'Enough Sauerkraut and Beer': France and Germany Celebrate 50 Years of Friendship

[sysop]

In a SPIEGEL interview, French politician Jacques Delors and former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer discuss tight, but sometimes complicated, relations between their countries on the 50th anniversary of the Franco-German friendship treaty.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-878755.html

[Morthole]

Having lived and worked in both various regions of France and having lived and travelled for work throughout German-speaking Europe, I cannot help but wonder what these career politicians like Delors and Fischer really mean when they mention these hazy words like "Europe", "family" etc., and in what sort of "euro-religious seminary" they must have been reared.

These terms "Europe" and "family" may be loaded with an almost fanatical religious meaning for eurofederalist career politicians, but they could not be more remote from the citizens for whom there is no sense of "European family" whatsoever. Even on the administrative and cultural layers immediately below these career political drivers of this "sacred" quest, i.e. those who have to promote this idea, there is emptiness: take the mutual lack of interest to this fabled Franco-German Brigade envisaged as a military "rapid reaction force" in the 1980s, what happened to that for lack of interest? Look at the Franco-German "EU" sponsored television channel "ARTE". I did many times on both sides of the border: if a German program was shown in France the French would switch to another channel, and vice-versa in Germany. So the only programs featured are those of rehashed and dubbed old productions from the detested England or the USA! So much for "European family".

I could go on.

Ideologues like these career politicians, Delors and Fischer, need to step back and take a weather check to look at the depth of alienation their "project" has wrought on the real "Europe", this continent, an alienation that will only be aggravated by fiscal union and all other forms of engineered ever-closer-union without the consent of the people.

I hope these back-slapping politicians and pro-Brussels media look over their shoulders at the gathering economic storm as they congratulate each other in Paris and Berlin.