PARIS | By Michel de Pracontal, via Presseurop.eu | Markets analysts often augur the failure of the EU project because of national and cultural diversity. But American researchers recently completed a study of genes from the European continent. Their conclusion: all of today’s Europeans are descended from the same ancestors.
Pessimists around the world repeat that the European Union is doomed because of structural weaknesses and the economic crisis. But in many fields, the EU holds its own against world powers like the United States and China, argue Mark Leonard and Hans Kundnani.
MADRID | By Antonio Sánchez-Gijón, capitalmadrid.com | François Hollande’s presidency has made little progress in convincing Berlin that the Eurozone will not recover if it has to implement further budget cuts.
BRUSSELS | By Alesio Pissano | Once upon a time the EU was a global leader in fighting climate change. In the last few years it has played a pivotal role in tackling CO2 emissions and boosting the green economy world wide. But, how is the economic crises affecting the EU’s green path?
LONDON | In a way, the Great English Euroscepticism was irrational until the Eurozone began to burst here and there, and the well-meaning rhetoric of the elites in Brussels and Strasbourg fell into a provincialism-stinking pit.
VALENCIA | By Laura Garsando, Mètode magazine | Lorenzo Sanchis works at UMDO (Unit of Optoelectronic Materials and Devices) of the Institute for Materials Science (University of Valencia) and has coordinated the research group that developed the first acoustic invisibility cloak that works on three-dimensional objects.
PARIS | Le Monde, via Presseurop.eu | In granting extra time to Madrid and Paris to clean up their public accounts, Brussels has shown good sense. This is in contrast to the rigid position it had adopted until now, which dragged the EU executive into a fool’s game with wayward member states.
MADRID | By JP Marín Arrese | Those longing for a growth strategy to invigorate their ailing economies delude themselves in thinking that Ms Merkel might prove to be more tractable once she is re-elected.
MADRID | By Antonio Sánchez-Gijón at CapitalMadrid | On May 9 the European Union will deliver Charlemagne Prize to Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite. The idea is not to reward her as a former EC Commissioner, but as the person who embodies the success of three small countries of Northern Europe out of their deep economic crisis in two years. While the populations of the Mediterranean Europe and France are raised in arms against austerity policies imposed from Brussels and Frankfurt to exit the stagnation and save the euro, two European Baltic nations are looking forward to joining the common currency.
MADRID | The eurozone’s central bank should have acted as a last resort lender years ago, so peripheral economies would not have had to endure the punishment of excessive prices on market credit.