Europe Archive

In March, Sweden abruptly decided not to renew a five-year defense industry cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia, amid a diplomatic spat after Sweden’s foreign minister criticized Riyadh over its human rights record. The controversy led to headlines around the world and exposed the tension for Sweden, the world’s 12th-largest arms exporter, between promoting global defense sales and advancing democracy and human rights. But this is far from a new issue for Stockholm, and given the worsening security climate in Europe, the Saudi episode is unlikely to change minds in Sweden about the need to export defense equipment, even to non-democracies. […]

If ambitious aliens reached Earth tomorrow, they might conclude that the planet is too troublesome to bother conquering: The world looks like an ungovernable place. The European Union faces an ever-intensifying crisis over Greece. Arab powers and their Western allies are struggling to keep up with terrorist attacks and atrocities by the Islamic State. The U.S. military reported last week that Russian and Chinese assertiveness now makes the chance of great-power war “low but growing.” Can these crises be defused? The answer may lie in Vienna, where talks on an Iranian nuclear deal are coming to a head, after widely […]

The Greek debt crisis entered uncharted waters this week, as Athens defaulted on an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan after negotiations with its international creditors to extend its bailout program broke down. This report collects World Politic Review’s coverage of the crisis, from its origins in 2010 to the final days of the negotiations. For the next two weeks, all of the articles linked below are free for non-subscribers. From Crisis to Contagion In October 2009, the newly elected government of then-Prime Minister George Papandreou revealed that Greece’s budget deficit was far greater than previously acknowledged. The announcement caused the […]

It seems a little odd that the final countdown to a Greek default saw the clock run out on what was in reality a puny payment. Greece was due to pay the International Monetary Fund a mere 1.55 billion euros Tuesday, by itself a rather inconsequential sum in the global credit markets. Athens’ inability to pay that small amount set off the chain of events that put global markets on high alert and continues to threaten the decades-old project of European integration. While Greece has held testy exchanges with creditors from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central […]

In late May, at a high-level Community Party meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping cautioned that religions in China must be free from foreign influence and incorporated into socialist Chinese society. Xi’s warning appears to have its limits: It has not deterred the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, from reiterating his hopes that the embryonic dialogue between Beijing and the Holy See will continue to move forward. But the prospects of warmer ties between Beijing and the Vatican doesn’t play well in Hong Kong, where the city’s Catholic leadership has been a vocal supporter of the democracy movement in […]