Analyst on European and international affairs, author of several books including Europa y la globalización (Buenos Aires, 1998), visiting lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires and former public servant at the European Commission.
Who are the real “Europeans” today? The bureaucrats, officials and parliamentarians of the European institutions, in their somewhat isolated “Brussels bubble”? A few distinguished philosophers and other intellectuals who firmly reject nationalism?
On 22 November the right-wing presidential candidate, Mauricio Macri, won the presidential elections in Argentina, at little distance from the government candidate from that always somewhat incomprehensible Peronist movement, located somewhere between popular and populist, left and right, democracy and authoritarianism, and tradition and progress.
Since 2013, when negotiations began, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact, or TTIP, has been hotly debated by the informed European public. Much less known, logically, is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which, after more than five years of negotiations, was signed on 5 October in Atlanta, Georgia, by the US itself, Japan and ten other countries bordering the Pacific, with the significant absence of China.
The Roman Empire stretched as far as the Danube and the Rhine, where the name of Cologne itself still recalls the ancient Romans. But it was precisely the “northern barbarians” that put an end to it. And central Europe, the Mitteleuropa of the upper Danube, experienced the many migrations that completely changed the face of Europe.
While Greece continues to give nightmares to both European politicians and public, Portugal appears to have emerged from the worst difficulties in recent years and have swallowed the Troika’s bitter pill with prospects of soon overcoming its serious economic crisis. Its political leaders do not cease to emphasize that they have successfully…
The Greek crisis has considerably widened the gap between the EU Member States and this is likely to continue. As was stressed after the bitter “commitment” on the morning of 13 July, only France and Italy, as well as Cyprus, strove to “save Greece”, preventing the “Grexit” which Germany and others, possibly fed up with endless European summits, more or less openly encouraged. The cracks are not, therefore, only “north-south” or “east-west”, but also dangerously affect the fundamental basis of the EU itself.
Written in conjunction with Jovana Savic
Somewhat obscured for the European public by simultaneous other urgent issues, the 17th EU-China summit took place in Brussels on 29 June 2015. It was chaired by the Presidents of the European Council and the Commission—Messrs, Tusk and Juncker, respectively—and the Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, marking forty years of bilateral cooperation and diplomatic relations.
After 54 years Cuba and the United States finally re-established diplomatic relations in July 2015. There is little doubt that in this “fall of the Caribbean Wall” has been influenced by China’s growing presence in the Americas…
Among other issues, the year 2015 will continue to be marked in Europe by renewed tension between the European Union and its somewhat “problematic” Member State, Greece; tension of almost unprecedented nature, certainly long-lasting and with unpredictable consequences for everyone. At the political level, this is a tension that pits a relatively radical version of the left, which is dominant in the new Greek government, against conservative liberalism, which is little questioned by social democracy that is associated with power in Germany and Europe more generally, as a moderately influential minority partner.
