Word: unionizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When I'm looking for something I've dropped on the carpet, I have a bit of a problem." ANGELA MERKEL German Chancellor and chair of a European Union summit that will ban 27 E.U. nations from using conventional lightbulbs by 2010; Merkel conceded that new energy-saving bulbs are "not yet quite bright enough...
...founding of the European Economic Community in 1957 was a momentous event. Today's Europe is the largest expanse of peace and widely shared prosperity in the world. It is perfectly true that the E.E.C. - as it was called in 1957, the European Union as it is now - is not solely responsible for that happy outcome. After the carnage of World War II, it was as much American minds and muscle as European ones that determined that Europe needed new institutions binding nations together if it was to avoid the catastrophes of war. Indeed, NATO and the Marshall Plan, both...
...spawned admirers - how could it not? - but not imitators. No other multinational grouping - not Mercosur in Latin America, not asean in Southeast Asia - has anything like the powerful institutions of the Union. Europe's history and geography, it turns out, are unique. Its nations are small enough and close enough to understand each other and have shared values; but at the same time, all of Europe lived through such horrors in the 20th century that its nations' postwar leaders needed little convincing of the virtues of cooperation. In Europe, nationalism has a bad name; in much of the rest...
True, that judgment would have been harder to make in the early 1990s. Then, Jacques Delors was the President of the European Commission, the single currency was being planned, and François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl were shaping European policy. It seemed certain that political union would follow the economic variety and the E.U. become a second democratic Atlantic superpower. But that dream was curdled by European dithering in the Balkan wars and by the concomitant realization that European electorates had no stomach for displays of superpowerdom as they have been conventionally measured: that is to say, in killing...
François Bayrou insists he has nothing to prove. His life story suggests otherwise. The leader of the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) and for many years a minor presence in the rarefied world of French politics, Bayrou has emerged as a serious contender for the country's presidency. He has done so in spite of his homespun background. A smallholder's son from the Pyrenees, saddled with a stutter as a kid, he never rounded off his résumé at one of France's prestigious grandes écoles as many politicians...