This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics.

President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary.

On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people.

Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 - so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology.

Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now.

Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there - all as part of his UN Ambassadorship.

Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians - and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria.

So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War?

He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated - something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on.

———

***

Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals.

By BILL KELLER
Published in The New York Times August 16, 2008

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

Related
Map
Russia Marches, Neighbors Check Their Cards (The New York Times, August 17, 2008)
Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China (The New York Tines, August 14, 2008)

Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism  www.ft.com August 12, 2008)

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.

In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment.

Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.

But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor.

This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.

The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises.

History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.

***

——————

The New Age of Authoritarianism.
By Chrystia Freeland
Published: August 12 2008 in The Financial Times.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.

It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.”

Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal - and possibly eternal - ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet - which was really the Russian - suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.

That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.

Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s.

For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment - China - is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.”

But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view - and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do.

In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”.

The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all.

But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength - and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society - an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”.

Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad - as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000.

Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.

 chrystia.freeland at ft.com

Georgia and the Ukraine made moves to get closer to the West - they applied to become members of NATO. Georgia also worked with Western Europe in order to help the EU with access to Azerbaijan and Central Asia petroleum and gas. Russia clearly did not regard this bypassing of its traditional authority over what it considers as its brood. At the UN they still are bunched as former CIS and other Eastern bloc friends. Georgia had to be punished and Ukraine had to be thought that its future may be of the same sort.

Now, did the Georgians think that the US will be more then a paper tiger? Lots of promise, social help - but militarily? Then - it really is not direct US interests, but rather EU interests. So, why would Russia not say to itself that showing the EU that the US is a paper tiger - nu - that is something that can also help loosen further the EU-US ties.

Will the US react by telling the Russians that their economy does not justify their being members of the G8? That would be a reasonable game-play, but who will pick this up in the US Presidential contests?

Aha! so here we go. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw honesty. Perhaps he was right of sorts and Putin has now provided a pay-back. Russia’s moves strengthen McCain in his competition with Obama.

Was this move intended to help the Republican’s in the Presidential competition, and a sign of an oil-hungry party in charge, that barks but does not bite, rather then a new force that would make the world less dependent on oil - and oil these days is indeed the only thing going for the present version of a degraded Russia. The future is bleak for Russia in a world that will be dominated by China and India with the billion-plus people, and their booming internal economies that by now whistle at Russia as there is very little except brute nuclear power that this country has to offer them. Oil - yes - but the oil to China and India will arrive by ship rather then by pipe - and if it is a pipe - that pipe will come from Central Asia and not Russia.

Do we think that National borders are holly? No! But then South Ossetia belongs together with North Ossetia to one Free Ossetia State - and that is clearly not what Russia wants. They did not let go of Chechnia either. So the question here is whose ox is being gored - and the ox will suffer just the same under this or another regime. The South Ossetians of Georgia had at least a chance at a new and better life. By playing the Russian cards they blew it and that is why the civilized world is on Georgia’s side. If this sort of game digs deep into the Ukraine, our best advise to the Ukraine government is to take the Czech example of friendly divorce, and let go of those eastern territories that want some more Russian punishment. Ukraine will then soon find out that they are better thereof - and the Russian Ukrainians will just be set back and have to start their lives anew.

Statement of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute
August 11, 2008

As you may know, over the weekend, anti-Semitic graffiti was painted on the Lithuanian Jewish Community building at Pylimo 4. The Vilnius Yiddish Institute condemns this vandalism, and expresses it solidarity with Lithuanian Jewish Community’s leadership, staff and members. We urge Lithuania’s Police do their utmost to quickly identify and bring to justice the hateful people who committed this crime.

The Vilnius Yiddish Institute appreciates the strong statements of condemnation from President Adamkus and Prime Minister Kirkilas and urges them to take the steps needed to put an end to anti-Semitic expressions that are injuring democracy in Lithuania and harming Lithuania’s reputation internationally.

Here are the statements from the President and the Prime Minister:

President Valdas Adamkus on Monday, August 11, 2008 stated: “Contempt targeted at the nation which has suffered from genocide is not casual hooliganism. It is a destructive and sordid act against Lithuania as a whole, not only Lithuania’s Jewish community. I underline that there is no, and will never be, room for hatred and instigation of discord in Lithuanian society. I have no doubt the organisers and perpetrators of the act will be identified and punished.

At the time when the traditions of tolerance and respect for human rights are being consolidated in Lithuania and when Lithuania is helping other states to consolidate freedom and democratic values, I consider such dis-reputation of our country a harsh provocation against Lithuania.

I call on all people of Lithuania to be intolerant to the instigation of hatred whatever form it may take. It is only through our joint efforts and strong condemnation of instigation of intolerance that we can create a safe, open and European-like Lithuania of the twenty-first century.”

Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas on Monday, August 11, 2008 stated:

“The Lithuanian Citizens of the Jewish descent had contributed a lot to the making our Homeland famous. The tragedy of the war time Holocaust has to remind everybody how disastrous is policy of racial and ethnic hatred. The so called „patriots“ making antisemitic graffiti on the walls and writing in the internet comments with racist phraseology actually hate Lithuania and make harm to her.”

Poland keen to block EU’s CO2 auction scheme.
PHILIPPA RUNNER, for EUobserver, August 7, 2008

Poland is seeking allies to stop the EU launch of “full auctioning” of CO2 credits from 2013, amid fears the union’s push to cut overall emissions by 2020 could damage new EU states’ economies and undermine energy security.

“We are trying to find allies for our position, especially among new member states. It’s possible to form a blocking minority and we are working on this,” senior Polish government aide Michal Boni told Polish press agency PAP on Wednesday (6 August).

Warsaw: fears to see its energy firms outbid by richer western rivals (Photo: EUobserver.com)

Under the EU’s current Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) - in which high-polluting companies buy CO2 emission credits from lower-polluting firms to fall in with national carbon output quotas - 90 percent of credits are given out free.

A European Commission climate change package, unveiled in January, proposes that from 2013 companies will have to buy credits in international auctions, with some sectors, such as power generation to buy 100 percent.

The package - which aims to reduce total EU industrial emissions by 21 percent by 2020 - also proposes that Brussels will cut the overall number of emissions credits available in the EU by 1.74 percent annually after 2012.

But Poland, which produces 96 percent of its energy from high-polluting coal plants, fears the auction system will see its energy firms outbid by richer western rivals and will spike energy costs, hampering investment in new technologies.

“The negotiations are ongoing…We can’t allow a situation in which we are forced to limit CO2 emissions, without being able to invest in our own energy security.”

***

UN link-up

On Wednesday, the commission also announced plans to dovetail the ETS system with the Clean Development Mechanism - a parallel CO2 reduction scheme run by the UN under the Kyoto protocol - by December.

The move will allow EU companies to get CO2 credits if they invest in climate change projects, such as tree planting or replacing “dirty” technology with newer alternatives, in developing countries.

“Linking up with the UN’s carbon credit registry will further strengthen Europe’s leading role in the global carbon market,” environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said, AFP reports.

Japan - Emissions deal reached with Ukraine.
Bloomberg, Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Japan has agreed to buy greenhouse-gas emission allowances from Ukraine to reach a target set under the Kyoto Protocol. Details of the contract, including volumes and prices, will be determined through negotiations, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a statement late Monday. Japan is now holding talks with the Czech Republic and Poland to make similar contracts, it said.

Ukraine is likely to release less greenhouse gas than permitted by the Kyoto accord. Under the terms of the treaty, it can sell the difference to polluters who exceed their ceiling. Japan has increased the amount it will spend on buying allowances for the year ending next March to ¥31 billion ($292 million), compared with ¥18.4 billion in the past two years, according to METI.

The contract with Ukraine follows a similar agreement Japan signed in November.

Japan has pledged to cut emissions of gases blamed for global warming by 6 percent from the 1990 level by the end of 2012. Emissions rose 6.2 percent in the year that ended in March 2007 from the 1990 level.

Ukraine’s total emissions of greenhouse gases in the five years through 2012 are forecast to be 2 billion tons fewer than its ceiling, according to the statement.

Pushed overseas?
Nippon Steel Corp. said it may be forced to increase production overseas should it be disadvantaged under new international climate change rules now being discussed.

Japan’s biggest steelmaker may have “no choice but to shift to Brazil and other countries to expand output,” Nippon Steel Executive Vice President Hideaki Sekizawa said after China, India and 14 other nations at last week’s Group of Eight summit in Toyako, Hokkaido, considered long-term emission cuts.

The summit was held amid efforts to unite industrialized and developing nations on a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming after it runs out in 2012.

—–

The term “hot air” was framed at Kyoto by those realizing that the collapse of old inefficient industries will lead to drastic reductions in the GHG emissions from former Eastern Bloc countries.

At Kyoto, in 1997, environmentalists contended that this sort of shrinking in GHG emissions should not be part of CDM or any form of Kyoto Mechanisms. The Principle of Additionality was established in order to eliminate this sort of deals.

July 3, 2008. Liberal leader expresses dismay at socialist populism over Lisbon Treaty.

On the margins of an ALDE Group meeting in Tallinn yesterday, European Liberal Democrat Leader, Graham Watson, met Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to discuss the future of the Lisbon Treaty in light of the Irish referendum and recent unhelpful remarks by European socialists (notably PASOK President George A. Papandreou and Austrian Chancellor Gusenbauer) demanding referendums on changes to the Treaty.

“Recent moves by Socialist leaders to make all EU treaty changes dependent on national referenda is at best irresponsible and at worst - an ill-conceived bow to populist pressure. Pawning the solution to the treaty stalemate is a bid to court eurosceptic voters which makes us all hostages to fortune” said Watson after the meeting. “The Irish rejected the Treaty, so it is right that their Government be invited to come back with an alternative solution to the dilemma we now face. Their task will not be assisted by such unilateral declarations.”

Watson went on to praise Estonia’s constructive role in Europe and the country’s Liberal economic model combining a flexible labour market and strict fiscal policies.

We saw His “Replika” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1976, and himself, and excerpts from his work on Dante, at La Mama that year. When we visited years later Warshaw, we made it as an important part of that visit to see his Teatr Studio, in that Stalinist Wedding-Cake of a building in the “Palace of Culture.”

Also, reading his obituary, we understand a little better his background. He was born in Rzeszow, a place we visited to see the ruins of what was once a tremendous Rabbinic Court. Though not Jewish, Szaina, with a name that might have shown Jewish influence, knew because of his youth experiences about the terrible loss, not only to Jewry, but to Poland itself. After the war he studied theater in Krakow - the main city of what was once Western Galizzia. A place full of memories from what was once a flourishing Jewish culture center. Though Nazis destroyed the Synagogues and killed the people, they did not touch the tomb of the Remuh - Rabbi Moshe Iserless - that survived thus, and is still to be seen with the 400 year old tree that sprouted from under the tombstone. Even the Catholics in town regard the place as holly - so no-one, not even the Nazis, dared to destroy that part of the cemetery that was the center of the Jewish part of town.

Five Catholic Priests, Professors at the Jagelonian University, established a Hebraic studies department in this city that had no Jews left. It was for the locals to study Hebrew in order to try to revive some of the past glory. When I visited there for a three week stay with a group of students from NYU, one of the professors gave me a new book that was a compilation of the archives of the old Krakow headquarter of the local Bnei Brith organization. I delivered the material to the Washington DC headquarters. It is these Professors that helped create a row of Jewish style restaurant in that Kazimiresz part of town - on the Street where there are the remains of the Remuh. The local Poles played there Jewish Klezmer music. I was one evening astonished seeing Elie Wiesel “Kibitzing” a game of chess in one of these restaurants - the one called Ariel.

The theater revival had also to do with an attempt at revival of the Jewish culture. Krakow has thus what was seen as a strong innovative streak of theater. Very dark in its content but quite lively and spirited in the way it is staged. It was this sort of theater, some based in Krakow and some in Warshaw, that brought into existence the modern theater of the seventies. Grotowski, Kantor, Sjaina were very different pillars of this phenomenon.

The obituary also mentions the town of Nowa Hutta, and Sjaina’s Teatr Ludowy. We were there, and what was even more interesting, at a festival in Krakow, I remember a performing visit from that place. Another theater was Crikot.

So, please read the obituary, and be inspired that from all that darkness sprouted unbelievable art. This was the pain that had to find an outlet - and if you like it or not - that was real theater and real self sacrificing performance.
People like Ellen Stewart and Richard Schechner can still testify to the spirit of these people that were active in the 60s and 70s, and left their influence on the modern stage. As it is extremely well described in the obituary - theater is not about words but about acting. Szaina knew to bring out that pain with nearly no words altogether - and he communicated that pain directly to our hearts. Surely, later on others wrote and staged pieces with more wording, but the Grotowsky method has become part of theater education. In our review of the “Persians” at Sienna college in Albany, New York, I was aware that Dr. Mahmood Karimi Hakak, an Iranian, had studied with Richard Schechner, and thus introduced some of the elements of stage design that originated with this sort of theater.

Further, as the UN deals now with the question of what is Genocide, and we just had an event at the UN on the topic on June 26th, with the UnderSecretary-General Kiyotaka Akasaka making the opening introduction, it should indeed be considered as educational imperative the viewing of the filmed performance of Szajna’s Replika, as he suggested himself.

Budapest to house EU Techonology Institute - the Europe’s answer to MIT.
RENATA GOLDIROVA, June 19, 2008 EUobserver/Brusells.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Hungary’s capital, Budapest, has been selected to house the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), the union’s flagship project to boost innovation, research and higher education.

On Wednesday (18 June), ministers in charge of competitiveness met in Brussels to put an end to the wrangling over the institute’s seat. Last month, they failed to agree due to a Polish veto on the matter.

Slovene education minister Mojca Kucler - who was responsible for steering the dossier through the European Council, which represents EU states - praised “efforts invested by member states for the common good of the EU” and described the institute as “a special milestone in the European research policy”.

The European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has also welcomed the ministerial deal, saying that the EIT will add to Europe’s capacity to bridge the innovation gap with its major competitors, the US and Japan.

In 2006, the 27-nation EU invested 1.85 percent of GDP into research and development, far from its 2010 goal of three percent. By contrast, the US spends around 2.7 percent.

According to EU education commissioner Jan Figel, the work of the institute would be organised through so-called knowledge and innovation communities - partnerships of universities, research organisations and companies.

The commission believes that such networks could help transform education and research and attract bright young brains from within and beyond Europe.

“It is not going to be one dot on the map,” Mr Figel told EUobserver, referring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which inspired the EIT concept. “We offer co-operation so the EU becomes more innovative,” he said.

Budapest was the only applicant able to meet the two criteria set by ministers - that the winner should be a “new” member state and not already be home to an EU agency.

But regarding the latter point, EU diplomats feared Poland’s behaviour at the negotiation table.

The country, also bidding for seat, had previously threatened not to withdraw its own application, unless it won some level of participation. It wanted, for example, the new institute’s governing board to meet in the Polish city of Wroclaw, one diplomat told EUobserver.

Besides Budapest and Wroclaw, three other applicants were keen to host the administrative headquarters of the institute - Germany’s Jena, Spain’s Sant Cugat del Valles, while Slovak capital Bratislava joined forces with Vienna in launching a cross-border bid.

The Budapest-based institute will operate with a total budget of €2.37 billion from 2008-2013, with €308.7 million of that coming from EU coffers. The rest of the monies are supposed to come from public and private partners as well as from the new institute’s own activities.

————–

We hope that, for the sake of coherence, the Budapest headquarters of EIT will find ways to cooperate with the Bratislava-Vienna group also. The Wroclaw push seemed out of place and was rather a clear effort at grand-standing.
We realize that  the City of Wroclaw is involved in such issues as the organisation of a European Citizens’ Forum (over two days) entitled: Towards a Europe of solidarity, but we insist that an EIT will have to deal with such technical issues as the development of technologies in view of changes that will have to happen because of global warming/climate change.  The institute will need laboratories and not just talk-estivals. Poland seems to have misread this intent.