Word: ashton
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Europe's Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton spoke with TIME senior editor Simon Robinson and correspondent Leo Cendrowicz. Highlights...
Critics point to the selection of Herman Van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton as Europe's President and Foreign Minister as symbolic of a lack of vision. Van Rompuy, a former Belgian Prime Minister, is known for his ability to balance local sensitivities - no small feat in Belgium - and cajole opposing camps towards a consensus. Useful attributes, no doubt, but hardly the ones needed to make the E.U. count on the international stage. Ashton, a former British minister and European trade commissioner, has little experience in foreign affairs. "Van Rompuy and Ashton give the impression of being chosen for their limits...
...early days for the new team, of course. Van Rompuy and Ashton could surprise their detractors. "We should be ambitious," Ashton told TIME in late January. But for all that ambition, Europe is no closer than it ever was to answering Henry Kissinger's famous question: "Who do I call when I want to call Europe?" So what explains the gap between Europe's stated ambition in foreign policy and its performance? And how can that gap be closed? (Read an interview with Catherine Ashton...
That argument begins to break down when you have aspirations to help fix the world. Over the past decade or so, many Europeans have liked to think of the E.U. as a counterweight to Washington and now Beijing: a big, rich, but more benign global power. Ask Catherine Ashton to define Europe's ideals, and her aspirations are far from modest: "Democracy. Human rights," she says. "Wanting to see stable, secure nations, with whom we enjoy political dialogue and economic relationships...
...take part in a two-day seminar on innovation, visiting the kinds of labs, design rooms and incubators where new technologies are born. Two weeks ago in Moscow, he hosted a delegation from the real Silicon Valley that included top executives from eBay, Twitter and Cisco Systems. The actor Ashton Kutcher also came along, and documented the visit on his Twitter feed. "Russia is building their own Silicon valley. And they want help," Kutcher tweeted on Feb. 18. "If we rebuilt it today what would we do differently...