Europe’s Troubled Marriage: The Bond Between France and Germany Is Fraying ?- by Peter Gumbel

As the financial crisis has taken its toll on Europe’s southern perimeter, Germany has grown used to being insulted and vilified. In Greece, Cyprus and even Spain and Portugal, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Germans in general have been depicted in the press as uncaring hardheads, and at times as a throwback to warmongering Nazis, for the way they are supposedly imposing their economic stamp on the rest of the euro zone. For the most part, the Germans have shrugged off the caricatures.

But when France’s Socialist Party, the party of President François Hollande, circulated a draft text on April 26 that attacked Merkel for her “selfish intransigence” and called for a “confrontation” with Germany over policy, the reaction was one of surprise and pain. France, after all, is the country that allied itself wholeheartedly with Germany in the 1950s to drive forward the grandiose project of greater European integration. While there have been policy differences in the past between the two countries, they’ve never before descended to the level of personal insults.

The draft text was quickly amended to remove the offending passages. But the damage has been done. In the aftermath of the incident, policymakers and political analysts in France, Germany and elsewhere have been trying to figure out how serious the rift is, what its primary causes could be and, above all, what it means for the future. While interpretations differ, the consensus seems to be that the cohesion between France and Germany that has been so critical for the past five decades is now seriously fraying.

Note EU-Digest: this article in Time Magazine unfortunately is another of the many underhanded efforts by the "Financial Industry" and their cohorts ( London City) to destabilize European government actions and policies in curbing the excessive power of the financial Industry (and the Wall Street establishment) on the European financial and banking  industry. ,

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