Joseph A. Harriss
Skies are dark with chickens coming home to roost as the European Union faces its worst existential crisis since its founding. But EU officialdom has other creatures than chickens on its mind, namely, hamsters. Not just any hamster, but none…
At first, France’s Socialist Party leaders made a good show of being beside themselves with joy on August 23. A careful, timorous Cyrus Vance, Jr., had finally decided that, however Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s semen came to be splattered all over his…
Two cheers for Marine Le Pen. The new president of France’s National Front party holds that the nation-state is the only legitimate basis of government. She vocally detests soulless multinational organizations. She cordially despises that usurper of national sovereignty, the…
Ironically, his luck began to change that happy day two weeks ago in Paris when Dominique Strauss-Kahn took the wheel of a $135,000, V-8, 500-horsepower Porsche Panamera. Before he could even test its acceleration (0 to 60 in 4.2 seconds),…
With policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic slashing public spending and searching for ways to reduce military budgets, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has just begun construction of a splendiferous new $1.38 billion headquarters on a 100-acre site in…
PARIS — You’ve got to hand it to France’s little big man, he has a way of getting what he wants. Whether it be the presidency of his country, a trophy wife, or generally punching above France’s weight in international…
Atheism is trendy — again. Over the centuries it periodically raises its ugly head, from the ancients like Epicurus and Lucretius, who blithely described a purely material, pleasure-based, godless universe, to Europe’s 18th-century Enlightenment. And now something called New Atheism…
It was exactly 130 years ago this winter that the famous French diva made her long-awaited appearance in America. Thanks to a barrage of advance publicity and sulfurous rumors, Americans were dying to see the wicked Sarah Bernhardt, believed to…
The euro, that artificial Funny Money used by 331 million Europeans in17 nations — the 17th, Estonia, joined the euro just this week — was conceived in sin and born in corruption. The New Year brings the prospect that the…
One of the more heroic feats of nearly 75 years of French socialism is to have made “work” a particularly nasty four-letter word, something to be avoided like very sin. For decades, assorted handouts have multiplied and overlapped, along with…
