Regarding ‘Socialists, centre-right quibble over eurozone reforms‘:

The Swedish prime minister’s arguments against an EU-17 Eurogroup summit are irrelevant at best. The most relevant way to coordinate Ecofin decisions on withstanding the impact of debt contagion demands the holding of an EU-17 summit and policy commitments going forward.

Including non-euro members (e.g. the UK, Sweden and Denmark) would principally facilitate political stalemate and policy constraints.

If Sweden wants to be heard inside the EU-17, it should decide to join the euro now!

Dr. Hari Naidu

Private citizen

Regarding ‘Macedonia under pressure to solve ‘name dispute’‘:

One more time we are seeing a typical Greek destructive anti-Europe policy in the guise of Greek foreign policy and Mr. Droutsas.

I would like to make the following points:

1. There is also a prefix before the name ‘Macedonia’: ‘Republic of’. The term ‘Republic of Macedonia’ describes a political subject in the region, a state under the ‘long’ name Republic of Macedonia. North Greece is just a geographical region called Macedonia for internal use in Greece. This Greek region does not ‘deal’ at international level.

2. Greece is forcing a prefix ‘North’ and the name ‘North Macedonia’ because in the Greek nationalistic-expansionist ideology, usually Greece calls south Albania ‘North Epirus’. In Greek educational textbooks, Greek historians talk about yet to be liberated ‘North Epirus’. Epirus is also a region in western Greece.

3. The destructive Greek ideology, which is forcing ‘North Macedonia’ in place of ‘Republic of Macedonia’, is negative for the Balkan region in the coming decades. Every geographical ‘prefix’ associating every person with divisions between peoples and nations. Can you name one sensitive region in the world where there is no conflict surrounding the use of geographical prefixes?

4. The ‘Republic of Macedonia’ is a name for its citizens. They have the right to self-determination. This is a basic human right for every human being.

5. The name ‘Republic of Macedonia’ is the most neutral term for peaceful coexistence in South-East Europe.

6. We can see Greece’s lies at financial level. What about Greek lies against basic EU principles?

Greece is not respecting the Macedonian minority in North Greece at all.

Pavlos Filipov Vskopoulos
Member of EFA-RAINBOW
 http://www.florina.org

Regarding ‘Canada vows to challenge EU seal products ban‘:

This cooperation with Canada is inhuman indeed. I think that a large-scale debate should be initiated, to see if there is genuine demand for such products on the market.

I myself would never buy any products made from seals. I agree with reasonable hunting, meaning that the seal population can evolve and exist in normal conditions, but practising exhaustive and abusive hunting is pure suicide for humanity too.

It is much more comfortable, but irresponsible, not to do anything or not to think about better alternatives, and simply sign such a deal in an office. The officials concerned should go out to Antarctica/the North or South Pole and see those who hunt traditionally, not exhaustively or on a large scale, but for a living.

Such people respect the environment. We cannot respect and take care of the environment/educate ourselves from a comfortable office chair. Any directive, strategy or empty talk will be in vain if such a thing is permitted by EU officials.

We live on the same planet as Canada. Such measures and irresponsible actions will not affect me, you, or the signing parties, but always the next generations.

Yours sincerely,

Emese Mate

As a Chinese national, I am all for the Chinese government’s decision to cancel the EU-China summit.

When you have a summit with a supposedly “strategic partner”, you expect to receive treatment as such. If the Europeans cannot stop their outrageous way of asking the Chinese for economic cooperation on the one hand but rubbing their face in the sand politically on the other, they should not expect a smiling face from China.

Meeting the Dalai Lama is not something of a “spiritual bonding” as the French label it. It is a political statement against China: even a fool knows this. Mixing with the Dalai Lama stands for supporting what he is for, and he is for separating Tibet from China under the name of “Tibetan autonomy”. That is how all Chinese view this issue and they reject it offhand.

If Europeans do not respect the Chinese view, then they can mix with the Dalai Lama as much as they want, but don’t expect the Chinese to pretend nothing has happened and still do business as usual with Europeans.

Confucius once put it well: “Do not do onto others as you would not have them do onto you.” Europeans should learn the right way to treat a partner. If you feel that the Chinese have slapped you in the face, please remember it was you who did so first to the Chinese.

Michael Meng

Chinese national

Why is it that for so many, including members of South African Development Community (SADC), the penny still has not dropped in respect of President Robert Mugabe?

In ‘Adolf Hitler: the Final Analysis’ (Spellmount, 2005), I produced compelling evidence that the Führer was suffering from chronic schizophrenia, and that this accounted for his bizarre behaviour. Equally, in my book ‘Robert Mugabe: Teacher, Revolutionary, Tyrant’ (History Press, 2008), I argue that Mugabe (a huge devotee of the Führer, who now presides over what is, in effect, a large concentration camp in the centre of Africa) is also suffering from a chronic and intractable mental condition – namely psychopathic personality disorder. This renders him, amongst other things, completely impervious to any point of view other than his own.

For this reason, any attempt to negotiate with him is predestined to fail, as many have discovered to their cost, ever since he came to power. This, sadly, will continue to be the case.

Sincerely,

Andrew Norman

In your article ‘EU warned of Russia’s Arctic appetite’, you wrote “Poignant, who is an historian by training, recalls that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made the historic mistake of donating Crimea to Ukraine”.

Crimea wasn’t donated to Ukraine – this is a beautiful myth. The Parliament of the Soviet Union requested the Parliament of the Ukrainian Socialistic Republic to accept the Crimea under its jurisdiction, because it failed to arrange proper water supplies and development for that territory. After considering the request, the Ukrainian Parliament accepted it by passing the respective resolution.

To compensate the losses of the Russian Socialistic Republic, the same amount of Ukrainian territory in the east was transferred to Russia.

Thus it was not a donation. It can be classified as an exchange of territories between countries. Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has all the respective documentation and maps before and after the exchange.

How would the French react to the discovery that the Champagne region (which is irrefutably French) was donated to France by the Germans? I doubt that the reaction would be very good. So, why should we stand for such inconsistencies? Because we are Ukrainians? Crimea is on Ukrainian territory and no speculation on this is acceptable.

Sincerely,

Oleksandr Tereshchenko
International lawyer

The European Union (EU) is due to publish its long-awaited ‘Communication on Regional Integration in ACP countries’ soon.

The document represents a welcome update of the EU’s strategy of supporting regional integration worldwide, last laid out extensively in 1995. In the intervening years, regional integration has leapt to the forefront of the global agenda, as increasing globalisation has led states to conclude that many of their most pressing problems – issues such as climate change, pandemics and armed conflict – can only be dealt with at the supra-state level.

The EU has acknowledged this trend, and is today without doubt the world’s leading proponent of regional integration. It actively backs dozens of regional integration schemes, both close-to-home (e.g., the much-touted new ‘Union for the Mediterranean’) and further afield (it has collaborated with the Association of South East Asian Nations since 1980), lending technical, financial and moral support.

The EU has impeccable credentials in regional integration, given its own largely successful coalescence into a single entity over the last 50 years. Cognizant of its unique comparative advantages, eager to strengthen its relations with far-flung parts of the globe and sincerely believing that regional integration contributes to the establishment of a more peaceful, prosperous and just world system, the EU has found the correct framework for handling many of its international relations.

While the policy largely makes sense, however, its application has not always been well-thought out. The case of East Africa is revelatory: there the EU is undertaking a range of regional integration projects, from helping to finance the East African Community’s (EAC) soon-to-be-completed headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania to providing technical assistance with the development of an EAC common market. In July, the EU also co-organised a high-level conference in Dar es Salaam on ‘Accelerating Regional Integration in Eastern and Southern Africa’. The conference brought together dozens of African ministers and development partners, and while there were interesting debates at times, the event was plagued by the EU’s mistaken belief that Eastern Africa, parts of Southern Africa, and the island nations of the Indian Ocean somehow all constitute a single ‘region’.

The organisers should instead have realised that no less than five separate African regional organisations were represented at the conference (COMESA, EAC, IGAD, COI, and SADC); the difficulty in organizing a conference at such a broad level is that the states present looked to get very different and occasionally incompatible benefits from regional integration.

The EU’s problem of targeting the wrong region is not limited to Africa. In South America, for example, the EU has a disturbing pattern of vacillating between supporting limited regional organisations, such as Mercosur and the Andean Community, and wider integration schemes, be they at the continental level or in even broader configurations (i.e., including Central America and the Caribbean). The latter, while having the benefit of being inclusive, rarely allow for the political intensity that can move integration along. The EU thus undermines one of its most promising and distinctive foreign policies by failing to focus on the most appropriate regional levels, substituting breadth for depth.

To be fair to Brussels, finding the appropriate level for each part of the world can occasionally be a very difficult and subjective task, as academics can attest to. However, the solution is not to lump dozens of countries together into the broadest bureaucratic categories possible, such as ‘Eastern and Southern Africa’.

Hopefully the EU’s new strategy document will maintain and strengthen the policy of promoting regional integration while demonstrating some new thinking on how best to apply it.

Nicolas de Zamaróczy is pursuing a Ph.D. in International Relations at the University of Southern California. He can be reached at  Patrick Worms, Aspect Consulting http://euractiv.blogactiv.eu/2008/05/13/russian-misinformation-cannot-obscure-truth/ Sir,