Europe Archive

On July 7, for the first time since 1969, Libyans voted to elect a General National Congress as part of efforts to create a new political system after the toppling of Moammar Gadhafi last year. The elections saw 2,639 individual candidates compete for 120 seats in 69 constituencies, with 559 women making up 44 percent of the candidates registered for seats reserved for political parties. Turnout was high, with 2.8 million people — of which 45 percent were women — registering to vote from among the roughly 3.5 million Libyans eligible to do so. The polls, which were the country’s […]

There are two simultaneous and contradictory trends occurring right now in the international system. The first is the diffusion of power, as reflected by the displacement of the old Group of Seven, which at its founding in the 1970s comprised the bulk of the world’s productive capacity, by the Group of 20, where there is no longer one dominant power capable of driving the global agenda. The second is the reality that the United States still far outstrips any other one state or group of states in terms of capabilities, ranging from the power of its currency to its ability […]

Having done all the right things at last week’s European Union summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel found herself blamed, even attacked, in Germany for the summit’s outcome. Merkel helped prevent Spain — and, further down the line, Italy — from going bankrupt, thereby protecting German industries from the potential consequences. Yet, she faced an outcry back home that she had effectively allowed Germany to be blackmailed at the summit by a hostile alliance of French President François Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. This gap between what might be the first step toward a […]