Renewing European ties

[Classical_Liberal]

Personal Note: Europe is a very important pressure point for those of us who would like some action on the "real two state solution". It doesn't have an Israeli lobby, a neoconsevative foreign policy establishment/punditocracy, a press compomised by ties to the military industrial complex, or fundies that long for the end times. It Israel's largest trading partner, so it should be pretty easy to apply pressure from this angle. Israeli trade is a fairly insignificant part of European trade and a very significant part of Israels. Asia is another pressure point with even more sympathy for the two state solution, and another major Israeli trading partner.

Renewing European ties



The enlargement of the European Union with the addition of 10 new members on May 1 raised to impressive new heights a process that began hesitantly more than 50 years ago. Furthermore, the accession of eight countries that were liberated from lengthy communist domination just a few years ago added great historic significance to the enlargement.



The festive atmosphere on the continent that has now become the world's largest trading bloc indicated another victory for trends toward internationalism over the fears felt by countries both inside and outside the EU about the blurring of their national identities.

However, to skeptics the enlargement also represents the outer limits of the ability of this this "economic Gulliver" to translate its growing power into supranational political terms. EU leaders, like President of the European Commission Romano Prodi, are aware of the difficulties inherent in creating a common denominator for 25 societies that run the gamut from wealth to relative poverty and from influence to dependence.

The EU's enlargement not only strengthened its base, it is also likely to dilute the union's own principles out of a need to acquiesce to the differing national needs of its immensely varied member nations. Yet all of these fears cannot detract from the magnitude of this European achievement in a world rent by wars and violent clashes between cultures......

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/422777.html