An Anglo-German liaison

摘要

The pattern was once predictable. Before each important European summit, the leaders of France and Germany would get together and issue a joint statement of intent. Their partnership had driven the process of European integration since the 1950s, leading the way on everything from the common market to the single currency. But this month, as European leaders prepared to gather in Brussels for a constitutional convention on the EU'S future, something odd happened. Gerhard Schroder, Germany's chancellor, released a letter on European reform written jointly with none other than Britain's Tony Blair. It dealt with plans to make EU summits work better. They should, suggested the German-British pair, get less bogged down in minutiae and be less bound by the need for unanimity. The letter's precise contents were less striking than its very fact. In both France and Germany, it was treated as a bombshell. Die Welt, a conservative newspaper, heralded it as a "European revolution" that marked the end of the Franco-German motor as the EU'S driving force. Liberation, a left-leaning French paper, made the same point in different words. "The time when the Franco-German axis made Europe's weather," it opined, "seems definitively over." Some French officials seem to have come to the same conclusion. At a recent private dinner in Brussels, Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, is said to have pronounced the Franco-German special relationship "dead".