European Union

Der Plan and the Onion: Under New Management

By Julian Lindley-French

There is something vaguely disturbing watching a Brussels European Onion summit from afar; especially when the topic is how to waste even more of my money. Watching a few with an awful lot of money in offshore tax havens (the Euro-Aristocracy) instructing a few others on huge tax-free salaries (the Onionistas of the European Omission) […]

A Smart EU Reponse to Yanukovych

By Borut Grgic

The turmoil that has gripped European-Ukrainian relations following the sentencing of Yulia Tymoshenko risks jeopardizing an important strategic relationship, and both sides stand to lose big from this fallout. Whether or not Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister, is guilty, was given a fair trial or should be punished for her commercial interests and dealings while […]

High Noon for Europe’s Banks

By Michael Lafferty

There is a gigantic hole in the balance sheets of Europe’s banks – from France to Germany, from Spain to Italy. Even the UK, which thought it had put all this behind it with an unprecedented bailout of major banks in 2008, cannot be excluded. The banks desperately need vast amounts of new capital to […]

Georgia in the West: A Policy Road Map to Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic Future

On October 13, the Atlantic Council Task Force on Georgia, co-chaired by Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Lindsey Graham, released a major new report on Georgia at an event held on Capitol Hill, arguing for intensified domestic reform and a new sense of common purpose and clarity from the United States and Europe to work toward […]

The Eurozone’s Original Sin

By Ben Carliner

When the seventeen countries that make up the Eurozone joined the monetary union, they each gave up a very important privilege: the ability to borrow in their own currency. For most members, this seemed at first less a concession than a windfall. Rather than paying a premium over the German benchmark, Eurozone members saw their […]

Germans Love Europe, but Not the Euro

By Wolfgang Ischinger

Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have spent the last year trying to explain Germany’s halting, confounding approach to the euro crisis. Digging deep into the country’s history, a recent article in The Economist emerged with a telling question from the theologian Martin Luther: Why should sinners be given an easy way out?