The Berbers

IN MOROCCO their language has been made official. In Algeria they lead protests against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s regime. In Tunisia they are rediscovering a long-suppressed identity. In Libya they man the rebels’ western front in the mountains south of the capital still held by Muammar Qaddafi. Even in Egypt’s oasis of Siwa, near Libya’s border, Berbers are finding that the revolution has given them a chance to revive their cultural rights.

“There is a Berber renaissance taking place across north Africa,” enthuses Mounir Kejji, a Moroccan Berber campaigner. In his country a new constitution, endorsed in a referendum on July 1st, officially recognises the Berber language for the first time, though parliament will decide what this means in practice; Arab nationalists and many Islamists have long demanded that Arabic be the sole language of administration and state education.

The authoritarian Arab nationalist regimes that dominated the region used to accuse the Berbers of threatening national cohesion. Now, shaken and in some cases overthrown, they have seen Berber activism take on a new lease of life. Even where they are a minority of only a few thousand, as in Egypt and Tunisia, Berbers have been able for the first time to form community associations.

Libya’s rebellion is fiercest in the Nafusa Mountains, a Berber heartland long neglected by the government. Colonel Qaddafi has refused to acknowledge Berber culture for most of his reign, describing it as “colonialism’s poison” intended to divide the country. Only in 2006, apparently after his son Seif al-Islam intervened, did he lift a ban on the use of Berber names.

Berbers make up about 5% of Libya’s 6m-7m people, though some activists put the figure higher. In recent weeks they have set up a radio station. The rebel-controlled Libya TV, based in Qatar, now broadcasts in Tamazight, the Berber tongue, for two hours a day. In June, says Mr Kejji, a delegation of Libyan Berbers affiliated to the rebels’ Transitional National Council put a linguistic query to their Moroccan counterparts: how should they write “army”and “national security” in Tamazight, so that Libyan uniforms could have a badge in their own language alongside Arabic?

A written script for the various Berber dialects was created only in the 20th century. Algeria’s Kabyles, a Berber people said to number 4m, have usually preferred the Latin alphabet, whereas a Tuareg alphabet, called Tifinagh, is now officially used in Morocco and has been adopted by Libyan Berbers who were banned from using it under the colonel. (The Tuareg are nomadic Berber pastoralists living mainly in southern Algeria, eastern Mali and western Niger.)

The Berber revival has rekindled enthusiasm for pan-Berber solidarity. “There’s an awareness among Berbers across north Africa of that element of their identity which they share,” says Hugh Roberts, an expert on the Maghreb. But each country in the region, he says, has its own particularities. The dream of creating a community of 20m-plus people (estimates of the total vary widely), stretching from Egypt’s western desert to the Atlantic, would be stymied by the multiplicity of Berber dialects and by the variety of political circumstances. “A single Berber identity exists only virtually—on the internet and among diaspora intellectuals,” says Mr Roberts.

Indonesia - 237m people, 17K islands

Top 10 Aspiring Nations

According to Time magazine, the followings are the countries with most possibilities to become independent States:

1. Scotland
2. The Basque Country
3. Tibet
4. South Ossetia
5. Kurdistan
6. Quebec
7. Western Sahara
8. The Republic of Cascadia
9. Padania
10. Second Vermont Republic

We are not very sure if number 8 and 10 are just jokes or Time reflects the historical American ignorance about the world - not mentioning, among others, Tirol or Catalonia. As someone said "War is the tool God uses to teach Geography to Americans".

Click the headline for link to original article in Time.

4th July - Independence Is Good

Flanders & Scotland

All hail Belgium. Plucky little Belgium is now showing the way against the corporatist cardinals of Europe's mother church. On Monday this week the separatist New Flemish Alliance secured most seats in the Belgian assembly. The party leader, Bart de Wever, favours "evolutionary evaporation" of the Belgian state and the emergence of Flanders as a freestanding member of the European Union. Sooner or later, he will get his way.

In 1992 (but on 1 April) the Times published a front-page story pegged to a Belgian public service strike reporting a secret plan for Flanders to rejoin the Netherlands. French-speaking Wallonia would go to France and Brussels become the independent capital of Europe. An editorial remarked that "the dissolution of Belgium comes as a shock", especially as a radio shutdown meant Belgians were "unable to check the date". The paper was inundated by enraged Belgians who, despite producing Magritte and Tintin, lacked a sense of humour.

The Times was 18 years ahead of itself. The joke is coming to pass in the corridors of Brussels. Belgium has been an artificial construct since its invention in 1830. Until recently the Flemish-speaking 6.5 million were dominated by the French-speaking four million in Wallonia. The country never evolved the customary institutions of a unitary state, such as nationwide parties, a single language or a common media and political discourse. Everything was north versus south.

Since the 1980s Flanders and Wallonia have been given ever more devolution, as has the French-speaking Brussels enclave within Flanders. Each round has yielded a desire for more. Over the past two decades Belgium has ceded to Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels services such as health, education, development, agriculture, even foreign trade treaties. Only taxation and social security are national, and these are the proximate cause of Flemings' anger, since their taxes pour south to finance Wallonia's "social dependents".

During the election Wallonia's socialist leader, Elio di Rupo, ignored Europe's economic crisis by calling for ever more transfers from Flanders, for higher state spending on health and pensions and for price controls on food. Belgium is thus a microcosm of the EU, a treaty state in which political entities claim resources by territorial negotiation. The result was inevitable. Just as German taxpayers are finally fed up with subsidising Greek pensioners, so Flemings are fed up with subsidising Walloons.

In these circumstances Belgium's elite has looked to supranational bodies such as Nato and the EU for its status, even as statehood disintegrates beneath its feet. Despite being the battlefield for Europe's wars throughout history, Belgians have no enemies other than themselves. Why should they be expected to cohabit in coalitions that notoriously take months to form and weeks to collapse?

However much Euro-enthusiasts wish it were otherwise, the craving for lower tier self-government refuses to die. Indeed, it is booming. In Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, even the UK, concession after concession is made to devolutionary sentiment. It is made with a patronising nod at the parish-pump quaintness of separatist leaders, dubbed populist, extremist or right-wing, never just democratic.

To the Economist, de Wever is a "populist bruiser". To the Times, his success has "potentially disastrous implications" for Europe. Similar language is used of the Italians' Northern League, Scotland's nationalists and Spain's Catalans. No one says why. To modern Eurocrats, localists are merely below the salt.

Countries dissolve when the political logic that held them together dissolves. There is no reason why an independent Flanders should not be as resilient as Slovakia, Slovenia, Ireland or the Baltic states. Bigness is no guarantee of prosperity, usually the opposite. Big statism is a hangover from 20th-century imperialism and the needs of perpetual war. It is now claimed for globalisation, but as that draws power away from democratic institutions, so the self-governing urge claws it back.

The crisis in the euro was the widely predicted result of the EU's leaders running faster economically than they could ever walk politically. At first they thought they could even out the performance of nations by transferring huge sums from rich to poor. This infuriated the rich and enslaved the poor in dependency. The move from what was a free-trade union to what is touted as a "fiscal-transfer union" has gone beyond what is tolerable to the disparate European electorates who must foot the bill. The euro saga is Belgium times 10.

The European movement now mimics the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century. Its popes and cardinals, in perpetual conclave, fear Protestant dissent on all sides yet do nothing but reassert the dogma of ever-closer union and demand that everyone works for a "better Europe". Rebellious provinces must be suppressed. Any move to democratic referendum, such as in 2005, must be ignored. Top-down edicts pour forth and cash is lavished on subordinate governments. Should a Verdian Don Carlos emerge "to defend the glorious cause of Flanders", he must be wiped out by the Inquisition or ridiculed by the press.

The best analysis of this phenomenon remains Larry Siedentop's Democracy in Europe, which argued, in 2000, that the union was doomed without a legitimacy beyond the synthetic nonsense of the European parliament. Language, geography, history, kinship and customs of consent had to be recognised as the building blocks of a new democracy. Siedentop called for English as the common European language, the evolution of a collective political class, more respect for localism and a European senate. It was not enough to consign national and sub-national identities to a department of minority languages, funny clothes, country dancing and cheese.

The one thing Siedentop did not contemplate, writing still in the 20th century, was that the major premise of his analysis might simply be rejected by Europe's peoples. They might no longer regard it as essential to their security and prosperity to enter a union to finance the spendthrift welfare of Greece and Spain. A new generation might not see the corruption of Brussels as "a price worth paying" to avoid a third world war. Flanders might simply want to rule itself.

Since the debacle of the Lisbon referendums, Euro-pluralism has emerged as proof against ever closer union. The Single European Act of 1986 appears to have been a sort of psychological boundary, beyond which political unity should not have strayed. Go too far, as did the Lisbon treaty, and the threads would snap. Europe would lose touch with its component countries, and they would lose touch with their subnational identities. In extremis, they would face break-up, as have Spain, Austria and now Belgium. The history of enforced European union has, after all, been a long parade of catastrophic dictatorship.

When a country – let alone a continent – lacks the bonds of a collective nationhood it is no longer a country, merely a state. Nations forged in war do not necessarily survive peace. Belgium may retain the trappings of sovereignty, a monarch, an army, a customs union and (perhaps) a football team. But taxes and cross-subsidies will only be acceptable within self-governing communities with a shared sense of co-responsibility, not across whole continents.

Ignoring this maxim is what is sorely testing the eurozone and is breaking Belgium. Nor should the UK think itself immune. Devolution everywhere is a political one-way ticket. After Flanders, Scotland.

by Simon Jenkins

The Real Europe Speaks

George according to Patrick

I always thought there was something funny about England. When I was a child in Ireland, we would watch That's Life! on the BBC on a Sunday night and see the locals roar with laughter at funny-shaped vegetables or dogs that said the word "sausages". I'll be honest: we laughed too.

And then Esther Rantzen's tone would darken. Without warning, we would be plunged into the miserable lives of children growing up in damp public housing, watching parents who filled their children's bottles with fruit juice and rotted their teeth being shamed or – the one I'll always remember – hearing the heart-wrenching story of an elderly couple duped out of their life savings by a travelling con man. On that particular occasion, Rantzen showed us a photo-fit. "Maybe you've seen him," she said, staring straight down the lens. "Maybe he approached you, maybe you saw him at a petrol station, a pub or a restaurant. Look around you. Maybe he's sitting in the room with you right now."

I looked around. The only people in the room were my parents and my sister. I tried to imagine a chain of events that would lead to a complete stranger being wedged on the couch with us. Furthermore, what would induce us to sit down, a family and this stray we'd taken in, to watch That's Life!.

Was this how people lived in England? Did strangers often drop by on a Sunday night to watch your telly? Did you all live communally? Were there only a few televisions?

It made England seem like the most foreign place imaginable, a place where groups of strangers clustered together round a flickering light, like survivors in a disaster movie. And in one of these huddled communities, a con man was looking at his own face, drawn in pencil from a pensioner's description, doing a long, fake yawn and going "Is that the time?" before getting ready to run. England was strange.

Of course, many years later it would become my home, and even though I have seen almost every inch of this country after spending the last decade criss-crossing it from theatre to theatre, England still manages to surprise and bewilder and amuse. I've been watching you for a while now, and here's a brief sample of some of the conclusions I've so far been able to draw. Please don't take them too personally.

London
First to go in disaster movies

Great cities have a gravitational pull. For me, there are basically four of them – New York, Paris, Tokyo and London – and they exist to distort the space around them. They draw the population in, usually young and ambitious and willing to endure shitty houseshares in the city's endless warren of sub-divided houses.

England plays host to London, much like it plays host to the Premier League. It used to be yours, and now it belongs to the world. You want proof of London's international iconic status? In any Hollywood science-fiction movie, when they show that montage of all the alien attacks from around the world, London always gets flattened first. I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen Big Ben flooded, zapped or struck by a meteor. That's how you measure global brand-reach.

If the English were to be glibly summed up as pragmatic but a bit moany, though, then this is the perfect capital city for them. The city is massive, and Londoners negotiate daily a ludicrously complicated transport system, by underground, overground, bus and boat. This gives them endless opportunities to complain, but it also forces them to perform route calculations of astonishing complexity, usually without even looking up, for fear they might make eye-contact, or show weakness, or share a human moment with a fellow commuter, which is not the way things are done in London.

My favourite-ever joke (of my own) is about Londoners and their gift for re-routing. It was about the response to the bomb attacks on 7 July 2005. This is the joke:

The media reacted as if the attacks would, or should, be greeted like 9/11 had been in New York. Of course, the attack was nothing like 9/11, and besides . . . this is London.

They've had the Blitz and then there was the IRA . . .

In fact, the response in London to the attacks was much more:

"There's been a bomb on the Piccadilly line!"

(Long, thoughtful pause and then, like a problem being solved . . .)

"Well, I can get the Victoria line . . ."

Trains
They're not that bad, honest

Attacking the English rail system may be a national sport, but it's a pleasure denied to me because of how bad the Irish rail system is in comparison.

For example, if you want to travel between Manchester and Birmingham, the country's second and third largest cities, there are three trains an hour, two of them direct.

If you want to make the same journey between Cork and Galway, cities of the same relative status in Ireland, you take a bus for four hours. The only way to do this by train is to make a giant V; you take the train to Dublin, on the other side of the country, get off in the capital and take a train back to the other coast again.

Unfortunately, the myth of how terrible the trains are here has become so endemic, and so pleasing, that even as I write these last few paragraphs, I can see you all putting your fingers in your ears and going, "La la la la, I'm not listening, I'm not listening."

Obviously, this is because of the magical trains they have in continental Europe, which glide silently and punctually from town to town while, at the front of the Virgin Pendolino service to Stockport, a dray-horse wheezes and heaves.

I have sat on the Eurostar when they announce in Kent that the train is now travelling at 186mph; and the English people roll their eyes as if to say, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?"

Drinking
Bingeing on beer is in your DNA

The nature of English drinking has always been a subject of debate in the country, with a certain aspirational tendency which presumes that, with just the right tweak in the licensing laws, an eruption of cafes will occur and it'll be just a couple of glasses of chardonnay before the match. With the perfect piece of legislation, you'll all go Mediterranean.

This is never going to happen. Your drinking is all about binges and serious drunkenness, more in keeping with the Germanic and Nordic (and Irish) attitude to alcohol. People don't drink as heavily in warmer climates because it's hotter there, and hot and drunk don't mix. And they drink wine in hotter climates because that's where grapes grow; in northern climates we grow grain.

It's become the norm for English people to think that they are drinking at unprecedentedly high levels. But, as Peter Haydon, author of An Inebriated History of Britain, has pointed out, today's English "are rather poor drinkers compared with our ancestors". Before there was a plentiful supply of clean water, beer and ale had been staple, healthy parts of the English diet for hundreds of years. In the 16th century, it's estimated that the average person in England consumed around 850 pints of beer a year.

As with many heavy drinkers, it wasn't until Britain switched over to shorts that the trouble started. By the last years of the 17th century, it has been estimated that consumption stood at 24 pints of gin a year for every man, woman and child in England. In 18th-century London, where two pints of "mother's ruin" were consumed per person per week, gin was cheaper than milk. I'm not sure which part of that last sentence is more striking. Is it "two pints per person per week" or "gin was cheaper than milk"?

To you, this gin-epidemic episode might be old news. But we aren't taught a lot of English history in Irish schools. So you can understand my glee at discovering the gin epidemic. We get a lot of grief, the Irish, about being heavy drinkers, but you . . . had a gin epidemic. Oh sure, we like a pint now and again but . . . you had an epidemic . . . of gin. This is like finding out that your disciplinarian stepfather actually has a teenage police record for possession of marijuana.

Football
Sorry, you didn't invent it

Preston football club's ground, Deepdale, is home to the National Football Museum, where I once spent a large chunk of an afternoon marvelling at the sheer brass neck of whoever had collected the memorabilia inside. The depth of exhibits is quite astonishing and 95% of them could be prefixed with the words "the actual". There are the actual balls from the 1930 and 1966 World Cup finals, the actual replacement Jules Rimet trophy (after the original was stolen) and, most impressively, the actual jersey worn by Diego Maradona in the 1986 "Hand of God" match. The thrill of seeing that jersey in a case in front of you can only be a fraction of the emotion that Maradona must have felt when he received a letter from an English football museum requesting it. He must have turned to whoever was standing beside him and gone: "No way! You're shitting me, right? This is a gag, isn't it?" To the best of my knowledge, there is no glass case in Hastings containing the arrow that killed Harold.

The museum should lay to rest one old chestnut, though. The English didn't invent football. They codified it, which is a different thing altogether, and a less emotive thing to shout about when you next fail to qualify for the World Cup. You didn't invent football because you didn't invent the ball, or kicking, or fields. We should only be grateful that the Victorians didn't gather together in a room and write the first rules for the use of the wheel, or fire, so that you can claim credit for them as well.

Villages have been dragging, pulling, kicking and running against each other for millennia; you just happened to be the ones with an empire when the upper class took an interest.

It was Cambridge University who initiated the first rules, in 1848; a further 15 years passed until the formation of the FA, and even then the game was sufficiently unrecognisable from the modern version that one of the delegates, from Blackheath, lost a vote to retain shin-kicking and the club promptly left to turn their schism into rugby instead.

And I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm telling you this for your own good. Almost 150 years later, whenever an English team is beaten, the line bemoaning, "This, in a sport we invented", still gets trotted out.

You've got to snap out of this. It's like you want to pour vinegar into the wound. It's a bit like having Maradona's jersey in the middle of the national football museum. Had to pile on a fresh layer of pathos, didn't you? Couldn't just enjoy a nice day out at the football museum. Had to have a little bit of disappointment in the middle of it.

Animals
You like them more than people

England, which is a largely urban, industrialised nation, pining for an illusory rural past, treats the animal kingdom with an astonishing amount of sentiment. Just look how many of the classic animal stories are primarily concerned with the idea of a natural idyll under threat from modernisation: Black Beauty, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, Tarka the Otter, Watership Down – even Born Free.

George Orwell was smart enough to place his allegory of communism on a farm, since he knew the English reader would instinctively side against his own species. It's the same reason that the dog is the real brains of the Wallace and Gromit operation. Gromit is also the public face of the Kennel Club's "Good Citizen Dog Scheme", the largest dog-training scheme in the United Kingdom. It says a lot that the Kennel Club suggests that one of the main questions the course will answer is: "How do you learn to live with your new dog?" There's no suggestion that a dog-training course might teach the bloody dog to live with you.

Consider also the English ability to emphasise the tragedy for animals even amid horrendous human events – the horrified reaction to the IRA's bombing of the Horse Guards in 1982, or the hoax bombing of the Grand National in 1997, as if somehow targeting horses was a new low, rather than of relatively limited importance given the human damage inflicted. When one of the horses that survived the Horse Guards bombing died in June 2004, he got his own story on the BBC and this tribute from his commanding officer: "[Yeti was] the epitome of a grand old gentleman, increasingly frail but never losing his zest for life and never, ever forgetting his manners." It's as if the English have projected on to their animals the values they fear are disappearing from their own society.

The RSPCA is one of the largest charities in England and was the first charity of its kind in the world. It was founded in 1824 by a group that included anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, and became "Royal" when Queen Victoria lent her authority to it in 1840. Here again there is the odd juxtaposition where at the same time England was involved in widespread barbarism in the name of empire, she was taking time out to tell people to be nicer to animals.

Patron saints
Learn the lesson of Paddy's Day

In the last few years, there has been a campaign to re-launch St George's Day, in an effort to find a few non-sporting occasions for self-celebration. It was in part another expression of that bizarre section of England that likes to perceive itself the victim of a terrible injustice. How can the Celts have their day? Why has everyone heard of Paddy's Day and not of brave St George? Where are our parades?

There are a couple of simple reasons why St Patrick's Day is a massive global success story and St George's Day is not. Obviously, there's the drinking, the parades and the enormous Irish diaspora, which clung to the festival as a celebration of home and developed it into the cavalcade of Guinness and green that it is today.

England can have none of this. You have a diaspora, of sorts, in the sense that you have expats all over the world. This is fundamentally different to Ireland, however, in that your diaspora is mainly in Provence, where they moved of their own accord. In the tragic tale of Irish emigration, very rarely was anyone overheard on the coffin ships saying: "Well, we've just always wanted to run a small hotel in the Dordogne. The kids have reached that age, so we said, what the hell, let's go for it."

It also doesn't help that St George never even set foot in England. There are no historical sites to venerate, because he was never here. This is similar to the never-ending English devotion to the hymn Jerusalem, despite it being a long feedline to a very curt and obvious punchline:

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? No.

And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? Nope.

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? Still a big nooo, I'm afraid.

And was Jerusalem builded here Among those dark Satanic mills? No. It wasn't. Sorry about that. (And it's "built", by the way.)

The fact is, you can't reverse-engineer something like Paddy's Day. And you probably don't want to. Are you ready to put aside your ambivalent attitude to religion and force the entire country to convert to Catholicism and then give the Church hierarchy unfettered access to the reins of power? We know you don't want it and I didn't move to England to sit through that again.

Face it, England is the victim of its own success. You can't gobble up other nations, absorb them into your flag, and then whine that your original flag doesn't get the attention it deserves. This is what you wanted with the empire; suck it up.

Moreover, it might be worth asking if there isn't a bigger price to pay for the kind of cultural success Paddy's Day has achieved. There isn't an Irish person alive who hasn't cringed at the sight of Guinness hats and leprechauns being bandied about like That's Who We Are.

Every year, we see the footage of drunken American kids wearing "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" T-shirts and getting hammered in our honour. Even at home, the day has always been a bit of an underage drinking festival. I appreciate the craic as much as anyone; I just dislike the entire nation being reduced to a caricature. All those campaigning furiously for a St George's festival might be wise to ask themselves if they want to see England narrowed down to a man in a cartoon dragon costume running down Fifth Avenue. "Tally-ho!" they'll shout, in a Dick Van Dyke English accent. "Tally-ho!"

by Dara O Brian

Kernow & Devon

Buying Home

"Home is the most important place in the world"
IKEA

O give me a home...

The Maldives’ president has come up with a solution to the world’s problems

Rex Features

LOSING one’s home is a sadly common experience in these dark economic days, but it normally happens at an individual, rather than a national, level. The residents of the Maldives, however, face collective homelessness as a result of rising sea levels, which are expected eventually to engulf the 1,200-island nation, whose highest point is 2.3 metres above sea level. Faced with this alarming prospect, the country’s new president, Mohamed Nasheed, has come up with an equally dramatic solution: put aside some of the Maldives’ tourism revenues to buy another homeland.

At first blush Mr Nasheed’s notion seems a bit over the top. Countries don’t usually go round purchasing large lumps of other nations. The only precedent he cites—Jews buying up bits of Palestine before Israel was established—does not inspire confidence that his plan would increase world harmony. And since the rich countries that caused the climate to change and the seas to rise can easily absorb the Maldives’ 370,000 people, it seems reasonable to assume that Mr Nasheed and his compatriots will be offered citizenship elsewhere.

The empty quarter beckons

Reasonable, but wrong. Australia’s government has already turned down a request to offer citizenship to the 12,000 people of Tuvalu, another small, drowning island; so a few hundred thousand Maldivians knocking on rich-country doors seem likely to get even shorter shrift. Anyway, they may not want to be absorbed into a larger nation. They might prefer to stay together to maintain their community spirit and traditions of folk-dancing and imprisoning political dissidents. So a solution as radical as Mr Nasheed’s may be the only answer.

It’s a buyer’s market in property these days; and, if the Maldivians are looking for an island, Iceland is said to be going cheap. But they may be spoilt for choice: think of all the tiresome bits of territory that other countries would like to offload. The snooty English, for instance, have long disparaged Wales, which they caricature unfairly as being populated mostly by Methodist preachers and disaffected sheep. It might be a challenge to persuade the Maldivians to swap their palm-fringed paradise for Llandudno pier on a wet Sunday afternoon; still, a bit of adroit marketing, focusing on the height of the hills, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anthony Hopkins (both sadly no longer resident) might do the trick.

Once Mr Nasheed’s visionary notion gains acceptance, it could have far wider application. The Israelis, for instance, could put an end to a hundred years of futile hostilities by buying somewhere for the Palestinians. If they clubbed together, they could get somewhere really nice—Florida, maybe. China could stop making aggressive gestures towards Taiwan and buy Malaysia instead. It’s already run by Chinese, so they’d hardly notice the difference. And Barack Obama, committed to uniting America, could defuse the nation’s culture wars by purchasing an alternative homeland for those of his countrymen who want more use of the death penalty, less gun control and no gay marriage. A slice of Saudia Arabia’s empty quarter would do nicely: there’s plenty of space and the new occupants would have lots in common with the locals.

The British are familiar with the notion that, if you’re bored at home, you grab somebody else’s country; but recent experience suggests that invading places can be expensive and troublesome, so a market solution seems a better way of dealing with national dissatisfaction. The British are, let’s face it, fed up with their damp little country. Instead of renting villas in Tuscany, they should buy the place; instead of complaining about the weather, they could complain about Silvio Berlusconi. The Russians suffer from too much crime and too much snow; the Gulf Arabs from too much heat and too little fun. Both should think of buying a temperate, orderly city with decent nightlife, such as London. Wait a minute…

(from The Economist)