- Article Information
- Category: June 2008
- Created on 01 June 2008
The Irish “no” to the European Union’s modernization blueprint has fueled a new round of skeptical American commentary about Europeans’ real ambitions. “In Europe, a Slide Toward Irrelevance” was the title of an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, a foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “The danger of this latest blow to European confidence is that our allies, including Britain, could gradually sink into global irrelevance,” Kagan wrote.
- Article Information
- Category: April 2008
- Created on 13 April 2008
More news about Germany’s “new emigration”
The German government has started subsidizing moves by unemployed Germans to help them get to jobs they find abroad. Known as “mobility incentives,” these payments cover moving costs for workers and their families anywhere in the world.
- Article Information
- Category: April 2008
- Created on 03 April 2008
Germans are emigrating at a record pace despite their country’s strengthening economy. In 2006, roughly 155,000 Germans left the country, apparently drawn by economic hopes.
- Article Information
- Category: Summer/Fall 2007
- Created on 02 June 2007
“Which is the most neutral country in the world? Czechoslovakia. It refuses to intervene even in its own internal affairs.” So went an anecdote I heard twenty years ago in communist-era Prague. But now it is June 2007. The Czechs joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004, and President George W. Bush has visited Prague to make his case for the U.S.-built anti-missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland to be built by 2012 to cope with threats from rogue states such as Iran. Formal bilateral negotiations are only just beginning; it remains unclear whether this anti-ballistic system can work or how it relates to NATO’s plans or whether the U.S. Congress will actually fund it. But none of those uncertainties forestalled Russia’s President Vladimir Putin from threatening to put those two central European facilities in the cross-hairs of Russian nuclear missiles. How popular is the shield in the Czech Republic? The center-right Czech coalition government, headed by Mirek Topolánek of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), says it wants it. But for months, Czech public opinion has run about two-to-one in opposition to the shield, with 10 percent undecided.
- Article Information
- Category: Fall/Winter 2006
- Created on 02 September 2006
“When it comes to the special relationship with America, Conservatives feel it, understand it and believe in it.” Thus David Cameron, who during the months since he took over the leadership of the British Conservative Party, has set in motion one of the most dramatic repositioning exercises in the party’s history. After years of appearing marginalized in British politics and foreign policy, the Conservatives are reaping useful (if not spectacular) dividends in the polls, enabling them to pull ahead of the ruling Labour party and Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats. Under Cameron, all areas of party policy are being revisited, and foreign policy is no exception.
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