The European Project Sags

摘要

From stettin in the baltic to trieste in the Adriatic, Europe is seething with resentment about one nation's hubris. The Continent reverberates with angry denunciations of that renegade nation's lawless unilateralism. No, the nation is not the usual suspect, the United States. It is France. This may be remembered as the month when the Euro- pean project-the long, sometimes stealthy attempt to make the noun "Europe" denote a centralized political entity as well as a geographical region-began to collapse under the weight of its unrealism and undemocratic nature. Certainly the project has lost momentum, for two reasons. One is the behavior of the nation, France, that most ardently wants Europe to become a unified counter to American power. The other is the insurrection against their government by one of Europe's most deferential and state-broken people-the rarely turbulent Swedes.