Europe

At the end of his New York Times column today, Nick Kristof offers a, frankly, adorable apology to the country of Slovenia.

In several columns, I've noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone -- worse than Slovenia! -- gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don't see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

So true! And, we noted in FP's office, Slovenia is a total Central European jewel: beautiful, prosperous, calm, safe, wealthy, and Mediterranean (tucked between Italy and Croatia, with access to the ocean and the Alps) -- plus, apparently, with universal health care to boot.

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Today, an Italian court convicted 23 U.S. citizens, 22 of them acknowledged as CIA agents, for the daylight abduction and "extraordinary rendition" of cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, better known as Abu Omar.

The CIA snatched Abu Omar off of a street in Milan in 2002, sending him to the U.S. base in Ramstein, Germany, and then to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.

Adam Serwer at the American Prospect asks: "This case has always puzzled me -- Italy is an ally. Why was extraordinary rendition necessary? Such methods are usually reserved for apprehending individuals in countries that are not friendly to the United States precisely because those countries won't cooperate."

It's a good question, with a somewhat queasy answer: the CIA did it, I presume, because it was the most efficient way to do it, and, at the time, the CIA operated in extralegal channels with impunity. (The case that always confused me most was that of Ahmed Agiza -- human-rights respecting U.S. ally Sweden actually participated in that one.)

And it seems the Italian court is ensuring the CIA knows there's no impunity now, even if the only real effect is that former Milan station chief Robert Lady needs to cancel his European vacations. 

Does Boris Johnson have a superhero alter-ego? Buffoonish mayor of London by day, cycling vigilante by night?

Environmentalist documentary maker Franny Armstrong would certainly argue that. Johnson swooped to her rescue yesterday, when she was pushed up against a car by a gang of girls -- she described them as "feral kids" -- wielding an iron pipe. Apparently he was cycling past and heard her cries for help. Reportedly calling the attackers "oiks," he gave a brief chase before returning to escort Armstrong home, in best super hero form.

So instead of asking watching political candidates debate, we should have them challenge each other to wrestling matches.

 Armstrong admitted she did not agree with Johnson's politics, and had voted for his rival Ken Livingstone in the mayoral elections. But she added: 'If you find yourself down a dark alleyway and in trouble, I think Boris would be of more use than Ken.'"

Perhaps mayors across the world are united in their lonely quest against crime. Newark Mayor Cory Booker chased a mugger outside of city hall in 2006, while a Bloomberg deputy tackled a BlackBerry thief earlier this year.

What kind of tights does our cycling hero Boris have on beneath the pinstripes, I wonder.

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Maybe it's just because we've been discussing upcoming Berlin Wall-related content here at the office, but I find Matt Welch's Reason cover essay, calling the 1989 defeat of communism in Europe, "the Unknown War" a little strange:

November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes in this issue as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s (see “?‘The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs,’?” page 42). There have been more Hollywood hagiographies of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in the last five years than there have been studio pictures in the last two decades about the revolutionary anti-communists who dramatically toppled totalitarians from Tallin to Prague (see Tim Cavanaugh’s “Hollywood Comrades,” page 62). And what little general-nonfiction interest there is in the superpower struggle, as Michael C. Moynihan details on page 48 (“The Cold War Never Ended”), remains stuck in the same Reagan vs. Gorby frame that made the 1980s so intellectually shallow the first time around.

Sure, it might be nice to see a Hollywood blockbuster or two about the Gdansk shipyard strike (unfortunately for producers, Lech Walesa wasn't quite as dashing as Che) but is there really a lack of end-of-cold-war awareness out there?

The "post-9/11 era" is only just starting to eclipse the "post-Cold War era" as foreign-affairs writing's most ubiquitous cliche. (If you're submitting to FP, please don't start your piece with either of them.) Indeed much of the contemporary debate over globalization takes 1989 as a starting point. 

It seems to me that the images of 1989 -- from Tiananmen to the fall of the wall -- are just as, if not more iconic today than anything from 1968, which seems to be Welch's nominee for history's most overrated year. The tsunami of Berlin Wall media content that's already starting to trickle out in advance of next week's anniversary should drive that point home. As should German Chancellor Angela Merkel's address to congress today in which she described how "the wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot limited my access to the free world" until 1989. How exactly is Welch proposing that we take this anniversary more seriously?

Welch's larger point is that "Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world" as more and more of the U.S. economy is nationalized. But while these trends might not be moving in the direction Welch likes, it seems odd to argue that the free-market vs. government-control dialectic is being "ignored" given the number of times Obama's economic policies have been decried as socialist in the last year. 

GERARD MALIE/AFP/Getty Images

The EU's long international nightmare seems to be over. Czech President Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty treaty, nearly two years after the ratification process began. Klaus finally agreed to sign after the Czech constitutional court finally ruled against a legal challenge to the treaty, but the legendary Euroskeptic also took the opportunity for a parting shot: 

"With the Lisbon Treaty taking effect, the Czech Republic will cease to be a sovereign state, despite the political opinion of the Constitutional Court," Klaus said. 

The treaty will likely come into effect on Dec. 1, after which attention will quickly turn to the race for EU president. 

Yesterday, Italian police arrested Pasquale Russo, the boss of the powerful Camorra mafia syndicate. Russo was arrested alongside his brother, Carmine, and on Saturday the police arrested a third member of the family, Salvatore Russo.

The Camorra's main business is in drug sales, primarily heroin and cocaine, and including everything from ecstasy to hashish. Local police say the business is worth half a million Euros a day; investigators say it's Europe's largest drug market. The Camorra is one of the four largest Italian mafias involved in protection rackets, which draw in about another 250 million Euros a day. Camorra associates have also been connected with crimes ranging from billion-dollar cigarette smuggling operations to illegal sewage dumping. And all of the Camorra's operations have been accompanied by violence; the mafia is allegedly responsible for more than 3600 murders, including an outdoor execution caught on closed-circuit cameras -- Italian prosecutors went so far as to publicly release the video to draw attention to the case.

Angelino Alfano, Italy's justice minister, has described the recent round of arrests as an "extremely hard blow" to the Camorra. But there's reason not to write the syndicate off just yet -- as the Camorra men have been arrested, equally-violent Godmothers have taken their places.  

Photo: GIULIO PISCITELLI/AFP/Getty Images

With the news that Iceland is planning to close shop in Iceland, my colleague Preeti Aroon reminds me that according to Thomas Friedman's "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention," the country is now vulnerable to attack from McDonalds-having nations. (There are a few it haven't exactly endeared itself to lately.) This could be a problem since, despite their viking heritage, Iceland has no standing army. 

They're the kind of citizens any cash-starved government would want: a group of wealthy Germans have launched a petition this week calling for higher taxes on wealthy Germans. The group claims that Germany could raise €100 billion if the richest people paid a five percent wealth tax for two years. 

Germany is not known as a low-tax country--tax revenues were 37% of GDP in 2007, in line with other EU countries, and above countries like South Korea (29%) and the United States (28%). The petitioners claim, though, that those who "made a fortune through inheritance, hard work, hard-working, successful entrepreneurship, or investment" should put their money into an economy that, while better off than some other EU counterparts, is still facing rising unemployment through next year.

But deficit hawks shouldn't start dreaming of a shift in worldwide tax perceptions: the petition has fewer than fifty signatures, and, after their most recent rally, one signatory told the AFP that it was "really strange that so few people came."