EU From Finland With Love and to Germany

Well Finns can relax over Christmas as most still want to do. Family stuff over Xmas remains important to the majority of Finns. Holiday time. No longer are Finns seen as being a kind of manager of EU things. After December it is Germany that takes this gift from the democratic Greeks. Germany will be presidential. But over the last 24 hours the Finnish establishment has been putting words into journlists mouths and succeeding to get them repeated in print. The words say that Finland is satisfied, all went rather well and pats on backs everywhere.

But for some time a few writers and broadcasters have tried to get closer to the truth. This last 6 months has done but 2 things. One for Finland and the second a little bit of help against UK-USA foreign policy in the Middle East. That is about all. Six months of hard work, toil and expertise and ..... ?

All the rest was a quite typical EU cock-up of predictable proportions. Turkey? Global warming? ........ Russian cooperation ........ and more. All rather much of a failure say the "other voices" that managed to get into print.

Finland gained a new centre for chemical quality control, an EU agency ( over 500 jobs), to research and test and inspect the use of chemicals. Good for Finland and Finns and we hope good for Europeans too. Success. OK ( So long as bad chemical weapons of mass destruction are included in all this - which they most certainly will not !!!) But anyway this EU agency was needed.

A Finnish diplomacy, along with others of course, did manage to soften the blows dealt by Bush and Blair in the Middle East. Problem is Bush and Blair learnt nothing from that process. Bush and Blair do not do "learning by doing with others". Bush-Blair ways are knowing and doing against others. So this Finn-EU success is limited. So that is the two things really ... Oh sorry ... EU consitutional matters ... umm ... over to Germany.

Mrs Germany is saying that she will do a little better ( no examples given yet). Maybe she means that Germany will keep a little bit and change a little bit of the "Constitution" and also put on hold a little bit. That would be a real success now for the EU.