To the barricades

摘要

"It is again time to stop the countries of A the European Union from erecting national barriers," warned Giulio Tremonti, the Italian finance minister. "If not, we will risk an August 1914 effect... with, at the end, a war that no one wanted." Roberto Maroni, another member of the Italian cabinet, was more defeatist: "Europe is dead," he said, urging Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, to do for his country's textile industry what Dominique de Villepin, his French counterpart, has done for France's energy companies.