While these institutions have made some headway in meeting the infrastructure needs of Asian countries, some critics of the World Bank and ADB argue they are slow and bureaucratic, and impose stifling environmental and social constraints which deter investment.
The current crisis in Ukraine is a game changer for Europe. While it has reignited a necessary public debate about collective measures to ensure Europe’s security, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) immediate neighborhood has witnessed a considerable worsening of security conditions for some time.
If the 20th century was about an ideological fight between market-economy versus Communism, the 21st could very much be about liberal democracy versus imperialism. This could be the very lesson of Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Power politics is – even though it has never disappeared – now a reality that the EU and the U.S. […]
The countries of the European Union tend to be viewed as the main advocates at the national level for developing a more comprehensive and binding global plan to tackle climate change. As the EU pushes forward, other nations have been stuck in neutral or have been retrenching. With the European economy continuously struggling to pick […]
Five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, its reverberations are still being felt throughout the world. GDP in many wealthy countries remains well below its pre-crisis peak, and in Europe the global financial crisis has morphed into the Euro crisis. The downturn has been most pronounced along Europe’s southern coast, as countries wrestle with […]
After one week of progressive securitization of the Syrian problem by the US, Britain and France, it appears that the members of the Euro-Atlantic community were getting ready to build a coalition of the willing in order to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The United Nations recently sent UN […]
Should Europe care about the Snowden’s leak? Absolutely, but don’t expect too much from the EU and its Member States to fully defend privacy rights of European citizens. Earlier this week, Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton contracted by the NSA, leaked top-secret […]
The struggle for positioning in the solar energy marketplace took another turn. On June 4 Karel de Gucht, the European Commissioner for Trade, announced a new 11.8 percent tariff to be applied to imported Chinese made solar panels, and photovoltaic cells and polysilicon wafers, two system components. To avoid an additional increase escalating to […]
“Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,” exclaims Shakespeare’s Henry V in his fervid St. Crispian’s day speech on the eve of the battle of Agincourt in 1415. In the observance of this month’s 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq there appears to be no danger of consigning this event to oblivion. Most […]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to Oslo this week to meet with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg to discuss the euro crisis and energy issues, including cooperation in the Arctic. This was the pair’s fifth meeting in nine months. Stoltenberg stressed the importance of German and European companies in assisting with the development of the Arctic […]
In hopes of generating patriotic fervor, German politicians have asked that their national football team to be compelled to sing the national anthem before each match. Players, such as Mesut Özil and Lukas Podolski, have been criticized for not participating in the ceremonious singing of the Deutschlandlied before each national match. Why? Özil is a third generation Turkish-German and Podolski first […]
When one reads the words ‘arms sales’ or ‘weapon systems sold’, one does not usually expect to see the word ‘Germany’ close by. Though it may be quiet global arms dealer, for the past several years (2007-2011) Germany has been the world’s third largest arms exporter. Though Berlin 9% of the total exports trails the […]
Could Nazi Germany happen again? Could an autocracy take hold in a democratic country? These are the questions posed by a teacher in modern Germany, a teacher who is forced to teach about autocracy to high school students for one week. When he asks those questions, many of his students say they believe the sway the Nazis […]
Initially sprung as a pro-reform movement with demands for government accountability and transparency, today the Syrian conflict has morphed into a multiplayer geopolitical chess game that so far has proved to have no limits in inflicting pain on the players involved. With Iran fearing the loss of a key ally, Turkey aspiring to dominate a post-Arab […]
Following up on the controversial Guenther Grass poem discussed in a previous post, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine published last week a very long article addressing the question of whether the six sophisticated submarines Germany supplied Israel are being equipped with nuclear weapons. Co-reported and co-written by eight people, the very long article contains a lot […]