Word: unionism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Singapore, to reply to Rachman's column by saying that Europe was a "political dwarf in ... the rapidly changing geopolitical environment." There's an element of truth to the charge, but it goes too far. For one thing, it ignores the triumphant role of exemplar that the European Union has played in the last two decades. Yes, the pettifogging rules and endless bureaucratic wrangling of the E.U. may be easy to satirize - and when asked in referendums, Europeans repeatedly indicate that they do not want the E.U. to turn into a giant superstate. But it was the promise of accession...
...geography should flow two pressing priorities of European strategic policy: closer engagement with Russia and with Turkey. Both nations feel aggrieved at their treatment by Europe, Russia because (in breach of promises made in the early 1990s) NATO was extended not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union but actually inside them; Turkey because it thinks that the E.U. intends to dangle the carrot of accession, while never truly intending Turkey to nibble...
...Europe does not have one for Russia - unless you want to call "Let's not rile the Bear" a strategy. Nor is "Let's annoy him a little bit" the epitome of statecraft. The latest example is Georgia. In the wake of the Russian invasion this summer, the European Union froze talks about a new economic partnership. But on Nov. 14, that killer sanction was lifted after just 10 weeks when the E.U. and Russia embraced at a summit in Nice...
...much for the courtship. The intimidation of Europe's East - the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic - is also doing fine. Ukraine and the Baltics, after all, were once part of the Soviet Union, and the others were satrapies until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Never mind that all of them, with the exception of Ukraine, are now firmly embedded in E.U. and NATO; for Russia they are either the "near abroad" or what the tsars used to call Russia's "sphere of influence...
...other side, Russia remains true to the quip of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt about the Soviet Union: "An Upper Volta with nukes." OK, today it is not just rockets. The Kremlin's power also flows (more effectively, in fact) from those pipelines that have hooked Europe on Russian oil and gas. But for all of its fabulous riches in the ground, Russia remains a kind of Third World country, an extraction economy whose welfare and clout fluctuate with the price of oil. Today, oil fetches less than one-half of what it did when Russia, flush with cash...