Europe

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.”

March 2013
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.”

March 2013
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.”

March 2013
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.”

March 2013
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.”

March 2013
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.

March 2013
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.”

March 2013
The Month in Review
by the editors of Current History
An international chronology of events in January 2013, country by country, day by day.

March 2013
Map of Europe
by the editors of Current History
Map

March 2012
The Misdiagnosed Debt Crisis
by Daniel Gros
“A few nations' public debt problems have become a systemic, area-wide financial crisis because of the fragility of the European banking system.”

March 2012
Europe’s Threatened Solidarity
by Erik Jones
“Left unchecked, the current crisis could reshape almost everything from money and finance to security and defense, and from welfare state institutions to immigration policy.”

March 2012
Can Italy’s Monti Save the Euro?
by Jonathan Hopkin
“Italy may reluctantly accept being ‘saved by Europe’ once again. But…[if] the country turns back to populism, there will be dramatic consequences for the governance of the European economy.”

March 2012
Why Austerity Isn’t Working in Greece
by Franklin L. Hess
“The EU ought to…take a more pragmatic approach toward both the country’s finances and the euro zone’s economic future.”

March 2012
Ukraine’s Perilous Balancing Act
by Steven Pifer
“As democratic backsliding cools Ukraine’s relations with the West, Yanukovych faces the prospect of having to deal with Putin and Moscow from a weaker position.”

March 2012
Sweden’s Welfare State at a Turning Point
by Frederick Hale
“What concerns social scientists, of course, is the question of who will support an aging population legally entitled to lifelong social security.”

March 2012
Perspective: The New Middle East Will Test Europe
by Simon Serfaty
The Arab Spring will sorely test the ability of Europe, mired in financial woes and institutional confusion, to help shape events in its near abroad.

March 2012
The Month in Review
by the editors of Current History
An international chronology of events in January, country by country, day by day.

March 2012
Map of Europe
by the editors of Current History
Map

April 2011
Books: When India Starved and Britain Stood By
by Sumit Ganguly
A new book documents a tragic episode during World War II, when Winston Churchill could not be bothered to prevent starvation that killed nearly 4 million Indians.

March 2011
The Euro’s Never-Ending Crisis
by Barry Eichengreen
“The fact that resolving the crisis will be costly has one silver lining. It concentrates attention on the need to reform the institutions of the euro area to prevent equally costly crises from occurring again.”