debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The eurozone crisis has made reforming the EU’s institutional framework an urgent priority. Based on a recent speech to the Federal Trust, Andrew Duff MEP argues that without revision of the EU’s treaties to create a fiscal union, the EU’s very survival is now in jeopardy. He advocates the merging of the two EU treaties into one [...]
Misconceptions about the crisis and about the role of Europe and the Member States are spreading rapidly. First and foremost, one major consequence of the financial markets crisis was re-interpreted as a sovereign debt crisis, thus transforming an effect of the crisis into a cause. Listening to general debates in the European Parliament, you could [...]
Geologists have demonstrated that an earthquake is the end-product of many minor episodes of seismic slippage along a fault line; each smaller event increases the tension until finally the whole shebang erupts. History proceeds forward in a similar seismic fashion, and recent events in Europe bear this out. In fact, September 2012 may one day [...]
In their new book, ‘For Europe’, Guy Verhofstadt and Daniel Cohn-Bendit outline a manifesto for the creation of a fully federal Europe, complete with a new European constitution. In an interview with EUROPP editors Chris Gilson and Stuart A Brown, they discuss their manifesto, arguing that the current eurozone crisis leaves EU Member States with no alternative but to [...]
Finally, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has accepted a new form of European Union. More than ever, the EU must combine greater stability, financial transfers, and mutual solidarity if the entire European project is to be prevented from collapsing under the weight of the ongoing sovereign-debt crisis. For a long time, Merkel fought this new EU [...]
To understand the present and future, sometimes it’s helpful to revisit the past. In the case of Europe, it is instructive to consider the young United States of America in 1789. The thirteen former colonies had expelled their British colonizer with the crucial help of the French, and began the delicate task of trying to [...]
This issue is of persistent concern for investors worldwide. Holders of European government bonds believed that they knew what they had bought. Sure, there was no such thing as a eurozone sovereign security. But German, French, Spanish, and even Greek bonds all carried roughly the same interest rate, so they were deemed equivalent. Investors now [...]
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