Blogoir: February

What's the difference between the way top leaders deal with other and the beery ruminations of blokes in pubs, banging on about the about the mischief and duplicity of foreigners?

Less than you might think!

A fascinating sub-plot (or maybe it IS the plot) in the Greece/Eurozone debacle is the role played by über-bankers Goldman Sachs, as bailed out by the US government. Whose people and former people pop up everywhere.

Baseline Scenario is hot on the case. It looks as if Mario Draghi's hopes of becoming ECB president are in steep decline. He has some searching questions to answer.

Will the last guinea pig on the Titanic please switch off the lights?

Is hosted by Is there more to life than shoes? (We are never told.)

A link to a nice piece by Natalie Bennett about her Grandmother's thrift and good nature.

And some good - but maybe fake - advice to young ladies from the Heresiarch.

Luckily the Technology Liberation Front give us the answer.

Pragmatic optimism.

Families are tricky. They stretch to outer limits our private sense of responsibility.

You are Diligent. You work hard and honestly, you treat everyone fairly, you are generous towards friends and family, but you dislike being exploited or ‘expected’ to help others who don’t do all they can to help themselves.

You have four siblings, Dopey, Grumpy, Lazy and Feckless:

• Dopey does his best, but is dim and usually misses opportunities to do better; he appreciates favours from other family members, and now and then reciprocates in a cack-handed way
• Grumpy works hard and has had more success in life, but begrudges others their success; she expects favours to be offered generously by other family members, but is ungrateful/dismissive when that happens and never offers favours in return
• Lazy never tries hard, preferring the idea of the good life to the reality of the hard work needed to achieve it – she values favours, but usually does not reciprocate. Not exactly selfish or mean-spirited – just somehow air-headed and not that bothered
• Feckless works hard but squanders the results on fun and parties – has no long-term plan and lives only for the moment

You may or may not be your siblings’ keeper. But if you have good fortune or they fall on hard times, how far might those siblings make a moral claim to part of your success?

Complex issues and emotions are involved:

• The limits of generosity of the would-be giver – should Diligent be so generous to the others as to put his/her own immediate family’s welfare at risk?
• A calculation by Diligent as to how far the favour will in fact be used well – better to give more support to someone who at least tries hard but usually fails, or to the sibling who is in more need but likely to fritter away any support given?
• Does reciprocity or at least genuine gratitude come into play? Should Diligent’s generosity be affected by how far the individual recipients of generosity might extend favours if roles were reversed? Is it somehow better or more just to share more generously with people who are grateful, than with people who ‘expect’ support and then sneer at its level?
• And underlying it all is a philosophy of how the world should work. Does Diligent believe that the best way for people to get through life is to take responsibility for their own fate, and that those who make miscalculations should themselves bear the cost of the consequences and not try to get others to bail them out?
• Or does some sort of abstract ‘solidarity’ automatically kick in, so that any sibling falling on hard times through the results of selfishness or idleness or greed or fecklessness or incompetence can call on Diligent to sacrifice some of the results of his/her hard work and thrift?
• If that ‘solidarity’ principle applies, how far might Diligent insist that the selfish/idle/greedy sibling be shown to have mended his/her ways as a condition for support? Is it not heartless to expect everyone to behave well as Diligent invariably does?
• If Diligent subsidises his siblings’ poor work, is he doing them benefit or harm in the long run? 

A lot going on here at the most human micro-level, even in the happiest families.

So welcome to the European Union, namely Article 122 of the THE TREATY ON THE FUNCTIONING OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (Consolidated Version - emphasis added):

1. Without prejudice to any other procedures provided for in the Treaties, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy.

2. Where a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may grant, under certain conditions, Union financial assistance to the Member State concerned. The President of the Council shall inform the European Parliament of the decision taken.

Should Diligent Germany now help Feckless/Lazy/Grumpy/Dopey Greece and the other PIIGS?

The rule when the Eurozone was set up were clear. No bail-outs for countries not accepting financial discipline!

The threat of this awful implacable inflexible harshness was thought to be a necessary and sufficient condition to compel countries which had no serious tradition of running a currency successfully to realise that they were being promoted to the major league, and had to lift their game.

Ha ha. That boring northern European stuff is not for us gay southern European types. Who dares deny us our carefree way of life? We always knew that we wouldn’t accept all that drab discipline and paperwork and transparency – and taxes! And you stuffy Germans knew that too, even if you say now that you trusted us to behave like you.

So what’s the problem now? If there’s a crisis now, it’s your fault, not ours. You knew for years exactly what was going on, but looked the other way.

Wha-a-a-a-t? You’re saying now that we have misbehaved and that you won’t bail us out? That we have to tidy our room, work harder, tighten our belts and be poorer? That we are to get less lavish dinners than everyone else here? For years to come?

Are you patronising and selfish oh-so-clever people crazy as well? Where’s the solidarity in that?

Don’t you realise that what you are dealing with here?

When you brought us into your neat, tidy house, the whole point was that we would set the limits of general tidiness, not you! Which means that if you now insist that we tidy our room, we’ll wreck the whole place - just to spite you - dragging everything down to our level.

So what would you rather have? A complete mess, or a quiet life?

Borrow some money from some other suckers such as your own taxpayers’ kids if you have to. It will be years before they realise that you can’t repay it.

And puh-lease. Don’t start whinging that the Irish are behaving well, so we should do the same. If they want to make a scrawny fool of themselves by going on a long-term diet, that’s their problem.

It’s just not our style, here in the sunny south. It’s our culture, see? And Europe is all about celebrating diverse cultures.

Now excuse me. It’s long lunch time - I'll send you the bill later. Then I’ll need a siesta.

* * * * *

All of which goes to show that the Eurozone crisis is exposing the very heart of European Solidarity (or not). Since it goes to really very simple issues of trust and responsibility.

And perhaps there just are limits to trust and responsibility. Perhaps it makes no sense to set up supranational institutions which ultimately are unable to cope with these simple values, as the political legitimacy of those institutions is grounded not in trust and responsibility backed by law and elections, but in vainglorious elite ambition and hoping for the best. In the end, it just can't - and more importantly won't - work that way. 

See also in the USA. The Tea Party tendency is protesting that government is Just Too Big:

... more and more people are waking up to the fact that this just doesn’t work. We don’t have the money to keep throwing more and more of it into dysfunctional public schools, overpriced state colleges and government at all levels. In the competitive world we all live in now, our society has no choice but to learn how to do these things much more cheaply. Otherwise the blue sector will drag the whole country down with it.

This is part of what drives the Tea Parties: there’s a sense out there that the time for careful, limited reform is past. We need a crowbar, not a scalpel, to fix the blue beast.

It’s all the same point, expressed differently on either side of the Atlantic.

In the banking sector and in the public sector alike, limits of risk-management and common-sense responsibility have got lost in a sea of complexity. And accountability has spiralled out of control.

Back to manageable family values?

More from me (if you can face it) over at Business and Politics.

On Iran - who is weak and strong in the Negotiations between Iran/USA/Russia/China:

It all boils down to a simple proposition: you don’t win more in any negotiation than your objective strength deserves.

In a struggle between a lion and a hyena, different sorts of strength (physical power, agility, guile, deviousness) all come into play.

And on a more metaphysical level, what does it mean to say that resources are 'finite'?

Is "Toyota’s stuck throttle ... a metaphor for our greedy, addictive, all-consuming, cancerous so-called civilization"?

Er. No.

Remember the Siege of Gondor in Lord of The Rings, when the defenders fall back from one defensive ring to the next as the wild armies of orcs crash through?

Brian Micklethwait painstakingly looks at how the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) came to add Immediate and Catastrophic to the acronym to give us ICAGW.

But now they are falling back in some disorder, yet ruthlessly trying to work out which position might be most tenable against the wild-eyed skeptic orcish hordes:

The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them lose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied.

This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all.

The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians.

And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri...

Actually, the debate concerns not only that, but whether, if CO2 does indeed cause warming, that warming is caused to any great extent by humans, and above all whether, anthropogenic or not, this warming will at some future date turn catastrophic.

To put it acronymically, the CAGW camp will still be fighting over all of those remaining initials. It's not just a matter of whether CO2 is causing the W. This is the terrain of the next big battle.

At what point do the skeptics get to behead warmists and catapult the heads back over the ramparts to terrify those still inside the crumbling castle?

Via Drudge, this piece at Big Journalism which claims that the evil excesses of certain Islamist fanatics known as the Af/Pak Haqqani terror network have prompted a violent backlash against them:

As Siraj Haqqani moved from village to village, rounding up the sons of poor Muslim families to fight for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he offered the villagers free medical care.  He even sent his physician, Dr. Hassan Duraz to conduct the clinics.  There was a horrific catch, though.  Duraz was a monster...

For those women and girls unfortunate enough to catch the good doctor’s fancy, it was show time.  The Haqqani uncle and cousin would be brought into the exam room, they would set up their video equipment, and Duraz would drop his trousers and go to work.

The Haqqanis and Duraz sexually assaulted poor women throughout the tribal regions and captured every moment of their degradation and humiliation on video to enjoy over and over again.

Then, when the story broke, urgent action was needed to cover tracks. Namely murdering all the luckless women concerned, and indeed the vile Dr Duraz too.

But one of the tapes is now circulating.

Siraj Haqqani - you are so doomed.

I have had an enquiry from someone who follows closely UK immigration issues asking about the policy issues surrounding the opening of the UK labour market to Poles in 2004 when Poland joined the EU:

Did the UK government encourage mass Polish immigration into the UK?

No.

Well, not really.

What happened was this.

Parts of the Blair government were very nervous about a tidal wave of Poles and other Eastern Europeans washing over the UK once we opened our Labour markets unconditionally.

Or rather they were nervous about the Conservatives making a big row about it after Jack Straw announced the policy in 2003. The more so since most other EU countries in a show of noisy EU anti-solidarity made clear that they would not open their labour markets unconditionally.

Which meant that whatever tendency there was for millions of Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and the rest to storm out from their respective homelands to look for jobs would be funnelled mainly in our direction, making the tidal wave even more fast, big and scary.

So intense consultations took place round Whitehall - should the UK row back on this commitment?

PM Blair took a breezy decision. Let it rip.

Previous experience with Portugal and Spain suggested that there would be a surge of interest (and people) but in due course it would all calm down without too many problems. But he threw a small bone to anti-immigration fears by setting up a 'registration scheme' for new arrivals with a view to at least having some sort of numbers to use in subsequent debates on the issue. Other administrative devices were used to try to stop people coming over to UK and promptly claiming benefits.

Thus it transpired that I as Ambassador had to go along to the then Polish Interior Minister Jozef Oleksy to break the official news of our keenly awaited decision. Oleksy previously had been Polish Prime Minister, but had an unerring knack of attracting controversy and scandals - a droll and unconventional figure by most former communist standards.

I pompously told Oleksy that I had the honour to inform the Polish Government that HMG had taken an important decision concerning the UK labour market after Poland's EU accession in May 2004, namely:

• The labour market would be opened unconditionally with immediate effect on 1 May 2004.
• Any Poles who wished to travel to the UK to live or work could do so with out a visa.
• Moreover, an effective amnesty would be given to all Poles who had been living in the UK and working illegally.
• All Poles seeking to work in the UK would be expected to register under a new scheme, but registration was not a condition for getting a job.

Oleksy looked at me in amazement and said in Polish: "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?" What's the catch?

"No haczyk," I replied. "It's as simple as that."

Oleksy simply did not believe me. He was sure that just as most EU capitals were announcing different severe restrictions on Polish workers after Poland's EU accession, the UK had to do the same. There had to be a catch with those tricky Brits!

He kept pressing:  "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?"

I assured him that there really was no haczyk.

We meant it. Unconditional opening with immediate effect after Poland's accession. The Brits were simply generous, open-hearted people. The Poles might like to remember who their real European friends were after this.

That's how the Polish Flood started.

By mid-2006 there were claims that there were more Poles in the UK than in Warsaw. Some indeed were feckless.

But by 2009 as the UK economy drooped many were heading back home. 

In the great sweep of things, Tony Blair got this one just right.

Ten years from now, let alone twenty or fifty or one hundred, the whole episode will have been forgotten. Those Poles who have stayed in the UK will be doing well, often paying taxes and generally acting as a force for good sense and intelligent conservative values. If any country wants immigrants, get Poles.

Although in a famous telegram to London I did warn Whitehall that this was coming the UK's way - whether we liked it or not. (I'll write this up separately).

Unfortunately there were risks for Poles coming to our country, as the families of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka so tragically found out.

For most others the experience seems to have been positive and helpful, with lots of Polish compliments to the UK on its easy-going ways and lack of bureaucracy(!).

And let's not forget that a while ago we were exporting our unemployed people to Poland in large numbers to look for work.

These things come and go.

Just to say that those readers who have not yet had a quick look at ADRg Ambassadors - a bespoke new senior mediation, consultancy and training panel comprising various former Ambassadors - should do so.

Since our launch in January we have attracted some healthy interest, including from quite unexpected places. It turns out that there is a lively demand for the regional skills, languages and professional wisdom which this panel might bring to bear in dealings with foreign governments and organisations, especially in unusual or pioneering areas of activity.

Plus the training aspects show early promise. There are a number of different 'diplomatic' training options out there, but very few if any combine high-level operational experience with professional mediation training.

So if you are a business doing creative things in a brand new commercial area and you want to discuss quietly how best to set about tackling foreign governments (or foreign problems which do not fit into neat categories), look no further.

Get in touch with the experts.

Bishop Hill has been trying to post a climate comment on the Guardian's opinion site, CiF.

But he is being 'moderated'. In other words he is in a category of suspected comments offenders, which means that his comments may or may not be posted, once the 'moderators' have perused and sanctioned them.

Why? Because he previously suggested that Guardian pundit Monbiot resign!

Earth to Guardian: thanks for making Bishop Hill more credible than you.

A good round-up from Michael Ledeen on the moves by the nervous Iran regime to curb protests:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail.  They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move.  They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.

He links to two energetic sites, worth a look if you are interested in the passion of pro-reform Iranians: Planet Iran and homlafayette.

An interesting sub-plot is the way the Iranian regime is closing down mobile phone, Gmail and other services which might help people mobilise fast and well.

Who knows, it may work. But it also suggests that when an elite are that scared of the mass of the youthful public, something bad is going to happen to them sooner or later.

See also this loser.

Time for a change in English libel laws.

The core idea of the law is sound. If X tells untruths about Y and damages Y's reputation, Y should have an action for damages against X.

But the procedural, costs and other legal encrustations which have grown on this sensible idea have created a stupid and unjust deformity.

The Libel Reform Campaign is hard at work trying to drum up public support for this cause.

Check out their principles for reform, which look good enough to me

Then sign their petition. A hundred thousand signatures are needed. This blog's noble readers alone could add several thousand names.

So get on with it. It's a couple of clicks away.

... why not have one who is lively, unconventional - and knows more about computers than even some teenagers?

Someone who makes you think about the future, not the past.

Who pours out ideas.

And whose own website tops the global Google rankings for the word Unreasonable.

Sounds good to me.

I am starting to produce material for the fast-growing Business and Politics site. (Fear not. This site continues unabated, soon with a face-lift.)

Such as this piece today on whether it is 'suicidal' to expect continuing economic growth, or suicidal not to:

What is economic growth, in fact?

It’s nothing other than decisions by people to do things together, usually expressed in legal contracts which give expression to new ideas by putting resources behind them. Profoundly democratic and cooperative behaviour. Which also is why the most dangerous, unstable and poor places in the world tend to be those places where there is no respectable legal order.

So less growth = fewer contracts = fewer ideas brought to fruition = less freedom = less humanity... 

... I was at a conference in New York on the Internet and Politics a while back. One speaker put it in stark terms: the change brought by the Internet is that over a billion people now own the means of production of ideas.

An astounding insight. And every time one of them does a deal with someone else to give effect to an idea, global GDP clocks up a notch. Just as it does when Roger Steare or I write a blog piece about it.

Is that really so bad? Would it not be suicidal to try to stop that happening?

To put it another way, economic growth should not “be seen as essential to well-being”. It is well-being.

With added Abbey Road:

One of the very hardest things for a newly elected leader is to move into a new frame of mind - and give organisational expression to it.

Above all, how best to deploy the people who have slaved away to achieve victory and now expect a role in Power?

The problem is that running a government is completely different from running an election campaign. Will the people did such a fine job in the latter in fact be any good at the former?

And in ways which are impossible to explain to outsiders or even to insiders, it all starts and ends right at the very top. The tone of voice, the air of authority, the confidence and courtesy and wisdom of the people immediately around the Leader all combine to send positive signals through the government system as a whole.

Which also works the other way. Ill-temper, discourtesy, disorganisation, indecisiveness and so on at the very top spread downwards and outwards very fast.

My own classic example of this was when John Major visited Moscow as PM. He made a good personal impression when talking to people. But there was just no Authority. He did well at a press conference, but as he came back-stage afterwards his question to his team was a sort of uneasy "How was I?".

Not: "They nailed me on that one - kick the sorry asses of the people who wrote that brief, and let's get it right next time!"

In short there was a baffling lack of self-confidence right at the top, which led to the sense of doomed 'greyness' of the people around him - they could not be more bright and positive than the PM was. And that permeated the government as a whole.

Whereas with Tony Blair there was the opposite phenomenon, which also has been disastrous - a breezy instinct for charming spin, 'winging it' from the sofa without doing the work, getting away with just what is needed and no more, avoiding confrontation, politics by bubble.

And let's not mention Gordon Brown's calamitous team.

All of which leads us to various hard-edged looks in the USA at where President Obama has been going wrong. They do not make pretty reading.

He looks to have given too much power to a tiny core of trusted people whose ambition and vanity has got far out of control. Much to the detriment of good advice and steady policy-making:

... needed advice from a broader range of advisers "is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang's tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office, but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured."

Memo to Next Leader:

Start thinking now about how you are going to bring into your close, most trusted circles people you never may have met, but who will be vital to delivering the right results - and how you are going to nudge some of your current most trusted people away from the policy roles they so fervently expect.

Otherwise you'll just make a hash of a huge opportunity - as Obama is doing.

The Greek masses are revolting:

Public sector workers in Greece have launched a nationwide strike in protest at government measures to tackle the country's huge budget deficit.

Flights have been grounded, many schools closed, and hospitals are operating an emergency-only service.

The government wants to cut pay, reduce pensions and revise the tax system...

Hey! We can't pay our way. So you government types in Athens need to force other people in the EU to pay for us! What's the matter with you all out there? Don't you care about our feelings?

A superb Negotiation between Germany and the Markets. The more desperate the situation in Greece, the more the German government has to scramble around for options while at the same time appearing to stand firm against a bail-out, since wobbly noises might make it even more expensive when it finally happens.

But maybe it is best to bring in the IMF, humiliating as this might be to the Eurozone, and let them take the obloquy and rage of the Greeks as they thrash around in the mess they have made for themselves?

Comfortless as this situation is for most practical purposes, it is nonetheless instructive and helpful to see so stark an illustration of the Reality of the Consequences of Evading Reality.

I stopped reading Andrew Sullivan after he started gushing against the Iraq war after gushing so strongly in favour of it.

The vile images of the Abu Ghraib abuse of Iraqi prisoners seemed to sway him against the whole enterprise, as if he only then realised that war is a hard and dirty and violent business, and recoiled from what he had supported.

Too shallow and self-indulgent. Policy is tough, Andrew. Deal with it.

Anyway, he still whirs away eloquently to a huge readership and even has a couple of people helping him write the material, arguing (oddly?) that because he has so many readers he needs this support.

Here is a long article by Leon Wieseltier which carefully takes apart a lot of Sullivan writing on the Middle East and Jewish views thereof. It is worth reading as a subtle analysis of different sly prejudices which pop up in Sullivan's work and in many places elsewhere - and for its insights on the blog genre:

Sullivan desperately wants the Jews to be good Jews, to be the best Jews they can be. He wants edifying Jews. Don’t they realize that if they fail to edify, they may lose his friendship? The fools!

...  Criticism of Israeli policy, and sympathy for the Palestinians, and support for a two-state solution, do not require, as their condition or their corollary, this intellectual shabbiness, this venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews.

I have striven for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and territorial compromise, and two states, for many decades now, but Sullivan’s variety of such right thinking is completely repugnant to me. There are decent and indecent ways to advocate change. About the Jews, is Sullivan a bigot, or is he just moronically insensitive?

To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left. He is the master, and the prisoner, of the technology of sickly obsession: blogging – and the divine right of bloggers to exempt themselves from the interrogations of editors – is also a method of hounding.

He's on to something there.

How many bloggers deep down have a good answer to the question, "All right - but isn't all that interminable huffing and puffing about policy really just all about you?"

Should we care about the appalling HIV rates in South Africa, if the people of South Africa elect someone who does not care either?

Want a hyper-epidemic? All you need is a tradition of polygamy AND high levels of female autonomy. Big Men have their little network of wives and/or lovers. Women buy in to duty sex for the status and security, but get to run their own little networks on the side, for the fun of it.

That has been the pattern in South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and a number of other countries where more than one adult in seven has HIV.

But woe betide anyone who points this out. At best, you are insensitive to cultural traditions. At worst, you are perpetuating racist myths of the hypersexualised African male, blah, blah, blah.

Shouldn't people get what they deserve?

Update: a reader who knows the subject writes:

Surely the real irresponsibility lies within the card-carrying ANC? It's they who really choose the country's leader.

Well, sure.

But I think the point the writer of the above article was getting at was just that.

We need to have the courage to tell Africans bluntly that certain African cultural norms are dooming them, and not flinch when accusations of RAAACISM come flying back..

And we also need to speak out strongly against the folly of ridiculous leaders who in one way or the other play to dangerous African superstitions and prejudices and make things worse.

When Nelson Mandela dies, how many of the thousands of obituaries round the world will blame him for not roundly denouncing Thabo Mbeki and his crazy AIDS policies, which have led to hundreds of thousands of African deaths? 

Isn't it a perverse form of racism - and in any case a policy hugely damaging to Africa - not to press hard points like this?

As you try to grasp what is happening in Ukraine, you may well be asking yourself: what does Ukraine mean anyway?

And, needless to say, views differ. There is a root word kraj in Slav languages which has all sorts of nuanced meanings in different Slavonic languages, linked to the idea of land, or borders of land, or land on or around the borders of a country/territory.

Remember the Krajina Serbs, who attempted to set up a Serbian territory separate from Croatia until Croatian forces crushed their resistance and most Serbs fled to Serbia?

Or indeed Momcilo Krajisnik? Another unhappy Slav with the kraj root in his name.

So Ukraine suggests either a 'border' territory, or a 'separate' principality or territory in its own right, depending on who's talking.

Ukraine's voters accordingly seem to face two eternal choices. Either to be somehow part of the Russian psychological space, on the frontiers of Russia's western lands. Or to be a separate territory, defined in their own terms, and looking at least as much to Europe as to Russia.

Which explains why any person elected President needs to be a magic knight:

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is not a particularly happy one: the majority of Ukrainians don't want a head of state with clearly formulated ideological priorities, with the experience and attitudes of a radical political fighter, with an explicit geopolitical orientation, and with an economic-reform program that can be hard on their wallets. That may explain why different groups of Ukrainians have such widely diverging views of their country's past and future...

... the voting habits of the majority of Ukrainians could still enable a politician to become head of state who is capable both of winning the support of the majority of voters and of implementing genuine modernization.

That politician would simply have to have enough human virtues, combined with managerial ability, to overcome all possible objections on the part of either the east or the west of the country, and both the right and the left.

That may sound like a fantasy, but then the whole of Ukrainian history for the past 20 years has resembled a fantastic saga of wandering in circles locked in time, waiting for a knight to break the spell.

Elections there tend to be close-run things these days. Western Ukraine, predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, looks mainly West towards Brussels. Eastern Ukraine, predominantly Russian-speaking, looks mainly East towards Moscow.

Viktor Yanukovych is seen as East, Yulia Tymoshenko as West. It looks as if this time round East has edged home in front.

A triumph for Moscow over the West/Europe?

Maybe. But not a huge one.

There is now a lively and tough political space in Ukraine, and whoever runs the place has no real choice but to manage relations with both Moscow and the EU carefully.

Ukraine's main problem is that it is the subject of an existential tug-of-war between a Westernising trend in Slavic thinking and a more traditional Moscow/Eastern trend.

Alas for Ukraine, the Russians weigh less but pull harder on their end of the rope than the EU does. 

Some Europeans are more European than others. Too many EU capitals in general (and Paris in particular) are quite happy for that part of Europe to be seen as 'not quite European enough', and to stay mainly outside European processes. Why annoy the Russians for the sake of all that empty space and complicated people? 

Some Russians hanker after reabsorbing Ukraine somehow, although the grisly case of Belarus and wider failed attempts at CIS integration show that even under what appear to be optimal conditions it is not possible to put chunks of the Soviet Union back together again.

So Moscow contents itself with making sure that if Russia can't have Ukraine, the West won't have it either.

We can expect Yanukovych (if confirmed as President) to talk a lot about Europe, safe in the knowledge that the EU doesn't know what to do about Ukraine other than send in lots of consultants and bureaucratic experts, some of whom do some useful work now and then. Nothing much will happen on Ukraine/NATO.

Which is not to say that Ukraine will stagnate (necessarily). As someone has wittily put it:

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues.

On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer.