More little countries

The situation in Georgia reminds me again about the force of nationalism. I don't pretend to understand the situation at all, but I presume that again there are multiple groups of people who a) don't like each other, b) treat each other badly, and c) probably deserve each other. And as for the whole Serbia/Kosovo thing, I don't know what to think. Separation is a good thing as it might stop the bitterness, but a bad thing because it provides another example that groups can't co-exist. It is a good thing as we should acknowledge groups of people their right to self goverment, but a bad thing because the new divisions often go along with the creation of small, embittered and often badly treated minorities inside them. And on and on.

But frankly, my biggest problem with dividing big countries into smaller ones is that I begin to wonder why we need all these silly little countries and what good does it do in the long run? Drunk a few months ago I was arguing with a Nationalist Catalan friend of mine, and my final comments were along the lines of "why do you want to create another bullshit little country?" and "what, another Switzerland? Sheesh." Drunk or not, I think I may have had a point.

Smaller countries don't just create additional currencies and border crossings, but actually divulge power into smaller and smaller pieces. What chance of a powerful voice in Europe does (say) Slovenia have compared to (say) Poland? Sure, they can be members of the EU, they can join Nato, etc. but will any of the big players in the world really listen to them? When I think of the former Yugoslavia, exactly this force - namely the desire by neighbors not to have an over-ambitious all-slavic nation - was very often behind the politics. Italy and Austria, for instance, were always vetoing the early Yugoslavia pretty clearly for this reason. Originally it was because they thought it easier to make land claims on a set of smaller countries, but perhaps those now running Italy and Germany and France and England have, at the back of their political consciousness, a desire not to have another Poland storming into Europe, but a series of smaller, rinky-dink countries that are easier to manipulate.

I don't pretend that such a view addresses any of the complexities of the Georgia or Kosovo situations, but it is at least something that a semi-nationalist might like to remember. United we stand; divided we have less influence.

Yugo diary 2008 VI - Building a house without a boiler in the bathtub

In England, even now, people almost never have good water pressure. I remember being amazed when I bought my first flat in the UK to find that, though the flat was built in 1988, that, like most other places I'd lived in to that point, hot water was made by heating (electrically) cold water that was stored in a large, un-pressurised bucket stored in the ceiling. This means that, like every where else I'd lived, that hot water pressure consisted of a dribble driven simply by gravity from the ceiling, and that, consequently, one could never adjust temperature in the shower, having either scalding hot or freezing cold water, and nothing in between.

Things are generally better on continental Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), but as we slowly begin to renovate a house here, I've been noticing some of the oddities of house-building here. Namely the boiler-in-the-bathtub phenomenon. Having a boiler in the bathtub seems to be about as consistently ex-Yugo as the insistence on wearing slippers in the house (watch out for Brain fever) or the universal paranoia about drafts causing serious illness even in hot weather (ditto). In both Serbia and Croatia it often seems the norm to place the houses boiler above the bathtub. And more often than not this comes at the expense of any ledge to put soap on, or (more seriously) anywhere to fix the shower head to the wall, meaning that showers consist often of a rubber hose with a shower head that one has to hold, while always avoiding contact with the boiler next to you.

And its funny that people rationalise this with the same pseudo-logic that English people use about the water pressure. Where English people might say that European hot-water is too strongly pressurised (one friend told me that showers in Germany actually hurt), at least one Croatian builder told me that if the boiler was anywhere else, it might take 20 minutes for the hot water to move through the pipes. And just like in Enland, there is no counter argument along the lines of "but I've seen it work better in other places, honestly".

Still, if I had to choose, a boiler in the bathtub beats never having proper water pressure, but I'll fight tooth and nail to get that damned boiler put somewhere else.

Yugo diary 2008 V - Langauge Lunancy in Unlikely Places

Croatians are probably the most language sensitive in the former Yugoslavia, and I'm certainly not the first to comment on this. But I must admit this sensitivity is being expressed in some pretty odd places, the oddest of which is surely ingredients of snack foods. While on holiday, one always buys a lot of junk food - salty sticks, coke, etc. - and Croatian manufacturers clearly see this is as an opportunity to express linguistic distinctiveness.

On the back of many foods, the list of languages explaining ingredients is impressive: Slovak, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, German, English, Italian. And helpfully the standard traveler/car symbols for the countries are used to denote them: SK, RU, HU, RO, DE, GB, IT. I noticed the other day a symbol I hadn't seen before MNG as well as separate lists of ingredients for BiH, HR and SRB (Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia). And then it clicked: Montenegrin, making four lists of ingredients where previously there would have been just one. A glance revealed that the differences were mostly a mixture of ijekavian and ekavian changes variously mixed up in ways presumed to be most peculiar to the language and some cute differences, such as Kisela voda being used only in Serbian & Bosnian for carbonated water.

I wonder if armies of ex-Jugoslav polyglots are employed to accentuate the differences in what is, after all, a single list of ingredients that would - minor variations aside - be understandable by all four groups of people. Perhaps it is worth thinking about what the equivalents would be like in the various English flavors. I mean, after all, it is obscene to consider English, American, Australian and Canadian to be the same language. So let's set the record straight with the ingredients to Coca-cola.

USA: Seltzer water, High fructose corn syrup, carmel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffine, aspartame (NutraSweet brand), potassium benzoate, citric acid

GB: Sparkling water, corn syrup elevated in fructose, colour of caramel, phosphoric acid extract, flavourings (including caffeine), Nutrasweet, benzoic acid potassium salt, citrate at low pH.

CAN: Club soda, sweet corn syrup, carmel colour, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine, Nutrasweet artificial sweetener (contains aspartame), potassium benzoate, citric acid.

AUS: Carbonated water, corn syrup, carmel coloring, phosphoric acid, flavors from natural sources, caffeine, Sweetener (Nutrasweet, contains aspartame), benozic & citric acids.

No problem. A few spelling differences (e.g. Caffeine/Caffine, Colour/Color, Carmel/Caramel), different colloquialisms (Sparkling/Seltzer water), and rearrangements and voila! Not that there is actually any difference between them, but perhaps somebody who didn't speak English might begin to believe they were truly different, though related.