Nicolas Sarkozy delivered an official speech on foreign policy today, March 28, in Paris. Here are the main highlights : – Europe : Priority should be given to the institutional crises opened by the French and Dutch referenda. Sarkozy proposes a”simplified treaty whose aim will not be the re-foundation of a political Europe. Its aim [...]

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The French presidential campaign is mainly about domestic issues. But we start hearing the various candidates giving their views on the future of Europe, and more precisely on what should be done to revive the process of EU’s integration after the French and Dutch”No” to the European constitutional treaty.   Here are the basics about [...]

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Despite concerns over global current account imbalances and volatile energy prices, multinational companies increased their investments abroad last year at a robust pace. According to the recently released estimates from the United Nations, foreign direct investment (FDI) rose from $916 billion in 2005 to $1.2 trillion in 2006, the second highest level on record and [...]

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Newsweek has become the latest international media outlet to raise the prospect of serious economic problems in the pipeline for the European Union’s newest member states. In an article entitled:”Europe’s Fallen Angels”   (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17081618/site/newsweek/) the magazine quotes Simeon Djankov, chief economist at the World Bank as saying:”I think every one of these countries is going [...]

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Among a number of interesting developments in Belarus in recent days, the Minsk based news agency BelaPAN reported Wednesday that the authorities were considering granting amnesties to certain categories of prisoners. It was not clear whether this would include political prisoners. But given Lukashenko’s new found enthusiasm for better relations with the West we should [...]

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Vladimir Putin’s combatative approach to the United States at the Munich security conference this weekend prompted an ironic response from US Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Responding to Putin’s list of accusations over America’s role in the world, Gates said:”As an old cold warrior, one of yesterday’s speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a [...]

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According to an article in the February 9 edition of Izvestia, the Belarusian economy appears to have lost $5 billion in de-facto subsidies from  energy price hikes by Russia this January. This estimate, sourced to Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko himself, is greater than previous estimates which had ranged from $3.5 billion to $4 billion. The [...]

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A tabernacle of Germanness — or rather Bavarianness, one of its Holies of Holies, really — has been stormed by a German Turk. Django Asäl (born in the small South German town of Hengersberg in 1972 as Ugur Bagisayici) will do the”Starkbieranstich” on the Nockherberg. There are Germans of Turkish ethnicity in the federal legislature, [...]

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European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel will be in Washington DC on Thursday and Friday this week for meetings with all the key farm policy players in the Administration and in Congress. A deal between the EU and the US on cutting farm tariffs and subsidies holds the key to the stalled WTO ‘Doha [...]

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Russian president Vladimir Putin said Thursday  he was considering forming a gas”OPEC” along the lines of the oil cartel of the same name. Putin was speaking at a marathon, three and a half hour long, press conference in the Kremlin with more than 1,000 foreign and local journalists.  The suggestion, which bounces off a proposal [...]

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