March 2013
Crisis and Reform in the Euro Area
by Daniela Schwarzer
“A major challenge for policy makers lies in the fact that they may have to move forward with a deepening of integration at a time when the EU and the euro area confront a growing crisis of acceptability.”
Why 2013 Is Not 1933: The Radical Right in Europe
by David Art
“If Europe continues to pull itself back from the brink of financial calamity and political instability, historians will write books not about how the radical right destroyed the European project but how elected officials checked populist influences and found a way to muddle through.”
The End of Equality in Europe?
by Jason Beckfield
“[T]he level of income inequality within European nations has been increasing since neoliberalism took hold in the EU in the 1980s and 1990s.”
France’s Struggle to Compete
by Ronald Tiersky
“German economic dynamism still complicates French prosperity, but as the euro zone states struggle out of the financial crisis, it is clear that Germany and other EU partners also undergird France’s economic resilience.”
Diverging Paths in the Western Balkans
by Jelena Subotic
“Croatia has bought its ticket to Brussels, and Montenegro could be next, while Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo are stuck in a crowded, smoky waiting room.”
Perspective: Germany’s Alarming Disaffection
by David P. Calleo
Germany’s postwar leaders played a critical role in creating the European Union. Their successors need to remember that federalism benefits the strong as well as the weak.
Books: Eastern Europe Behind the Curtain
by William W. Finan Jr.
A new book by Anne Applebaum offers a heavily detailed, ground-level history of the arrival of communist rule in postwar Eastern Europe. The author aims, she says, to understand “totalitarianism in practice.”
The Month in Review
by the editors of Current History
An international chronology of events in January 2013, country by country, day by day.
