NUCLEAR POWER IN EUROPE (2)

As I feared would be the case, the official death toll from Friday's earthquake in Japan (not the quake itself, but the subsequent tsunami) has risen sharply, and now stands at about 2,400. Many people think that it will end up a lot higher. Whatever the number, the earthquake was a catastrophe for the country, with widespread devastation and over 500,000 people made homeless.

The other likely casualty from the event is any future expansion of nuclear power, particularly in Europe. The earthquake and subsequent aftershocks have caused at least three explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, situated on the coast some 250km north of Tokyo and right in the middle of the zone "severely" affected by the earthquake. Radiation is leaking out, leading to an evacuation of everybody within 20km of the plant, and a no-fly zone in the airspace. The incidents are already the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and may yet get worse. They have also provoked a swift reaction elsewhere. Germany, which voted as recently as last autumn to extend the life of its nuclear plants, has now put that decision on hold, pending an analysis of what happened in Japan; so too has Switzerland. Plans for new plants look decidedly less likely than they did a week ago.

It is true that Japan - in contrast to Europe - is a particularly vulnerable country for the siting of a nuclear reactor, since it sits right on the edge of the so-called Ring of Fire in the Pacific Ocean. Yet because of that, it also has probably the highest proportion of earthquake-resistant buildings in the world. It also has a huge need for nuclear power, since it has not one drop of fossil fuel of its own, and must import the lot, a position that may well come under strain during the next 50 years. Put bluntly, if the safety of nuclear power can't be accepted in Japan with its notoriously stoic population, then it probably can't be accepted anywhere. Not least in Germany, where there is a strong anti-nuclear movement, who were out in force in the streets this weekend.

In a world desperate to find ways of reducing its reliance on fossil fuel, a de facto moratorium on nuclear energy will inevitably have profound consequences. Not least for our wallets.

Walter Blotscher

VISITING COPENHAGEN

My elder son turned 21 last weekend; many congratulations to him. We had intended to do something with him to celebrate this milestone; but he is a busy bee these days, so it had to wait.

On Friday I went up to Copenhagen to see him. We drank beer at the pub where he works, and then I took him out to dinner at a cafe near where he lives. I had a terrific steak, which I mention, since I don't eat much meat these days (my daughter being a vegetarian). I slept overnight in his room, and in the morning he made me a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs (ditto).

My son was buzzing with energy and exuberance. He is full of activities and plans and events and hopes, what you would expect to see in a young man with the future ahead of him. It was great to see. Must be all that meat ...

Walter Blotscher

ENGLAND v. SCOTLAND

England maintained the possibility of winning a Grand Slam in rugby's Six Nations Championship by beating Scotland 22-16 at Twickenham this afternoon. It was a scrappy match, in which Scotland played their underdog spoiler role to perfection. But England had just enough muscle to win through in the end. Now only Ireland in Dublin to beat.

I watched the match on my p2p file-sharing link. Often these crash midway through something interesting, and you have to reboot them again. Today, however, it was perfect sound and video all the way through. I still don't know how they do it; but until Danish television starts showing rugby, I am not going to complain. 

Walter Blotscher

EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN

In my post reviewing the year 2010 I said that one of the themes was the recurrent power of Nature, which remains more than a match for humanity's ingenuity and technological progress.

This morning's earthquake and tsunami in Japan prove my point. The earthquake, measured at 8.9 on the Richter scale, is reckoned to be one of the five biggest ever recorded. And although loss of life - so far - appears to be modest, the tsunami rushing across the Pacific Ocean as I write may well change that.

It is a sobering event.

Walter Blotscher

TWO GOOD FILMS

I have seen two good films in the cinema during the past week.

On Sunday I went with my wife and daughter to see The King's Speech in Odense. The film cleaned up at this year's Oscars, winning best film, best director and best actor. It's a simple tale of a man's struggle against adversity, the adversity being a stammer and the man being King George VI, thrust into the role against his will by the 1936 abdication of his elder brother Edward VIII. I really enjoyed it.

Tonight I went with my daughter to see The Social Network at the local cinema. This is about the founding of Facebook, which - remarkably - didn't exist until the beginning of 2004 and now has hundreds of millions of members, myself included. Mark Zuckerberg is obviously a brilliant computer geek, and his idea (if, indeed, it really was his idea) quickly made him the world's youngest billionaire. But if the film is true, then he also screwed his one real friend in the process, which doesn't make him very endearing. Compelling to watch in a slightly repellant way.

Walter Blotscher

IMMIGRATION AND INTEGRATION

Readers of this blog will know that during the past decade, Denmark has moved under a right-of-centre minority government from being a liberal social democracy, tolerant of foreigners, to the E.U. country with possibly the tightest restrictions on immigration. The very right-wing Danish People's Party has brilliantly exploited its pivotal role by giving Parliamentary support to the Government in order to provide a working majority for legislative proposals in exchange for a progressive tightening of the rules on refugees, asyslum seekers and other undesirables, all cloaked in a rhetoric of anti-Muslim, pro-Danish nationalism.

Readers of this blog will also know that I consider this a bad thing. Partly because I myself am an immigrant, and have children who come from two cultures (successfully, in my view), so I consider the whole premise rather offensive. But also because I see it as Canute-like in its futility. Everybody agrees that in 20 years or so (and, in some areas, already now), Denmark will face severe labour shortages, paticularly in "care" services; and the only possible solution to those labour shortages will be to import labour, most likely from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries. Furthermore, while the DPP is actively trying to bolt the stable doors to the outside world, rich and infertile Danish couples are actively undermining the whole stable gene pool by merrily adopting babies from China, Vietnam, Columbia, Africa and elsewhere. These children will grow up completely Danish, but will not look anything like "Danes". So the DPP concept of "Danishness" is simply not one that can be maintained in the future.

(An interesting side note. The one institution that has worked all this out is, perhaps surprisingly, the one that is supposedly the most representative of Danishness, namely the monarchy. The current queen is half Swedish, and she married a Frenchman. Her elder son married a Tasmanian, and her younger son two women in succession, one half English, half Chinese, and the other French-Swiss. All of which means that the next king but one will be - at most - one eighth ethnic Danish. Yet this has not made the monarchy in any way unpopular, the exact opposite in fact.)   

Against that background, yesterday saw some dramatic changes. The first was the sacking (itself unusual) of Birthe Rønn Hornbech as Integration Minister, and her replacement by Søren Pind. Denmark is a signatory to two U.N. conventions that give stateless persons up to the age of 21, who are born and raised in Denmark, the automatic right to Danish citizenship. This covers people without a state, such as Palestinians, but also a handful of others who for various reasons are stateless. It turns out that under Ms Rønn Hornbech's two predecessors, the Ministry refused around 30 applications from Palestinians for Danish citizenship, even though these people had an automatic right to it. Since the conventions are pretty clear (and, if there was any doubt, the U.N. could easily have clarified matters), this was bad enough. The real problem was that after Ms Rønn Hornbech discovered the situation in 2008, the policy continued. Parliament was not told of what had happened until early 2010; and although the affected people have now had their cases taken up again, the inevitable questions about "who knew what, when?", coupled with leaks and counter-leaks from the Ministry, have dominated political debate here for the past couple of months. The Prime Minister demanded a review of the whole saga, which Ms Rønn Hornbech delivered on Sunday. At a stormy meeting to discuss it the following day, she apparently heaped all blame on her two predecessors, and saw no reason to resign. The Prime Minister saw otherwise, and fired her. There will now be a formal independent investigation headed by a judge.

Mr Pind (who will run the Integration Ministry in tandem with his previous job of Aid Minister) comes from the libertarian wing of the dominant coalition Venstre party, and is viewed in many quarters as a bit of a young, ideological hothead. In his first Ministerial statement in his new job, he was true to form. Integration has failed, and should be replaced by "assimilation" he said. Danish culture was being undermined, and this should stop. If you don't want to become Danish, then you should "stay away". All this points to a further tightening of the immigration rules, even though most people, even right of centre voters, think that they are already tough enough.

Yet on the same day that Mr Pind appeared to be signalling an intention to take Danish immigration policy in an ever more rightward direction, the whole basis for that policy was being undermined by the European Court of Justice's judgment in the Belgian case of Ruiz Zambrano. In 1999 Mr Ruiz Zambrano, a Columbian national, came to Belgium and applied for asylum. A year later, his wife and small son came and applied for refugee status. These were both refused and they were ordered to leave the country; however, it was accepted that they should not be sent back to Columbia, owing to the civil war then going on. In particular, Mr Ruiz Zambrano had suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome after his son had been kidnapped for a week. Over the next couple of years, Mr Ruiz Zambrano got a job and the couple tried to have their status regularised, but to no avail. Crucially, they also had two more children, who were given Belgian nationality. When Mr Ruiz Zambrano lost his job, he applied for unemployment benefit, which was refused, on the grounds that as a foreigner, he had not worked enough days to entitle him to it. He was also refused a work permit. Mr Ruiz Zambrano went to court; and it was a reference from this case, that the ECJ had to rule on.  

E.U. citizenship was introduced by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty; everyone who is a national of a Member State is automatically a European citizen. It is for the individual Member State to decide for itself about nationality; but once it has so decided, then the rules about European citizenship apply. In a series of landmark cases, the ECJ has interpreted those rules very broadly, on the basis (repeated in Ruiz Zambrano) that "citizenship of the Union is intended to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States". In particular, Member States have to ensure that the rights of E.U. citizens are real rights, not illusionary ones. In the Ruiz Zambrano case, the E.U. citizens are the two children born in Belgium with Belgian nationality. If their parents are denied work and residence permits and/or unemployment benefits, then the result would be that they would not be able to support their children in Belgium and would have to leave the E.U. Since a forced departure from the E.U. would be a fundamental restriction on the children's right of citizenship to reside in the E.U., logic dictates that the parents must be allowed those permits and benefits.

This decision, a strong and clear decision issued by the Grand Chamber, will drive a coach and horses through much of the Danish Government's immigration policy. In particular, the so-called "24-year rule", whereby Danes wishing to marry people from outside the E.U. (read poor countries) cannot do so until the prospective spouse is 24 years old (unless they go and live in another, more welcoming, E.U. country such as Sweden first). Secondly, the newly formulated "points system", by which prospective immigrants are vetted as suitable for coming to the country. In both cases, if a Danish (and therefore E.U.) citizen is involved, such restrictions are illegal under E.U. law. Proof of that fact comes from the DPP's legal spokesman, who is already calling for immigration decisions to be decided in Denmark, who should be "master in its own house". This is, in effect, a call for abandonment of the E.U. Treaties; which - fortunately - ain't on.

All in all, a good start to the week for those opposed to rabid nationalism. Which includes me.

Walter Blotscher

ARAB DEMOCRACY (3)

In my earlier post on events in the Arab world, I said that I didn't think that things would pan out in the same way as they had in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980's.

That hunch seems to have been correct. Although both Tunisia's and Egypt's Presidents have been forced out of office, it is still unclear how the two countries will find their way to democracy, if indeed they will. While in Libya, a full-scale civil war appears to be breaking out between the western half of the country, controlled by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi from Tripoli, and the eastern half, which has fallen to people who started out as demonstrators, but who are now fully-fledged rebels. With the rest of the world looking on from the sidelines, with or without a mooted no-fly zone, the outcome of that fight is far from certain.

Two months on, I am still not optimistic that the Arab world - in general - will become democratic any time soon.

Walter Blotscher