but we're in danger of facing the same issue because of our open borders.”

The largest shelter in Europe, Tierheim Berlin, or “Animal Shelter Berlin,” is an enormous concrete compound. Designed by the architect who built Chancellor Angela Merkel's residence, it houses monkeys used for research in East Germany before reunification, abandoned and confiscated farm animals, exotic lizards, parrots, rabbits, and just about every animal you can name — along with 800 cats and 300 dogs.

With an annual budget of around $10 million, the shelter houses animals indefinitely if no one adopts them, resorting to euthanasia only in the case of terminal illnesses that cause undue suffering.

Many of the animals have gone through hell before getting here.


No one knows how many puppies and kittens are transported illegally into Germany each year. But activists like Kaminski say highway accidents and routine traffic stops revealing cars and trucks loaded with animals from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — as well as a steady flow of sick and abandoned pets — hint at a booming trade.

“The puppy mill problem in the US is bigger than here, but we're in danger of facing the same issue because of our open borders,” she says.

In one case, Autobahn police and animal control officers recovered more than 100 pug, bulldog, husky and Saint Bernard puppies after a truck from Slovakia crashed near the city of Schifferstadt in Southwestern Germany.

Puppies were stacked in boxes in a closed truck bed reeking of urine and feces, conditions a horrified veterinary department official said surely reflected animal rights violations across the border.

Nevertheless, police maintained there were no grounds for filing criminal charges in Germany, whatever conditions the pups might have been raised in.

“From a purely legal standpoint, there is no actionable offense because the animals have valid vaccination certificates and the necessary documents,” police spokeswoman Simone Eisenbarth told Germany's Bild newspaper. “Unfortunately, our hands are tied.”



Newly adopted shelter puppies in Bucharest, Romania. (AFP/Getty Images)

The problem isn’t unique to Germany.

The truck caught on the Autobahn was actually headed to Belgium. A similar case netted a major importer in Luxembourg last year.

In Britain, a recent Channel Four documentary revealed that the relaxation of the country's once-stringent quarantine laws with the adoption of the EU's pet passport system has resulted in a massive increase in puppy smuggling there.

The impotence of the authorities in Germany — where regulations governing the treatment of animals are among the toughest in the world — highlights the difficulty of stopping the cruel trade.

The driver in the Autobahn case was fined nearly $30,000 to cover the costs of rehabilitating and quarantining the pups, many of which were injured or sick. But such hefty fines are rare and the chances of being caught with direct evidence of mistreatment remain slim, meaning profits still outweigh the risks.

Public outrage is also fleeting, says the Berlin animal shelter's Kaminski.

“You have headlines for one or two days and then the incident is forgotten,” she says.

Still, the country's animal rights activists may be making at least some headway.

In May, Germany’s federal food and agriculture authorities held the country's first roundtable discussion of the issue, focusing on possible new measures to combat the trade, including regulations that would require Germany-based retailers to obtain permits before importing any animals.

For Kaminski, there's an even easier solution.

“If you want a puppy,” she says, “go to a shelter.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140806/europe-germany-puppy-mafia-animal-smuggling

Scientists revolt against one of Europe’s most ambitious research projects

Dissenters are threatening to boycott a $1.6 billion attempt to simulate the brain’s workings.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, August 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — If it’s true, as the saying goes, that politics in academia are especially vicious because the stakes are so low, raising the ante doesn’t always seem to improve matters. At least that’s what an ongoing revolt by researchers against one of Europe’s most ambitious scientific projects appears to show.

With $1.6 billion in funding and hundreds of researchers from across the continent, the European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) is attempting to simulate the workings of the human brain using big data systems. It represents the EU's grandest undertaking in science since the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) completed its search for the so-called “God particle.”

Like that experiment, which succeeded in 2013 — and the sequencing of the human genome a decade ago — the Human Brain Project is addressing one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. And it promises huge rewards.

But last month, more than 150 neuroscientists signed an open letter to the European Commission demanding a new, more transparent review of the project, suggesting it’s “not on course” and that its funding should be parceled out to smaller neuroscience projects as individual grants.

Since the letter was published, the number of signatories has grown to more than 600.

They argue that autocratic leadership and flaws in the project's design have doomed it to failure, and they've threatened a boycott if something doesn't change.

In an official response, the European Commission said that it welcomes debate, and some HBP members say they're open to discussions.

Led by Zachary Mainen, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme in Portugal, the dissenters say that’s a promising sign.


“There's more going on between people in the European Commission and the HBP than there was before all this,” Mainen said in an interview.

Nevertheless, both sides have become increasingly entrenched since the squabble became public.

The HBP leadership points out that the project was selected only after a lengthy review process by a panel of 25 renowned experts in the field. Raising objections now, they say, is like complaining about a sports referee’s credentials only after he's ruled against your side.

The dissenters insist that review process was meaningless because the panel’s members are anonymous, their deliberations made behind closed doors. The protesters are unofficially calling for the project leader, Henry Markram — a professor of neuroscience based in Switzerland — to be replaced.

In a sign of how frayed tempers have become, the project’s co-director Karlheinz Meier, a University of Heidelberg professor who specializes in computer modeling of neural circuits, says he resents the opposition's methods more than their arguments.

“I don't like this kind of Facebook style which has been chosen, to just click on the letter and say I like it or I don't like it,” he said of the open letter. “This is not the way science works.”

There are real scientific differences, too.

In what Markram has described as “a paradigm shift” for neuroscience, he hopes to gather the vast amount of existing data about various neural structures in order to plug into a yet-to-be-developed supercomputer. It would run thousands of statistical simulations to determine the most likely connections and interactions between them.

If it works, the method could “reverse engineer” a map of the brain's circuitry that would otherwise take millions of conventional experiments to achieve, he says.

To further that focus, the HBP in May slashed the arm of the project devoted to cognitive neuroscience — the more theoretical study of the connections between neurons and higher mental processes such as decision-making and memory. The open letter’s signatories say that’s turned the project into a computing exercise, drastically lowering its odds of teaching us much about the brain.

They argue that simulations alone will never be enough to provide an understanding of how the firing of neurons translates into thoughts and feelings. Instead, they advocate constant interplay between the theoreticians who look at brain function from the top down — from the perspective of behavior — and those who look at it from the bottom up, from the perspective of neurons.

Alexandre Pouget, a neuroscientist from the University of Geneva, says without contributions from both sides, it would be astounding if the project achieves its goal of building an artificial human brain within ten years.

“I would be blown away and would probably retire,” he said.

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Markram and his supporters counter by saying that's exactly the same kind of nay-saying that was once leveled at the human genome project, the Hubble space telescope, the CERN supercollider and other successful scientific collaborations during their early stages.

Co-director Meier says scientists already have plenty of theoretical understanding to get started on the project as it’s currently envisioned.

“If we would wait until we've understood the brain, then we wouldn’t have to simulate it anymore,” he said.

Whether or not the European Commission agrees remains to be seen.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140731/human-brain-project-european-commission