For Jean-Pierre Denis, the mini-treaty does not simplify relations within the EU: "The Union is in the grip of a terrible stranglehold, seized by an evermore irresolvable contradiction: constrained by the public to offer surface simplifications, it can only apply them through complication and fussy, sometimes downright twisted legal quarrying. But the after effect of well-meaning and obscure technical-political measures is always a tendency towards scepticism. This perverse spiral is working more than ever. In its form as much as in its contents, the simplified treaty will be terribly complicated, much more incomprehensible even than the Constitution project." (11/10/2007)

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Political analysts Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Simone Bunse find the new treaty's propositions for EU presidency confusing: "The new arrangement hardly brings the EU closer to its citizens. The rotating council presidency at the level of the ministers will now either be invisible except by bureaucrats, or on the contrary, national presidencies will continue to be proclaimed in order to boosts governments' prestige and agendas. So we will have: the EU council president, the rotating council presidency, the high representative for foreign policy as the vice-president of the commission (itself with its president), alongside of course the European parliament's president. It is by no means clear who will represent the EU under this new arrangement. Maybe this is par for the course in a multi-centred union, but it would be nice if such multi-centredness could be expressed more clearly." (10/10/2007)

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"The French head of state is casting himself in the role of 'trouble shooter', as he did at the last EU summit, and trying to break down the institutional blockade which has gone on for years in the EU," Stefan Brändle writes on Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to mediate between Lech Kaczynski and the EU. "French diplomacy could be tempted to adopt a halfway position between London - which like Warsaw has refused to sign the fundamental and civil rights charter - and Berlin. Paris is fond of the idea of maintaining the German-French axis, but has also recently increased its efforts to collect points in Eastern Europe and Poland." (11/10/2007)

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According to a recent Gallup poll, more than 50 percent of Danes want a referendum on the new EU treaty. The newspaper doesn't think this is a good idea. "Referendums can be an important and necessary element in a lively democracy. ... But it doesn't make sense to hold a referendum on a treaty aimed at increasing the EU's possibilities for making sound decisions for the benefit of Europe's citizens. It will be difficult to win support among citizens for a referendum on a primarily technical document. The referendum would be more about other things - about the pros and cons of certain areas of EU cooperation, about upcoming accessions or about the fact that the EU is perceived as being too obscure." (11/10/2007)

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Interviewed by Michel Abescat, the French writer Daniel Pennac expresses his concern as commercial advertising catches up with childhood. "Day after day, children's desires to consume are stimulated in the same fields as adults': clothing, food, transport, electronics, phones... Thus the child acquires a commercial legitimacy and is turned into an indispensable cog in society's market on an equal footing with adults. Children access property without exchange, with their parents' money, or by 'muddling through'. The system doesn't care so long as money is circulating. Thus children who show up at school today are little proprietors, animated by desires they are used to having swiftly satisfied. From now on in our culture the purchase of a desired object has become, for parents, the principal means of showing their affection. (10/10/2007)

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Turkish writer Elif Shafak will discuss literature in Europe with her Catalan colleague Baltasar Porcel at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Sunday. Next year Turkey will be the fair's Guest of Honour. In an interview with Kai Strittmatter she talks about the complexity of her home country: "Of course it's unfortunate that authors and journalists are put on trial in Turkey and that my book was brought to trial, but Turkey is more than that. Turkey is a country with a tremendous diversity in voices. Our literature scene alone is bubbling with energy. But there are so many clichés about Turkey. Sometimes I get the feeling we're not exotic enough to be interesting; not important enough to be part of your literature. We still live in a one-way world: new publications in French, English and German are published very quickly here. But what about the other way round? Very little. We read much more of your literature than you read of ours." (11/10/2007)

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"The legal reinforcement of the Beneš decrees [in Slovakia] cannot go without comment," Hungarian historian Tamás Stark asserts in an interview with János Dobszay on the current dispute between Hungary and Slovakia: "But Hungary must recognise that it is dealing with a young state that has only recently discovered its national identity. The Slovaks' attitude conceals the fear that the expansion of the Schengen border will blur the border between Hungary and Slovakia, and thus initiate the 'historical reconciliation' and reunification of the Hungarian nation. Although the borders won't de facto disappear, the mere thought makes Slovaks shudder. For this reason I don't believe we'll witness a reconciliation in the near future. We must wait until the tumultuous emotions that accompany the early stages of the formation of a nation have been worked off. We must be very sympathetic towards Slovakia." (11/10/2007)

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While political relations between Slovakia and Hungary remain strained owing to their difficult common past, Marius Kopcsay notes that there are many commonalities in the lives of the people of the two nations: "Despite the political quarrels, Slovaks still buy houses in Hungary because they're cheap there. Thousands of Slovaks travel to work in Hungary and thousands of Hungarians spend their holidays in Slovakia. There is also a large amount of trade between the two countries. Practical everyday life is more important than political gestures, and ties to the present are stronger than ties to the past, which we can no longer change anyway." (11/10/2007)

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All three Baltic states are experiencing labour shortages as a result of heavy emigration and booming economies. Lithuania has now launched a publicity campaign aimed at encouraging emigrants to return. "Lithuania's growth rates are just as high as Estonia's," the paper comments, "and the labour shortages there are having such a strong impact that political leaders are finally translating words into action and appealing to the hundreds of thousands of people who have left the country in search of work abroad. The information centres now being set up in Western Europe are probably not exactly what Lithuanians living abroad need, but at least the initiative shows that the government hasn't forgotten its citizens. However it's more important to focus on improving living standards and working conditions within the country." (11/10/2007)

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"[The massive yes vote] in the referendum organised by the main Italian unions on the 'Welfare protocol' around the pension reforms, concluded last July [between the Prodi government and the unions] say a lot about the country's aspirations", considers the editorialist Massimo Giannini. "A timidly reformist signal appears to be emerging. Italians are calling for practical solutions, not ideological quarrels. ... . The result reflects the fracture running through today's work world. [On one side] the minority (around 20 %) are against the agreement : traditional workers in the big steel factories of the North, men in their fifties heavily marked by politics. And, on the opposite side the enormous majority (around 80 %) of the 'others' : employees in small and medium companies in their 30s and 40s with less political backgrounds and who are more preoccupied by salaries than social questions." (11/10/2007)

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"On Tuesday, October 8th, Santander, the Spanish bank associated with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Fortis, won the battle for control of the top Dutch bank, ABN-Amro with a record takeover bid of 71 million euros", notes the Spanish daily. "For the first time a cross-border project like the ABN and Barclays one has been blocked by a hostile public bid presented by an international banking consortium. ... It must be stressed, however, that the triumph of the consortium was made possible by political authorities and the Dutch central Bank, who respected market rules rather than succumbing to nationalist temptation - so widespread in Europe - to defend their country's number one bank. ... The Dutch example, beyond the sacrifice it implies, is the key to building a stronger Europe." (10/10/2007)

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Along with physicist Peter Grünberg, another German scientist has joined the ranks of this year's Nobel Prize winners: the chemist Gerhard Ertl. However Christian Füller sees no reason to chalk this up as a triumph for Germany's education policy: "The elderly researchers who have now received the Nobel Prize made their discoveries 20 or 30 years ago. The findings made by Ertl and Grünberg have nothing to do with current education policy or even research policy. ... Isn't it more likely that the Nobel jury has discovered the last living skilled workers in Germany? Would anyone dispute the fact that the country lacks hundreds of thousands of engineers and highly qualified workers for the development of things like environmentally friendly engines and for exploiting the advantages of genetic engineering in a responsible way? ... Sorry, but two Nobel Laureates can't make up for the lack of education reforms and research incentives for today and tomorrow." (11/10/2007)

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"Daniel Propper is a classical pianist. On Friday12th, Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th [of October] he will be playing in the ruins of the Poste de Tour &Taxis, surrounded by taggers. These aerosol and felt marker artists will be creating a new American dream to the soft sound of Jeremy Bentam's music. The performance will add colour to the Sound & Music Festival, the foremost big music event organised in Belgium", exclaims the daily. "We wanted an exceptional place to create an unprecedented of urban art and music, explains Jeremy Bentam. We dreamt of New York and Barcelona, but finally the project has been organised in Brussels. The Sound & Music Festival organisers immediately applauded the idea." (11/10/2007)

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All available articles from » Daniel Couvreur

Antonio Astorga is amused by the passion provoked by France's rugby player Frederic Michalak, who has become a gay icon on the Web. "Last Saturday [in the France-New-Zealand match won by the Bleus], He arrived on the pitch on the 67th minute and by the 69th he was tackled to the ground by the All Blacks who above all remembered seeing his bare chest in the 'Stadium Gods' calendar and in the cosmetic advertising campaign for 'Biotherm Homme'. ... For the French, Michalak is THE sex bomb. He has launched the fashion of 'sporno': eroticism in sport; the athlete as new sex symbol. ... Rugby players, all too long wrongly associated with brutes who barge into one anther in scrums, and wrestle in mud, have now been raised to the status of 'erotic myths', who, after a battle of lines, rucks and mauls pamper their skin." (11/10/2007)

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Alexander Andreev paints a dark picture of the Bulgarian capital Sofia. "Everyone knows that the city is overcrowded, dirty, paralysed by traffic jams and unbridled construction. Everyone knows the reasons too: on the one hand there's the economic boom, the low unemployment figures, the low prices; on the other there's the totally archaic city planning, the poor infrastructure, the corruption. Each day Sofia attracts people who move there to work either temporarily or permanently, to shop, to build and - like the Sofians of old - to use the overburdened infrastructure. Around what was once a medium-sized city, cheap, densely populated suburbs where the new capitalists live are sprouting up overnight in concentric circles. It won't be long before slums make up the outermost periphery. The losers of the transition will live there and rummage around in the refuse." (11/10/2007)

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More from the press review on the subject » Infrastructure / Travel and Transport, » Architecture / Cities, » Public Culture, » Bulgaria

"European parliament has begun work to update its rules covering lobbyists in addition to existing efforts by the European Commission to draw up an interests register and code of conduct for 'interest representatives'", notes the daily, highlighting the "vital role of the parliament as the European Union's 'co-legislator' with important amending powers that help shape the laws proposed by the Commission. These in turn are implemented in member states across a large spectrum ranging from financial services to the environment, affecting the lives of all in the EU. ... Lobbying is big business in Brussels. Some 15,000 lobbyists are said to ply their trade among the European institutions. That this figure is only a guesstimate is reason enough to bring more transparency to their activities." (11/10/2007)

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