Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb.
Read Here | The Spectator
What ails the Atlantic alliance is not a lack of capabilities or resources—after all, the Euro-Atlantic basin holds eight hundred million people, a combined $20 trillion in gross domestic product and several of the world’s leading military powers—but the political commitment to use them.
Read Here | The National Interest
At 7 p.m. local time on Oct. 2, 1990, East Germany’s national anthem was played as the country’s women’s handball team squared off against West Germany. They won 24-20. But at midnight, their country was no more: Germany was reunited. Prior to that event, world leaders had so feared German reunification that it nearly didn’t happen. But 30 years later, it can only be described as a phenomenal success.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
After the end of the Franco era, King Juan Carlos I helped his country become wealthy and democratic. Today he is exiled, with his legacy clouded by possible connections to tax fraud. What happened?
Read Here | Der Spiegel
The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have awakened the continent from its decades-long economic and political slumber and reinvigorated the EU integration project in ways that were unimaginable just six months ago… This crisis may forge a Europe that is more confident and more assertive on the world stage—one that will help strengthen and define the twenty-first-century global order.
It took four days of almost constant and uninterrupted negotiations, but in the end, a deal was made: EU leaders agreed on a roadmap out of the coronavirus economic crisis in the early hours of this morning, with the package predictably hailed as “historic” by almost all involved. Historic it might be, but that is hardly a positive development: instead, it will further intensify EU integration in areas where an “ever closer union” is unwise…
The COVID-19 crisis has pushed Europeans’ strategic thinking about China – already shifting because of three developments – past the tipping point. After years of pursuing closer bilateral economic ties, Europeans suddenly realise that they have become dangerously dependent on Chinese trade and investment.
Markus Soder’s political instinct combined with his charismatic media appearances make him a qualified prime candidate for Germany’s conservatives at next year’s election. There are just a few hurdles in sight. Most importantly, Soder is ‘only’ chairman of the CSU, representing one federal state while the CDU is present in the other 15. Both parties run together at general elections, but only twice did a CSU leader serve as the joint candidate for chancellorship.
Bergamo is the epicenter of the hardest-hit province of Italy’s hardest-hit region, Lombardy, the site of hundreds of coronavirus deaths. Families here are deprived of a bedside farewell with virus-stricken loved ones, or even a traditional funeral, and the cemetery is so overwhelmed by the number of dead that military trucks transported 65 bodies to a neighbouring region for cremation this week.
It took COVID-19 several weeks to mass migrate from China to Europe, but the continent is now awash in the virus. The pandemic has fully arrived in Italy and Spain. Other nations await the disease, hoping to slow its spread. It will kill many Europeans. It also might kill the European Union, at least the idea of a European community in any meaningful sense.
