A Bit More Detail

• 3 Quarks Daily writes about the ways in which Cuba, and Havana, have been seen in the American imagination.


• Antipope Charlie Stross solicits suggestions as to what he should print with a 3-D printer.


• Crooked Timber is alarmist about the United States, making comparisons to Pakistan and to Weimar Germany.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the simulated atmospheres of warm Neptunes.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Russians are leaving France without their Mistral carriers and that Russia is talking about building its own space station.


• Joe. My. God. notes that an Argentine court has given an orangutan limited rights.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that transgendered workers now have legal protection in the United States.


• Marginal Revolution reflects on the new Nicaragua Canal and is skeptical about Cuba's economic potential.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw links to an essay examining how New Zealand set the global 2% inflation target.


• The Search looks at one effort in digitizing and making searchable centuries of book images.


• Towleroad looks at Taiwan's progress towards marriage equality and notes the refusal of the archbishop of Canterbury to explain the reasons for his opposition to equal marriage.


• Window on Eurasia notes the different effects of the collapse in oil prices on Russia's different reasons, looks at language conflicts in the Russian republics, and observes the revival of Belarusian nationalism.

• Centauri Dreams notes the thinking of Martin Rees and Freeman Dyson on the diaspora of life beyond Earth, noting that it's going to require as much adaptation to new environments as it will (would?) the adaptation of existing environments.


• D-Brief notes theory about planetary system formation suggesting that suggestive gaps in protoplanetary discs of gas and dust don't necessarily reveal planets.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird links to the recent paper suggesting that tide-locked red dwarf planets are much more likely to be habitable than previously thought.


• Geocurrents analyses the possibility that Iran might be divided between a conservative Persian-speaking core and reformist peripheries.


• GNXP's Razib Khan notes evidence from Ethiopia suggesting that there has been immigration into Africa as well out of the continent.


• Registan describes a Chinese copper mining project in Afghanistan that never quire took off.


• Savage Minds' Rex reviews William McNeill's biography of historian Arnold J. Toynbee.


• Strange Maps maps the leading causes of death by continent.


• Supernova Condensate describes the possibility of life-supporting environments on Europa, not only in the subsurface ocean but in lakes located in the ice crust.


• Window on Eurasia quotes a Tatar nationalist who argues that Tatarstan can be to Russia what Lithuania was to the former Soviet Union, i.e. the unit which breaks the country apart.

When Egyptian Christian Kerollos Maher watched on television as petrol bombs and rocks rained on Cairo's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral he had only one thought - emigration.

"Egypt is no longer my country," said the 24-year-old construction worker, standing in the courtyard of the country's largest cathedral where one Copt and one Muslim died in sectarian clashes this week.

"The situation of Christians is worsening from day to day. I've given up hope that things will improve," he said.

Christians, who make up a tenth of Egypt's 84 million people, have been worrying about the rise of militant Islamists since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

But after days of fighting at the cathedral and a town outside Cairo killing eight - the worst sectarian strife since Islamist President Mohamed Mursi was elected in June - many Copts now question whether they have a future in Egypt.

An angry young fringe of a community that has lived in Egypt since the earliest days of Christianity may also be turning to violence.

"The attack on the cathedral was the crossing of a red line," said Michael Sanouel, a 23-year old technician in a steel plant. Sanouel rushed to the cathedral "to defend it" when he heard about the clashes that lasted more than five hours.

"I have been looking for a while for a job abroad, in Italy or Germany," he said, standing next to a piece of charred wood from a tree hit by a petrol bomb hurled over the compound wall.

"I have two children but I don't want them to grow up under a Muslim Brotherhood regime," said Sanouel, who slept in the cathedral compound like dozens of others after the clashes, ready to defend it if more confrontations erupted.

Spain's parliament is expected on to take the first steps towards declaring bullfighting a key part of the country's cultural heritage in an attempt to revitalise a dwindling, if gory, tradition.

A popular petition, signed by 590,000 people, seeks to have the bullfight formally categorised as an asset of cultural interest - a move that would give promoters tax breaks and allow them to flout a ban imposed by local authorities in the eastern region of Catalonia.

The conservative People's party of prime minister Mariano Rajoy, which holds an absolute majority in parliament, has already said it will back the petition and start the process of turning it into law.

This comes as figures released by the culture ministry show bullfighting is in the middle of an historic decline, with Spaniards gradually turning their backs on it and recession seeing public money to fund fights dry up.

Between 2007 and 2011, the number of fights dropped from 3,650 a year to just 2,290. Of the latter, top class fights involving professional bullfighters or horse-borne rejoneadores and bulls aged three or above accounted for just 1,120 fights. Only 560 fights were of top rank matadors against full-grown bulls.

Numbers are believed to have dropped further in 2012, when Spain fell back into a double-dip recession, public austerity saw even less public funding for bullfights and the Catalan ban came into effect.

Pauline Marois says she looks forward to chatting about independence next week — not to helping achieve it.

She will meet with Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, during a stop in Edinburgh on Jan. 29.

Marois says she knows his pro-independence Scottish National Party has observed her Parti Québécois with interest and she's ready to answer any questions Salmond might have.

"I will obviously not interfere in their politics or decisions," Marois told a news conference Tuesday.

"But you know they have observed Quebec quite a bit, and our experiences. Mr. Salmond will surely have some questions to ask me."

So what is the meeting's objective?

"My objective is not necessarily to make a contribution, to have an influence, but it's really an exchange between political people who have similar perspectives on certain subjects, such as achieving more powers and on the means for achieving powers or becoming independent," she said.

Unlike the Scottish nationalists, the PQ has already held two referendums in failed attempts at independence over the years but currently has no timetable for a third such vote.

The SNP, on the other hand, is now planning to hold its first such referendum after being elected with a majority government for the first time since the creation of the modern Scottish parliament.

Although the PQ and the SNP have forged ties over the years, it will be the first time their respective leaders meet while in power.

Their movements do share a familiar obstacle: less-than-favourable polls.

Surveys peg support for Scottish independence at levels that suggest it might be hard to achieve when the referendum takes place in the fall of 2014.

From a Scots-Canadian perspective, the closest parallel between Scotland and anywhere else is not Quebec, Ireland, Iceland, or Norway — it’s Canada. Indeed, it is Groundhog Day for people like me who lived in Canada for many years and live in Scotland now.

Scottish government rhetoric in favour of multiculturalism and immigration distinguishes it from other parts of the British body politic, but is very familiar to Canadian ears.

Ditto a recent consultation on gay marriage that unleashed exactly the same apocalyptic arguments against it that were heard in Canada before it was legalized in 1995.

Ditto the headline debate at the last Scottish National Party conference that confirmed party policy on withdrawing nuclear weapons from Scotland but voted in favour of membership of NATO. That debate raged in Canada from the 1960s until the squadron at Comox on Vancouver Island flew the last nuclear weapons back to the United States in 1984, leaving Canada a non-nuclear member of NATO.

This paralleling of the Canadian experience in Scotland has gone largely unnoticed on both sides of the Atlantic. Over here, comparisons between Scotland and Canada tend to be seen as historical rather than contemporary; in Canada anything with the words ‘independence’ or ‘referendum’ attached to it is viewed through the prism of Quebec.

However, there is definitely something going on, even if it is subliminal. It’s almost de rigueur in Scotland for politicians and others to use the saying “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation” and attribute it to Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. In fact, Gray paraphrased it from a line in Canadian Dennis Lee’s iconic poem Civil Elegies published in the early 1970s. Back then, Pierre Trudeau was reinventing Canada as a European-style social democracy with a unique maple-leaf twist.

The leaders of Albania and Kosovo vowed to achieve unity for ethnic Albanians in the region during the centennial celebration of Albania's independence in the Macedonian capital Sunday but said it should be "within EU boundaries".

"Through the European Union we are going to realise the project of our national unity," Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha told some 10,000 people in Skopje.

Berisha insisted that states bordering Albania should not fear this unity.

"I urge all the neighbours to understand that the national unity of Albanians is nothing wrong," he said, cheered by a crowd chanting "Great Albania" and waving Albanian red flags.

His words were echoed by Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci, who said that Albanians in the region, including the minorities in Serbia and Macedonia, were "stronger than ever and should work together."

[. . .]

No incidents were reported during the celebration, which has heightened tensions in Macedonia, prompting police to step up security and Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska to appeal for calm amid fears of possible inter-ethnic violence.

Several incidents had been reported in recent days, with youths setting ablaze the flags of rival communities in Skopje and the Albanian-dominated northwestern town of Tetovo.

A leader of Macedonia's ethnic Albanians and former guerilla leader-turned-politician, Ali Ahmeti, whose party organised Sunday's celebration, also called for respect because "a nation that seeks its rights can not disrespect the rights of others."

The tide is turning, Catalan filmmaker Josep Citutat tells me. "Something is changing so fast. A lot of people around me, family and friends, who weren't independent – now they are." Record numbers marching on the streets outside his flat in Barcelona confirm his judgment.

Around 1.5 million people were thought to have filled the streets of the Catalan capital last earlier this month. Independentistes poured in from around the region, creating a sea of yellow and red up and down the famous boulevards.

The strength of the protest was no surprise given the dire economic condition in the debt-addled region of a country suffering the worst of the eurozone crisis. As Europe has seen before, economic suffering is feeding nationalist sentiment.

History aside, a portion of this growing antagonism has its origins in the imbalance between what Catalans contribute to central government in Madrid and what they get back in return. The idea that they are supporting the rest of Spain, which is close to collapse, breeds resentment and mirrors similar reactions in northern Europe over the eurozone crisis in general.

[. . .]

Laid bare, Catalonia accounts for approximately 20 per cent of Spain’s economic output, but holds 15 per cent of the population. Economists estimate that Catalonia pays €12bn more in taxes per year to Madrid than it gets back to spend. Many Catalans put this estimation as high as €16bn.

Catalans also pay more than anywhere else in Spain, on average, for property conveyances, health care, vehicle registration, highway tolls and income tax (which rests at 49 per cent in the highest bracket).

Just last month the region asked Madrid for a €5bn bailout, despite cutting faster and deeper than many of the other 17 autonomous regions.

And all this amid Catalonia’s own crisis. Just last month the region asked Madrid for a €5bn bailout, despite cutting faster and deeper than many of the other 17 autonomous regions. The anger caused by the cuts makes Catalans feel they are subsidising Spain more than ever - galvanising the independence movement further.

• Catalonia, unlike Québec, is a "have" territory within its country and continent; it's economically more productive than any Spanish region apart from the Basque Country, contributes more to the Spanish federal budget than it receives. Questions of economic viabiility that might be fairly raised for Québec don't obviously appear for Catalonia.
  
• Catalonia, unlike Québec, is embedded in a regional federation of states of varying sizes and levels of development, none clearly dominant over the others, to which an independent Catalonia could plausibly join. Outside of the Canadian federation, the United States could be potentially overwhelming. Catalonia in the European Union isn't implausible.

The key issue here is that the threat of independence is very much empty. Unlike Scotland’s case, there is no political deal to break in Spain. Catalonia never accepted terms for a union with other parts of Spain, but was one of four regions brought into the Spanish fold through the merger of the crowns of Castille and Aragon, in the 15th century.

The U.K.’s unwritten constitution, for all its merits, is no brake to Scottish independence. The Spanish constitution, verbose as it is, includes specific provisions against the independence of any of the country’s regions. These provisions would also block a vote for such a move—unless it is held in the whole of Spain, as the constitution establishes all Spaniards are holders of indivisible sovereignty.

Beyond legal stuff, then there’s political reality. Catalonia is the largest economy of any Spanish region, and larger than Greece’s, but depends heavily on trade with the rest of Spain.

Javier Díaz-Giménez, a IESE business school professor, says economists have a term for this: “local goods bias.” Catalonia-based businesses know perfectly well that their economic ties with Spain after a potential independence would be very much frayed. That’s why the head of the main Spanish business association, a Catalan, last week openly came out against independence.

Politically, the odds are also against Mr. Mas.

Catalonia, like the rest of Spain, is strongly pro-European Union. But the one immediate, obvious and undeniable effect of Catalan independence would be secession from the EU, a group of countries of which the state of Catalonia is not a member.

By giving its blessing to an obscure festival that propagates the ties between the Hungarian nation and the tribes of Central Asia through a theory with historical and living links to the Hungarian extreme right, Orban’s Fidesz party has tossed another explosive device into relations between Budapest and the rest of Europe.

Up to a quarter of a million visitors descended on the plain near the small town of Bugac in central Hungary this past weekend for the fourth annual Kurultaj, a gathering of tribal chiefs and national folklore groups that pay lip service to the tradition of Turanism.

The Turanians, so the theory runs, were a tribe of Iranian origin led by the mighty Tur. They were later identified with the Turks and later still embraced as forebears by several Central Asian nations in search of their ultimate origins. Most modern scholars regard this as an ungrounded theory, a modern legend.

In Hungary, the belief in the Magyars’ Turanian origins took hold in right-wing circles between the wars, a time when a part of the Hungarian elite sought cures for the trauma of the Trianon Treaty and the loss of two-thirds of the Hungarian empire’s territory and a third of its population. Far more dangerous than the Turan I – Hungary’s only domestic tank during World War II, built on license from Czechoslovakia’s Skoda works – Turanism became part of the ideological arsenal of the Hungarian Arrow Cross fascists.

The Arrow Cross line leads directly to the members and fellow travelers of today’s extreme-right Jobbik party, marked among other things by its undisguised anti-Semitism. With cynical irony you could remark that Jobbik’s public support for the anti-Israel statements of Iranian leaders stems not just from ideology but also from the belief in a shared ancestry.

For the first time this year, the Kurultaj festival became a semi-official event, although until now it’s been associated mainly with Jobbik. Marton Gyongyosi, the deputy chairman of Jobbik and of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, spoke last weekend of the need to seek the roots of the Hungarian nation in the east, the MTI news agency reported. He talked of the fictional Finno-Ugric theory “by which the Hungarians’ enemies try to undermine them,” and praised the official governmental “opening to the East” policy – which is nothing more than Budapest’s attempt to extricate itself from diplomatic isolation in Europe by looking for friends in Asia.

The musty theory of Turanism serves this purpose excellently. Tribal leaders were welcomed in parliament by deputy speaker and Fidesz member Sandor Leszak, and the government donated $310,000 to the Kurultaj organization. This weekend parliament saw not just oldsters in exotic folk costumes on its Secession-style benches, but also displays of battle scenes and falconry, among other things.

[. . .]

The Hungarian government’s cozying up to a mythology exploited by fascists is taking place against a backdrop of the “rehabilitation” of the interwar dictator Miklos Horthy – he’s had streets renamed after him and a statue of him erected – and international criticism of rising anti-Semitism in Hungary. It could be grounds to surmise that Orban and his party are nearer to the extremists of Jobbik than Europeans had previously thought.

[B]eginning with his 2007 election, Sarkozy began to change that. Sarkozy’s economic policies and his stance on major foreign-relations issues might change from day to day, but on Quebec he was consistent—and more hostile toward separatists than any of his predecessors.

Sarkozy’s best Canadian friend is the steadfastly federalist Power Corporation CEO Paul Desmarais. On a 2008 visit to Quebec City, Sarkozy became the first modern French president to come down openly against separatism. “I don’t see how proof of fraternal, familial love for Quebec has to feed proof of defiance toward Canada,” he said. “Frankly, if there’s someone who would tell me that the world today needs another division, then we don’t have the same view of the world.”

Enter the new guy. Hollande is a socialist and Harper really isn’t, and Conservatives in Ottawa worried that Hollande would differentiate himself from Sarkozy by retreating from his predecessor’s pro-federalist stance. But to their surprise, senior French and Canadian sources say the two leaders have managed to get off to a good start together.

Even on Quebec. On that election-night phone call, Hollande referred to “une amitié et un cousinage” with Canada and Quebec, which could translate as a reference to France’s Canadian friends and its cousins in Quebec. Note-takers and public-service parsers on the Canadian side noted the resemblance to Sarkozy’s preferred language: “amitié et fraternité,” friends and brothers.

Two weeks later they were at Barack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland for a G8 summit. In their first face-to-face meeting, Hollande said two things about Quebec to Harper. First, that France sees its relations with Quebec and its relations with all of Canada to be parallel, harmonious and essentially synonymous. Second, that Hollande has no intention of disrupting that state of affairs.

Both French and Canadian sources interpret those comments as a continuation of Sarkozy’s line on the whole business, which was in turn viewed as an unusually pro-federalist departure from past practice. So Sarkozy left his Quebec brothers, or at least the Péquistes among them, out in the cold—and Hollande seems content to prolong that diplomatic isolation.