Dailies and periodicals” “

The decision of Ecofin to avoid procedures and sanctions against France and Germany for excessive public deficit makes the front pages in all the main international dailies. The decision has aroused the strong reaction of the Commission in Brussels and the protests of member states. “Crisis of credibility for Europe”, comments Thomas Fuller in the Herald Tribune (26/11), according to whom the decision of EU Finance Ministers contains “an inevitable ignominy. For the benefit of the iniquitous economies of France and Germany, the European partners have passed from a law that Germany considered rigidly binding since 1997 (…). Now France and Germany have become inert, incapable of cutting back on their expenditures and accelerating growth, while Spain, at one time suspect, has been capable of combining budget cuts and the reduction of unemployment”. A “Europe in crisis” is also analysed by Le Monde (27/11), which in its front-page article declares: “By suspending the procedures opened against Germany and France, for failure to contain their public deficits, European ministers of finance have opened an unprecedented crisis on the Stability Pact (The new situation risks widening the gulf between the virtuous members at the budgetary level and the dunces; between large and small countries, just at a time when the delicate negotiations on the European Constitution conceived for 25 member states are reaching their conclusion”. “Paris and Berlin bend Europe to their needs”, is the front-page headline in La Croix (26/11), in which it is claimed that “the Fifteen have pensioned off the stability pact”. “Stability Pact. Positions entrenched”, is the headline in the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire (27/11). “On the one side, the Stability Pact, on the other the Constitution: in the middle, Europe”, comments Carlo Baroni, according to whom the intergovernmental Conference in Naples could be “the right occasion to try to resolve the too many questions that still divide the Union”. In recent days the Spanish press has given wide coverage to Spain’s isolated position in the European Union. El Periodico ( 26/11) declares that “Spain is reinforcing its rejection of the new distribution of power within the EU because it could prejudice it”. Enric Hernández writes in the same paper that “ Aznar is warning the Franco-German axis of the fact that there’s no alternative to the voting system negotiated at Nice” and points out that “Madrid and Warsaw are reinforcing their alliance in their relations with Brussels and rejecting any prospect of Europe marginalizing NATO”. In the same paper it is explained that “the EU is privileging diplomacy instead of preventive war”. According to Eliseo Oliveras, Brussels correspondent of the Spanish daily, “the definitive version of the EU security strategy is breaking away from the USA by emphasizing the political character of preventive action, which ought not to remain hostage of a purely military concept”. The writer Luis Racionero comments in the pages of La Vanguardia ( 24/11) that Europe is Christian but not only that: “That the European Union wants to characterise itself as a secular state seems to me reasonable, but to deny the Christian roots of Europe is just as arbitrary as to suppose that Christianity is the only element that has shaped her”. Many comments in the German press are devoted to the terrorist attacks in Istanbul. “The terrorists have demonstrated their ability to strike everywhere in the world. Now it must be the community of the civilised countries that must demonstrate they are able to react in a determined way to this challenge“, declares the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (21/11). “It is not by chance that Turkey was attacked“, writes Dietrich Alexander in Die Welt (21/11). “For nothing would be more fatal to these fanatics than a prosperous Islamic State that lives in symbiosis with the fundamental freedoms defined by the West”. “Leaving aside any dispute about Turkey’s entry into the EU, now’s the time to give Turkey moral support”, he adds. Writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau (21/11), Karl Große points out the differences between Islamic religion and Islamism: “Nothing is so much to the advantage of Islamism than an undifferentiated hostility to Islam: that’s precisely what the Islamists wish to provoke. […] The justified indignation in response to crimes justly imposes the need for retaliation. But if Islam were to be confused with Islamism, the aim of the latter would be achieved”. “Terrorist attacks like those of Istanbul … shake the confidence even of those who hope in a tacit burial of fundamentalism, if it is not provoked too much. It’s an ingenuous hope, just like the position” of Bush, who “does not want to understand that the school of thought at the basis of fanaticism almost hopes in a hard-line reaction”, comments Stefan Kornelius in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (21/11). “What then is the right response? Unity, political success and… moderate toughness“. The weekly Der Spiegel (24/11) notes: “Istanbul too is a symbol: it’s the economic metropolis of the secular Turkey that belongs to NATO, that wants to enter the EU and that is interested in a relation of détente with America. Istanbul is the Turkish New York”. ———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1252 N.ro relativo : 82 Data pubblicazione : 28/11/2003