Stufi

According to ANP:

The European Commission have brought the Netherlands to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg over discrimination with regard to student grants. According to Dutch law, students who want to qualify for student grants to study abroad, need to have been legally resident in the Netherlands for at least three of the previous six years. According to the European Commission, this residency requirement is in breach of EU rules about free movement of labour.

AHRC, ESRC, and friends – please take note. Thank you.

More politics (unstructured thoughts)

Three interesting Op/Ed pieces from the Dutch press:

Martin Sommer in De Volkskrant continues the Irish EU referendum theme. Kees Aerts in Trouw discusses the apparent demise of social-democracy in Europe. And Hans Goslinga, also in Trouw talks about difference between old and new people's parties, and why it's important to stick to politics rather than settle on a cross-party business cabinet.

Points that they (more or less) make that I agree with:

• As there is very little that can be done against whatever comes from Brussels, opposition politicians that run on an anti-Europe ticket are misleading the electorate. European integration is at a point where opting in or out of individual treaties and rules and regulations makes very little difference indeed. Empty words, then, all of it.


• One of the old values of social-democracy was cultural enlightenment. Aerts is right that this was probably a top-down process. The idea is levelling upwards, raising the level of the masses, rather than levelling downwards, lowering the level of the elite down to the gross common denominator. Of course you can ask whether this is actually true, seeing as even news and discussion programmes on tv have been turned into "infotainment".


• The masses see Europe as a case of "their rights versus our interests", and are no longer interested in the left-wing intellectual elite's messages about how cool international cooperation is. They feel threatened by globalisation, sometimes rightly so, and put more faith in messages about cultural conservatism, regardless of whether these messages come from traditionally right-wing or traditionally left-wing parties.


• It's probably better to keep talking rather than sidelining politics and give power to a cross-party cabinet of successful academics and businessmen. That idea is probably not even that bad in theory, but in practice, it won't be accepted by the masses who have lost their faith in people with a different outlook in life. Recall the PVV's hate speech against intellectuals with university degrees and designer glasses.

Final question: is this really a question of a change from politics of left versus right to politics of intellectuals versus non-intellectuals? Are they all that different? And should we care?

Politics

I was reading up on some of the issues around last week's referendum in Ireland about whether or not to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon. The quickest way to get to some relevant links of course is to look up the referendum on Wikipedia, which was made even easier by there being a link to the article on the Wikipedia front page. (Which for me functioned as a reminder that I was meaning to read some more about it.)

Two things.

I was amazed and slightly appalled that one of the people active in the "NO to Lisbon" campaign was Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. This is not an Irish party that is rallying for Irish independence from the UK – of course, they managed to kick out the Brits somewhere between 1916 and 1949, depending on how you define independence. No, it is a British party (in fact, mostly an English party) rallying for the European Union to stay out of British politics. But apparently it is alright for UKIP themselves to butt into Irish politics. I can understand that UKIP are evangelical about their "No to EU" message, fair enough, but if you want other countries to stay out of your politics, maybe you shouldn't get actively involved in another country's politics either.

The other thing is that the same Nigel Farage has said that the referendum was like a corrupt election in Zimbabwe or Afghanistan. Part of this is probably sour grapes, but it is a bit awkward to just disregard the outcome of the previous referendum (2008) and try again just because you didn't like the result. This reminds me of a talk at the Sociolinguistics Symposium in Amsterdam, where one of the keynote speakers pulled off exactly the same trick: the first set of experiments didn't show what we wanted it to show, so we re-did them, and then we liked the results better. Maybe the Irish should have waited with a new referendum – at least the two EU referenda in Norway were twenty years apart and there was enough change in both the electorate and the political situation in Europe to warrant trying again.

I also have thoughts about referenda, the provision and processing of relevant information, and the political landscape in general, but they are for some other time.