Aaah, Europe! Exoctic on one level (Parisian cafes, wonderful food, old churches and loads of history to look back at) and fraught with major issues (such as major unemployment and some economies not travelling well at all) on another. An "interesting" perspective on Europe by columnist, Roger Cohen, in "Long Live Europe" on the New York Times, Roger Cohen.....
"There’s an American cottage industry specialized in Europe’s woes: a feckless Continent whose defense spending is never adequate; a monetary union that is irretrievably flawed; a land of welfare that breeds unemployment; a place of resurgent hatreds that led Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, to observe this year that Europe “looks more like 1933 than 2015.”
Nope, Europe looks more like 2015, a borderless market of more than half a billion people between whom war has become impossible, so attractive to much of humankind that thousands die trying to get into it, a Continent where entitlements including universal health care are seen not as socialist indulgence but basic humanity, and a magnet to states outside the European Union that long to be part of this security-conferring entity.
Entities are unsexy. They do not send a shiver down the spine or cause a telltale tremor. But the entity without precedent that is the 28-member Union has delivered. It has delivered peace above all, prosperity however frayed, and freedom to former inmates of the Soviet imperium. It has also created an awareness of European identity that falls short of European patriotism but is nonetheless a counterweight to the primal nationalism that stained the Continent with so much blood.
As Dominique Moïsi, a French political scientist, observed to me recently: “Europe is alive. It is not well, but it is alive.” A falling euro and cheap oil have even prompted economic stirrings. European automakers had their best performance in a year last month. Growth estimates for the eurozone economy this year are being revised upward."
"There’s an American cottage industry specialized in Europe’s woes: a feckless Continent whose defense spending is never adequate; a monetary union that is irretrievably flawed; a land of welfare that breeds unemployment; a place of resurgent hatreds that led Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, to observe this year that Europe “looks more like 1933 than 2015.”
Nope, Europe looks more like 2015, a borderless market of more than half a billion people between whom war has become impossible, so attractive to much of humankind that thousands die trying to get into it, a Continent where entitlements including universal health care are seen not as socialist indulgence but basic humanity, and a magnet to states outside the European Union that long to be part of this security-conferring entity.
Entities are unsexy. They do not send a shiver down the spine or cause a telltale tremor. But the entity without precedent that is the 28-member Union has delivered. It has delivered peace above all, prosperity however frayed, and freedom to former inmates of the Soviet imperium. It has also created an awareness of European identity that falls short of European patriotism but is nonetheless a counterweight to the primal nationalism that stained the Continent with so much blood.
As Dominique Moïsi, a French political scientist, observed to me recently: “Europe is alive. It is not well, but it is alive.” A falling euro and cheap oil have even prompted economic stirrings. European automakers had their best performance in a year last month. Growth estimates for the eurozone economy this year are being revised upward."
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