From a diplomatic perspective, sure, journalists should be ignored. From a human perspective, they are not, especially when they write for papers that tend to represent elite government opinion, such as Le Monde.
I think Kyoto is directly involved in the present poison, for the simple reason the the Greens are an important constituency in Germany at this point, and key to any Socialist electoral strategy, either to woo Green voters, or to woo the party into coalition.
Actually, there is nothing inevitable about the push for a confederation of European states, when there are still many languages and customs as barriers, when many of the affected states are very attached to their sovereignty, and when there are countervailing separatist movements pushing for even further European fragmentation, such as the Basque terrorists, Scottish nationalists, the Northern League in Italy, and others. Nor is it inevitable that Atlanticism should be superceded. After all, NATO is superceding the UN as the principal body which can address global security threats and humanitarian catastrophes, but it is cannot function without US leadership, as was demonstrated during the Kosovo crisis.
I predict that most of the EU will rebel if France and Germany precipitate a further crisis in NATO, and "Europeanization" itself will come into question........ |
