Sarko

So I know it's been over a month since I last posted, but I've been busy and I haven't had a lot to say (hard to believe I know!)

Anyways I caught some of a show on France's TV3 with Nicolas Sarkozy. I have to say the man had some interesting things to say. I've heard a fair about about in him in the media, although we hear a lot more about his opponent Royale.

He seems to be a pretty committed candidate and the one article referred to him being the 'Thatcher' of Britain, and he does seem to want to challenge the state to move in a more minimalist direction. He attacked the fact that France has such a huge public service, and like I think we will end up doing in Canada, he wants to use attrition to shrink the public service.

It's actually interesting to try and understand how France is organized, I did take a course on European politics and we were supposed to deal with France but the class was not that well taught and we ended up skipping a whole lot of stuff.

The other thing I am reading is A History of Postwar Europe. It's pretty interesting and I have for a while been interested in European politics, though that interest has been fading lately. It's an interesting book and tries to put the entire Postwar European experience into a narrative. I'm only about 2/5th of the way through but his focus on Eastern Europe I find particularly interesting and of course he does provide a huge reading list at the end, so maybe i'll do mroe reading about Europe.

One of the books I have had to set aside for the moment but that i think should be extremely interesting is A history of the English speaking peoples since 1900 (which in his case means the Uk, the US and the white dominions) . The thesis itself should prove to be fascinating, in that he argues the war on terror like the second world war as well as the cold war bring together the English speaking peoples in their particular project, which he hasn't quite defined yet.

I assume it is something like promoting peace and democracy for non-English speaking peoples everywhere. Should be fascinating read!