Europe Archive

A Wednesday report in the German economic daily Handelsblatt makes clear that German-Iranian trade continued to boom in 2007 despite existing U.N. sanctions and international calls to isolate Iran economically. According to statistics cited in a report by Germany’s Federal Trade Agency (BFAI), German exports to Iran are supposed to have declined by 15 percent to around €3.5 billion. However, in what the paper calls a “surprising development,” German imports from Iran actually increased by 50 percent to some €580 million. It should be noted, moreover, that both figures are said to be based on statistical data running only through […]

On closer inspection, the story of Saddam’s Hussein’s financial holdings in France is full of perverse twists and interconnections that cast many aspects of the run-up and aftermath of the Iraq War in a new light. The fact that a front company of the late Iraqi dictator should own a major stake in the publisher of the sneeringly titled “I am America (And So Can You!)” by Stephen Colbert — a comic who made his name, after all, by mocking President Bush and, notably, the latter’s decision to invade Iraq — is only the most glaring of them. As noted […]

Diplomatic tension between Russia and Great Britain that has been building over the past year is likely to continue in 2008. The tension began in May 2007, when Russia refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, the main suspect in the murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (the successor to the KGB) and an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko defected to Great Britain in 2000 and became a British citizen. He was poisoned with radioactive polonium at a London restaurant in November 2006 while attempting to investigate the murder of Russian journalist […]

One story that appears to have largely fallen through the cracks of international news coverage during the holidays is the mysterious expulsion of two European officials from Afghanistan in late December. The Irishman Michael Semple and the Briton Melvyn Patterson are reported to have left Afghanistan in compliance with the expulsion order shortly after Christmas. Semple has been widely identified as the acting head of the European Union delegation in Afghanistan — although the site of the EU delegation, officially headed by German diplomat Hansjörg Kretschmer, makes no mention of him in this capacity. Patterson is an official of the […]

According to official results released yesterday, Mikheil Saakashvili won a definitive first-round victory in this weekend’s snap presidential elections in Georgia. Saakashvili received a narrow majority of votes, thereby obviating the need to engage in a runoff with the next-highest vote getter. The Central Election Commission concluded the former president garnered 53 percent of the vote on Saturday, while the second-place finisher received 27 percent. Whatever their effects at home, the events of the last few months are unlikely to either improve Georgia’s already troubled relationship with Moscow or bolster its chances of joining NATO, which Saakashvili, his main political […]

This year, the leaders of the European Union likely will become preoccupied with securing ratification of the Lisbon Reform Treaty, which their heads of state and government signed on Dec. 13, 2007. The aim of the treaty is to strengthen Europe’s ability to advance its internal and external objectives. Despite surface appearances, the new arrangements, if adopted, will not radically enhance Europe’s status as an international security actor. The Treaty of Lisbon, also known as the Reform Treaty, aims to restructure the EU’s core institutions in response to two fundamental changes in recent years. First, from April 2004 to January […]

On Dec. 23, the Belgian Chamber of Representatives approved the formation of a new interim government, thus providing a respite from an institutional crisis that had seen the country without a government for some six months since general elections in June. The crisis was provoked by the inability of leading political parties from Flanders and Wallonia — the Dutch-speaking north and the French-speaking south of the country respectively — to come to terms on a governing coalition. It has transformed the hitherto merely theoretical prospect of a break-up of Belgium into a real possibility. One party that explicitly favors the […]