Let us also be honest from the start. My heart does not fall apart when reading the news about the financial crisis. While feeling compassion for those hard-working people now losing their jobs, I think it can only do us good. We have seen such extremes in wealth distribution that the situation needed corrections. Plus, we have seen the financial sector being expanded progressively to rule above anything else. Which would have been OK, if people would not lose compass and understanding of what the financial sector was there to do: service the demand for money. It has long passed that function…the Madoff case in the US just proves how greedy and unscrupulous people have become. And how little the state did to protect the economy and the people from them.

Then I’ve seen the riots in Greece. I still fail to see the point of destroying private property like mad, but I guess some extremists see this as a method of settling the bill. However, pointless violence apart -I was really happy to see people on the streets peacefully protesting about dire life conditions. And Greece is an EU member state – with 20% unemployment, with 20% of people living below the poverty line, with a seriously deteriorated educational system and little optimism left. All this after the bling-bling of the Olympics in 2004. I’m actually surprised there are no more riots…

So, long live the Lisbon Strategy.

To put in perspective the Greek riots. Madoff rips off some 50 billion dollars, but no one goes to the streets. Have you also noted that no one was protesting on Wall Street when Lehman Brothers went bust and when investment banks massively laid off their workers…? Let’s see if there will be people on the streets once Ford, GM and Chrysler go bust.

I bet you they will show up in masses.

This comes at least to me as a surprise, but on a second thought – was there any way out? In the last 17 years both NATO and the EU have tried to steer away from this issue, saying it was not related to the memebership in the two organisations. NATO was to fall first at the Summit in Bucharest this April, EU followed suit with the European Council meeting in June (PDF).

The EU was, to use a nice metaphor that Jon really likes, “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. In addition to the June European Council, the elections in Macedonia just before didn’t go very smooth (see news here). The long awaited invitation to start accession negotiations with the EU therefore didn’t follow with the Progress Reports on the 5th November.

But let’s speculate on the reasons why Macedonia made this move:

1) To set the issue aside of any pending membership applications: this would be smart, if it wasn’t for one detail = they did so unilaterally. It would have been better of course to agree with Greece to submit the issue of the name as such to the court, instead of waiting for the “mediators” to suggest a solution. Now the suit is only about the Greeks’ role, not about the name issue

2) It was done for domestic political reasons: after the less-than-perfect elections and the negative response from the EU, both the Government and the President (although less-than-friends) were perhaps happy to distract the public.

3) There is nothing they can lose: any move towards the EU will not come in the foreseeable future, unless the name is settled. After the offer of candidate status was made to Serbia (=that would put Macedonia and Serbia at the same stage in the enlargement process), the Macedonian authorities simply let it go.

Probably it was a combination of all three. Let’s see how it goes…Bear in mind Macedonia still has some internal issues to solve.