Friends, Germans, citizens from all over, sisters and brothers. We once had a dream. It was the dream of what Europe could have been: Not a single market, a single currency or a common budget. No, we dreamt of Europe as a Peace with Justice Project. That dream has gone, it evaporated in the cold […]
The post Europe’s Self-Betrayal: War, Austerity, Palestine and the Struggle for Peace – Munich Speech, 15-2-2025 appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
JD Vance, the US Vice President, told Europeans that their values are no longer America’s values. Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, added that Europeans “can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever.” Keith Kellog, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, confirmed that Europe will not have a seat at the table […]
The post Europe in the Post-Atlanticist Era – The Guardian appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
@ChrisGiles (Financial Times) decided to have some fun by celebrating “The astonishing success of Eurozone bailouts”, using Greece as the poster girl/boy of that exercise in futility, the EU’s most spectacular failure. With such friendly scribblers, Europe has no need for sworn enemies! His evidence? That Greece, the basket case of the euro crisis, reported […]
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Advocates of European unity used to celebrate the European Union as a peace project. But well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European vision of a peaceful road to shared prosperity had begun to frazzle, and now the invasion has facilitated the EU’s mutation into something much uglier. ATHENS – Europe has become unrecognizable. Advocates of […]
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“Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.” Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National […]
The post Reversing Europe’s and Australia’s slide into irrelevance & insecurity – National Press Club of Australia speech appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Of all European politicians who never led their countries, Jacques Delors and Wolfgang Schäuble had the greatest impact on Europe. Between them, the two men, who passed away within a day of each other in December, shaped today’s European Union, warts and all. ATHENS – Of all European politicians who never led their countries, Jacques Delors and Wolfgang […]
The post The Two Faces of the Euro: Jacques Delors and Wolfgang Schäuble – Project Syndicate Long Read appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Wolfgang Schäuble was the embodiment of the political project of buttressing a monetary union in which he himself did not believe. To do so he had to impose violent austerity even in Germany and to dismantle democratic institutions in countries like Greece. In other words, Schäuble personified the explosive contradiction that gave birth both to […]
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Against the backdrop of the new cold war between the United States and China, the European Union’s top brass seems to be adding to the pressure on China by issuing credible threats in response to four grievances. Alas, the Chinese authorities are probably more amused than alarmed. ATHENS – On the December 7, the presidents […]
The post Europe’s Bad China Bluff – Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
As the 24th EU-China Summit concluded on Thursday, it is natural to want to look behind the declarations and official speeches to identify the deeper forces shaping the European Union’s relationship with China and its policies toward China. But to understand the nature of these forces, it is crucial to go back to the very […]
The post Why Europe is not free to relate to China – China Daily op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Since taking over as president of the European Central Bank in late 2019, Christine Lagarde has committed three major errors that play right into the hands of right-wing populists. Now, one can only hope that these parties’ own incompetence will sink them before next year’s European Parliament elections. ATHENS – Christine Lagarde’s three blunders as president […]
The post Christine Lagarde’s Gifts to Populists – Project Syndicate appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.