The European Council on Foreign Relations

Madrid view: is the worst over for Spain in 2013?

Date: 2nd January 2013  |  Author: Jose Ignacio Torreblanca,

Categories: Euro Crisis, Madrid view, Reinventing Europe,

How does 2013 look for Spain? Is the worst over? The answer to that question depends largely on how “worst” is defined.

The absolute worst scenario, the collapse of the euro, can now be set aside thanks to the decisive action of European Central Bank president Mario Draghi. The wording he chose in a statement on the issue – “I will do whatever it takes to save the euro and, believe me, it will be sufficient” – was exactly what the markets had been waiting for since 2010. Markets now know that betting against the euro could be dangerous.

But this does not mean that the crisis is fully over.

For domestic political reasons, EU leaders are still reluctant to follow Draghi’s lead and do whatever it takes to consolidate the euro. A banking union has been born, but it is still half-baked, while the more ambitious proposals aimed at a fiscal union are still in their infancy. EU

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Madrid view: A British Europe

Date: 10th December 2012  |  Author: Jose Ignacio Torreblanca,

Categories: Madrid view, Reinventing Europe,

Returning from London I am still stunned by the growing intensity of the Europhobe-Europhile debate. The EU is a corrupt, undemocratic entity that is robbing us, say some in the heat of the budget debate. If we leave the EU, say others, we'll become a kind of Singapore. Indeed, in the cold light of day there can be little reason for surprise at the raw nature of this battle. The British are now headed for two referendums that will clarify questions of particular importance: is Scotland to remain in the UK, and the UK in the EU? If a country's national identity hinges on questions about who we are, what we want, and with whom we are to achieve it, then two principal anchorages of any state are being called into question here.

We often hear that this debate shows the low degree of Europeanization in the UK, which entered the EU reluctantly, as the result of a chain of internal and

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The faces of a post-Putin future?

Date: 30th November 2012  |  Author: Ben Judah,

Categories: Rule of law, democracy and human rights, Madrid view, Wider Europe,

“Russia has no future.” Last autumn you heard this repeated like a mantra in Moscow. “We have no future.” Putin’s capital talked this way because everyone interested in politics had done the same thing on September 24^th 2011. The day of the United Russia party congress that the “national leader” announced he would return to the Kremlin. Everyone interested in politics had calculated how old they would be in 2024. The year that constitutionally Putin would have to leave the President’s post. That moment etched itself into the memory of a generation. It seemed only to mean one thing – Putin had a monopoly on the future.

Then the unexpected occurred. The Moscow protest movement suddenly flared and even if it did not break, or really dent, Putin’s grip over the Duma, the bureaucracy, the oil, the gas or the FSB, it cost him that monopoly on tomorrow. It exposed that he was not in

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Madrid View: I want my money

Date: 29th November 2012  |  Author: Jose Ignacio Torreblanca,

Categories: Euro Crisis, Madrid view,

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Madrid view: After the battle

Date: 12th November 2012  |  Author: Jose Ignacio Torreblanca,

Categories: Madrid view,

The re-election of Barack Obama is one more battle in the long war that the left and the right have been waging for three decades, over the role of the state. In duration and geography, and intensity, it calls to mind the Thirty Years’War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. Then the conflict was about territory, religion and dynastic succession. Nowadays the battle is about rather more post-modern issues: the limits of the state and the market, the tension between freedom and equality, and the setting of frontiers not between territories, but between social classes.

This 30-year pseudo-war, in the analogy drawn by Bill Clinton to dramatize the virulence it is attaining in the US, began with the victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979 and 1980, a turning point in the view of the state. While, until then, both American conservatives and European social democrats not too

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