debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
France and Germany held largely contradicting hopes and aspirations for Europe’s common currency. To France the key issue in establishing a European monetary union was to end monetary dependence, both from the vagaries of the U.S. dollar and from regional deutschmark hegemony, and to establish a global reserve currency that could actually stand up to [...]
France is planning to relax budgetary targets in the current year, failing to meet prior commitments, delaying the return to a balanced budget and incurring slippage in reversing the rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio, now set to peak at 94.3 per cent of GDP next year. About time too! Under the new economic governance rules [...]
Talk about statistics and the EU and the things likely to spring to people’s mind are the fiddling of the Greek fiscal accounts or, in Germany at least, doubts that the official inflation rate was really telling the true story of how – allegedly – expensive everything had become after the introduction of the euro. [...]
The celebrations of 50 years Franco-German reconciliation are behind us and maybe the most impressive fact they revealed was how “normal” these relations have become. De Gaulle re-accredited the “great German nation” after the war, Helmut Schmidt and Valery Giscard d’Estaing laid the foundations for Europe’s Monetary Union, Mitterrand and Kohl implemented it, but all [...]
So, tomorrow we will finally hear David Cameron’s big speech on Britain’s future in the European Union. So much has already been trailed and leaked that it will be difficult for Cameron to come up with something substantially new, but rumour has it that he is at least trying. In the meantime there is an [...]
The Mali conflict has caught the EU asleep at the wheel. But with support from across the Union and credible, limited aims, a European intervention in Mali can be successful. It took almost three years for the European Union to craft a “Strategy for Security and Development in the Sahel”, finally enacted in September 2011 [...]
France is at a crossroads. It has numerous valuable assets, but it cannot postpone long-overdue reforms, or else it will become increasingly irrelevant in a fiercely competitive global economy. This is the economic challenge that President François Hollande, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and all of us in the French government must confront. We face a [...]
The more the evidence builds up on the disastrous effects of austerity on economic activity and jobs, the more those that are responsible for this failure become lyrical. The Commission’s autumn economic forecasts already carried the imaginative title of ‘sailing through rough waters’. Last Monday, an opinion piece in the FT can be read as [...]
Who can deny that Francois Hollande has a serious problem? Polls show his popularity has plummeted – that only just over one-third of the public still support him. In his press conference speech on 12 November he sought to convince a growingly sceptical public that he can turn France around, that “decline is not our [...]
France and Germany are setting tongues wagging. Despite the celebrations at Ludwigsburg last week,where Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande did a great job making the Franco-German relationship look good on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s speech to German youth, the general tone in Berlin is one of a certain irritation when it comes [...]
Francois Hollande’s Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, claims the new budget (unveiled on 28 September) is ‘fair, economically efficient and allows France to meet its priorities’. In the carefully chosen words of the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, the claim is ‘total moonshine’! It is true that more than half the €37bn in planned budgetary savings [...]
Rarely is a high-flying country brought back down to earth in a single night, but that is precisely what happened to Germany recently. In both football (soccer) and politics, the country had come to embody an unseemly mixture of arrogance and denial. It thought itself the measure of all things European, in terms of both [...]
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