Many outward economic indicators still tell a story of German success. Inside, there are many signs of a troubled country lacking a strategic vision for itself and for Europe. The eurozone financial crisis highlights this vacuum - but the heart of the problem is political, says Ulrike Guérot.
The turn into a neoliberal direction of European integration is at the root of the present crisis. In the search to avoid a global depression, European leaders may be forced to move closer towards a federation. Such steps are fraught with difficulty and will meet nationalist populism head-on in a
In July, amidst great drama, the Eurozone seemed to enact a political compromise, saving the euro as a single currency. Its effects on stabilisation are uncertain, but a Eurozone that is politically ‘less weak’ will do ‘less badly’ in the coming major collapse.
Yes, European leaders could all agree when it came to imposing austerity on Athens, Dublin, Lisbon and Rome, ‘reassuring’ financial markets, saving creditor banks, increasing countries’ financial burdens and putting public enterprises on the market at sale prices. But such policies make exiting th
The historic decision by Germany’s government to end the country’s nuclear-energy programme is owed to the enduring vitality of the anti-nuclear movement. Paul Hockenos maps the implications for the rest of the world.
Foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan meet in Islamabad to discuss security issues. In northern Kenya, inter-communal clashes over resources leave ten dead while Maoist rebels kill five security men in attacks in central India. Germany has agreed to supply NATO with bomb components for operati
It is taboo for Berlin of course, but a German strategy for EU withdrawal could actually be good for European cooperation.
Germany's decision to decommission its nuclear power stations is the outcome of a half century of anxiety about technocratic modernity.
Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
Centre-right parties across Europe are announcing the failure of multiculturalism. We are witnessing a co-ordinated revival of Enoch Powell's idea of the aggressive outsider out to dominate the rest; only now race and immigration are being played out on the terrain of culture and religion
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
Europe’s leaders are reversing their historically generous role in assisting countries out of criminality and fascism. What we are seeing now therefore strikes at the heart of the European project not just the euro.
