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Friday, February 27th, 2004
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9:57a
( What are my Battle Fishies statistics? )
( Which Family Guy character am I? )
current mood:  amused (comment on this)
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8:42p - [NON-BLOG] Generic Update
Things have gone nicely. The weekly English grad students' coffee hour was enjoyable. Too, I was able to vet my proposal for my final paper in my Laurence Sterne class (the relationship of Yorick, in A Sentimental Journey, to France and French culture as a sympathetic yet English observer), and go for a swim in the PEC. Then came, in the evening, a Kingston livejournalers' get-together in the Sleepless Goat. (That link, incidentally, leads to pictures. I'm the guy with dark hair, glasses, and a goatee.) Today was slow, but Fight Club, now.
Tomorrow, me and a few friends will go see Monster. Aileen Wuornos' story is oddly captivating, if only because it shows what some people on the margins of society can become, in rather graphic and horrifying detail. Too, business networking skills hosted Thursday the 4th in the evening at Dupuis Hall by Catherine Bell.
current mood:  tired
current music: Republica, "Ready to Go" (5 comments |comment on this)
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9:49p - [BRIEF NOTE] Morocco and the European Union
The European Union has quite a few peripheries unlikely to join the European Union for some time yet. Take the states of the west Balkans--Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of), non-Yugoslav Albania, and, perhaps one day, Kosova. Had Yugoslavia remained united, three of these states (possibly four, depending on how you see the Serbian-Montenegrin relationship) would have been ready to join the European Union. Yugoslavia was, after all, the most prosperous and liberal of Europe's Communist states. The Wars of Yugoslav Secession changed this. Ukraine and Moldova might be culturally European, and extraordinarily dependent on the future EU-25 for whatever prosperity and stability they might enjoy, but their very desperation makes them unsuitable candidates. Turkey has tried to get into the European Union for forty decades and is only now getting up to the minimal standards of membership.
And then, there's Morocco. As Uganda's New Vision has noted, Morocco's government and people are quite eager to distance themselves from Africa.
This land of 30.5 million, whose coastline is washed by both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, is geographically misplaced in Africa, so its people love to think.
It could as well have been designated part of Europe, being separated from Spain by just the seven-mile wide Strait of Gibraltar. Though racially considered an Arab land, half of its population speaks French as their mother tongue. Spanish, the other colonial language, is widely spoken too.
For the better part of the 38 years during which Hassan was in power, he was convinced Morocco rightly belonged to Europe so much that the country's policies were decided not in Rabat but in Paris and Madrid.
( Read more... )
Morocco, like Turkey, might be a Westernized Muslim country close to Europe and its Union in more ways than one. However. Turkey might be poor by European Union standards, but it at least is a relatively modern society: mostly urban, modestry industrial, politically modern. Morocco, for its part, remains a rural and tribal society, fundamentally poor and underdeveloped, still run by a fairly authoritarian monarchy.
As the BBC observed, more than 60% of Morocco's exports might go to the European Union, and Europe provides "most of Morocco's tourists, remittances and loans." Morocco might even have a free-trade deal with the European Union that has already caused many European textile companies to relocate to the country for cheap labour. So far, though, in a world economy where free trade and unrestrained flows of finance and (non-dual-use) technology coexist alongside the restriction of labour movements to and from the countries at the heart of the world economy, though, Morocco (and individual Moroccans, of course) look set to be kept perpetually outside the European Union. The best symbol of this might lie in the status of physical connections between Morocco and the European Union:
A hint might lie in the fate of the bridge planned to span the Straits of Gibraltar.
Announcing the project in 1988, the late King Hassan undertook to complete it before 2000. Work has yet to begin.
current mood:  sympathetic
current music: Laibach, "The Final Countdown (Juno Reactor Version)" (18 comments |comment on this)
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