Posted on 04/30/2013 2:02:50 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
The Franco-German axis that has driven EU affairs ever since Schuman and Adenauer in the early 1950s is collapsing before our eyes.
This was inevitable. Their interests have become incompatible under monetary union. The currency that was supposed to bind them is turning them into enemies, as this newspaper long warned.
The latest argument gaining traction – advanced by Prof Bernd Lücke and the German eurosceptic party AfD among others – is that the only way to save the Franco-German relationship and therefore the EU is to break up the euro before it does more damage. Interesting twist.
In the thirty or so years that I have been following EU affairs – or is it nearer 35 years now since I studied in French literature in Paris, and German philosophy in Mainz – I have never seen ties between Europe’s two great land states reduced so low.
The French Socialist Party crossed a line by lashing out at Chancellor Angela Merkel in person. It is one thing to protest “German austerity”, it is quite another to rebuke the “selfish intransigence of Mrs Merkel, who thinks of nothing but the deposits of German savers, the trade balance recorded by Berlin and her electoral future”.
There is no justification for such an ad hominem attack. German policy is indeed destructive, but that is structural. It is built into the mechanisms of EMU and the anthropological make-up of the enterprise.
The policy would not be greatly different even if a Social-Democrat/Green coalition were to win the elections in September, though this did not stop these two parties describing the French outburst as “legitimate and justified”.
German Vice-Chancellor Phillip Rösler has retaliated in kind against Paris. An internal paper by his Free Democrat Party (FDP) more or less ridicules France as
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Next time, Germany gets to KEEP France!
LOL
we need to keep an eye on your Ardens forest.
GMTA!!!
Why do new French Navy ships have glass bottoms?
So they can see the old French Navy ships!!!
Oui, Vive la France ! Je suis ici déclaration en douane... 
mes amis et collègues amateurs de liberté et de bons vins !
Kerry ! Kerry ! C'est notre homme ! Kerry ! Kerry ! Il paie pour le vin... 
Kerry ! Kerry ! C'est notre homme !
Translate at http://www.bing.com/translator/ if... 
you can stomach this merde--
So they can see the old French Navy ships!!!
LMAO! Good one!
It doesn’t take an economics genius to understand that no German wants to spend his hard-earned money propping up France, Greece, Cyprus, Spain and any others who can’t live within their means. Not for nothing was the story of the Tower of Babel included in the Bible.
The EU did not NEED the Euro and the EU would have been better off today had the French particularly and the European international bankers NOT been so politically envious of the U.S. dollar, so envious that their offspring to satisfy that envy - the Euro - was given an artificial birth “before its time”.
The introduction of the Euro should have proceeded in very gradual stages based on more than simply national-government-deficit to GDP ratio benchmarks (which they all violated). Just as importantly as a single item such as national-government-deficit to GDP ratio (as far as the start of a new “common” currency), were GDP growth rates, GDP-per-capita rates, trade balances, work-force participation, and unemployment rates, just to name a few.
The premature establishment of the Euro was no solution to underforming economies joining it. The same ones that were underforming when the Euro was started, the same ones for whom it was said establishing the Euro would benefit them, are the same batch, for the most part, that are underperforming today.
Why? The Euro fixed nothing in terms of internal structural economic reforms that needed fixing in any EU country and particularly not in the countries most in need of internal economic structural reforms.
I think the European nations that stayed out of the Euro must be happy they did.
I am pretty sure we’re going to think more than twice before saving France again too.
One name: Nigel Farage
He rocks!!!!
To my Brit friends....VOTE UKIP !!!
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