Every July I cannot stop thinking of that morning of July 20, 1974. A boy, born and raised on the Greek island of Lesbos, in very close proximity to Turkey, listening as his mother tells him that Turkish planes are flying over the village, and that we may be invaded.
With energy supply in Europe a renewed concern, will the large reserves of natural gas in Cyprus become a peacemaker in the long-standing conflict, or become part of a larger game for regional stability?
Cyprus cannot be a nation-state under Greek Cypriot majority rule, or two nation-states in a loose co-federation under the surveillance of NATO forces. But could Cyprus be a new united Republic founded on the ideas of labour and a common Mediterranean civilization? If the EU said yes.
A solution to the Cyprus conflict remains elusive, particularly since national elites use it to maintain their positions of power. Only moving the peace-related segment of Cyprus’s civil society away from the periphery will make a locally-accepted peace process viable.
A political settlement to the Cyprus dispute is no longer just a romantic fantasy; it may be the only way out of the country's current economic crisis.
This second of two essays on military spending and the EU crisis, explores the role of the European arms trade, corruption and the role of arms exporting countries in fuelling a debt crisis, and why these 'odious' debts need to be written off. See Part One here.
The extraordinary bounce-back of the banks reveals the most disturbing, but least obvious, largely invisible, feature of the unfinished European crisis: the transformation of democratic taxation states into post-democratic banking states.
Are the apocalyptic scenarios pervading the discourse of ‘surprise’ around the 'crisis' in Cyprus repositioning the sense of self of Cypriots vis-à-vis their institutions, the state, or the future ?
The simple truth unpalatable to Eurozone authorities is that small peripheral EU economies and even big economies like Spain and Italy, are victims, not designers of the liberalised financial architecture that was built way back in 1992, repeating earlier twentieth century failed experiments that
The justification for the ‘rescue’ plan for Cyprus appears reasonable: taxpayers should not have to pay for the costly mistakes of bankers and ‘tax havens’ should be eliminated. But the ‘bail-in’ plan does not achieve these objectives.
French and German overriding of the European Commission over the Stability Pact can be seen, ten years later, to have been disastrous. A vision more powerful, more engaging, more profound than “common interest” is now required if Europe is to survive, and divided Cyprus is a test case.
Cyprus' unique political culture, as well as its relationship with Russia, played an important yet underappreciated role in the island's recent economic crisis.
