Word: blocs
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...unlikely to win a majority, and would need coalition partners - perhaps from among the Kurdish nationalist parties that again polled strongly enough in their own areas to potentially earn a kingmaking role in Baghdad, or from the Sadrists and other Shi'ite Islamist parties, or even from Allawi's bloc. But Allawi has alleged widespread fraud by his opponent's supporters, setting the stage for a potentially violent struggle over the election's legitimacy. For many Sunnis who voted for the first time on Sunday, being told that the election was rigged against them would reinforce their alienation from...
...Europe is to realize its own dreams and those of others, it has to change the way it does business. Acting as a true single bloc would bring greater influence. One of the problems in international meetings, says Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a professor of international political economy at IMD in Switzerland, is that the E.U. is "paralyzed by its members." A senior Asian official describes - with evident exasperation - how at international summits European leaders talk endlessly to each other. "They're very clubby," he says, and it isn't meant as a compliment...
...surface, there is a new spirit of national unity. All the political coalitions contesting Sunday's election have at least some semblance of sectarian diversity. Even the most homogeneous of the big blocs pretend to be more diverse than they really are. For example, the Shi'ite Islamist bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, which critics suspect would like to spin off oil-rich Shi'ite southern Iraq into an autonomous region, includes one Sunni party from Anbar province. When asked, many average Iraqis say sectarian violence was something forced on them by outsiders, a bad dream from which they...
...recovery from recession has been fragile and slow - the bloc is only forecast to grow by an anemic 0.7% this year. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, warns that Europe risks a "lost decade" of stagnation and decline if it does not act boldly now to modernize its model of socially inclusive capitalism. The Europe 2020 plan focuses on honing the E.U.'s technological edge, especially in green industries, and on improving higher education. And it sets key targets for E.U. member states, including raising the overall employment rate from 69% to 75%, boosting investment in research...
...Europe 2020 strategy had a similarly ambitious predecessor that failed to deliver: the ill-fated Lisbon agenda, which was adopted with fanfare by E.U. leaders a decade ago with the aim of transforming Europe into "the world's most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy" by 2010. But the bloc fell far short of its goal of overtaking the U.S. and Japan, and even failed to meet its self-imposed economic targets. For example, that plan also called for E.U. research and development spending to increase to 3% of GDP, but only Sweden and Finland currently meet that threshold...