Italy

“I salute the memory of a great statesman who deserves our highest admiration. May his example remain the inspiration for those who will persist on the path to everlasting peace in the Middle East. By doing so, they will pay the strongest tribute to Prime Minister Rabin’s achievement. They can count on the strong and continuing support of the European Union.”Commission President JacquesSanter in a statement following the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

THE Council of Industry Ministers agreed in principle to launch an action plan aimed at boosting European industrial competitiveness. Governments should remove administrative red tape, ensure competition is unimpaired, promote training and accelerate technical standardisation in the Union. The Commission will be asked to prepare a report every year into the progress made in implementation.

AS Spain’s turn at the helm of the EU draws to a close, its dream of opening up Europe’s 136 billion ecu-a-year electricity market to competition seems unlikely to come true.

EUROFIGHTER. Eurofrigate. Eurocopter. Increasing joint weapons systems give the impression that European nations are integrating their defence industries along the lines of the single market.

THE fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in the former Soviet Union may have been welcomed by most Europeans but, for Europe’s armaments industry, it has spelled crisis.

SIX years ago, Germans on both sides of the vanishing wall were breathlessly witnessing the unthinkable: the silent collapse of a threatening world that most people assumed would survive for decades to come.

EUROPE’S small companies will be banging at the doors of the commercial banks in Amsterdam later this month in a bid to win themselves greater access to funding.

THE European Union must look for common solutions to the problems faced by its overstretched social benefit systems, Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn declared this week.

THE European Union woke up this week to find yet another change to the annual calendar being mooted in Italy.

NATO watchers have begun a countdown to mid-November, when ambassadors to the 16-nation alliance are expected to decide on who should lead the beleaguered institution.

IT makes two European Union nations very angry and most of the others nervous. So nervous, in fact, that most say they have no opinion on it at all. “Who has proposed that?” political counsellors and spokesmen ask, adding quickly: “We have no position on that.”‘That’ is the notion of a seat for the EU on the United Nations’ Security Council.

DANISH liver pâté, meatballs and Swedish fruit syrup threaten to become a cause of friction between the European Commission and MEPs.

EU FARM ministers this week adopted a controversial scheme allowing member states to pay farmers compensation for income losses brought on by currency movements in neighbouring countries.

SCHENGEN countries are preparing to increase bilateral policing arrangements to counter fears that the abolition of internal frontiers will weaken the fight against crime, drugs and terrorism.

THE European Union faces the prospect of another presidency virtually paralysed by domestic political problems as Italian Prime Minister Lamberto Dini prepares for a vote of no-confidence in his government.

As the European Union faces yet another period of political unrest at its helm, Rory Watson studies the options to steady the boat

EVERY now and then, a top German policy-maker says something he shouldn’t and suddenly his private thoughts are made glaringly public. When this happens to us mortals, the worst possible consequence could be the end of a friendship or marriage. For these people, it can spell the collapse of a country’s monetary policy framework, the demise of a 14-year-old monetary system and the onset of a diplomatic storm.

HUMOUR, as they say, is no laughing matter, particularly for the hard-pressed folk in Directorate-General 69, who have spent the last eighteen years not coming up with a good Euro-joke.

PUT simply, EU legislation is proposed by the European Commission and approved by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, after consultation with two advisory bodies, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions.

THE European Commission has reacted angrily to remarks by the Belgian Economics Minister Elio Di Rupo concerning a controversial no-claims-bonus car insurance scheme in use in Belgium.

THE steel industry has always been a subject of special concern to the European Union. The first of the European Communities was the European Coal and Steel Community of 1953, which aimed to ensure competition and allowed price and output control at times of “manifest crisis”.

IT’S official – or it will be soon.

SPANISH efforts to break a five-month deadlock over whether the EU should promise to introduce a common tax on carbon energy have already been attacked from both sides.

LATVIA has formally applied to join the European Union, but concedes the road ahead will not be easy. The small Baltic state, which regained its independence only four years ago after half a century as part of the Soviet Union, has made EU membership a key plank of its foreign policy since 1991. Latvia already has an association agreement with the EU and is the first of the Baltic countries to apply formally for membership. Latvian President Guntis Ulmanis said he hoped the application would convince sceptics of Latvia’s determination to integrate itself into the West. Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have also formally applied to join the EU and the Czech Republic has said it intends to do so early next year.