Globalist: In U.S., a withering view of Europe as a sideshow - Americas - International Herald Tribune
From the International Hearld Tribune on trends in Europe, esp. post French and Dutch "No" (Non and Nee) on the EU Constitution.
From June 15th
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"Has Europe become a sideshow? Perhaps this town of haunting but also melancholy beauty is not a bad place to pose that question, for it offers at every corner some reminder of the way that great power and wealth may pass, leaving nothing but their golden shell.
It is now just over 200 years since the 118th and last Doge of Venice, Lodovico Manin, surrendered to the slogan-touting revolutionary army of Napoleon Bonaparte, so putting an end to the Most Serene Republic in the fastness of its lagoon, a power whose often enlightened commercial sway had stretched for centuries across the eastern Mediterranean.
'Take this, I shall not be needing it again,' Manin said on Friday, May 12, 1797, as he handed the Doge's close-fitting white linen cap to his valet. Sometimes it is clear when things come to an end. At others, the lines of history are blurred, less demarcations than smudges.
So it is in a Europe today that does not know if the dominant and fruitful postwar idea of 'ever closer union' is now dead. When European Union leaders meet this week in Brussels, they will face for the first time the fact that tens of millions of Europeans have turned their back on a Union whose geography, identity and ambition seemed murky.
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