Letter From Europe: Agreeing With Nick Clegg, When It Suits

PARIS — There was a time when, almost like a mantra, British politicians of all stripes would offer enthusiastic assent to just about everything Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, might suggest.

“I agree with Nick,” they would say in the days of political courtship before the national election a year ago when voters, disenchanted with big party politics, returned a hung Parliament in which neither of the traditional titans — Conservative and Labour — had a majority. The perennially third-place Liberal Democrats became the kingmakers. Agreement with Nick was the passport to power.

Then, after some brief wrangling, the person who agreed most with Nick turned out — counterintuitively, perhaps — to be the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who agreed with Nick so much that he made him deputy prime minister in Britain’s first coalition government since World War II.

Laughing, joking with each other, icons of youthful promise, both svelte and well-spoken, the two men appeared side by side in the rose garden at 10 Downing Street — some pundits even called them clones — insisting publicly that their alliance would work for the good of their battered land despite their wide ideological differences.

But a year, it hardly needs to be said, is a very long time in politics, and ever fewer people seem to agree with Nick.

When he agreed to Conservative plans for a huge increase in college tuition fees, students rampaged in London, blaming him for breaking promises.

In a referendum last week on his flagship policy to overhaul the electoral system, Britons voted by a ratio of two to one against. Across the land, in local elections on the same day as the referendum, the blame for Britain’s harsh austerity measures seemed super-glued to Mr. Clegg, whose party lost hundreds of local council seats, unlike Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives, who had steamrollered the cost savings through Parliament yet survived the vote intact.

In other words, the experiment in what Mr. Cameron once called a “new politics” had stalled.

So the Liberal Democrats are finished, right? Their day in the sunshine of power is over, yes? Britain will inevitably return to two-party politics, eschewing the coalition negotiations and compromises that routinely haunt European alliances from Berlin to Rome?

Well, maybe not. This week, it became the fashion again to agree with Nick, or, at least, to encourage him to stay on as his party’s leader and fight what could be Britain’s biggest political struggle to safeguard its vaunted National Health Service from Conservative changes.

Indeed, the National Health Service has become the potential battleground not just for the survival of the coalition but also for something quintessentially British that many Britons fear will be lost to ruthless Conservative measures that pander to privilege and punish the poor.

As the Conservatives have cast around for ways to cut costs in the face of Britain’s debt, with the Liberal Democrats tagging along — sometimes like children on an outing — Mr. Cameron’s followers already have shown themselves prepared to assault whole pillars of a Britain portrayed by the former poet laureate John Betjeman as a nation of suburban predictability and bucolic charm.

The austerity measures have threatened public libraries and forests — both beloved of middle-class and literate supporters who have resisted the ax of austerity.

But the National Health Service remains Britain’s great institutional conundrum — the only source of free medical care for most people, a central assumption of British life, at once beloved and reviled for its blend of administrative bungling and miracle moments, yet now jeopardized by reformist zeal.

The proposed changes would hand control of most of the ￡100 billion, or nearly $163 billion, annual health budget to the service’s 42,000 general practitioners and, critics argue, they would propel the public health system into the arms of private service providers who would cherry-pick the most lucrative parts, leaving other parts to crumble.

There are clear signs that Mr. Cameron himself believes the changes are too radical.

And now, said Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Guardian, it is time for Mr. Clegg to reverse his previous acquiescence in the health care overhaul. After his drubbing by the voters, she wrote, “a burning-rubber U-turn is never a pretty political sight, but it is the only option that might, just possibly, avoid sudden death.”

The Liberal Democrats themselves seem to have drawn similar conclusions. Mr. Clegg has promised a “muscular liberalism” to differentiate his party from its coalition partner.

It is not a hard calculation. While some Conservatives want to call an early election, they have no guarantee of surviving a fresh ballot if they are depicted as the dragon-slayers of the National Health Service. Mr. Cameron, indeed, has said he does not want the coalition to collapse, agreeing with Nick who wants it to continue albeit with different ground rules.

“We need to show people where we have a moderating influence on the Conservatives and we need to stand up for our values and say that loud and clear,” Mr. Clegg said.

It is clear enough from the coalition’s mood music that the unease between the parties goes far beyond policy matters.

Lord Tony Greaves, a Liberal Democrat peer, even called Mr. Cameron a “toffee-nosed slimebag.”

Such epithets evoke Britain’s enduring class distinctions, which reserve much opprobrium for those like Mr. Cameron, educated at Eton College, Britain’s most exclusive private school, and Oxford University, where he joined an elite dining and drinking club called the Bullingdon.

In Parliament, the opposition Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has used that record to lampoon Mr. Cameron as Flashman — a fictional 19th-century bully, scoundrel and military officer with upper-crust credentials. (Mr. Cameron hardly helped his own case the other day when he turned to a female lawmaker, Angela Eagle, in Parliament and told her to “calm down, dear.”)

The prime minister has sought to deflect Mr. Miliband’s jibes, letting it be known, for instance, that, in a one-of-the-guys way, he likes to be called Dave.

So maybe, Dave has concluded it helps to have a political partner called Nick, sometimes to agree with, and sometimes to take the fall. Or, as Mr. Cameron put it in public on Thursday, “a strong coalition government” is “what I’m absolutely committed to delivering.”

 

World Briefing | Europe: Demjanjuk Taken to Nursing Home

MUNICH — John Demjanjuk was released from a Munich prison on Friday, the day after he was convicted of taking part in the murder of 28,000 Jews during World War II. He was taken to a nursing care facility to await the outcome of appeals of his conviction and five-year prison sentence.

Mr. Demjanjuk, 91, left Stadelheim prison, where he has been held for two years, at about 4:30 p.m. local time Friday according to Michael Stumpf, the prison director. Mr. Stumpf declined to disclose the name of the nursing facility, saying that Mr. Demjanjuk had requested that he not do so.

The prosecution of Mr. Demjanjuk may be one of the last major Nazi war crimes trials. A panel of judges found that, contrary to his denials, Mr. Demjanjuk, Ukrainian by birth, had worked as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. The court found that there was no way that any guard at the death camp could not have participated in the extermination of prisoners there.

The court found that, considering his age, his infirmity and the fact the he is now a stateless person, there was little chance that he would try to flee while his appeals progress. But the order to release him Thursday presented authorities with a conundrum, because it was unclear where he would go.

The release Friday followed an intensive search by prison authorities for a facility that would accept Mr. Demjanjuk. “It was very difficult,” Mr. Stumpf said.

Mr. Demjanjuk will remain free at least until the appeals process runs its course. Margarete N?tzel, a judge who is spokesman for the Munich courts, estimated that the appeals would take a year and a half, but she said two years was also plausible. Just compiling documents and transcripts from the trial could take six months, she said. Mr. Demjanjuk spent much of the trial in a bed set up in the courtroom or in a wheelchair. Mr. Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mail Friday that his father requires weekly medical treatment for a bone marrow and blood disorder, chronic kidney disease and severe degeneration of the spine.

However, Cornelius Nestler, a law professor who acted on behalf of a dozen Holocaust victims during the trial, accused the elder Mr. Demjanjuk of “exorbitantly” exaggerating the seriousness of his ailments. During final arguments last month, Mr. Nestler noted that while Mr. Demjanjuk lay almost lifeless in the courtroom he would joke with reporters outside.

On Thursday, relatives of Sobibor victims, who were recognized as co-complainants for the trial, said they were more concerned with raising awareness of what happened at Sobibor than exacting revenge on Mr. Demjanjuk, whose two years in pretrial detention will count toward his sentence, leaving him about three years left to serve if his appeals fail.

Rudie S. Cortissos, who lost his mother in Sobibor and survived the war by hiding in Amsterdam, said on Friday that he regretted that Mr. Demjanjuk will be able to live in peace during the appeals. But Mr. Cortissos also said in an e-mail message: “It does not upset me. A decision made by judges in a democratic country like Germany should be accepted.”

Under German law, defendants should not be held unless they are considered likely to flee. Still, the decision to let Mr. Demjanjuk out of jail angered some. “We feel that this is an insult to his victims and to the survivors,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Los Angeles, said in a statement Thursday.

The verdict comes after decades of legal proceedings in three countries involving Mr. Demjanjuk, who emigrated to the United States after the war and became an auto worker in Ohio. After losing his American citizenship in 1985 for lying about his past, Mr. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel and accused of being a particularly brutal guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka camp in occupied Poland.

But an Israeli high court overturned his conviction and death sentence in that case in 1993, ruling that Mr. Demjanjuk was not Ivan even though it appeared he had been a guard at a different camp, Sobibor.

Mr. Demjanjuk returned to the United States, but after more years of legal proceedings he was deported to Germany in 2009 to face trial.

The long legal battle made Mr. Demjanjuk one of the most well-known war crimes suspects, even though he was said to have ranked low in the camp hierarchy.

Mr. Demjanjuk’s defense lawyers argued that an SS identity card and other documents were falsified by the Soviets. But Judge Alt said there was a clear trail of documents and testimony that demonstrated Mr. Demjanjuk’s path from Soviet prisoner of war to Sobibor guard.

Jack Ewing reported from Munich, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.

 

Palestinians and Israelis Seek Support in Europe

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In Paris, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy while the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, was expected in Berlin to talk with Chancellor Angela Merkel. The encounter in the German capital came just 24 hours after Mr. Abbas, the leader of the Western-backed Fatah movement which holds sway in the West Bank, joined forces with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, the Islamist group that many in the West call terrorists.

Mr. Netanyahu, in London to meet Prime Minister David Cameron, labeled the unity deal a “tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism,” illustrating the gulf between Palestinian and Israeli strategies and perceptions. Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction and Israel, like the United States and the European Union, classifies the group as a terrorist organization and refuses any dealings with it.

While Mr. Abbas seemed certain to laud the advantages of Palestinian unity, European aversion to Hamas may well make Mr. Netanyahu’s mission easier, analysts in Paris said, though many European countries, including France, have been largely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The European diplomacy on Thursday came under the looming shadow of several other events scheduled for later this year.

Later this month, Mr. Netanyahu is to meet President Obama at a time when the American president is buoyed by the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and has emerged as a sponsor of the Arab pro-democracy movements sweeping the region from Libya to Syria to Yemen One result of the changes has been the readiness of the new Egyptian leadership that replaced the ousted Hosni Mubarak to sponsor the Palestinian unity pact.

Beyond that, in September, the United Nations is to consider the fraught issue of declaring recognition of a Palestinian state — a prospect that has galvanized both sides.

During a visit to Berlin in April by Mr. Netanyahu, Chancellor Merkel said she would urge Mr. Abbas not to press for a United Nations declaration of statehood, according to German news reports at the time. In public, she said: “We support a two-state solution, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state” and German diplomats said Berlin wanted a negotiated settlement.

The French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, said his government may seek to press Mr. Netanyahu to consider a restarted peace initiative, according to French news reports. “How much will we be able to get him to evolve? You know the man, his character, his determination,” Mr. Juppé said of Mr. Netanyahu. “Our idea is to try a last resort initiative, so that, in the month of September, when the question of recognition is raised, we can say we tried everything.”

While Israel refuses to deal with Hamas, Mr. Abbas says the Palestinians cannot return to peace talks without a halt to all settlement activity by Israel.

 

Europe Leads in Pushing for Privacy of User Data

BRUSSELS — As pressure grows for technology companies like Apple and Google to adjust how their phones and devices gather data, Europe seems to be where the new rules are being determined.

Last year, Google generated a storm of controversy in Germany when it had to acknowledge it had been recording information from unsecured wireless networks while compiling its Street View mapping service.

Then, last week, regulators in France, Germany and Italy said they would examine whether Apple’s iPhone and iPad violated privacy rules by tracking the location of users.

Also, reports emerged last month that the Dutch police had obtained information from TomTom, a maker of popular satellite navigation devices, while setting up speed traps, prompting concerns by users and an apology from TomTom.

The companies all said there was nothing sinister about their activities, though Apple said it would issue a software update limiting the time that location data was kept to seven days. None of the information, the companies said, is particularly sensitive from the point of view of personal privacy, and they claim it will help them to deliver better services in many cases.

To address concerns about data protection, Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, said in a speech Tuesday that she would propose extending unionwide rules about breaches of privacy to online banking, video games, shopping and social media.

The rules require phone companies and Internet service providers to inform customers of any data breach “without undue delay.”

“European citizens care deeply about protecting their privacy and data protection rights,” Ms. Reding said in a separate statement.

“Any company operating in the E.U. market or any online product that is targeted at E.U. consumers should comply with E.U. rules.”

Ms. Reding made her remarks shortly after Sony apologized for a data theft involving 77 million account holders of the PlayStation Network, and a week after Apple said it would change the software that logs the location of users of its iPhone and iPad tablet computer.

“Seven days is too late,” Ms. Reding said Tuesday, referring to how long it took Sony to inform account holders.

Regarding Apple, she said she understood how the discovery that the iPhone collected location data had eroded “the trust of our citizens.”

Abraham L. Newman, an assistant professor at Georgetown University and a specialist in European privacy issues, said Europe’s spotlight on privacy could offer companies like Apple and Google the chance to reorganize the way they handled policies worldwide, using European standards in their corporate strategy.

Alternatively, he said, the companies could develop policies to ensure that data gathered in Europe was sufficiently “quarantined” to comply with rules, but limit changes in the rest of the world.

“Apple is entering a political dynamic in Europe which is similar to Google’s experience,” Mr. Newman said. “Authorities in Europe have decided that consumers better not be duped in a world of unlimited location data where companies know literally every step you take.”

What particularly distinguishes Europe is the strong role played by so-called national data protection authorities in keeping tabs on privacy issues, he said.

In the United States, there is no single agency dedicated to privacy, and while the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission can deal with violations of privacy, those agencies are mainly focused on enforcing fair business practices.

But Ms. Reding said the differences between Europe and the United States should not overshadow signs of convergence, like the work by the Obama administration and Congress to pass a privacy bill of rights that would stop companies from collecting or sharing personal information without an Internet user’s consent.

“Until recently, there was a common belief that the E.U. and U.S. have different approaches on privacy and that it would be difficult to work together,” Ms. Reding said.

“This can no longer be argued in such simple terms.”

 

Letter from Europe: Libya Crisis Reveals Splits on E.U. Goals

 

BERLIN — The Libyan war is not good news for NATO. In spite of the upbeat speeches by NATO foreign ministers last week in Berlin, only 14 of the 28 member countries militarily support the no-flight zone and actions to protect Libyan civilians from attack by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces. Only six of them are carrying out airstrikes.

With support from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, the NATO mission in Libya is now a coalition of the willing, which analysts say undermines the cohesion of the alliance. But compared with other missions undertaken by NATO, the alliance this time moved with unprecedented speed in beginning the operation.

The Libya crisis is even worse news for Europe and its military ambitions. It shows more clearly than ever how most E.U. countries are unwilling to match their defense ambitions with any broad strategic goals.

“The decision by many European countries not to contribute to the NATO mission bodes ill for Europe’s foreign and security policy,” said Jan Techau, director of Carnegie Europe, the European center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Particularly damaging for Europe was Germany’s decision to abstain in the U.N. vote that authorized the no-flight zone over Libya. That was a huge disappointment to the United States and particularly to Britain and France. “Germany positioned itself outside the Western consensus,” Mr. Techau added. In doing so, he said, Berlin was undermining attempts by Europe to become a convincing defense player.

Britain and France had lobbied the U.N. Security Council to authorize the no-flight zone. Once authorized, with the United States, Canada and Denmark, they began the airstrikes.

Then came the crunch. The Obama administration did not want to continue leading the mission. It has enough on its plate with Afghanistan. Besides, Libya is considered Europe’s backyard. So for the first time ever, the United States asked NATO’s European allies to take over the command and control of the mission.

At first, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, balked at giving NATO that role, hoping that France could take the lead. But eventually he had to realize that Europe was not going to become a defense player in its own right with France at the helm.

“Libya confirmed France’s worst beliefs,” said Clara Marina O’Donnell, a defense expert at the Center for European Reform, a research organization in London. “It could not rely on its E.U. partners.”

It was a blow to France’s ambitions. “France’s goal of leading Europe in defense matters is receding,” said Bastien Irondelle, security expert at Sciences Po, the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris. “For his military aims, Sarkozy will now have to go outside the E.U. That means coalitions of the willing.”

It is not for want of trying by France, and Britain, to shift Europe from its preference for being a “soft power” — providing humanitarian aid and building civilian structures — to becoming a “hard power” with military force as an option.

They knew as much during the 1990s when the European Union, with its diplomacy ridiculed, had no idea about how to stop the war in the former Yugoslavia. It had to rely on the United States and NATO to end the fighting. Europe’s paralysis prompted Britain and France in 1998 to launch the Union’s European Security and Defense Policy.

Britain, then under Prime Minister Tony Blair, believed a stronger Europe was vital for the trans-Atlantic relationship, because most E.U. missions would depend on NATO’s military assets. The Union, therefore, would not become a competitor to or grow independent of NATO.

France, then led by President Jacques Chirac, thought differently. “It always wanted Europe to become a strong defense player, a European power,” said Mr. Irondelle.

Despite the ideological differences, London and Paris worked together. In 1999, they pushed the Union to agree that by 2003, the bloc should have the ability to deploy a force of 60,000 troops within 60 days and sustain it for a year. It never happened.

London and Paris in 2003 then came up with the idea of E.U. battle groups, or expeditionary forces. These units would consist of 1,500 soldiers each and be deployed within five to 10 days. These units have still to be tested.

With prodding from London and Paris, the Union managed in 2003 to agree on a European security strategy designed to foster a global strategic culture among European countries. The reactions by the Union to the changes sweeping across the Middle East showed how the Union was out of its depth.

The Union’s shortfalls in defense, including expenditure and military capabilities, persuaded Britain and France to forge last year a far-reaching agreement in defense cooperation. It included sharing aircraft carriers and collaborative research for both countries’ nuclear deterrent systems.

“The Anglo-French accord confirmed the frustration in London and Paris over E.U. defense efforts,” Ms. O’Donnell said. She added that European defense could become even weaker as long as these two countries continue to cooperate so closely.

Yet opinion polls across Europe show that citizens want the Union to have a stronger defense and security policy to underpin the bloc’s support for human rights. But paradoxically, polls also show that the public is unwilling to support military action or fund any increase in defense spending to defend the bloc’s values.

The main reason for this discrepancy is that Europe, as a bloc, does not have a strategic culture. “Only Britain and France have a strategic culture and natural outward approach,” said Mr. Techau, from Carnegie Europe.

That could change — if Germany changed.

“Germany could lead others if it adopted a more open approach to foreign policy. But Germany has neither the muscle nor the strategic scope to think in global terms, unlike Britain and France,” Mr. Techau said.

Indeed, Chancellor Angela Merkel shows no inclination to take any lead in shaping Europe’s defense, or, for that matter, foreign policy. Therefore, say analysts, the United States, Britain and France will continue as they did during the Libya crisis, forging coalitions of the willing that will leave Europe and NATO weaker.

 

Slow Payers Hinder Trade in Europe

ZARAGOZA, SPAIN — In 2001, an agricultural co-op here was supplying truckloads of wheat to an Italian pasta maker. At first, no one at the Spanish co-op, Arento, was much alarmed when the pasta factory in Milan fell behind in its payments.

The co-op did not cut off the credit until the pasta company owed €1 million, or more than $1.4 million today, never realizing how hard it might be to collect a debt in another country in the European Union. But now, a decade later, having spent years in the courts and tens of thousands of euros on legal bills, Arento has recovered only half of what was owed.

“We came face to face with the Italian legal system,” said Luis Navarro Olivares, Arento’s director general. “The trips to Milan were Kafkaesque. Really, Italy is too far away on a cultural level, a legal level and an administrative level.”

In theory, the European Union is one gigantic economic zone of about 500 million consumers all integrated into the world’s biggest trading bloc. But the ideal is still far ahead of the reality, particularly for businesses that end up trying to collect debts across the Union’s many borders. There are still 27 different national legal systems at work in the bloc, each with its own procedures for handling claims, property attachment and bankruptcies.

European officials say at least €55 billion a year in debt is simply being written off, much of it because businesses find it too daunting to press expensive, confusing lawsuits in foreign countries.

Officials and business leaders say they believe that debt collection problems are a profound deterrent to commerce within the European Union and one of the reasons that job creation and wealth generation falls consistently behind the United States, where pursuing debts across state lines is a comparatively easy task.

With much of Europe still caught in an economic slump and several countries weighing down the bloc’s growth prospects because of huge sovereign debt problems of their own, E.U. officials are starting to circulate proposals for fixing this comparatively simple problem, in hopes of yielding a quick, cost-free stimulus to Europe’s financial health.

Debt collection is just one example of the shortcomings of a market which, for legal, linguistic and cultural issues, rarely functions as a single space. Professional qualifications in one country often are not recognized in another, for example, and local business regulations frequently make it hard for Europeans to set up shop in another E.U. country.

A more effective single market, the Union officials say, could generate €60 billion to €140 billion in additional trade — the equivalent of an additional 0.6 percent to 1.5 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product.

But individual E.U. countries still jealously guard the right to control many regulations covering business, and to operate independent civil and commercial legal systems.

Valle García de Novales, a lawyer here in Zaragoza who specializes in international commerce, tells her clients that any debt of less than €100,000 is not even worth pursuing in court.

“You let it go because it is just too costly,” she said.

What is worse, many companies have been so discouraged that they have given up on doing business across borders. Meanwhile, fewer than 10 percent of European consumers buy anything from a Web site outside their home country.

In an effort to improve the situation, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm in Brussels, is working on a series of proposals to improve the single market. They include 12 priority changes to help reinvigorate the single market, from an agreement to recognize one another’s educational qualifications to an E.U.-wide system for registering patents.

This year, it is expected to propose a standardized Europe-wide system to freeze the amount of money owed to a company in the debtor’s bank account. That would prevent it from being moved to another country — often as easy as a mouse click — while providing an incentive to settle the claim quickly.