European budget agreement

Jean-Jacques Roth compares the results of the European summit in Brussels to those of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting which ended yesterday with a compromise among the 149 members countries. He believes that the negotiators "rescued something crucial by reaching agreement in their respectives talks: multilateralism. (...) In Hong Kong as in Brussels, no one can say what today's agreemments will beget tomorrow by way of new initiatives. We do know, however, what a failure to reach them would have meant: a victory of a battle of wills over the spirit of compromise, and a substantial weakening of the collective will as a tool for global governance. Contrary to the imaginings of so many anti-globalists and nationalists - united in the same illusion that a breakdown in talks would have been a salutary outcome - hope was the real winner here."

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