Nicolas Machiavellian

It's been a while since I posted on Nicolas Sarkozy, and a couple of weeks since the intercession of his wife Cécilia seemingly occasioned the release of the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor in Libya (something I posted on last December), though at the time German sources claimed that negotiations by EU delegates were already well underway and that Sarkozy's instrumentation of his practically-estranged wife was nothing other than a publicity stunt. Following the bluster with which Sarkozy's debut showing at June's EU summit in Brussels was reported in the French media and his stuffing of his cabinet with a number of centre-left fall guys - the most prominent of which is new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner - it appears that Sarkozy's greatest borrowing from Anglo-Saxon political economy would be the fine art of spin. Many of the more naïve French supporters of Sarkozy claimed before the election that the wee man would make France an international force to be reckoned with once again. He is certainly managing to put that idea about.

Except, of course, that now it has been established that Sarkozy's intervention was a pretext for arranging the sale of a nuclear reactor and other deals with the Libyans. After initially strenuous denials, Sarko's government has stopped trying to counter the accusations first floated in Le Canard enchaîné, a publication that rarely gets such things wrong. The Germans are fast losing patience with the French, after an early rapprochement with the Elysée Palace, and my election-day assessment of Sarkozy and his lack of substantial difference from the fetid political culture of Gaullism is proving to be prescient, even if I say so myself.

Sarkozy, while holidaying in New England, had a confrontation today with a couple of American photographers, grabbing the camera off one of them; his critics here in France are rubbing their hands with glee at this latest dispatch, but I have a certain degree of sympathy for him in this instance. Meanwhile, French rapper Doc Gynéco, a high-profile supporter of Sarkozy, was bottled offstage this weekend at a music festival in Switzerland of all places by a dozen or so bolshy leftists. Interestingly, Sarkozy affirmed upon the release of the Bulgarian nurses that they 'were French', which is a more gracious conferral of honorary citizenship than that offered to tens of thousands of non-nationals that actually reside in France. Though I despise Sarkozy, I readily admit he is a formidable politician. What I can't understand is how he has managed his first couple of months in such a shambolic fashion. The Socialist Party might not even have to reorganise at all if Sarkozy's faux pas continue.

Force Feeding

Back in March I reviewed the Austrian documentary Our Daily Bread, which took a cool, dispassionate look at the production process in European agribusiness. Despite the formal placidity of the film it was implicitly critical of the practices it portrayed and now another film has come from the same country that covers much of the same ground while taking a more avowedly polemical stance. We Feed the World (which takes its name from the motto of the German seedling multinational Pioneer, which features in the film) is directed by Erwin Wagenhofer and its target is the commodification and over-rationalisation of food production. While Our Daily Bread offered a critique by its simple unvarnished mounting of scenes of industrial labour, We Feed the World goes straight for a broadside against the deleterious effects of homogenised food and the food subsidies of the developed world (in particular the EU, the US and Japan) and its subsequent dumping of food in markets such as West Africa, making it impossible for local farmers to survive.

The chief protagonist is the Swiss sociologist and UN Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler, who delivers statistic after damning statistic to give the film its primary argument - the pauperisation of the Third World in order to benefit Western producers. The other side is represented in the opening scene by an Austrian farmer who affirms that the only way to maintain one's standard of living at previous levels is to expand one's farm by up to five times. This has resulted in a third of Austrian farmers leaving the land since the country's accession to the EU in 1995 and as the farmer says, a chief motive for this is the public's demand for cheap food. Free marketers will of course ask here what the problem is as according to them, the market resolves such problems of its own accord. There are however too many ill effects to allow this argument to go unchallenged.

One of these is the homogenisation of food production, witnessed in a visit to a fish market in Lorient in Brittany and a trip aboard a the trawler of a small Breton fisherman who prides himself on making small hauls, thereby bringing in fish unblemished by the effects of enormous nets and increased underwater pressure. There is also Karl Otrok, the head of Pioneer Romania, who admits that he prefers organic vegetables to the uneconomical, tasteless and aesthetically attractive specimens produced by his company's products, and who says that Western agribusiness has already 'fucked up' the West's agriculture. A visit to the enormous greenhouses of Almería (the 'winter vegetable' capital of the world) shows the effects of an economic miracle that is now in danger of producing an environmental catasprophe. The last word is given to Peter Brabeck, CEO of Nestlé, who is obviously on a different wavelength to the film's makers, and who speaks optimistically of the future, seeing only progress. Ziegler has already argued that Brabeck is himself at the mercy of the shareholders and not in a very good position to be too cocksure of his own future prospects.

We Feed the World is occasionally a bit too didactic and its arguments are likely to be already shared by many of its audience but it has a number of qualities that make it compulsive viewing: firstly, all the interviewees - from Ziegler to Brabeck - are all brilliant, fluid speakers, secondly, there is a lot to learn from the film, particularly in terms of agronomy and botany and thirdly, the scenes of people at work are fascinating, the repetition and attention to detail mesmerising just like Gustave Caillebot's celebrated 'Les raboteurs de parquet'. When this labour gives way to mechanical rationalisation later in the film the effect is jolting. If the arguments of the film are somewhat predictable, its method and formal composition are superb. Should be seen, preferably on a double-bill with Our Daily Bread.

Give Us This Day....

It's a few days since I saw Nikolaus Geyrhalter's documentary Our Daily Bread, which offers an oblique and often impassive look at European agribusiness, or rather at the industry which underpins it. The title evokes King Vidor's socialist drama of the same name from 1934 though there is surprisingly little polemic in Geyrhalter's stately enigmatic film; though the film pledges over the opening title to donate 5% of its royalties to organisations with a commitment to producing and supporting organic food, there is no damning endictment of the production process, even as we see tomatoes, chillis and cucumbers being harvested on an industrial scale by placid migrant workers, piglets being gelded, pigs and fish alike being systematically gutted by machines, cows calving in pristinely clinical surroundings, cows being milked and later slaughtered in much the same. But then the polemic probably is there but in a latent sense. There is even no commentary nor any dialogue to speak of, and what there is appears to be natural and is left untouched by subtitles.

There is a similarity to Abol-Fazl Jalili's films, such as Dance of Dust or Delbaran, in the unflinching, steady tableaux, almost all framed with identical geometrical precision, and which invite one to be at turns repulsed, intrigued or bored. My own favourite sequence was the descent into a German salt mine, which is like something out of a science fiction film, the saline harvest gathered by two little identical-looking men, who resemble a cross between the Super Mario Brothers and Cerberus in their underground desert. There are scenes that might put some off touching meat ever again - though I, a recovering vegetarian, will have no such qualms - but the overall effect of the film is a quietly disquieting one, something that similar, more ideologically explicit, films such as Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka fail to achieve. Our Daily Bread is a film that allows both its subject and its audience a lot of space and it is all the better for that.

Floating Voter

I was talking to my Senegalese friend Fred about the recent Presidential elections in his country and which he was decrying as fixed (outgoing president Abdoulaye Wade being re-elected). I have to take him on his word for want of any real knowledge about Senegalese politics, but I was impressed by the fact that he was able to vote from Paris, as, presumably tens of thousands of other Senegalese living abroad can too (or at least those that have their foreign residencies regularised). Which is more than I can do from here; once again if I want to vote in May's General Election - assuming it doesn't arrive before then - it will be with the help of Ryanair that I do so, and given that I'm already taking a week off work that month for my brother's wedding in Andalusia, that may not be too feasible.

People have been arguing for votes for emigrants for a long time and successive governments, nervous at the prospect of facing a section of the electorate that might have a negative view of the political status quo, have resisted all such calls. Pundits such as the late Jonathan Philibin Bowman used to argue that allowing emigrants the vote would result in large electoral gains for Sinn Féin, which was a specious point of view as most people that emigrated from Ireland in the 1980s were no more inclined to support the Provos than those that were fortunate enough to stay at home. And even if the Shinners did enjoy a certain surge in popularity, get with it; if they were not banned from contesting the elections, people should not have been excluded from voting simply because they might have voted for them. It's called democracy, and pace Dev's infamous line, the People do have the right to do wrong.

Of course, the question of how long one should retain one's right to vote after leaving one's country is a valid one and I myself see a vote in France as possibly more pertinent given that I am unlikely to live in Ireland under the next government, whatever hue it might be. But I cannot do that without taking up French citizenship, which even if I were that bothered about doing (at the moment I don't see the point) I cannot for another three years at least. As we are now living in a Europe where we have the right to work wherever we want, and are taxed accordingly, shouldn't there be a trans-European accord to allow EU citizens living in another member state for, say, a minimum of two years, to vote in more than simply municipal and European elections? The French Communist Party, in its election manifesto, pledges to allow all immigrants, even illegal ones, to vote, though few people are banking on Marie-Georges Buffet inhabiting the Palais de l'Elysée come May. It seems absurd that in an era where Ireland is closer than ever before to the outside world, and Europe in particular, that Irish people living abroad should be stuck in an electoral no-man's land. Serves us right for leaving in the first place, I suppose.

On a Swiss Roll

A cracker of a news story here that I first discovered this morning in France's only Sunday newspaper, the snappily-titled Le Journal du dimanche, and which has since been confirmed by the New York Times. Swiss military personnel, whilst on manoeuvres earlier this week, got lost and accidentally invaded their tiny eastern neighbour Lichtenstein, an infraction made doubly embarrassing by the fact that the army of this most neutral of countries is barred by law from operating outside of Swiss territory. The Lichtensteiners, who possess no army of their own, are not unduly worried by the mistake, though a similar thing did happen in 1989, when adverse weather conditions caused shells launched by the Swiss as part of a training routine to land down on a section of forest in Lichtenstein. So much for the famed Swiss precision.

Dutch Courage

Holland is a country famous for its tolerance, albeit a tolerance with the marked flavour of the word's original meaning, as in 'tolerating a bad smell', or some such unpleasant thing. Dutch tolerance is more a logical corollary of the country's Calvinist heritage, even as the number of churchgoers has fallen since the 1960s; unwholesome things such as drugs, pornography and prostitution are allowed to exist more as phenomena for the righteous to avoid than as something to obtain as a worldly right. The world still needs Sodom and Gomorrah, even as most of the West is being liberalised to the point of banality. The fact that few Dutch people partake of the drugs that are freely available in their country, while the coffee shops are full of gormless, gauche foreigners getting baked on weed far stronger than anything they have ever smoked before, is no doubt a badge of pride for the frugal, clean-living locals.

A strange clash of different types of tolerance occurred five years ago with the emergence of Pim Fortuyn's vaguely racist, xenophobic political party. Fortuyn fought against Islamic immigration because he said that immigrant values were eroding traditional Dutch tolerance. It has been a similar complaint among right-wing liberals all over Europe in the past few years, and has often been used as a vehicle for a rather desperate, intellectually-tinged form of racism. Fortuyn was assassinated in enigmatic circumstances by an animal-rights activist before he could ever face the electorate but his party's policies have since passed into the political mainstream.

Whether the Dutch find the Platform of Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity (PNVD) less in collision with their values than Muslim immigrants is a moot point. The PNVD, which currently has but three members, is what might be broadly described as a 'paedophile-rights' party and its manifesto, published here on Harpers' website, calls for a phasing-out of the age of consent, an official ban on marriage, the right to be naked in public and for pornography to be broadcast during the day. It is unlikely to catch on, but I suspect it might meet with a good deal more of that grudging 'tolerance' than those non-Christian immigrant groups have been encountering of late, in a country where it has been made illegal to wear a burka in public. Wearing a burka by choice is without a doubt a severe sign of mental illness and I do not find banning it too offensive but one would think the Dutch could find it in their heart to 'tolerate' the 100 or so women in their midst that do so, if only to consolidate their position among the elect.