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European press accuses Britain of killing off EU constitution Document Actions 07/06/2005 Europe's press on Tuesday accused Britain of killing off the EU constitution, dealing a blow to the French-German axis and trying to divide and rule the continent by shelving plans for a referendum on the treaty. Newspapers in Paris and Berlin said Prime Minister Tony Blair had undermined the French and German leaders by ignoring their appeals to move ahead with the referendum despite its rejection by French and Dutch voters in the last week. "London has dealt a serious blow to the Franco-German couple" of President Jacques...

BRUSSELS gave a cautious welcome to Jack Straw's announcement yesterday, with many leaders believing it showed that the constitution was still alive.Speaking before a meeting of European Union finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the UK decision was a signal the constitution was "not dead". Jean Asselborn, his foreign minister, expressed the general sense of relief in Brussels that the British government had not shelved its constitution plans altogether. "Despite the setbacks suffered over the last few days, the Treaty is still alive," he said. "We welcome the fact that the British...

Britain will defy French and German demands to press ahead with the ratification of the European Union constitution when Jack Straw announces this afternoon that the UK's referendum on the charter is to be put on ice. The Foreign Secretary is due to make a statement to MPs at 3.30pm during which he will explain that there is no point clogging the legislative agenda with the Bill paving the way for a referendum next year until EU member states work out how to deal with the French and Dutch 'no' votes last week. At a Franco-German summit in Berlin at...

…Now it can choose a more attractive destination First of all, the triumph. The treaty for a European constitution was a rotten treaty for a rotten constitution. It should never have been negotiated, it should never have been signed, it was essential that it should be defeated. The treaty took us a long stride closer to a United States of Europe, run by bureaucrats for the benefit of the European political class. The French and Dutch voters showed the power of democracy, and justified the use of referendums on constitutional issues. The German and British voters would have done the...

The death throes of old Europe are a rebellion that is both thrilling and laced with menace In Brussels the “mannequin pis” winked. In Holland the boy took his finger from the dyke. In Paris Marianne bared not her breast but her buttock. The cock crowed, the lion roared, the bear growled. Bliss it was last week to be alive and in Amsterdam, the city which since the 17th century has embodied civic autonomy and global commerce. It has just perpetrated a revolution and can hardly believe it. Two hundred kilometres to the south in Brussels, the humiliated courtiers of...

During the past week The New York Times, which is far and away the most international-minded of American newspapers, has run not a single editorial on the rejection of the European Union constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands. And, up to yesterday, only one among its large stable of columnists has bothered to offer comment on the topic. By contrast, all the major Canadian newspapers have run either editorials or commentaries on this topic, or both. The explanation for this that comes most easily to mind is that while we, as medium-sized guys, pay assiduous attention to what...

Tony Blair has given up on Europe as an issue worth fighting for, senior allies of the Prime Minister have told The Sunday Telegraph. A leading Blairite cabinet minister made the admission last night as the European Union descended into deeper turmoil, with doubts surfacing over the future of the single currency. Mr Blair, who will seek to shift the focus of his administration on to poverty in the Third World this week during talks with President Bush, has told his closest allies: "Africa is worth fighting for. Europe, in its present form, is not." The signal is an astonishing...

We live in a time of reassessment and reappraisal of the European project; the defeat of ratification of the EU Constitution in both France and the Netherlands has left the bureaucracy in Brussels dazed and confused. Worse, the Brussels establishment is now suffering from cognitive dissonance, as their continued call for ratification votes in the countries that have not yet voted on it shows.People searching for an explanation as to why the EU behaves as it does, namely, in such a bureaucratic, statist and anti-democratic fashion, will find Paul Belien’s new book "A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. The rejection of the proposed European Union constitution by the French people on May 29 and by the Dutch people on June 1, in high-turnout referenda, is a clear indication of the sad state of Old Europe. Many pundits have claimed that the negative vote in France, the country that created the EU as a way to harness German energy to French ambition, has thrown the continent into disarray. The causation runs the other way. The popular rejection of the constitution is the result of the failure of the "European model"...

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, has urged EU leaders to "turn a crisis into an opportunity".He said it was now up to them to pull Europe together, avoid the "blame game" and address the conflicting issues which led to this week's emphatic rejection of the constitutional treaty by French and Dutch voters. Mr Barroso was speaking in Messina, Sicily, on the 50th anniversary of the six-nation conference there which launched the common market, now the European Union. The Commission president took full advantage of the irony of the timing, pointing out that the circumstances then were...

Brussels – Europe's political crisis spread to the euro yesterday after Italy publicly discussed abandoning the single currency and reverting to the lira. The Italian suggestion, once unthinkable to the European establishment, comes as a poll showed a majority of Germans want to pull out of the euro and revive the Deutschmark. The threats to the future of the euro have disturbed currency markets already nervous about the growing crisis over the European Constitution. In his remarks yesterday, Roberto Maroni, the Italian welfare minister, said it was no longer unthinkable that the country would abandon the euro and revert to...

When the Russian army chased Napoleon's troops all the way back to Paris in 1814, the occupiers were not just tolerated but welcomed. They were chic. The empress Josephine herself went riding with the young czar. The locals seemed to delight in subjugation, the more undignified, the better. "We women," wrote Mme. Chateaubriand, "would cry 'Off with our heads!' were we to hear our neighbors do so." The French are funny. They will always stand up against usurpation of their rights and liberties by foreigners — but they do take their time about it. Last week, their time came. French...

FOR all the hard work of its founding fathers, there are two ways the young currency could falter and die. One is quick and painful. The other slow and possibly even more agonising.The most dramatic outcome of a euro crisis would be for one member of the currency union to leave. This would be far more difficult and damaging than Britain's expulsion from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990. The ties that bind the dozen euro economies would be vastly harder to break. Since 1999, they have intertwined their economies, and especially their government borrowing. Any country leaving the euro...

Paris – Another European crisis, another Franco-German summit. President Chirac will meet Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, tonight after this week’s referendum debacles, but this time the pair are largely impotent. The Franco-German “locomotive” that has hauled Europe since President de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, the then Chancellor, sealed the partnership in 1963 looks more like a train wreck or, to mix metaphors, a wobbly tandem pedalled by two lame ducks. Both leaders have been thrashed by voters recently. Their economies are among the sickliest in Europe, with double-digit unemployment. The European Union’s eastward enlargement has shifted its political centre of...

THE political crisis that has engulfed the European Union since France and the Netherlands rejected its proposed constitution yesterday threatened to spill over and damage the euro.Embattled EU financial leaders spent the day defending the currency, dismissing talk of its break-up as “absurd”. One senior EU official said: “Euro notes and coins are for ever, like the euro.” In a symptom of the seriousness of the creeping doubts, Roberto Maroni, the Italian Welfare Minister, had suggested in an interview with La Repubblica that a referendum should be held on bringing back the lira. The euro had “proved inadequate in the...

THE warped-cross “Berlaymonster” headquarters of the European Commission was still standing yesterday. The announcements poured out — on the welfare of broiler chickens, carbon dioxide trading schemes, telephone regulation and approval for the takeover of a Finnish copper company.Workmen continued constructing vast new offices for the Council of Ministers. The subsidised canteens echoed with the polylingual chatter of well-heeled functionaries. The EU has been plunged into its deepest crisis for fifty years after two of its founding members overwhelmingly rejected its proposed constitution. But in Europe’s capital there was little sign that anything had changed. Berlaymont was a place in...

AMSTERDAM — Doom scenarios about the future of the euro are being heard in France and the Netherlands after both nations rejected the EU Constitution in recent referendums. The president of the Dutch reserve bank DNB, Nout Wellink, has dismissed the speculation as "nonsense", while German Finance Minister Hans Eichel claims such talk is "irresponsible". But the word is out: after two 'no' votes and a persistent economic malaise, doom and gloom scenarios are being heard about the future of the euro, Dutch newspaper 'De Volkskrant' reported on Friday. "It is no longer unthinkable that the euro will bust," Leuven...

Liberalism in crisis "Forgive me for making a blunt and obvious point, but events in Western Europe are slowly discrediting large swaths of American liberalism," New York Times columnist David Brooks writes. "Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers Continues...============================================================== Frog pops the Big Question but she says, 'NON!' So, the French overwhelmingly rejected the proposed European Union constitution. Must be those tricky Diebold machines again. The vote Sunday dealt the second...

Death throes . . . By Victor Davis Hanson Published June 3, 2005 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The French and Dutch rebuffs of the European Union constitution will soon be followed by other rejections. Millions of proud, educated Europeans are tired of being told by unelected grandees that the mess they see is abstract art. The EU constitution -- and its promise of a new Europe -- supposedly offered a corrective to the Anglo-American strain of Western civilization. More government, higher taxes, richer entitlements, pacifism, statism and atheism would make a more humane and powerful new Continent of more than 400 million to...

TODAY the electorate of France votes in its national referendum on the proposed EU constitution; it will be followed by voters in the Netherlands giving their verdict on Wednesday. The stakes could not be higher for the European Union, its ruling elite and the citizens of its member states, including Britain, whose own referendum on the constitution is now being subjected to a cynical game of political brinkmanship. Despite the consistency of poll findings showing the No vote ahead in both France and Holland, the large proportion of undecided voters makes it hazardous - as well as presumptuous - to...