The Balkan Chronicle

Eurozone countries will have to give up on normal democracy and the European Central Bank (ECB) will have to print money if the euro is to survive, Turkey’s ambassador to the EU has said on the eve of the EU summit.

Noting that EU leaders are going in “the right direction” by proposing central control over national budgets in return for help from the ECB, Selim Kuneralp told EUobserver in an interview on Wednesday (7 December) that traditional democratic structures have no future in post-crisis Europe.

As the world nervously watches whether European leaders can save the EU from breakup, another drama brews on the sidelines: the membership struggles of nations trying to break in.

On Friday, the day of a crucial EU summit on solving the continent's debt crisis, representatives of Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro will also be in Brussels pushing their bids to enter what increasingly looks like a crumbling house.

The irony is not lost on the Croatians, the closest to achieving their EU dreams.

Croatia is poised to become the European Union's 28th member in July 2013 after the ex-Yugoslav state signed an accession treaty on Friday.   

EU politicians hope Croatia's membership, a reward for deep democratic and economic reforms, will persuade other countries in the Balkans that reforms pay off and accelerate democratic transition in a region torn by ethnic wars in the 1990s.     

Later, European leaders are expected to delay a decision on granting Serbia the status of EU membership candidate, because of concerns over Belgrade's failure to mend relations with its former province Kosovo.    

"The achievement of Croatia proves to all in the region that through hard work, persistence, political courage and determination, EU membership is within reach," European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said at a signing ceremony on the sidelines of a summit of EU heads of state.     

The announced ''freeze'' on Turkey's relations with the EU will start already at the beginning of the coming year, and not only in the second half of it, due to the fact that Cyprus will soon be taking on the EU's rotating presidency. This was underscored in a Turkish daily after the position was announced yesterday by a high-level deputy in Ankara.

The newspaper, Turkiya, also underscored that the boycott of the EU Council would last 18 months, since it was linked to the presence of Cyprus in the ''troikas'', meetings chaired by the State currently holding the EU presidency but flanked by the countries holding the presidency in the previous and successive 6-month periods.

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. The private banks want to avoid any losses either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB’s charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.

Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds.

When Bilderberg Man Mario Monti promoted himself to regent of Italy almost three weeks ago, the air was thick with Valkyries warning that should the great witch doctor fail to square the books pretty damn quick, then not only would Italy go down the chute but she would take with her the euro and the entire apparatus of the European Union.

It was nonsense then and remains so today. There is no Euro crisis, the end of the world as we know it is not imminent – unless Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy pull off their sinister scheme for full European fiscal union on the back of what is nothing more than an entirely contrived and artificial crisis.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is currently in Germany on a five-day visit, has criticized German Federal Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich for using the term "Islamist terrorists" during a meeting on Friday evening, when the German minister said his government is fighting against every kind of terrorist, including racists and Islamist terrorists.

Davutoğlu interrupted the minister's speech when he mentioned "Islamist terrorists," and said: "One minute, I have never used the term 'Christian terrorist' even though the neo-Nazi killers [who are accused of killing eight Turks and one Greek] are Christians. You can't say 'Islamist terrorist.' Have we been using 'German racists,' following the incidents [murders of immigrants]?" and added that he can define the murders as racist killings and acts by a neo-Nazi organization, but does not call the killers Christian terrorists.

Moscow is unable to approve thousands of Kosovo Serbs' applications for Russian citizenship, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday.

Over 50,000 Kosovo Serbs have applied for Russian citizenship, Serbia's B92 television reported citing Zlatibor Djordjevic, a spokesman for the Old Serbia movement hoping that someone else will solve problems created by the Serbian state. But now hopes for 'brotherly help' are turned off, except in the form of humanitarian aid and diplomatic backing.

Following the downgrading of Belgium's credit rating, the British Foreign Office is advising its embassies to prepare contingency plans for the possibility of the collapse of the euro.

You would expect the British Foreign Office mandarins to be prepared for every eventuality - but here's a doomsday scenario which might just happen.

British embassies are now taking active steps to prepare for the possibility of the euro collapsing - something that's no longer as inconceivable as it once was.

The Foreign Office is preparing contingency plans to help expats from the Costa del Sol and the Algarve who could be stranded without cash - or caught up in riots and civil unrest.

Turkey's former ambassador to the EU, Volkan Bozkir, has described it as a spent force in world affairs amid general acceptance EU-Turkey accession talks are going nowhere.

Bozkir told delegates at a business congress in Istanbul on Friday (18 November): "The EU dream has come to an end for the world. There is a paradigm shift. The EU is no longer the same Union that provided comfort, prosperity and wealth to its citizens as in the past. It no longer generates visionary ideas such as Schengen [the EU's passport free zone], or the Common Agricultural Policy."

"Greece, Portugal, Spain - the EU has a hard time supporting these countries in the economic crisis. It is not able any more to help its members recover from a crisis."

Bozkir, who was Turkey's ambassador to the EU between 2005 and 2009 and is now chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Turkish parliament, blamed the situation on the EU architecture - fiscal union between unequal economies and consensus-based decision making.

Why does the public expression of Islam pose a problem -- not just in France, but all over Europe?

Yesterday, it was the construction of minarets in Switzerland; the day before, it was the headscarf. Today, it is the demand for halal (permissible according to Islamic law) meat in canteens and banned street prayers that have fuelled a sense of exclusion and led to tensions within French society.

It's in this context that a new report on Islam in the Arab-majority French suburbs was published in October. Titled "Suburbs of the Republic," this report by Gilles Kepel, a French political analyst specializing in Islam and the contemporary Arab world, comes a few months before the French presidential election, and confronts both politicians and Muslims with reciprocal responsibilities.

"Suburbs of the Republic," which addresses some of the issues regarding Muslim integration in France since the 1980s, notes that there has been a strengthening of religious feeling in poorer districts. This increased religiosity in the suburbs is partly due to insensitivity and negligence on the part of political and public authorities. Because of the isolating social housing policy upheld by both leftist and rightist governments for decades, for example, Muslims immigrants have often had to live in homogenous communities, rather than in diverse ones.

Turkey's growing influence in the Western Balkans has been pointed as a wake-up call for Brussels in an international conference in Europe's newest nation Kosovo to take a lead in its what they called "backyard" despite candidate country's tireless attempts in the past few years to cultivate peaceful relations among Balkan nations and staunch support Turkey lent for their integration into Euro-Atlantic structures.

Some participants of the conference, jointly organized by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and Kosovo's Foreign Ministry, encouraged a greater role for the European Union in the region, warning the bloc that it may be losing the Balkans as the influence of other countries such as Turkey, China and Russia grows.

Speaking at the conference, titled "South East Europe in a Multipolar Era," Kosovo's President Atifete Jahjaga and Prime Minister Hashim Thaci presented their goals as Kosovo's integration into European and Atlantic institutions.

"Never did a ship founder with a captain and a crew more ignorant of the reasons for its misfortune or more impotent to do anything about it." This was Eric Hobsbawm's damning judgment of the policy elite's response to the Great Depression. As these leaders reached for the old truisms of balancing budgets, lowering tariffs, and restoring the gold standard, they merely worsened the crisis. The same judgment may soon be passed on Germany for its role in the ongoing European sovereign debt saga.

After watching the economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal founder, the world has now turned its attention to Italy, home to the world's eighth-largest national economy and third-largest sovereign bond market. The diagnosis is sadly redolent: Europe should deflate its way to growth by sticking with a gold standard of sorts: the hard-money German-dominated euro. Meanwhile, under enormous international pressure, the Greeks replaced socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou with Lucas Papademos, a former official of the European Central Bank, and the Italians placed economist and former European Commissioner Mario Monti, hailed "super Mario," in the stead of Silvio Berlusconi. Yet despite the EU's coup d'état, the yield on ten year Italian debt went back above seven percent within twenty-four hours of Monti showing up for work.

The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.

This is the most remarkable thing of all: a giant leap forward for, or perhaps even the successful culmination of, the Goldman Sachs Project.

It is not just Mr Monti. The European Central Bank, another crucial player in the sovereign debt drama, is under ex-Goldman management, and the investment bank's alumni hold sway in the corridors of power in almost every European nation, as they have done in the US throughout the financial crisis. Until Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund's European division was also run by a Goldman man, Antonio Borges, who just resigned for personal reasons.

The world is being driven towards the "unthinkable scenario of untreatable infections", experts are warning, because of the growth of superbugs resistant to all antibiotics and the dwindling interest in developing new drugs to combat them.

Reports are increasing across Europe of patients with infections that are nearly impossible to treat. The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) said yesterday that in some countries up to 50 per cent of cases of blood poisoning caused by one bug – K. pneumoniae, a common cause of urinary and respiratory conditions – were resistant to carbapenems, the most powerful class of antibiotics.

German police have widened their investigation into the bloody activities of a neo-Nazi gang thought to responsible for 10 murders to include a string of unsolved crimes against immigrants and ethnic minorities.

Investigators have returned to the case of a 2004 nail-bomb attack on a Turkish neighbourhood in Cologne that left 22 people injured after a finding a DVD showing the bomb before it exploded in the possessions of the neo-Nazi gang.

An official from European Union Commission has said the European Union will prepare a roadmap to completely abolish visa requirements for Turkish nationals, a first positive signal from the 27-member club to revive Turkish-EU ties in the face of stalled membership talks of the candidate country.

EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malsmtröm said in a meeting in Strasbourg on Wednesday that before lifting visa requirements for Turkish citizens, the EU will enfore a new program on visa facilitation.

Police investigating a trio of neo-Nazis suspected of murdering a policewoman and committing a bank robbery have turned up a spectacular piece of evidence. They have found the weapon used in one of Germany's more mysterious murder series, the so-called "doner killings."

Police may be a step closer to solving one of the most mysterious murder series in German criminal history after a potentially crucial clue turned up in an investigation into another high-profile crime.

The murder series involved execution-style killings of nine shop owners, eight of them of Turkish descent and one Greek, in cities across Germany between 2000 and 2006. The press dubbed the murders the "doner killings" because the victims were all small businessmen and included two kebab shop owners, a grocer, a tailor, a flower seller and a key cutter. The only link that police found between the murders was the weapon used -- a Czech-made Ceska 83 pistol with a 7.65 millimeter caliber.

We have been witnessing a remarkable display of the best and worst of the eurozone, the group of nations that share the euro as their currency. The awkwardness that comes from sometimes being 17 individual countries, and sometimes one large one, is really showing.

The world was whipsawed when European leaders announced a summit to create comprehensive solutions to the Euro Crisis -- then had to announce a second summit a few days later when it became clear there would be too little agreement at the first one.

Next, it looked like an accord might not be reached even then, only to be followed, in the best tradition of the theater, by a 4 a.m. agreement. Financial markets shot up the next day, hesitated the following day, and fell sharply on the subsequent business day.

A surprise decision by Prime Minister George Papandreou to put a European Union debt deal for Greece to a referendum created shock and dismay among EU leaders Tuesday, though some -- chiefly French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- sought to limit the fallout of the move.

In a statement, Sarkozy said the referendum announcement had "surprised all of Europe."

"The plan adopted last Thursday, unanimously by the 17 members of the eurozone, is the only means possible to resolve Greece's debt problems," he said. "Giving the people a voice is always legitimate, but the solidarity of all the eurozone countries cannot work unless every country agrees to make the necessary sacrifices."