Europe Archive

This is a new feature we’re going to experiment with here on the blog, with the help of our intrepid editorial assistant, Kari Lipschutz. The idea is to catch significant news in the foreign English-language media, before it shows up in Western outlets. So, yes, it amounts to yet another news roundup. But we’re going to try to justify it by delivering not so much breaking news as developing news. In the context of Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect, we’re trying to catch the butterfly before it becomes a monsoon. So with that in mind, here goes: – Is […]

Vatican and Italian officials from across the political spectrum have lined up to denounce a decision by the European Court of Human Rights to penalize the government over the presence of crucifixes in Italian classrooms. The ruling could force a review of religious symbolism in public schools across Europe. “The crucifix is a universal symbol of love, meekness and peace. Preventing it from being displayed is an act of violence against the deep-seated feelings of the Italian people and all persons of goodwill,” Claudio Scajola, a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Freedom People party, told The Guardian. The Strasbourg-based […]

President Barack Obama met with European leaders to discuss a wide range of issues from Afghanistan to climate change. Obama said he believed that a strengthened E.U. is a positive development for trans-atlantic relations and congratulated the leaders on recieving the last signature needed on the Lisbon treaty.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans received 100 Deutschmarks to help start their new lives. Twenty years later, recipients remember how they spent their welcome money while former politician Theo Waigel remembers the high price of reunification.

I think it’s safe to say that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has yet to find the sweet spot for situating French foreign policy since U.S. President Barack Obama took office. In Sarkozy’s first year in office, he got great mileage out of combining his dynamic energy with President George Bush’s political bankruptcy to create a sort of credibility for French diplomacy. He used his leverage expertly, in both European politics (today’s final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty culminates his initial EU initiative) and in transatlantic affairs (backing up a desperate Bush on Iran and Afghanistan). But being the best (only?) […]

Today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will become only the second German leader in history to give a speech to both houses of the U.S. Congress. One issue she may avoid raising is her new coalition government’s controversial commitment to remove all U.S. nuclear weapons from German soil within the next few years. By formally adopting the commitment as a core element of its platform, the German government has dramatically focused attention on what has until now been a low-key debate within NATO over whether to retain nuclear weapons as a core element of the alliance’s strategy. Although the precise number […]