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Apocalypse Fairly Soon in Europe - Paul Krugman, New York Times

For the past two-and-a-half years, European leaders have responded to crisis with half-measures that buy time, yet they have made no use of that time. Now time has run out....

Are Germans Destined to Save the Euro? - Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph

To make it work, the euro will have to become a very different kind of monetary union. Whatever the historic mission, it's not clear that Germans are yet ready - political...

End Austerity Could Spell End for Euro - P. Boone & S. Johnson, Bloomberg

The euro currency is a malady that condemns at least a generation of Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Irish to the economic infirmary....

Italy's Political Outsiders Have Their Day - Tobias Jones, The Guardian

Unlike France and Greece, the election results can't really be read as a reaction against austerity measures. Since Italy currently has a "technocratic" government (a non-politic...

Europe's Growth Challenge - Lawrence Summers, Washington Post

Unfortunately, Europe has misdiagnosed its problems in important respects and set the wrong strategic course. Outside of Greece, which represents only 2 percent of the euro zone,...

Belated Reforms a Bitter Pill for Southern Europe - Der Spiegel

Assunta Linza, a petite 33-year-old, and her father Giovanni, 60, graying and with the build of a bulldozer, are sitting on the family sofa in a northern suburb of Rome. Assunta i...

The Vatican's Mob Murder Mystery - Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Daily Beast

Almost 30 years ago the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee disappeared. Now Italian authorities want to know if she's buried with a Mafia don on the grounds of a Vatican churc...

Europe's Financial Maginot Line - Desmond Lachman, The American

In 1940, the Maginot Line proved woefully ineffective in protecting France from a German invasion, despite the great amount spent on its construction and the high hopes placed on...

Big Labor in Little Italy - Anne Jolis, Wall Street Journal

A Milanese business explains how Mario Monti's reforms could help them - and why more change is needed....

Europe's Firewall Follies - Wall Street Journal

With Italy and Spain too big to save, squabbling over the size of the ESM looks a lot like deck-chair management....

Monti Pulls a Thatcher - Wall Street Journal

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has walked away from negotiations with Italy's labor unions and announced that he is going to move ahead with reforming the country's notorious...

The Italian Way - Irish Times

THEY ARE doing things differently these days in Rome and Italian voters and international partners and markets are noticing. Two men, new premier Mario Monti (68), who took the hel...

Will South Tyrol Split Off from Italy? - Alexandra Aschbacher, Der Spiegel

The governor loves to hunt -- geese, rabbits, fox, whatever happens to cross his path. Luis Durnwalder, the top hunter in South Tyrol, grants hunting licenses as if he were the lo...

Italy's Generational Crisis - Mark Gilbert, Foreign Affairs

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti returned home from a successful visit to the United States over the weekend, having won the praise of U.S. President Barack Obama for the rapid e...

How Europe Might Get Its Groove Back - A.A. Gill, Bloomberg

They discovered another Mona Lisa at the Prado in Madrid, just hanging about in the stock room. “What do you think that is?” asked some Spanish curator. “Let’s clean it an...

Can Italy Change? - Tim Parks, New York Review of Books

What would it mean for a country to change, profoundly? What real news would we get of that and how would it feel to its citizens? Would it necessarily be a good thing? A few month...

What U.S. Could Learn from Italy's Mario Monti - Nathan Gardels, CSM

Italy may find Prime Minister Mario Monti's dose of discipline hard to swallow, but his depoliticized democracy is the only form of government that can move Italy forward. Monti'...

Europe Is Stuck on Life Support - Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Germany, as creditor country, opposes a "transfer union" and insists that fiscal discipline is everything. It is right on the first point and wrong on the second....

The 'Russification' of Italy - Stefano Casertano, The European

The resignation of Silvio may be compared to the collapse of the Berlin Wall: for Russia, that historical event marked the beginning of a decade of violence, poverty and geopolitic...

Europe's Diverging Basket Cases - Pierpaolo Barbieri, The New Republic

Though the continent's collected prime ministers will no doubt again pledge to do all that's within their powers to preserve the grandeur of the European Union when they meet today...

Europe's Fate May Be in Monti's Hands - Philip Stephens, Financial Times

Italy is back. Germany’s Angela Merkel sits at the top of Europe’s power list. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy can lay claim to be the continent’s most energetic leader. Mario...

Can France Show Europe How to Move Left? - Mary Dejevsky, Independent

If left-of-centre governments were in power not just in France, but in Germany and Italy as well - in other words, in all three of the eurozone's largest economies - the effects ...

The Eurozone's Strategy of Pain - Jean Pisani-Ferry, Project Syndicate

For the third year in a row, the eurozone is the weakest link in the world economy. In 2010, attention was focused on responses to the crisis on the eurozone periphery – Greece,...

Costa Concordia: A Disaster That Was Waiting to Happen - Der Spiegel

Maritime experts say such a catastrophe was just a matter of time. In recent years, the cruise industry has been building ever-bigger ships in pursuit of profit -- and disregardi...

The Man Who Saved Italy's Reputation - The Independent

Publication of the exchange between the coast guard in Livorno and the captain of the stricken Costa Concordia, has made Gregorio de Falco a hero in Italy, and probably everywhere ...

The New German Nightmare Begins - Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia

German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to be the latest foreign statesman to discover just how astounding Italy statesmen can be. Her intervention in Italian politics is widely cr...

Italy & France Team Up Against Germany - Hans-Jurgen Schlamp, Spiegel

Germany has long insisted that austerity be the primary strategy used in confronting the ongoing euro-zone debt crisis. Italy has now joined France in demanding a more nuanced a...

Republicans Bash Europe in Search of Votes - Sebastian Fischer, Der Spiegel

Europe is socialist, bloated and a threat to the global economy. That appears to be the message from the ongoing presidential campaign in the U.S. Republicans in particular have ...

The Danger Debt Poses to the Western World - Alexander Jung, Der Spiegel

Countries around the world, particularly in the West, are hopelessly in the red, with debt rising every day. Even worse, politicians seem paralyzed, unable -- or unwilling -- to ...

2012: Year of Counter-Revolution? - Leon Hadar, Singapore Business Times

The outgoing 2011 is the Year of the Protester, according to Time Magazine. The insurgency targeting the ruling political elites, first in Tunisia, and then in Egypt, Libya, Syria,...

Can Europe Heal Its Own Woes? - Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate

BRUSSELS – European policymakers like to extol the strength of the eurozone: relative to the United States, it has a much lower fiscal deficit (4% of GDP, compared to almost 10%...

Italy Can Save Its Sovereignty and Euro - Martin Feldstein, Financial Times

The euro may soon collapse even though there is no fundamental reason for it to fail. Everything depends on Italy, because financial markets now fear it may be insolvent. If It...

What's Europe's Last, Best Chance? - Michael Boskin, Project Syndicate

The resignations of Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have highlighted how Greece, Italy, and many other countries obscured for t...

Euro Crisis Is Entirely Avoidable - James Surowiecki, New Yorker

The financial crisis in Europe, seemingly never-ending, has now entered a potentially disastrous phase. With interest rates on Italian and Spanish debt soaring, France looking sh...

Is Italy Ungovernable? - Raymond Zhong, Wall Street Journal

'Most Italians regard their government as something that's not going to help them, and as something that is to be avoided as much as possible. But this is the curious thing: They...

Can Troubled Italy Be Saved? - Michael Spence, Project Syndicate

As the economist Mario Monti’s new government takes office in Italy, much is at stake – for the country, for Europe, and for the global economy. If reforms falter, public fina...

Will Europe's North Pay Politically for South's Mess? - Jeff Simpson, G&M

The southern European countries (and Ireland) have massive current account deficits paid for through the European Central Bank that the northern Europeans have financed. The sums...

Can Italy Be Fixed? - Dalibor Rohac, The Blog

Mario Monti’s appointment as prime minister of Italy has given some hope to observers of the current crisis in the eurozone. Monti, a former student of Nobel Prize winni...

In Italy, Deep Disapproval of Leadership - Gallup

Italy's new government will need to restore Italians' confidence in their country's leadership as it steers the nation through its current debt crisis. Gallup surveys before Prim...

Where Are the Global Deciders? - Thomas Friedman, New York Times

At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make, if they want to deliver better living standards for their people, this epidemic of n...

Europe Must Not Allow Rome to Burn - Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Confronted with turbulence in the provinces, the euro zone has sent in new governors. In place of the wayward George Papandreou, Greece now has Lucas Papademos, former vice-pres...

Italy Always More an Idea Than a Country - David Gilmour, Foreign Policy

Why should we be surprised Italy is falling apart? With dozens of languages and a hastily made union, it was barely a real country to begin with....

Europe's New Technocrats Not Miracle-Workers - Gideon Rachman, FT

The situation in Europe may now be too far gone for even the most steely and brilliant of technocrats to turn things around....

Berlusconi Fiddled While Rome Crumbled - Ben Macintyre, The Australian

AS Silvio Berlusconi's power dissolved, another ageing, badly restored monument crumbled in a different part of Italy: in the ancient city of Pompeii, a wall collapsed into rubble...

Economist Accepts Mandate to Rescue Italy - Rachel Donadio, NY Times

Mario Monti, a former member of the European Commission, conditionally accepted a mandate on Sunday to form a new government in Italy whose main task will be to keep the country fr...

Italy

Europe's New Iron Lady Says 'Nein!'

Seeds of EU's Crisis Sown 60 Years Ago

A Fragile Europe Must Change Fast

Europe's Latin Bloc Is in Revolt

Watching Europe Choose Catastrophe

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