Category: European Union
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Wednesday, May 06, 2020
To Avoid a Collapse of the Eurozone, Europe Moves Closer to a European Megastate / Politics / European Union
By: Frank_Hollenbeck
The French president Macron recently fired a warning shot across the bow of the European ship of state. He said that without making all EU countries mutually responsible for the debts of individual countries the EU could collapse. In March, Christine Lagarde asked eurozone finance ministers to consider a one-off joint debt issuance of “corona bonds” to assist with the coronavirus pandemic. But this has been met with opposition by Germany and other northern European countries, since they do not want to be responsible for the debts of the more spendthrift nations of the EU.
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Thursday, January 31, 2019
Flash-Balls, Pitchforks And A Backstop / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
It’s educational and even somewhat entertaining to observe the role of the western press in the ongoing erosion and demise of democracy in Europe. But while it’s entertaining, it also means their readers and viewers don’t get informed on what is actually happening. The media paints a picture that pleases the political world. And it it doesn’t please politicians to lift a veil here and there, too bad for the public.
The Shakespearian comedy that was performed last night in the UK House of Commons is a lovely case in point. Basically, MPs voted whether or not to allow PM Theresa May to change the Brexit deal she had told them about a hundred times couldn’t possibly be changed. Brexit has turned full-blown Groucho by now: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
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Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Europe Has No Control Over Its Future. Period. / Economics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
Whenever we talk about the European economy, Germany drives the discussion.
Yes, the UK and France are big, but Germany is the giant. If Germany sneezes, the rest of the continent catches cold.
And it is sneezing hard right now.
Monday, January 14, 2019
Europe is Burning / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
There will be elections for the European Parliament on May 23-26 2019. They will likely change the face of Europe more than anything has done since the EU was founded. That is not some wild prediction. Many European countries have held elections since the last European elections in 2014, and just about all had outcomes that shook up domestic political ratios.
In most cases, countries went from traditional parties to newly founded ones. France erased the Socialists and center-right in 2017, and the final round of the presidential elections was between Marine Le Pen’s Front National and Emmanuel Macron’s brand-new En Marche. Macron won sort of by default, because France as a country would never have voted for Le Pen.
In Italy, M5S and Lega have taken over. In Germany, Merkel’s CDU/CSU coalition lost bigly though it remained the biggest party, but Angela lost her ‘socialist’ SPD partner which gave up so much it didn’t want to be in government anymore. In Spain, Mariano Rajoy’s center right lost enough to cede power to the Socialists who came up tops because they played a smart game, not because the Spanish wanted it to rule.
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Sunday, December 09, 2018
Macron Heralds The End Of The European Union / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
The concept of the EU might have worked, but still only might have, if a neverending economic boom could have been manufactured to guide it on its way. But there was never going to be such a boom. Or perhaps if the spoils that were available in boom times and bust had been spread out among nations rich and poor and citizens rich and poor a little more equally, that concept might still have carried the days.
Then again, its demise was obvious from well before the Union was ever signed into existence, in the philosophies, deliberations and meetings that paved its way in the era after a second world war in two score years fought largely on the European continent.
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Thursday, May 24, 2018
Insane EU GDPR SCAM Triggers Mass Email Spam Attacks! / Politics / European Union
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Once upon a time most spam emails tended to end up in users SPAM folders, but then along came another cunning plan out of the European Union Bureaucracy, The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR in the run up to which the world's email users have been increasingly subject to the worlds largest Spam Attack, where it has got to the point where most of the emails users are receiving are GDPR SPAM EMAILS! As companies desperate to be compliant in respect of GDPR are repeatedly asking for further consent for being on their customer mailing lists and are thus breaking OTHER EU regulations against the sending of such emails!
Saturday, November 04, 2017
Preparing For EU Collapse / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
If there is one thing the Spain vs Catalonia conflict reminds us of, it has got to be Turkey. And that is a much bigger problem for the EU than it realizes. First of all, Brussels can no longer insist that this is an internal, domestic, Spanish issue, since Catalan president Puidgemont is in…Brussels. So are 4 members of his government.
That moves decisions to be made about his situation from the Spanish legal system to its Belgian counterpart. And the two are not identical twins. Even if both countries are EU members. This may expose a very large European problem: the lack of equality among justice systems. Citizens of EU member countries are free to move and work across the Union, but they are subject to different laws and constitutions.
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Friday, November 03, 2017
Here’s Why Catalonia Has Put The EU In Danger / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
BY JACOB L. SHAPIRO : Catalonia is vying to become Europe’s newest nation-state, but this is a battle Catalonia ultimately can’t win.
Only 51.8% of members in the Catalan parliament supported the independence declaration. That means even Catalans themselves are divided over whether Catalonia should secede from Spain.
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Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Almost All Countries In Europe Have Border Issues / Personal_Finance / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN : For centuries, Europe has fought wars over borders. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Europe’s borders shifted wildly. As empires fragmented, new nations arose and wars were waged.
After 1945 and the beginning of the Cold War, a new principle emerged on the Continent. The borders that existed at the end of World War II were deemed sacrosanct—not to be changed.
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Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Fragmenting Countries, Part 1: Catalonia Is Just The Beginning / Politics / European Union
By: John_Rubino
Picture a life where you do most of your shopping through Amazon.com and the local farmers’ market, most of your communicating through Facebook and Instagram, much of your travel via Uber, and much of your saving and transacting with bitcoin, gold and silver.
Do you really need an immense, distant, and rapacious central government? Maybe not. Perhaps your region or ethnic group would be better off forming its own independent country.
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Thursday, April 06, 2017
4 Maps That Show Why Europe Is Destined for Extinction / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN: The European Peninsula runs from Portugal and Britain in the west, to St. Petersburg in the east, and the city of Rostov-on-Don in the southeast. It goes from the Mediterranean and Black seas to the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
Access to rivers, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic has let the European Peninsula build trade routes and flourish economically.
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Saturday, April 01, 2017
The EU Is One Big Fatal Flaw / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
The true face of the EU is presently on display in Greece, not in Germany or Holland or France. Brussels must first fix what’s going wrong in Athens and the Aegean, and there’s a lot going wrong, before it can move on towards the future, indeed towards any future at all. It has a very tough job in Italy as well, which it’s trying hard to ignore.|
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Dutch and French Electons - Winners are Losers and Left is Right / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
The Dutch elections on Wednesday have provided a whole bunch of Orwellian narratives. PM Mark Rutte’s right wing VVD party, actually the ‘business’ -or should we say ‘rent-seekers’ in 2017- party, who lost some 20% of the seats they had obtained in the previous parliamentary election in November 2012, down from 41 to 33 seats, is declared the big winner. While Geert Wilders’ very right wing party, PVV, won 25% more seats -it went from 16 to 20- and is the big loser.
Moreover, Rutte’s coalition partner, labor PvdA, gave up 29 out of 38 seats to end up with just 9. That’s a loss of over 75%. Together, the coalition partners went from 79 seats in the 2012 election to 42 in 2017. That’s an almost 50% less. Not that it could prevent Rutte from proudly declaring: “We want to stick to the course we have – safe and stable and prosperous..” Makes you wonder who the ‘we’ are that he’s talking about.
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Monday, March 13, 2017
Caesar, Turkey and the Netherlands Ides of March / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
I don’t think Holland realized they planned their election on the Ides of March, don’t remember the date or event ever being mentioned when I lived there as a child. That Washington knew what it was doing when back in 2013 it set the end of the latest debt ceiling compromise to March 15 is not likely either. Nor is Janet Yellen deliberately setting the Fed’s ‘next’ rate hike on the date. They may all, in hindsight, wish they had possessed a little more historical knowledge.
Friday, March 10, 2017
The EU May Bend to Keep From Breaking / Politics / European Union
By: STRATFOR
The European Commission is taking a clear-eyed look at Europe's future. On March 1, the institution presented a report proposing five different visions for what the European Union might look like in 2025. The report will doubtless take center stage at the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday between discussions of such issues as migration, security, defense and the economy. Along with suggesting that member states could integrate at different speeds, the white paper raises the possibility that EU member countries may regain control of some prerogatives currently under Brussels' authority.
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Friday, February 10, 2017
Tension between Italy, Germany, and the EU Is Growing / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
BY ANTONIA COLIBASANU : As mentioned in our 2017 forecast, Geopolitical Futures said that the evolution of the Italian banking crisis will force a confrontation between Italy, Germany, and the European Union. The groundwork for this confrontation was laid last year, and the face-off has further evolved already this year.
In December 2016, two Italian members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the populist Europe of Nations and Freedom groups asked the European Central Bank (ECB) in a letter to explain the “widening balance divergences between individual countries [in the eurozone] since the 2008 crisis.”
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Sunday, January 29, 2017
Le Pen, France - Sometimes It’s Better To Be Lucky Than Good, Populist Edition / Politics / European Union
By: John_Rubino
In 2015 there was no way the UK would vote to leave the European Union, so Prime Minister David Cameron promised to call a “Brexit” referendum as a cost-free sop to his party’s right wing in the upcoming election. The Conservatives won big, and Cameron kept his promise to run the meaningless referendum. But against all odds and contrary to nearly every election-day poll, Brexit won, flushing Cameron out of politics, pulling the UK out of the EU, and handing a huge victory to a populist coalition led by the UK Independence Pary’s Nigel Farage.
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Saturday, January 21, 2017
These Are the 3 Main Issues for Europe in 2017 / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN AND JACOB L. SHAPIRO : What will the year ahead look like for Europe? 2017 will be another chapter in the European Union's slow unraveling… a process that has been underway for over a decade.
The EU is a union in name only. The transfer of sovereignty to Brussels was never total, and member states are independent countries… each with their own interests at stake.
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Thursday, January 19, 2017
There’s Probably No Solution For Europe’s Problems / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
Our fifty states are essentially what the European Union’s founders wanted: a giant free-trade zone with a currency union and fiscal union. It’s working for us in part because our states, while unique, don’t have the centuries of cultural and linguistic diversity that Europe’s do.
The separate languages, cultures, and histories of its nations don’t mean Europe can’t develop better ways cooperate economically; but the EU structure—specifically the European Monetary Union and the euro—clearly isn’t the answer.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Italy, Germany, and the EU Are on the Brink of a Conflict / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
BY CHEYENNE LIGON AND ALLISON FEDIRKA : As a new year begins, we look at a key forecast that will bridge 2016 and 2017: the Italian banking crisis. In Geopolitical Futures’ 2016 forecast, we said that the focal point of Europe’s financial crisis would shift from Greece to the Italian banking system. For 2017, we forecast that the evolution of this crisis will eventually force a confrontation between Italy, Germany, and the European Union. Here, we establish a starting point for the looming Italian banking crisis in 2017, which will unfold over many months and have a range of consequences.