Category Archives: france

Chermany

Bloomberg has a couple of excellent pieces out this week on what’s going on with the French and German economies. The story of how Germany lately managed to rally its growth and drive down its unemployment rate is of particular interest to the Italian observer, in that a lot of the success seems to have to do with Germany’s Mittelstand — small- and medium-size businesses similar to Italy’s — and the long-term financing that underwrites their successes. (Check out Konrad Adenauer’s grandson taking a nice swipe at those profligate Anglo-Saxons.)

Want to borrow some money?

Germany’s response to unemployment — to have workers work less hours with no reduction in pay — is redolent of how Italian managers of SMEs deal with their problems as well, but obviously more to the story than that, since Italian unemployment keeps climbing and is now nationally at 8.5%, compared to Germany’s 7%. Of course Italy has undertaken labor reform — most famously the Marco Biagi reforms in 2002 — but has not managed to introduce the level of flexibility that Germany has.

The end of the article reminds us that Germany’s export-driven growth and wage depression at home recall China. This is true, but hardly news: Martin Wolf, warning of global deflation, told his listeners this back in March.

More on the Roma Debate

Il Cav courtesy of Le Figaro

Berlusconi comes out with Sarkozy against criticism on France’s treatment of Roma. Quoted in Le Figaro yesterday, “[EU Citizen’s Rights Commissioner] Reding would have done better to treat the subject in private with French leaders before speaking publicly as she did.” Some of the right-leaning Italian press is calling it a new French-Italian “axis” against immigration. Meanwhile, the NYT does a story on the Rom, and the comment of a Romanian official bears a striking resemblance to a comment on this blog a couple weeks back.

More on the EU and the Roma

In response to reader Scott, who raises some good points on my last post:

Romania is near to being the most impoverished country in Europe, and if there are no jobs in Romania workers will go where the jobs are. I would label them economic refugees (forced migration through economic necessity).

First off, I’d draw a distinction between Romanians of Romanian descent (of which there are more than a few in Italy) and Romanians who claim Roma descent. The former group has certainly felt this, which is why the Romanian state funded an ad campaign in Italy called “Romania, piacere di conoscerti” (Romania, pleased to meet you) showing the positive contributions that Romanian transplants to the belpaese have made. Divisive, surely, but it did underline a difference that many Italians were failing to see.

However, I find it ironic that French taxpayer dollars are basically paying for Roma vacations. They are deported, go home to see family and friends, and then return to France where they are let right back in. Does that make any sense?

Secondly, you’re right about the lack of fiscal prudence in deporting undocumented immigrants. There’s doubtlessly something cosmetic about deportation; in the specific case of the LN in Italy, the very small number of deportations actually carried out is in inverse proportion to the media attention they’re given, which is of course healthy for the League’s populist base. I would wager that, given the poor showing of Sarkozy’s UMP party in recent regional election, that something similar might be going on in France. After all, isn’t deportation the ultimate failure of any meaningful immigration policy?

I also suspect that other world leaders are secretly jealous of the bravado of Sarkozy and Maroni, and wish they could enact such policies yet with an even more hardline stance.

Every politician wants to be seen as “tough on crime,” no matter who commits it (indigenous or migrant populations) – just look at the rising number of Americans behind bars for minor crimes, serving those multi-century sentences that were formerly reserved for triple-named celebrity serial killers. (The Economist recently ran an excellent piece on this.)

The state has always made it clear that there is no place for nomadism in industrialized nations.

But I’m unsure of your assertion that states necessarily frown on nomadism. Look at the empires created in medieval central Asia, the Chinese in southeast Asia, or, perhaps most germane to a Westerner, the Jews in Europe. And I don’t think the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and Gypsies were necessarily a product of statism per se.

At any rate, the presences of large groups of nomadic people in southeastern Europe – their economic needs and ability, their habits and culture – should not have been lost on the European Commission during the 18 years that Romania waited to join the EU. So I would rephrase your conditional that “If you’re going to deport someone, either ban them forever or don’t fly them out at all” to “if you’re going to let someone into your club, be prepared to deal with both their advantages and defects.” Europe has certainly been able to make good use of Romanian labor, but has failed to develop any kind of coherent policy other than deportation to deal with serial lawbreakers from within its own bloc – no matter what their ethnic affiliation is. At bottom, it is simply a measure of just how far Europe has to come to ever closer union.