Word: giscards
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...year old Russian joke has Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev having a smoke with U.S. President Richard Nixon and French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Nixon produces a steel cigarette case inscribed with the words "To our leader, from the GOP." Giscard opens a silver case bearing the simple inlay "To my dear Valery." Brezhnev shrugs and flips open a massive gold case, with the inscription set in diamonds: "To our beloved Czar Nicolas II, from the grateful Russian gentry...
...cares whether Nixon or Giscard ever smoked - or ever shared Brezhnev's company together? Their function in the tale was simply to underscore Russians' jaundiced view of their own rulers. I was reminded of this joke from my youth by the furor over President Putin's recent acquisition of a unique piece of jewelry. At the Russian president's reception for American tycoons, Robert Kraft, the owner of this year's Super Bowl Champions New England Patriots, showed Putin his 2005 Super Bowl ring. It's a 14-karat, four ounces white-gold piece, studded with 124 diamonds arranged...
Despite widespread opposition to the U.S. strike, a silent minority of Europeans approved. Former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing spoke for them when he recalled how he sent French paratroops to quell an insurgency in Zaïre in 1978. On that occasion, he noted gratefully, "our forces were conveyed from Corsica to Zaïre by American planes." Giscard and Thatcher showed that not all Europeans have forgotten how allies, even when they disagree, sometimes have to stand by each other...
...treaty originates from and underpins undemocratic processes. Unlike almost any other document of constitutional pretensions in democratic history (including the one currently being created in Baghdad), it was composed not by a freely elected assembly but by an unelected Convention presided by Giscard-d’Estaing. Like a rerun, it lays out already well-known principles of economic integration in the EU: severely limited powers for the directly elected European Parliament and free rein for the appointed European Commission to demolish obstacles to the competitive marketplace whatever their form. A multitude of other provisions prohibit harmonizing labor laws...
Furthermore, the treaty, sadly, is hardly the visionary, forward-looking document hailed by Giscard-d’Estaing, Chirac and its other promoters. Instead, it consists largely of a restatement of past European treaties. The Convention would have revisited and reconsidered these elements if its genuine ambition had really been to strengthen and distinguish the Union as a specifically European political project. But that was not the goal...