The Agitator on Egeland's stingy misquote: "Unfortunately, blogs and right-leaning media continue to pile on the guy for something he never said. I suppose it took off because what was attributed to Egeland fits so neatly into what the right already tends to think about the UN. But it's also the exact kind of transgression bloggers and conservatives regularly jump all over the mainstream media for commiting."

I don't think the blogosphere was responsible for the "stingy" comment's endurance. Main Stream Media kept the comment alive for quite some time.

I'm afraid Jan Egeland's quip will haunt him for some time to come, in the same manner that Donald Rumsfeld's statement on "Old Europe" and "New Europe" has taken a life of its own.

Egeland's mistake was not seeing that he still represents a Nordic welfare state's point-of-view. So complete is the dominance of that point-of-view in Nordic thinking that any Nordic statesman's utterance is always seen in the light of that ideology. As we all know, that ideology has always been profoundly anti-American.

If Nordics take umbrage at that, then they should take pains to make themselves more clear. For now and in the future, Egeland will be labeled - in American minds - as an anti-American.

Egeland I don't think is actually an anti-american, however he does seem to fail to understand some basic economic concepts. Ie; the fact that Sweden commits more of its GDP to the UN compared to the US doesn't mean much when you consider that the US GDP is much larger than that of any EU state, and ironically most US states have larger GDPs themselves. This means that the level of aid given by the US is far greater than anyhting coming from Scandinavia.

Its not the greater division of any ever decreasing pie of wealth that we should be presiding over, rather we need to make the pie larger.

Just look at the recent Asia Boxing Day disaster, Australia managed to give much more than most European nations, with 500 million in direct aid, 500 million in interest free loans plus the cost of our military actions in purifying water and building hospitals in Indonesia.

David: Agreed - Egeland most likely doesn't think of himself as an Anti-American (that would be bigotry, of course). Yet he lives in a milieu where Anti-American "criticism" is so pervasive that its practitioners cannot see it as bigotry.

As to why the Nordics put such great store on government-to-government foreign aid (instead of freer trade) as an act of altruism, keep in mind that it reinforces the prerogatives of the state as an engine for social change: a very necessary concept for advocates of the welfare state.

Unfortunately, if we take Africa as an example - a recipient of massive amounts of foreign aid, yet whose agricultural products are mostly barred from the European Union - we should conclude that foreign aid has been a total disaster as a policy course. Its emphasis is more of a smoke screen for the essential stinginess of European welfare states themselves.

The fact that people like Egeland still advocate it has more to do with welfare state ideology than altruistic good will.

Markku,

I certainly believe there is much to your suggestion . The kind of thinking though that promotes it is very ingrained amognst ordinary Europeans. Most Germans I know would be appalled if they didn't have tariffs against these countries. Although I fail to see their assertion that having such protections is going to improve the lot of people in supposed "slave-jobs" working in places like Thailand etc..

For instance whilst I was in Germany, the foreign minister there released press statements warning Germans not to buy products made in China, and to buy German, because of the harsh working conditions there.

Regards,
David.

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