The visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Washington has attracted little attention in the US media, perhaps further proof that Berlin barely ranks as a world power these days, and consistently punches under its weight in international affairs. Compared to both David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel is a remarkably low-key figure when it comes to global impact, despite the size of the German economy. Judging by the content of yesterday’s joint press conference in the White House East Room, which has to rank as among the most dull …
Speaking to younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party about Germany’s 16 million foreign worker population, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this past Saturday: We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone’, but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed. This analysis, while spot on, is unfortunately years late. Three years ago The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst for European Affairs …
British Prime Minister David Cameron has completed a visit to Turkey with a passionate defense of Ankara’s aspiration to join the European Union. The charismatic young leader, who also completed a successful Prime Ministerial visit to Washington this month, has joined leading figures, such as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in accusing Brussels of not playing fair with Turkey. They’re right. When negotiations with Ankara began, Brussels set out 35 chapters of EU law for Ankara to discharge before a final vote on …
They are getting together again. This weekend in Toronto, Canada, President Obama and German Chancellor Merkel reconvene at the G-20 Summit to figure out how to move the global economy forward. The two leaders are indeed extraordinary and remarkable in many ways. President Obama is the first African American President while Chancellor Merkel is the first female Chancellor of Germany. Oh, by the way, they are both for “change,” too. What appears even more extraordinary are their strikingly different choices of economics playbook for “change.” President Obama has chosen the …
Both British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have criticized the European Union’s police training mission in Afghanistan this past week, and it is not hard to see why. With just over 200 staff (many of whom are bureaucrats and not trainers), the NATO Parliamentary Assembly has described the EU Police Mission as too small, underfunded, slow to deploy, inflexible, and largely restricted to the safety of the capital. It is more than two years since the European Union undertook to train Afghanistan’s police force and the …
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, March 14, 2009: If we want to actually strengthen the effect of such [stimulus] packages you simply have to implement them and not talk about the next one before the first has actually taken effect. Bloomberg, March 26, 2009: Chancellor Angela Merkel is injecting 82 billion euros ($110 billion) into the economy, the biggest stimulus package in Europe. . . . Germany’s spending spree came after Merkel exasperated European Union leaders, who wanted her to endorse a collective 200 billion-euro rescue package for the 27-nation trade …
Right now, the world has too little capital, too few jobs, and too little growth. So what do Europe’s leaders want to do? Press for yet more job-killing regulation and more investment-stifling oversight, with a heaping helping of “global governance” on top. If this wasn’t so dangerous, it would be laughably irrelevant. The European plans, unveiled on Sunday in the run-up to the G20 summit in April, are breathtaking in their intrusiveness. All financial market activities around the world should be regulated to ensure that they foster “sustainable economic activity,” …
TBILISI – It isn’t hard to see why Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze is a free marketer. A graduate of American private education and a citizen of the United Kingdom, the ethnic Georgian prime minister invoked Margaret Thatcher’s legacy as an example for today’s legislators to follow in confronting economic challenge when speaking at the fifth annual European Resource Bank. Gurgenidze put forward a compelling summary of his government’s reform agenda and its incredible achievements to date. He was slightly nuanced in his views on defense and security, but told …
