Nation Topics - Europe | The Nation

Examines relations between the U.S. and Europe. Plans of U.S. President George W. Bush for a diplomatic tour of Europe; Details of politics and economic policies in the European Union; Impact of politics in several European countries, including Great Britain, France, and Germany, on world politics; Discussion of race relations in Europe, particularly between Europeans and immigrant Muslims; Potential impact of Bush's European visit on world politics and international relations.

The article focuses on the European Union (EU) as a balancing power against the United States. In the capital of the EU, an unprecedented challenge to longstanding practices of American industry is unfolding. It is signaling its determination to unhinge U.S. industry from what remains of regulations limiting the poisons in our water, our bodies and our air. The EU has been steadily transforming itself from a facilitator of trade to a sophisticated geopolitical power. Over the past decade, EU member states have ceded governing and enforcement authority to Brussels in areas ranging from environmental regulation to food safety, accounting standards, telecommunications policy and oversight of corporate mergers. As a result, U.S. companies that do business in Europe--which remains America's largest export market--are quickly learning that "old Europe" is now wielding new world power. Just this year, U.S. manufacturers of such goods as chemicals, cars and cosmetics have been confronted with E.U. regulations that force a choice: Either conform to the EU's standards of pre-emptive screening for toxicity or risk sacrificing the European market.

Presents the poem, "To Old Europe From the Last Remaining Superpower: A Polite Request for Help in Iraq," by Calvin Trillin.

In more than fifteen years of rock-and-roll touring, my worst night of sleep followed a June 10, 1989, show at Centro Sociale Leoncavallo, an anticapitalist squat in Milan. On that impossibly long tour, ending just months before the Berlin wall fell, my band Soul Side played at social centers lodged in squatted buildings in Italy, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Germany. None, however, rivaled the squat in Milan where we were taken after our concert at Leoncavallo to "sleep" in a bat-infested room, on mattresses that had seemingly been marinated in bodily fluids. Since the mid-1970s, groups of anarchists, communists, punks and artists across Europe have availed themselves of liberal housing policies to seize and inhabit abandoned buildings, former factories, churches, schools, etc, and turn them into nonprofit, anticapitalist social centers. They are essentially illegal, and plenty are mercilessly crushed by the police. After several evictions, one of which spurred national solidarity demonstrations in 1994, Leoncavallo resides in an assortment of buildings behind huge walls that can be quickly barricaded in the event of another police raid. Social centers like Leoncavallo host a wide range of cultural and political activities: theaters, bookstores, art galleries, guaranteed shelter/or homeless immigrants, meeting spaces for antiglobalization organizing, Internet cafes, soup kitchens, yoga classes and live music of varied genres.Many social centers have disappeared, while a few have been given official recognition and support from local governments. Under the reign of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is hostile to anything and anyone falling under the "no global" umbrella, Italy has nearly 150 active social, centers, most of them stationed in squatted buildings. My band, Girls Against Boys, discovered that Leoncavallo is considered a menace to Italian society.

The article focuses on Europe's resentment against immigrants. Migrants in Greece are prey to prejudiced officials and ruthless employers. But still Greece has its advantages. In Great Britain the asylum seekers have been demonized. As most of the world sinks deeper into poverty and wars flare up more and more people are driven to uproot themselves. Though Europeans complain of being flooded, three-quarters of all refugees remain in their own regions. For the great majority there is no legal avenue to safety. Without new immigrants--many working illegally or semilegally for sub-minimum wages--the continent's economy would grind to a halt.

In this article, the author focuses on the long-debated issue of independence of Western Europe in terms of economic, industrial, political, and social perspectives. In Western Europe the period from 1945 to 1975 was one of unprecedented growth, and its people probably did better than elsewhere in terms of collective social benefits. This "social democratic" interlude, while not as attractive as it is now being painted in retrospect, did provide advantages worth defending. After twenty years of defeats of labor around the globe, the U.S. emerged with another potential model, one based on the unquestioned and undiluted dictatorship of capital. Now the leftist governments in Western Europe are striving to outlaw this model and seeking for another model against welfare state concept.

The article presents information about Europe. In thirteen of the fifteen countries making up the European Union, the Social Democrats are now in office. And on the evening of the historic monument when eleven of the union members will inaugurate their common currency, the euro, these leftist governments were reportedly putting pressure on the central bankers to relax their deflationary policy, to lower interest rates in order to spur production. With only Spain and Ireland still having openly conservative administrations, the European electorate has clearly rejected right-wing rule.

When the thinkers of the European New Right point to their main theoretical influences, the politician Antonio Gramsci's name stands out as an anomaly among such figures as conservative Weimar Republic theorists Carl Schmitt and Ernst Junger or the animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz. Only twenty years later, the assumptions of the New Right are an established part of political discourse throughout Western Europe, championed by political parties that vie for representation at every level of government. The principle that all peoples are biologically unique, and therefore not equal, also legitimizes disparity between First and Third World peoples.

Presents the poem "The Squabbles of Europe," by Calvin Trillin.

This article focuses on the secret operations of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Europe. Eighteen months have passed since the sensational disclosure of Operation Gladio in Italy brought to light more than a dozen secret armies established in Western Europe by CIA at the start of the cold war. It was also learned that secret armies like Gladio and its counterparts in Germany and France at times got out of control and were used by groups promoting a return to fascism. Mark Wyatt, an acting chief of station in Rome in the 1960s who attended a secret CIA training camp for Gladio soldiers in Sardinia, says he believes the program was valid and important in its early days.