14 NEWS Best columns: Europe
ROMANIA
Mexican authorities outrageously mistreated more
than 100 Romanian tourists, said Gabriel Bejan,
yet our media excused the abuse. Two planeloads
of Romanian families disembarked at Cancún’s
international airport late last month, expecting
to begin a relaxing vacation in the sun. Instead,
Mexican guards confiscated their passports and
phones and for three days held them in three
small rooms at the airport. They were kept there
“without enough water and food,” forced to sleep
on the floor and go to the bathroom under armed
guard. Wealthy people who expected to spend
money on the Mayan Riviera were instead treated“like homeless people in makeshift prisons.” The
Mexican press speculated that police took a hard
line because Romanian criminals had recently been
caught cloning tourists’ ATM cards and draining
their bank accounts. And just like that, our own
pundits justified the detentions. Analysts on TV
deplored Romanian corruption and pointed out
that five of the tourists were ultimately deported as
security threats. But Romanians do not “deserve to
be mistreated in droves just because some of them
break the law.” The belief that we merit collective
punishment is proof that Romanians still have “an
inferiority complex” from our Communist past.The “powerful American consulting firm” McKin-
sey has been the force behind President Emmanuel
Macron since the very start of his political career,
said François Krug. The French were surprised to
discover last month that McKinsey was running
this country’s vaccine rollout—a program that is
one of the slowest in Europe. When Le Monde
tried to look into the notoriously secretive firm,
we had to deal with countless “unanswered mes-
sages, categorical refusals, embarrassed apologies,
and compassionate expressions of ‘Good luck!’”
But we have now discovered that Macron’s con-
tacts with the firm go back to 2007. At the time,
he was a young government financial inspectoron an economic reform commission with Eric
Labaye, then head of McKinsey in France. When
Macron created his Republic on the Move party
in 2016 with an eye to the presidency, a dozen
McKinsey employees assisted in his economic
analyses and his campaign to survey French citi-
zens on their complaints—and seemingly, they
were doing that work pro bono. Once Macron
was in office, two former McKinsey associates
took top roles in his party and one took a job in
his cabinet, and Macron appointed Labaye head
of the prestigious École Polytechnique. This firm is
everywhere in the Macron administration—but it
answers to “headquarters in the U.S.”GettyWe’re barely a month into the post- Brexit
world and “the tortured question of the
Irish border” is already causing prob-
lems, said Arthur Beesley in the Finan-
cial Times. During Britain’s withdrawal
negotiations with the European Union,
both parties agreed that they wouldn’t
allow a hard border between the Repub-
lic of Ireland—an EU member—and the
U.K. province of Northern Ireland. Mili-
tary checkpoints had dotted that border
during the decades-long conflict between
pro-U.K. unionists and nationalists who
wanted a united Ireland, and those bar-
riers were removed as part of the 1998 Good Friday agreement
that ended the violence. To avoid the need for new checkpoints,
the EU and U.K. agreed that the North would effectively remain
in the EU’s single market. Goods now flow freely from Ireland
to the North, and from the North to the rest of the U.K. But
meat, fish, and other goods arriving in the North from the British
mainland have to be inspected on arrival to ensure they meet EU
regulations. This red tape has resulted in empty shelves in North-
ern Irish supermarkets, because many U.K. suppliers have de-
cided that shipping goods to such a small market isn’t worth the
customs headache. Unionist lawmakers in Northern Ireland now
want the border protocol scrapped, saying it endangers the U.K.’s
territorial integrity, and inspections at some ports were halted last
week after threats from suspected unionist paramilitaries.The possibility of violence is real, said Ivan Little in the Belfast
Telegraph. Masked gangs of unionist “bully boys” have staged
marches and sprayed anti-EU graffiti across the province, andthere have been claims of militants
recording the license plates of port
workers—who some extremists
accuse of aiding the nationalist
cause. Police say they have no evi-
dence that unionist paramilitaries
have threatened staff, but “if the
intimidation didn’t emanate from
the main terrorist groups,” who
is responsible? No sensible union-
ist supports these thuggish threats,
said Ben Lowry in the Belfast News
Letter. But there is “justified anger”
over “the Irish Sea border betrayal.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed during Brexit negotiations
that he’d keep our country united, yet the people of Northern
Ireland are now being treated as second-class British citizens. And
he did all this to appease Irish nationalist lawmakers in Belfast
and Dublin, who dropped ominous hints in the wake of the 2016
Brexit referendum that any border checkpoints within the island
of Ireland might be targeted by IRA terrorists.The potential dangers of a “permanent crisis in Northern Ireland
cannot be overstated,” said Patrick Cockburn in Independent .co.
uk. No matter whether the border between the EU and the U.K.
is located on land or in the Irish Sea, this frontier will remain “a
disputed no-man’s land where two communities struggle cease-
lessly for dominance.” The problem will surely dominate U.K.-
EU relations for decades to come and generate flash point after
flash point. There will be “much bad political blood” between
London and Brussels. We can only hope actual blood won’t be
spilled in Northern Ireland.Why do we
always blame
ourselves?
Gabriel Bejan
HotNews.ro
FRANCE
Brexit has disrupted food supplies to Northern Ireland.Consultants
are running
the show
François Krug
Le Monde
United Kingdom: New troubles in Northern Ireland?