On the day of the “three-man summit” in Berlin between Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerard Schroeder, the main international dailies examine the scope of the meeting and its possible impact on the new European framework, in the light of imminent enlargement. “Europe and the Berlin-London-Paris axis”, is the front-page headline carried by Le Monde (18/2), which notes that “officially the French President and the German and British heads of government are meeting to work on the economic programme of the European Council to be held in the spring. But they must also discuss the institutional ‘impasse’ in which Europe finds itself on the eve of its enlargement. Exasperated by the meeting in Berlin, six other countries of the Union led by Spain and Italy have sent a letter to Ireland (which currently holds the EU Presidency) voicing their concerns and announcing their intention to give a discreet lesson in community conduct to their ‘big’ partners at the Berlin summit”. In the view of the Herald Tribune (18/2), the “fears” of a kind of triumvirate of France, Great Britain and Germany are “understandable, especially with the beginning of EU expansion”, and in some sense also justified by the debate “on the social and economic reforms” taking place in the continent, which represent one of the topics on the agenda in Berlin. “Chirac, Blair and Schröder don’t want to dominate Europe but to overcome stagnation”: so says Ramiro Villapadierna in the Spanish daily ABC (19/2) in commenting on the Berlin summit . “They don’t want to dominate Europe but ask the Commission for an economic vice-president”. On the same page we read that “ the tripartite proposal of France, Great Britain and Germany is aimed at growth and job creation”. “A European strategy of peace” is the title of an article by Raul Romeva, expert in international relations, in another Spanish daily, El Periódico (19/2). He calls Europe “a union that has stopped being a political dwarf in international conflicts”. Romeva emphasises that “this does not mean it must act militarily, on the contrary, the genuine threats to the planet cannot be solved by weapons”. Giuseppe Dalla Torre ( Avvenire, 15/2) reflects on the validity and actuality of the “new” Concordat in Italy, twenty years since the reform of the Lateran Pacts between the Church and the Italian State. He argues that the “new” Concordat “is a model of the lay State whose cultural roots also include social doctrine, with its theses on the reciprocal independence and autonomy between Church and political community”. Many reactions have been prompted in the German press by the arrival of the news from South Korea on cloning human embryos. “ As yet the South Korean experiments have cured no one, but they have presented the world with cloned embryos and the Raelian sect with the instructions about how to produce them. In this sector full of charlatans, the new information will be read avidly. There’s clearly no shortage of young fanatics willing to adopt cloned babies. This horror will probably end only once the first cloned baby affected by deformations is born. The prospect is terrible“, says the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (13/2). In the same paper, Christian Schwägerl comments as follows (16/2): “ It remains to be seen… how society will handle the possibilities of using cloning for purposes considered beneficial, e.g. to eliminate pathological molecular factors or even to improve particular services. We are still very far from concrete possibilities as all scientists assure us but just how rapidly it is possible to overcome theoretically valid obstacles is shown by the news from South Korea“. Writing in Die Welt (17/2), Matthias Kamann comments: “ It’s possible to refute all the objections against cloning for therapeutic ends…. But what cannot be refuted is the objection that each fertilised human egg is a person, on whom it is not permissible to conduct experiments.———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1273 N.ro relativo : 13 Data pubblicazione : 20/02/04
