"The hard truth is this one-way street for Greece was imposed on us," Tsipras said. The lenders had sent the message that in a country under a bailout there was no point in holding elections, he said.
I also can imagine there being a “eurozone parliament”. The European Parliament should be involved more effectively in eurozone decisions.
I also think it would be possible for us to use the EU budget as an instrument for setting priorities in individual member states.
We could support the EU’s country-specific recommendations through a targeted and conditional use of resources. In this way, we could fight problems in individual countries and support structural reforms.
Insisting that countries comply with the rules that we have agreed in Europe does not violate national sovereignty. Otherwise we shouldn’t agree on any rules in Europe at all.
In the process, we in Germany will have to accept that, when it comes to decisions that are made on the European level, it is the European Court of Justice that is ultimately responsible for settling disputes – and not national courts.
The things that nation states, regions and local authorities can administer themselves should remain their responsibility. But once we have clearly divided up the responsibilities, then each level should have proper democratic legitimisation for its tasks. Then each level would take care of those things that can best be tackled on that level.
Instead, it should be a complementary and inter-connected system of democracies with different scopes and competences: a system of double democracy that is both national and European.
We would then be citizens of our national democracies and of a European democracy at the same time. We could give this idea a concrete form by giving citizens two passports.
Foi um momento patético, concordo, tal como foi patético o oposto, nos últimos meses (ainda ontem) a retórica política para consumo interno dizer que Portugal e Espanha é que estavam a bloquear um acordo com os gregos. Não me recordo de ridicularizares essa narrativa.
NATO and its allies will hold their biggest military exercise in more than a decade from October, deploying 36,000 personnel across the Mediterranean to counter the threat of Islamic State on the alliance's southern flank.
Briefly turning attention away from Russia, NATO commanders said on Wednesday the alliance would carry out some of its toughest training yet in a complex "artificial threat scenario" in which militants attack on land, from the air and at sea.
"We cannot choose between the eastern threat and the southern threat, we have to train for both," said General Hans-Lothar Domrose, commander of the NATO military command in Brunssum, the Netherlands, who is preparing the exercise.


