Despite the distracting political drama over the UK’s outlier rejection at last week’s European Union agreement on fiscal and budgetary coordination, it’s now become clear that main objective of the collective effort–to ensure …
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has yet to officially declare his imminent re-election campaign, but that hasn’t kept a teeming field of rivals from launching their own bids for the Elysée. That pack of presidential hopefuls …
Despite their much-anticipated announcement early Friday of a crucial pact to confront Europe’s surging debt crisis, the leaders who agreed to the deal might want to consider re-naming their mutual club the European Disunion all the same. Because while the main focus of the accord was supposed to be the sweeping debt-reduction rules to …
Elephant, meet room.
Doubt and despair returned to Europe by Tuesday despite positive reaction a day earlier to the French-German proposals to save the teetering euro. The reason? The pachyderm in the room that markets see all …
The details of the campaign by France and Germany to save the euro became a little clearer Monday though substantial questions about it remain as the week winds toward a European Union summit on the euro crisis summit on Friday. …
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Observers weren’t expecting much from the mini-summit Thursday in Strasbourg, France, where French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Italian leader Mario Monti met to discuss Europe’s dire debt crisis. Such lowered expectations proved well-founded. Because even as the situation threatening the …
It might be inviting to react to the death of former French first lady Danielle Mitterrand as the closing of the historical book on the legacy of her husband, France’s late president François Mitterrand. That reading, however, would unfairly short-change both the impact that Madame Mitterrand herself had on public affairs, and her …
The seamless partnership France and Germany forged in past weeks now shows signs of fraying as both countries spar over the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) and proposals to mutualize euro zone debt. By pooling financial liabilities and assets across the 17-nation euro zone, stronger nations like Germany and France could back …
At this point, writing an update on the continuing travails of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn seems a bit like flogging a deader than dead horse. But because unfolding developments appear to be delivering the coup de grace to any hopes Strauss-Kahn had of returning to public life–and reportedly …
Is significantly greater integration the surest way to prevent both the euro and even the entire European Union from blowing apart? Or is EU federation–and the basic powers national governments now wield being weakened in the process–exactly the kind of radical fusion certain to send countries jealous of their sovereignty fleeing …
There are occasions when even the scariest of movies will push the atmosphere of dread, danger, and doom a bit too far, and leave the scenario of improbable horror and panic feeling just stupid. That moment has arrived in Nightmare On Euro Street, as people who watched Europe’s escalating crisis through their fingers in terror begin …
French Prime Minister François Fillon unveiled another batch of debt-reduction measures Monday—and in so doing officially removed the word “austerity” from the blacklist of political correctness to which it had been banished. Instead Fillon rehabilitated the term as the weapon capable of preventing contagion of the euro zone …
