Articles by Viktor Sukup

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.


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.

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.

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.

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