The leader of the Flemish Christian Democrat Party and President-in-waiting, Yves Leterme, who has said that Belgium’s two main linguistic communities are only held together by “the King, the football team and some beers,” is pushing for more autonomy for the three regions (Francophone Wallonia in the south, Flemish-speaking Flanders in the north and predominantly-Francophone Brussels, which is an enclave within Flanders). And this is the problem - none of the parties in Wallonia want to take Leterme up on this option and form a government, preferring to maintain themselves as closely linked to a united Belgium as possible and rejecting further autonomy, which many see as a thinly-veiled separatist agenda from the north. With parties from Flanders banned from fielding candidates in Wallonia and vice versa, finding a coalition partner in the other linguistic community is vital.   

Whilst there are linguistic and cultural niggles (Flemings love nothing better than putting down their Gallic cousins in the south for their failure to master the guttural tones of Flemish, and Leterme once famously questioned whether the unfortunately-named Walloons were intellectually up to the task of learning Flemish), money plays a part as well. Whilst Wallonia used to be richer and more populous than Flanders, the tables have now been turned. Unemployment in Wallonia is nudging 15% and is twice that of Flanders, and wages in the south are significantly lower; and there’s a popular conception that southern Belgium is full of dole scroungers living off Flanders’ wealth. If Belgium were to take the Czechoslovakia option, Flanders would be one of the richest countries in the EU and Wallonia one of the poorest.

Belgian pragmatism will likely win the day, as the issue of who gets to keep Brussels makes separation too complicated and risky even for Flanders. The option of turning Brussels into a city state (Brussels D.C.) has been touted, but neither Walloons nor Flemings want to lose their link to the city. 

Obviously, Planet Churro doesn’t support the idea of countries trying to offload poorer regions, but if political progress is impossible due to the myriad differences between the more Anglo-Saxon-leaning Flemings and the more Latin Walloons, then maybe separation is the best option, as long as a formula can be found that suits everybody. This would require Wallonia to be financially compensated for the income it would lose due to spearation, and Flanders to foot the bill for ditching poorer Belgians. And all this could be brokered and managed by the EU, which has a direct stake in the future of Brussels and which could call the shots to the potential new-member States through its adhesion talks. But, of course, Flemish independence fervour might wane if the cash advantages were taken out of the equation.   

In simple terms the CAP doles out money to European farmers and agrobusiness because, erm, the French managed to wangle it into EU policy years ago to protect a powerful interest group and to keep the French’s rather soppy relationship with the countryside alive. Yes, Pierre, driving through the compiegne and romping round well-kept meadows is pleasant, but hardly what you’d call a priority as far as EU funding goes, wouldn’t you say?

The CAP ensures that every European cow recieves subsidies to the tune of 700€ a year and takes up 40% of the EU budget. On top of this, artificially lowering production costs for hairy-arsed cousin-chasers has meant that third-world farmers have not been able to compete with EU products either at home or on the EU market, thereby holding back development and keeping a dependency culture going. Yes, égalité, only not for the darkies, if you don’t mind. What’s more, the beneficiaries of this bizarre policy are often large landowners – one of the largest recipients in Spain, for example, is the publicity-courting Duquesa de Alba, one of the richest people in the country.  

The move has been possible due to rising market prices for agricultural products, so EU taxpayers’ money isn’t quite as necessary to ensure that farm-dwellers can shell out on fleece-lined lumberjack shirts and 4x4s, leaving a surplus to be invested elsewhere. So farmers won’t actually be any worse off, but will doubtlessly complain anyway. The EU is possibly getting an early dig in to take advantage of new French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s modernising streak. 

There are plenty of critics of the Galileo project, which is due to be operational by 2012. Many claim that simply copying something that already exists (the US NAVSTAR GPS system) is hardly where EU high-tech investments should be directed. But it’s predicted that satellite navigation will be a money-spinner in the future and that earnings will go straight back into EU coffers. Efforts to get private capital on board have failed dismally.

Whichever way you look at it, a shift in focus from agriculture, which can be carried out in developing countries, to technology has to be viewed as positive, and this move fits in well with the philosophy of an institution which is trying to get away from the past rather than cling on to it.

The Petraeus Report seems measured and faintly optimistic, and General Dave has apparently drawn it up without pressure from either the Pentagon or White House. Though the 30,000 soldiers forming the surge will be gradually sent home, there are no immediate plans for troop withdrawals, which makes sense, as until gains in reduced violence are capitialised on with advances in the establishment of institutions and the training-up of national security forces, pulling out troops runs the risk of returning to square one. Indeed, one of the key reasons for the failure to maintain the peace after toppling Saddam was troop shortages. With a PhD from Princeton, Petraeus has a clear understanding of the importance of state-building, which, as the neglected Phase 4 part of the invasion strategey, has arguably been the key to the failure of the US-led mission in Iraq.

The other star of the day is the US ambassador in Bagdhad, Ryan Crocker, the Farsi- and Arabic-speakng diplomat who’s affectionately known as ‘our Lawrence of Arabia’. When the invasion of Iraq was in the offing, Colin Powell asked for Crocker’s advice and was told that an invasion would bring ethnic divisions, sectarian conflict, a transition to democracy plagued with problems and the risk of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia taking advantage of the chaos to boost themselves as regional powers. But he wasn’t cool back then and nobody listened to him. Like Petraeus, Crocker sees clear advances in regions such as al-Anbar, but sees drastic troop reductions as potentially catastrophic.

Unfortunately this has panned out in such a way that as soon as competent people are on the job, public opinion in the US is clamouring for troop reductions and Congress is more opposed to the occupation than ever. Whilst the whole exercise up to now has appeared to have been conducted by a group of Risk afficionados jacked up on party drinks, for there to be any chance of salvaging things and getting the country on course in some form, the US has to stay the distance; it’s clear that viewing Iraq as a quick in and out job was an error right from the start. 

Success in Iraq is also crucial for the US if it’s to continue in its self-appointed role as promoter of democracy and saviour of the oppressed. If it can pull it off in Iraq, then promoting liberal democracy in other (oil-producing) regions of the world will be feasible. If it pulls out and lets Iraq deteriorate even further into a failed state, then intervention in any form other than air strikes will be off the cards for a while to come.    

US general Jack Keane has laid into the disengagement of British forces, who he claims have given up on enforcing security in an increasingly violent region to focus on training up Iraquis to do the job. Security concerns have also been voiced by the more impartial International Crisis Group, and credibility-seeking Lib-Dem leader, Ming Campbell, has predictably piled in with his own list of grievances.

PM Brown says there’s no timeline for withdrawal, but discreetly packing all troops into the airport compound does make the UK look a bit like a soon-to-abscond wife with a ready-packed suitcase under the bed. And the fact that military sources have been hyping up Afghanistan (not a vote-loser to the same extent as Iraq) as the main priority – for which they need the troops currently posted in Iraq – also raises suspicions.

Comparisons will be drawn with Zapatero’s pull-out of Spanish forces following his election victory in 2004, and ZP also compensated in international circles by upping troop levels in Afghanistan. Like ZP, Brown represents a country whose population opposed the intervention on a grand scale. However, unlike Brown, ZP had not voted in favour of the war, and the collateral damage of a pull-out was nothing like as high. If Brown wants Britain to continue punching above its weight he might want to bear in mind that a premature withdrawal could plonk Britain off the international stage as far as the US and others are concerned.

Domestic politics invariably influences international policy. Brown may be contemplating early elections in order to capitalise on the ‘Brown bounce’ and to consolidate himself as a democratically elected PM, rather than a party-appointed replacement for Blair, so an Iraq cut-and-run strategy may be a way of boosting his popularity, especially if smoothed over with a bit of job done rhetoric. However, the übermoralist and preacher’s son may find that shipping-out whilst things are hotting up in Basra has adverse effects, with Iraqi lives becoming tradeable currency in an election campaign.

Today the Contact Group (US, EU and Russia) is having talks before visiting Kosovo and Serbia. Serbia claims Kosovo as the cradle of Serb civilization, but the 90% Albanian-Kosovar population would rather go its own way after a short war with Serbia in 1998-1999. The war was ended with a NATO (read US) air campaign which bombed Milosevic’s men out of Kosovo, which incidentally, like Iraq, was not approved by a UN resolution.  

It’s a difficult one to call. For ninety percent of the population independence is the answer, but the remaining ten percent are seriously worried about their safety in the event that Kosovo does get its sought-after independence. And many claim that the granting of independence is simply rewarding ethnic cleansing (whilst media reports had the Serbs down as the undisputed bad guys – and Milosevic was certainly overstepping the mark, whilst the EU floundered around helplessly -, the Kosovan Liberation Army had been out looting and murdering its way through predominantly Serbian areas and driving  the locals from their villages – a fact which barely gets a mention in most news reports); and this would set a dangerous precedent, especially in other parts of the former Yugoslavia where divisions still exist within States.

Spain is dead-set against independence for Kosovo. Alberto Navarro, Spain’s Secretary of State for the EU, has expressed concern that outside powers are deciding on the fate of another country and that this will lead to another European State splitting up. But Albertito, we know that’s not what you’re really worried about. Any Spanish government support for Kosovan independence would fire up nationalists in Spain, who would charge their leaders with hypocrisy for supporting independence movements outside Spain whilst railing against them domestically. Of course, conditions in, say, Les Borges Blanques, bear little resemblance to Kosovo, and to attempt to apply the same criteria to both situations would be beyond puerile, but…

The EU could spice the deal with opening membership talks for Serbia, but there are a whole host of other issues which also block Serbian accession, such as turning over supposedly-difficult-to-find war criminals to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In the meantime, Kosovo could unilaterally declare independence, possibly counting on the US for support, as well as several members of the EU, thereby highlighting another issue on which the EU can fail to reach a consensus on. 

Whilst in Poland a couple of weeks ago just about everyone I spoke to saw the government of the terrible Kaczynski twins (of which Prime Minister Jaroslaw still lives with his mum) as a regrettable mistake; however, it was generally viewed as something transitory that would pass without holding back the country’s growth and transformation. As you might guess, I wasn’t collaring uberCatholics on their way out of Mass, so it’s fair to say that the views I got on the country’s government are not representative of the population at large, but even strong opponents regarded the whole thing as an unfortunate blip rather than a serious worry. 

For the EU this is excellent news, as the difficulty of negotiating with Poland on many issues is a serious drag. Though Poland did backfoot to a certain extent at the summit on a new EU charter in June, it is still very resistent to the EU, and more specifically, Germany’s power within the Union. The Polish public, however, is much more Eurofriendly than its conservative-nutter leaders, so it is to be hoped that if early elections are called, the twins, who were recently satirized hanging off Angela Merkel’s breasts on the front cover of Polish political weekly Wprost, will get more time to put into practice the family values which they hold so dear.  

In 2001 Russia and China signed up for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – an economic and security pact with all Central Asian countries except Turkmenistan – and it’s these two powers which are most active in the region. The US also has a presence, through its oil companies and military bases in Uzbekistan which were established as a springboard for the invasion of Afghanistan. US oil companies are often forced to hold back, however, due to the diplomatic difficulties of getting the oil to markets from landlocked Central Asia; this is tricky because the most secure routes for oil and gas pipelines often go through Iran (under a US sanction regime), and ex-Soviet states are reluctant to go through Russia or regional rivals in many cases. 

So what’s the problem? Some say that all that matters is that the oil gets on to the market. If China snaps up all the oil in the region, this frees up oil from other sources, though this can create an overdependency on Middle-East oil for the US.

The problem with China

As far as the EU is concerned China is taking away any influence in the region that the Union might have had. Why? Basically because of China’s no-questions-asked attitude when setting up trade and aid deals. Whereas the EU will always make trade and aid conditional on improvements in human rights, democracy, institutions, press freedom etc., China just goes in and slaps the money on the table. Of course, China demanding democratic improvements is like Paris Hilton going around telling people to take it easy on the cocaine, and this is the problem for the EU.

Though China has finally got tough on Sudan over Darfur, this was largely a response to its own interests (the showcase 2008 Beijing Olympics taking a hit) and this is an extreme case; there is no moral element to China’s foreign policy and it doesn’t see itself as having a responsibility to change the behaviour of other States. The EU, on the other hand, has set out its stall as a defender of democracy and already gets enough stick over its relations with Russia. It’s thus unlikely to embark on relations with other states which have no interest in improving democratic accountability, and as China spreads its influence around the world, the EU is going to find itself ever more getting knocked back as it seeks to secure more influence.

Individual EU States can of course get involved in Central Asia, as Germany is doing, and France and the UK can still limit China’s global actions through their seats on the UN Security Council, but the EU as an organisation with international clout is still something of a bedroom fantacist.

The Grim Reality demonstrates the human side of the conflict, which often gets lost as disputes over how many hundreds of thousand have been killed turn suffering into a statistics exercise. In The Untested Doctrine, Lee Feinstein persuasively argues in favour of action in Darfur on the part of the International Community, regardless of whether the UN gets round to approving this.

***AND the UN has just approved a 26,000-strong joint UN-AU force to be deployed before 1 January 2008 (BBC)***

El País, which by an uncanny coincidence has exactly the same number of Africa correspondents as Planet Churro, reports that Spain will be contributing to a UN-mandated EU mission in Chad to help with refugees from over the border in strife-torn Darfur. At the moment this will be logistical and air support rather than men on the ground - as with 3,000 soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Balkans, Spanish forces have hit their limit for overseas operations – but Spanish sources have admitted that they may give in to a bit of Gallic arm-twisting and send ground forces in if new-mate Sarkozy’s France leads the operation.

This is likely to lead into the joint African Union-UN force to be deployed in Darfur itself sometime early next year. The Sudanese government, which backs and arms the Janjaweed militia – made up of nomadic Arabic-speaking Muslims and repsonsible for killing around 450,000 (mainly civilian) sedentary non-Arab Muslim tribes in land disputes -, has agreed to the deployment of the joint AU-UN forces, though there are niggles about how African these forces should be. 

Another boost for Africa could come from Camp David as George Bush and Gordon Brown break the bread. Hard-faced Gordon, who wouldn’t surprise anyone if he came out and said that he put himself through two hours of self-flagellation and a cold bath every time he gave into the temptation to eat an extra shortbread, doesn’t seem like a natural drinkng buddy for laid-back, good ole boy Bush (yes, George, we know, you don’t do that any more). But Brown did manage to look as if he was having fun when Dubbya took him for a  high-speed spin in the golf buggy and the Scot has expressed his admiration for American spirit, so they might be able to rub along together in an unconventional sort of way. Darfur is apparently on the agenda and the word is that they will be pressing for a new UN resolution on the matter.   

A traditional stumbling block in the past has been China, which buys 80% of Sudan’s oil and supplies arms and infrastructure to the east-African State with no questions asked. China has backed up its trading partner in the UN when resolutions on Darfur have come up in the past, but with the threat of the 2008 olympics being labelled the ‘Genocide Olympics’ and China’s coming out to the world not being quite the love-in that Communist Party bigwigs are hoping for, the Asian giant has shifted its stance and voted in favour of an increased UN presence in Darfur and put pressure on Sudan to resolve the conflict. 

Feet-dragging by Khartoum and an ineffective mandate for the UN forces could scupper the whole intitiative, but that something is going on has to be seen as hopeful. 

 ***worth checking out this for background info on Darfur***

Tony the tiger

Though Moratinos has dressed his unwavering support for Tony up in vague ideas about the man’s determination rather than getting into specific details, there are theories doing the rounds that Tony will undergo a Supermanesque transformation from Bush’s diffident poodle into a roaring (well, you get the drift) tiger.  

Firstly, Blair is no longer responsible for upholding the special relationship between the US and Britain (roughly translated as “stay on side or else we’ll fuck you over like we did at Suez”), so he’ll have more room for manoeuvre; and connected to this, he’ll also, at least in theory, be representing the interests of the other three members of the Quartet (EU, Russia and the UN). None of the other members of the Quartet has to deal with an Israeli lobby internally, though neither do they hold anwhere near as much sway with Israel as the US does. Secondly, having made a dog’s arse of things in Iraq, the US commitment to single-handedly changing the world for the better has waned and it realises that without a reasonable level of international support its initiatives lack credibility, so Blair might get beyond the flying-jacketed backslapping he achieved with Bush over Iraq (possibly getting the US to tweak the screws on Israel, to which it donates 3$bn a year).  

Blair also has the advantage of being a big-hitter on the international scene, and can get easy access to the right people and kick up a fuss if things don’t stay on course, and his tenacity in getting a solution for Northern Ireland adds to his credentials.    

Playing hard to get with Hamas

Whilst it all sounds fairly rosy so far, pretending Hamas (the hard-line majority party in the Palestinian Parliament, and currently in control of the Gaza Strip) doesn’t really exist is likely to put a spoke in the works, as refusing to deal with Palestine’s other head is going to doom any solution to failure, and the economic strangulation of the Gaza Strip is only likely to radicalise its supporters. The old Cold-War tactic of economically propping up friends (Abbas’s West Bank) so as to get Hamas supporters to turn against their party in Gaza may work, but there again, it might not.

Israel

And then there are the Israelis. There is widespread popular support for an end to violence rather than victory, especially after the damage the country experienced from Hezbollah and Palestine last summer, but the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) works on narrow electoral margins and coalition-forming, more often than not with the kingmakers from the radical right. The recent appointment of Shimon Peres in the largely symbolic role of President is a positive sign, but loyalties shift very quickly in Israeli politics, especially when peace deals are in the offing. A solution with Abbas would be palatable for many Israelis, but the armed forces will continue provoking Hamas, which has so far been unwilling to accept the existence of Israel, in order to justify more incursions into Gaza and thus prolong the downward spiral of violence.

Solana out in the cold

The affable but somewhat ineffective Javier Solana – EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy – is yet again being left on the sidelines. Firstly cast out of the limelight by Blair’s appointment and then kneed in the groin by his countryman Moratinos’ support for Blair’s role, Solana has been damning the project with exceedingly faint praise. 

Whilst Moratinos’ brimming optimism is a good sign, a solution before 2009 is not the sort of thing you’d want to bet your house on, and without   some sort of initiative for sorting out the Hamas situation, the conference being touted for September in New York is unlikely to get much done in terms of a long-term solution.