EUROPE - Jean-Claude Juncker, the outgoing president of the European Commission, is credited with the observation about Europe’s political leaders that: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” Speaking when he was still prime minister of Luxembourg, Mr Juncker was talking about structural reforms — often disturbing traditional employment rights — to raise productivity. The lag between such politically painful measures and higher living standards often overruns the electoral cycle.
His maxim, however, can equally be applied to policymakers in the eurozone’s creditor states. Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl backed the single currency as both a fair price for reunification and as a mechanism to fix the new Germany into Europe. The euro would mark the route to a European Germany and provide a roadblock against a German Europe.
Mr Kohl’s offence — the original sin, I would say, at the launch of the single currency — was to shy away from spelling out to German voters the inescapable meaning of the bargain. It still goes unsaid. In short, Germany is the biggest beneficiary of European integration. The EU supplies the democratic stability and economic certainty on which its prosperity has been built. No country has more to lose from a break-up.
“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”
The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!
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