Putin's Jets Blast Through European Dream 25 Years After Berlin Wall Fell
Europe’s post-Cold War order is fraying and there’s no consensus over how to stitch it back together.
Some blame the European debt crisis for exposing the folly of the drive for economic unification. Some point to Vladimir Putin for redrawing the map by force and sending his warplanes to buzz NATO borders. For others, the vision of a peaceful, post-national Europe died off with the World War II generation.
The makers of European memory will ponder those questions this weekend, marking on Sunday the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing euro-euphoria. The lessons of the intervening quarter-century are more sobering.
“The easy assumption was that the international liberal order was prevailing,” said Nick Witney, a former head of the European Defence Agency, who is now with the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. “The fact is that those who don’t share those values are coming back. We’re not somehow riding the wheel of history any more than communism was.”
A few of the original builders of the post-Cold War European Union and euro are still at it. The European Commission’s new president, Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, traces his career back past the 1991 negotiations in Maastricht, the Netherlands that paved the way to the single currency.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-06/eu-dream-unravels-as-putin-jets-defy-end-of-berlin-wall.html