I'm going to squeam and squeam until I'm sick. Yesterday EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso turned up at a gathering of the political group leaders in Strasbourg to have what is described as an "Extraordinary exchange of views". They were talking about the Constitution amongst other things.

Recently French teachers refused to teach children the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, because they consider it to be racist. The refrain goes as follows:

To arms, citizens!
Form your battalions!
March, march!
Let impure blood
Water our furrows!

It is the mention of “impure blood” that causes offence.

The Netherlands and Belgium were the first countries to give full marriage rights to homosexuals. In the United States some politicians propose “civil unions” that give homosexual couples the full benefits and responsibilities of marriage. These civil unions differ from marriage only in name.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands polygamy has been legalised in all but name. Last Friday the first civil union of three partners was registered. Victor de Bruijn (46) from Roosendaal “married” both Bianca (31) and Mirjam (35) in a ceremony before a notary who duly registered their civil union.

Last Sunday, the Poles made up for the Germans. The elections were a clear victory for the conservatives. There are two main conservative parties, Civic Platform (PO), which is free-market conservative (or “liberal” as they would say in Europe, though not in America), and Law and Justice (PiS), which is social conservative. The two parties are almost equally strong. Before the elections it was long assumed that Civic Platform would become the biggest, but the elections showed the opposite, with Law and Justice attracting 27% of the votes and Civic Platform 24%.

The Dutch Government is introducing “new rules” regulating how newborns should die. According to these rules Dutch doctors who kill terminally ill newborns are no longer obliged to inform the authorities. The Dutch minister of Justice, Piet-Hein Donner, and his colleague of the ministry of Health, Clémence Ross, both Christian-Democrats, have agreed to apply the so-called “Groningen Protocol” throughout the country.

This week the Court of First Instance of the Luxemburg based Court of Justice of the European Communities ruled that decisions of the United Nations Security Council take precedence over national constitutions, European law and even the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). This ruling undermines the rule of law and the principles of the constitutional state and of democracy.

In a verdict of 21 September the five judges of the European Court of First Instance state literally that

“the right of access to the courts, a principle recognised by both Article 8 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 16 December 1966, is not absolute.”

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of capitalism. Too bad it was unable to cross the Berlin wall last Sunday, but never mind in the end it will.

The winds of change in Europe started to blow with the enlargement of the European Union with ten new countries in central and eastern Europe last year. Their vibrant economies have been growing fast thanks to a liberalised institutional framework that creates a favorable environment for investments and the creation of wealth. Limited government is now a reality Brussels has to deal with. The paradigm of big welfare state governments, including their regulatory harmonization attempts, has at last become debatable in the EU since at least ten member states are sceptical about it. As former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar put it: “If ‘old Europe’ is to compete effectively with ‘new Europe,’ it will have to lower taxes and rethink the social-welfare systems that high taxation supports.”

As Berlin goes so Germany goes. It is a city that condenses all the fragmentation and contradiction of this nation in one place. The name itself, iconic. It is at once a symbol of hope and doubt, joy and fear, triumph and tragedy. It is sophisticated and degenerate, inspirational and irritating, cosmopolitan and provincial. It is German.

The post-World War II West German Republic was never intended to be strong or politically efficient. Following the disaster of fascism, the last thing West Germans and the world wanted was a government able to effectively implement the majority will of its people, favouring broad consensus rather than popular dictatorship. Majority rule was unacceptable, proportional rule with significant power allotted minorities was the only conceived way to prevent a relapse into oppressive government. The post-war constitution and governments since 1949 have been an acknowledgement that Germans intrinsically do not trust each other, to a certain extent even fear each other.

The European Commission intends to fund research involving experiments with and the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. On 31 December a moratorium on EU funding for stem cell research ends. So far, however, the EU has not been able to draw up rules governing this type of research owing to disagreements among the member states. Some countries allow the harvesting of stem cells from so-called “spare” embryos produced during IVF (in vitro fertilisation). But in countries such as Germany, France, Ireland and Spain taking stem cells from embryos is illegal. Despite it being illegal in many member states, the Commission decided to go ahead with the funding.

Germany is the most left-wing country in Europe. In last Sunday’s elections, the parties of the left gained more than 51.1 per cent of the votes: 34.3 per cent for the Social-Democrats, 8.1 per cent for the Greens (sometimes described as “water melons”: green on the outside and red on the inside) and 8.7 per cent for the (former) communists of the Left Party. As in the previous elections of the past decade, the East-West ballot divide is striking.

Fifteen years after German reunification voters in the former East Germany still poll differently to the those in the west. German unemployment went up in the seven years of Chancellor Schroeder’s red-green coalition to almost 12 per cent. Yet in the east, where unemployment is twice as high as in the west, the Social Democrats (SPD) remained the biggest party with almost 30 per cent of the vote, while the Left Party got almost 25.9 per cent (compared to just 7.2 per cent in the west). The Greens won 4.4 per cent in the east. Over 60 per cent of the East-Germans, the so-called “Ossies,” voted for parties of the left. For the third consecutive time since 1998 they tipped the balance of power in the whole of Germany to the left.