European Student Think Tank

South­ern Europe is burn­ing. This crisis has turned out to be the great cata­lyst expos­ing national ills of pre­vail­ing polit­ical and bank­ing sys­tems. Con­ven­tions were over­thrown and polit­ical estab­lish­ments dis­mantled; yet, Europe seems to be on hold, or in slow motion at best, wait­ing the Ger­man elec­tions. In the mean­time, a toxic envir­on­ment is breed­ing, European cohe­sion is eroding.

Last Sat­urday, the mem­bers of the Indone­sian stu­dent asso­ci­ation (PPI) from the Neth­er­lands, Ger­many, and France gathered through His­torun. It is an event they have ini­ti­ated as a way to dis­cover and re-discover Indone­sian his­tory inscribed in the monu­ments of Leiden, a beau­ti­ful city in the Neth­er­lands’ Rand­stad, as a way to com­mu­nic­ate with Europe and the past…

With civil war in Syria, tur­moil in Gaza, Arab Spring after­shocks, and the con­flict over Iran’s nuc­lear pro­gram, it’s easy for out­siders to over­look one of the region’s most intract­able eth­nic con­flicts – Turkey’s internal battles with Kur­d­ish sep­ar­at­ists. The Kur­d­ish issue though deserves atten­tion as it remains a major inner secur­ity threat for the most polit­ic­ally mod­ern and eco­nom­ic­ally dynamic coun­try of the region.

The chances of a two-state solu­tion have rarely looked worse. In a recent open let­terto European Union for­eign policy chief Cath­er­ine Ashton, 19 former senior European offi­cials, politi­cians and dip­lo­mats claimed, “the Oslo pro­cess has noth­ing more to offer” and that without imme­di­ate action, the win­dow of oppor­tun­ity for a viable two-state solu­tion to the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict would soon close. A num­ber of ana­lysts have dis­puted this and gone ever farther, claim­ing that the Oslo pro­cess, refer­ring to the pro­cess of polit­ical nego­ti­ation for a Palestinian state that began with the 1993 Oslo Accords, is already dead.

One of the drastic con­sequences of the most recent global fnan­cial crisis that has deeply touched the European Union -the euro zone in particular- is that more and more young people are seek­ing oppor­tun­it­ies else­where. What are the meas­ures being taken by the EU? How come they can­not pre­vent the “great escape”, as more and more Europeans are flee­ing to emer­ging eco­nom­ies around the world? These are import­ant ques­tions for all of us to think about.

Des­pite severe fin­an­cial and eco­nomic prob­lems, Slov­e­nia can still avoid a bail-out – if investors stay confident

Liberté, égal­ité, fra­tern­ité. The fam­ous motto to pre­sum­ably epi­tom­ize the cor­rect model and stage of soci­etal and eco­nomic devel­op­ment. Admit­tedly, a great por­tion of the West­ern world owes their suc­cess and pro­gress to this power­ful ideo­logy. How­ever, today’s France under the left­ist lead­er­ship cap­tained by Pres­id­ent Fran­cois Hol­lande has taken the premise of égal­ité to another level. Con­sequently, his­tory may remem­ber Hollande’s reign dif­fer­ently: as a time of fisc­al­ité, mis­ere, faillite.

With the after­math of the Arab Spring in dire straits across the Middle
East and North Africa, demo­cracy has plainly not yet been achieved and
instabil­ity is dir­ectly on Europe’s door­step. While Europeans have their
own troubles to focus on, the EU has set up pro­grammes to engage in the
region that could reap real rewards.

The “Islanders” of the Falk­lands were called to a ref­er­en­dum on the 10th and 11th of March, cen­ter­ing on the archipelago’s con­tin­ued asso­ci­ation with the United King­dom. The vote yiel­ded unsur­pris­ing res­ults, given that ask­ing a crowd of Brits whether they think they ought to remain Brit­ish smacks some­what of an exer­cise in the absurd. This is how­ever rather irrel­ev­ant when this affair is regarded from the point of view of dip­lomacy rather than demo­cracy. A move which has played into a con­flict tak­ing place between China and Japan an ocean away .

As another expec­ted Euro crisis unraveled in Cyprus, a con­sec­ut­ive round of crit­ical exam­in­a­tions of the com­mon cur­rency is required. Instead of repeat­ing the same man­tras of lost inde­pend­ent mon­et­ary policies or severe dif­fer­ences in the European eco­nom­ies’ busi­ness cycles, another approach is needed. Per­haps the incon­veni­ent truth and the neg­at­ive unin­ten­ded con­sequences of the com­mon mar­ket are the fact that with one cur­rency, fluc­tu­ations in the European Union min­imum wage are inher­ently cre­at­ing det­ri­mental imbalances.