"It has become a ritual: twice a year, the European Commission evaluates the progress made by the EU country-candidates. Equally ritualistic are the weeks preceding the delivery of these reports, providing an opportunity for the leaders of the countries concerned to plead pro domo", explains Pascal Martin. He is alluding to Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev's visit to Brussels this week. Stanishev defended his country's adherence to the EU from January 1st, 2007. "In fact, according to a report, Bulgarian and Romanian membership in 2008 appears extremely impossible, the reforms belatedly undertaken by these two countries being unable to bare fruit in a single year. The Commission's policy so far has involved trying to obtain a maximum from the two States, even if that means resorting at the last minute to security clauses that would partially leave the new member in the waiting-room of the EU." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Ampliación de la UE, » Rumania, » Bulgaria
Todos los textos disponible de » Pascal Martin

"The European Commission is warming up to telling Romania and Bulgaria that they can join in January", writes foreign editor Bronwen Maddox, "it is making a lot of noise, implying that it has plenty of room for manoeuvre in that decision, but it doesn't. It maintains that it has plenty of sanctions up its sleeve if they fail to reform once they are in the European Union, but it doesn't. The next official report from the Commission on the two applicants' progress, or lack of it, is due on September 26. After that, the 25-member club will decide whether to admit the two new members in January, or delay for a year. ... The Commission has too many incentives to press ahead regardless of its misgivings about the entrants' readiness. Logistical pressures weigh against it: the cumbersome mechanisms for paying subsidies to farms are being put in place, and it would be difficult to unpick them in four months." (06/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Ampliación de la UE, » Rumania, » Bulgaria
Todos los textos disponible de » Bronwen Maddox

The newspaper's commentary focuses on Bulgaria's - by all rights impossible - admission to the EU. "The EU doesn't have much option: it has a firm contract with the Bulgarians that they can join in 2008 at the latest, whether or not they are ready for entry. But they're not - and this means the EU could fall back on an option that doesn't yet exist: to admit the country in 2007 but with second-class membership. The report by the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Olli Rehn, states that Bulgaria is failing to meet almost all the criteria that have to be fulfilled to join today's club of 25... The solution the EU is now threatening leaves it with at least a shred of credibility. If Bulgaria spectacularly flouts EU standards, it will simply be excluded from common policies. This means, for instance, that the verdicts of the Bulgarian judiciary, which lacks independence, would not be recognised throughout the EU. The people in the other EU countries would be grateful to the Commission for this." (05/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Ampliación de la UE, » Bulgaria

The Dutch women's rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes that "the most effective way for EU governments to deal with their Muslim minorities" is to "boost Muslim women who live within their borders. Education is the best method for this... Europe's politicians haven't begun to recognise the hidden potential in liberating Muslim women. They are wasting their best opportunity to achieve the successful integration of Muslims within a generation. Morally, governments have a duty to eliminate violence against women. Only this will make it clear to the fundamentalists that Europeans take their own constitutions seriously. Nowadays most oppressors simply think Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and dishonest, because Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they're told it's done in the name of religion." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Integración, » Europa
Todos los textos disponible de » Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"Although Internet has changed our lives, this technological progress could lead us to a cultural regression", advances the Italian writer Umberto Eco, who discussed with François Armanet his last essay about History's regression. "In 'Fictions', Borges told us the story of 'Funes or memory', this man who remembered everything, every leaf he had seen on every tree, every word he had heard during his life and who, because of his total memory, was a perfect idiot. The function of memory is not only to conserve, but also to filter. ... Yet, for a naïve navigator, Internet is Funes. Internet tells him everything without telling him if such and such information is reliable. ... If we do not educate Internet users, we will end up with six billion encyclopaedias. One per inhabitant of the planet!" (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Medios de comunicación online, » Global
Todos los textos disponible de » Umberto Eco

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair is due to specify on Thursday September the 7th the schedule of his departure, the daily looks back on this man's career. "He is the Labour Prime Minister who has had the longest run in the United Kingdom [nine years]. He has been wise enough to announce before a third victory that he will not be presenting himself any more. But he does not know how to leave and is dragging the Labour Party with him into an abyss. After having been one of the most innovative leaders of the left, he has lost in popularity by unconditionally lining up with the Americans in the Iraq war. ... Yesterday, several of his collaborators resigned. This bares a very strong resemblance to the end of a reign". (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Política interior, » Gran Bretaña

"Who could honestly have predicted, back in 1994 or even as late as 2005, that the years of New Labour ascendancy would end in this way, with an irreconcilable eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the two men whose raw talent and unprecedented closeness built the most electorally successful government in the history of the British left?" comments the daily. "With a sudden shower of government resignations following on from all the backbench plotting, Labour is a party polarising from top to bottom over the leadership question, and calls for a 'stable and orderly transition' now seem to belong to a lost age of innocence. Nevertheless, it remains in Labour's interest for there to be as smooth a transfer as is possible in the unforgiving circumstances: civil war could destroy this government, just as surely as it has destroyed others in the past. If ever there was a moment for Labour MPs, members and supporters to demand a return to sanity and respect within the upper reaches of their party, this is it." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Política interior, » Gran Bretaña

In a commentary, Adrian Severin, an ex-foreign minister of Romania, proposes that the Central European countries with pro-Atlantic sympathies should form their own federation within the EU. "Experience has shown that the USA can tactically win any war, but is not capable of developing a peace strategy on its own." He adds that Europe and Russia are not rivals of America. "Quite the opposite - as partners in the increasingly tough global competition, they could help to win out against newcomers like China. The obsessive idea of a world with a single pole led by the USA and its tactical support for local despots carries the risk that the USA will eventually lose control and become enmeshed in superfluous or costly rescue operations." (06/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Relaciones internacionales, » Europa, » EE.UU.
Todos los textos disponible de » Adrian Severin

In a commentary, former Polish defense minister General Stanislaw Koziej considers the pros and cons of a US missile defence base in Poland, saying the project could result in problems not just with Russia but also with Poland's European allies in NATO and the EU. "In this context it is important to know how other Europeans see the project. They seem rather reserved. For Poland this means we risk complicating relations with our allies and partners in NATO and the EU. A US missile defence base in Poland should definitely not be an alternative to NATO or the EU." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Política de seguridad / Crisis / Guerras, » Polonia
Todos los textos disponible de » Stanislaw Koziej

One third of the Roma in the Czech Republic live in closed ghettos, according to a study by the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. "This figure has surprised even the experts, who had previously assumed the existence of a dozen such ghettos," Vojtech Blazek comments. "Now it is clear they exist in almost every big major city... Roughly 90 percent of the Roma are jobless. They have no idea how to help themselves, and have already given up the struggle for a better life. They live on welfare. Sociologist Ivan Gabal warns, 'The problem is, there is already a second generation of Roma growing up in the Czech Republic who don't know anything else except being dependent on welfare. Disbanding these ghettoes will take up to thirty or forty years.' Although the EU will make two billion Czech crowns [70 million euros] available between 2008 and 2013, it is not yet clear what kind of concrete help the Roma should get." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Minorías, » La República Checa
Todos los textos disponible de » Vojtech Blazek

"The Ministry of Education and Religion's bill asking for confession in school to be dropped is causing an uproar, under-lines the daily." This announcement has indeed provoked the wraith of the Greek Church during the tumultuous beginning of this new school year. It refuses the implementation of such a bill and is asking the government to receive its own copy. The Church, not separated from the State, is counting on its powers of persuasion, but the ministry does not intend to give in. Is the Minister [Marietta Giannakou] not for once right in wanting to bring some order to schools? If we follow the Church's logic, the recent wave of immigration has as a consequence made an imam available to pupils, along with a Catholic priest, a pastor and even a lama! Confession is a sacred and personal act which no longer has its place in school".  (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Religión, » Ideología, » Grecia

The French government wants to privatize the company 'Gaz de France' in order to allow it to merge with the Suez group. The debate triggered off by this project offers, according to economist and political scientist Pierre Noel, "the opportunity to under-line the importance of renewing a single market for energy. ... The impact of merging on the conditions of our energy supplying ... will depend on the organisation and the regulations of the markets in which the future group will operate, thus the ability of the Member States to re-launch this big economic project which is the construction of European energy markets. Europe needs industrial performers with global calibre, but the emergence of these cannot be an alternative to the construction of continental energy markets : If they want to act in favour of energy security and the economic competitiveness of Europe, the Member States, including France, must dedicate themselves to this project with a sense of priority." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Energía, » Empresa, » Francia
Todos los textos disponible de » Pierre Noël

The journalist Sylvie Tanette takes an interest in the controversy triggered off in France by the latest edition of 'Le Robert' [French dictionary], in which the word 'colonisation' is defined as 'the enhancing, the exploitation of countries become colonies'. The representative council of black associations (CRAN) has called for the withdrawal of this work from bookshops. "A group of citizens taking on a dictionary, now that must be a first in the history of French lexicology. What the CRAN is trying to do is to open the eyes of the French, shake the habits of a country that for a long time has not wanted to question its colonialism (...)." (07/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Política interior, » Francia
Todos los textos disponible de » Sylvie Tanette

The poet György Faludy, who died recently aged 96, was an enfant terrible of Hungarian literature and a symbolic figure of political resistance, writes Gabor Muranyi in an obituary. Faludy survived a communist labour camp and spent many years as a political refugee in Paris, New York, London and Toronto. He returned to Budapest in 1988. The communist dictatorship regarded his idiosyncratic and highly popular translations of the ballads of François Villon as a topical critique of the system. "Faludy wrote that he translated Villon, 'because I could use Villon's name as a cover for saying a lot of things that wouldn't have been tolerated under my own name'." (06/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Literatura, » Hungría
Todos los textos disponible de » Gabor Muranyi

Every country has its own misfortunes, according to Vitalija Jankauskaite. In the USA it is race riots and violence, in Russia the resistance to Western democracy. "Big countries have big problems. Lithuania is modest by comparison - our misfortunes are that we lost at basketball and aren't allowed to join the euro zone because inflation is too high here. This has dented the country's image. But we can console ourselves. We might not have the euro, but we do have the most beautiful girls and the best beer. We're in the EU and NATO looks after the security of our airspace." (06/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Lituania
Todos los textos disponible de » Vitalija Jankauskaite

The European member of parliament Alexander Stubb presented a report this week on the "expense of interpretation in the European Parliament". For Paul Geudens, this document " shows once again the large sums wasted by the European Union. In 2003, Europe spent a billion euros on translations. ... In itself it is not such a surprise for an institution that counts 20 official languages. Cultural diversity costs money. English, as a European working language would render more efficient the functioning and save money. But do we want it? Manifestly not. In fact, the waste pinned down in the report is not generated so much by multilingualism of the EU as by the nonchalance of civil servants and delegates. Over 25 million euros have been spent for nothing [in 2003] because of useless reservations that lead well-paid translators to spend hours and even days twiddling their thumbs." (06/09/2006)

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Más de la revista de prensa sobre el tema » Política de la UE, » Europa
Todos los textos disponible de » Paul Geudens