This year, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies awarded 106 individual research, internship, and service grants to Notre Dame undergraduates.

Where did the students go?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not pleased with Cyprus governance:

Merkel told a closed-door meeting of legislators in Berlin today that she’s annoyed the Cypriot government hasn’t been in touch with the so-called troika of international creditors for days, according to a party official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the briefing was private. Cyprus’s decision to test Europe is unacceptable, she told them.

Could such a seizure of private banking deposits occur elsewhere in Europe? The idea has already been floated. Joerg Kraemer, chief economist of Commerzbank, was quoted recently in Handelsblatt Online about Italy:

Net financial assets of the Italians … amounts to 173 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This was significantly more than the net financial assets of the Germans, which corresponds to 124 percent of GDP, said Kramer. “So it would make sense, in Italy a one-time property tax levy,” suggested the Bank economist. “A tax rate of 15 percent on financial assets would probably be enough to push the Italian government debt to below the critical level of 100 percent of gross domestic product.”

In the meantime, a pro-Europe but anti-euro party has emerged in Germany and polled at 26-40% early this month.

UPDATE 3/27/13: Spiegel is reporting significant capital flight from two Cypriot banks on the eve of the deal, despite the “capital controls”:

There are indications that large sums flowed out of the two banks just before the first bailout package was signed in the early morning hours of March 16. At the end of January, some 40 percent of all savings held in Cypriot accounts were on the books of those two banks. Since then, however, much of it has been transferred elsewhere, despite orders from the central bank that accounts at the two institutions be frozen.

This appears to be an excellent way of demolishing every last trace of trust in both governing and financial systems.

UPDATE 3/28/13: The new President of the Eurogroup’s finance ministers told Reuters that Cyprus is not a special case but represents a new template for dealing with eurozone bank problems:

“What we’ve done last night is what I call pushing back the risks,” Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who heads the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers, told Reuters and the Financial Times hours after the Cyprus deal was struck.” If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders,” he said.

Well, interesting times are ahead.

Movement of Peoples

The first genome-wide perspective on the origin of Romani peoples has been published in Current Biology (Cell Press) by David Comas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) and Manfred Kayser (Erasmus University, Netherlands). Linguistic evidence has long placed the origins of the Roma in Rajasthan; genome data confirms this view and adds that intermarriage with non-Romani Europeans also contributes a great deal.

Gérard Dépardieu’s recent protest against tax rates in France reminds us that the free movement of people, and peoples, is often driven by economic incentives and disincentives. On the other end of the income spectrum, what are the movement patterns now in, for example, Spain, where unemployment is skyrocketing? More generally, youth unemployment is upwards of 40% at Europe’s edges, as this map based on Eurostat data shows.

Social & Political Geographies

Geography is one of those academic enterprises like English that has largely dissolved its disciplinary boundaries. It now encompasses not only the description of terra firma but of any phenomena (social, political, etc.) that can be mapped to it. With the advent of big data, maps have taken on new subjects, methods, and representational forms. One site that collects especially thought-provoking maps is Strange Maps by Frank Jacobs.

Patterns of Integration

One of the most obvious patterns of cultural solidarity in Europe is the sharing of food. Europe of course has long been known for its cuisine (France, Italy, Spain, etc.). One of the chefs best-known today for pushing the envelope is Ferran Adrià, from the famous (and now closed) restaurant, El Bulli. Adrià is leading the El Bulli Foundation, which aims in part to create a global database of gastronomy called BulliPedia. Like other cultural examples of modernism, Adrià’s approach to cuisine searches high and low and verges deliberately on the surreal to “make it new.” It’s interesting however that this global modernist cuisine is matched in status by its complement, the creatively locavore and primitivist cuisine of René Redzepi in Copenhagen, whose restaurant Noma is considered by the trade to be the best in the world.

Religion & Secularization

TEDx at the Vatican on April 19, 2013, will address religious freedom.

Other links of interest

eurozine, “Europe’s leading cultural magazines at your fingertips”

Council for European Studies (Columbia University)

Pierpaolo Polzonetti, assistant professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and Nanovic Institute Faculty Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the 2012 Lewis Lockwood Award for his book, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The book looks at how revolutionary America appeared to European audiences through the medium of opera.

Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution

The Nanovic Institute for European Studies is mentioned in the acknowledgments for supporting the book’s research funds, and microfilm acquisition, and hosting of a faculty discussion group that participated heavily in the review of the book. The Institute also provided support in the acquisition of the copy of L’orfanella americana, a rare Italian opera manuscript from 1787 that scholars had believed lost, but resurfaced in 2008 in Genoa, Italy.

The Lewis Lockwood Award honors each year a musicological book of exceptional merit published during the previous year in any language and in any country by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career who is a member of the American Musicological Society or a permanent resident or citizen of the United States or Canada.

Film Matters Magazine

Three Notre Dame students from the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television have published articles in the peer-reviewed magazine Film Matters, a quarterly magazine celebrating the work of undergraduate film scholars as well a prepares students for graduate study in the field and additional research. Javi Zubizarreta and Eleanor Huntington published in 2010 and now senior Kathleen Bracke, recent winner of the Princess Grace Foundation Award, will join them in 2012. Bracke’s article, “Understanding Defeat by Means of Jan Patocka: A Close Examination of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies“ is forthcoming in issue 3.1 (2012) of Film Matters. All three of these film students also received travel and research grants from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies during their undergraduate careers at the University of Notre Dame.

Patterns of Integration

The eurozone is integrated by a common low growth forecast: the European Commission expects the eurozone economy to grow 0.1%, a “macroeconomic rebalancing and adjustment which will last for some time still.” Europe’s centralizers are trying to help: though Spain for example will miss its deficit targets, Ollie Rehn at the European Commission has granted Spain a few years of relief from mandatory budget cuts. Never letting a good crisis go to waste, high-level discussions of a centralized banking union are underway.

Social & Political Geographies

Former Prime Minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, is in prison on a hunger strike “until election abuses have been recognized.” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recognized the abuses, sharing the opinion of Tymoshenko and OSCE election monitors that “the election constituted a step backward for Ukrainian democracy.” President Viktor Yanukovych, whose allies are expected to dominate the Ukrainian parliament, would like Ukraine-US relations “to develop fruitfully, in a spirit of friendship,” during President Obama’s second term.

Religion & Secularization

Chancellor Angela Merkel called Christianity the most persecuted religion in the world. The Synod for the New Evangelization in Rome issued a series of propositions.

The Movement of Peoples

An independent group of Swiss environmentalists (ECOPOP) has joined the Swiss People’s Party in demanding a referendum to reduce the level of legal immigration into Switzerland. (The group is inspired by Paul Ehrlich’s famously wrong book, The Population Bomb.) Without any sort of referendum at all, local officials outside Madrid have demolished the homes of Spanish Roma. Reflecting on similar destructions, Chancellor Merkel and President Gauck opened a memorial to Roma murdered by the Nazis.

A brief survey.

Patterns of Integration

Greece needs another 31b from the EFSF. The Eurogroup will confer about this next Wednesday. Prospects for growth around Europe are hard to see when, to take just one example, Ford Europe cuts 5,700 jobs in UK and Belgium.

Social & Political Geographies

The Flemish Independence Party (NVA) has made significant gains in local elections. We wonder about their resemblance to Catalan independents, whose talk of secession has made headlines recently in Spain.

The Movement of Peoples

While the Grand Palais in Paris exhibits a visual history of Bohemes (gypsies), the current French Minister for the Interior denies telling Parisian police officers to show “zero tolerance” of Roma in his neighborhood. In Marseille, meanwhile, French citizens burn Roma camps to the ground.

Religion and Secularization

A Synod for the New Evangelization has convened at the Vatican to discuss secularization in Europe and elsewhere.

The French Socialist Government continues to dismantle camps and deport Roma from the outskirts of Paris. The first great jazz musician from Europe was Django Reinhardt (b. 1910), from the Sinti group of Roma. Reinhardt lived in the outskirts of Paris near Saint-Ouen.

Now that August vacations are over in Europe, the European Movement  is back in the game, pressing hard for economic and political unification, making headlines. Here are some of the recent statements:

European Central Bank – Mario Draghi announces a plan to buy short-term sovereign debt with no “ex ante” limit but under certain “conditions.”

German Constitutional Court – Issued a provisional ruling (full ruling TBA) that clears the way for Germany to ratify, with conditions, a permanent bank bailout fund for the eurozone: the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Klaus Regling – As the head of the EFSF and the likely head of the ESM (which would eventually replace it), stated that “the euro is irreversible” and that “resolutions proposed by the European Commission can be adopted even against a majority of euro area countries [which] reduces the possibility of political interference significantly.”

Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, in his State of the (E)Union Address 2012, offered what he called a “Decisive Deal for Europe” which “requires the completion of a deep and genuine economic union, based on a political union.”

A full-court press in short against Europe’s centrifugal tendencies, such as … a third Greek bailout.

The German Constitutional Court is expected next week to issue its judgment on whether the proposed European Stability Mechanism (ESM) is congruent with Germany’s Basic Law. A “no” would be clear but cause widespread consternation. Even a “maybe” or “partially” will considerably lengthen the process of jointly addressing Europe’s (massive) sovereign debt problems, insufficient economic growth, record unemployment and capital outflows, the fragility of the eurozone, and the political integration of Europe 27.  The Court’s ruling is expected on 12 September.

The following week, on 19 September, faculty fellows of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies will hold a joint panel discussion of these topics at Notre Dame. Not without good reason is the Nanovic Institute’s film series this semester entitled “Power and Fragility.”