{"id":136,"date":"2003-01-22T22:16:04","date_gmt":"2003-01-22T22:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"tag:owlfish.com,2004:colinweblog.20030122221604"},"modified":"2003-06-30T23:20:59","modified_gmt":"2003-06-30T23:20:59","slug":"22012003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2003\/01\/22012003\/","title":{"rendered":"European Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A fairly good <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/europe\/2681821.stm\">article<\/a> by the BBC on the recent strengthening of the French\/German alliance.  The timing of these developments is interesting, and I&#8217;m not sure what to make of it.  My personal reaction is to think about the current work of the convention on the future of the EU, and to consider that any constitutional arrangement will have to ensure that a French\/German alliance does not dominate policy.  <\/p>\n<p>This is also likely to be the response of the leaders of the other members of the EU &#8211; and surely France and Germany know this.  So could it be that this is exactly the response that the pair (or one of the pair) is looking for?  If so why?  I suppose it might push the federal cause a little further ahead, but I&#8217;m not sure it works that much.  Another answer might be that they are trying to concentrate minds &#8211; France and Germany are moving forward on European integration, so other countries need to come forward with commitments on integration if they don&#8217;t want to be left behind.<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully I&#8217;ll find some ideas on this out there somewhere&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A fairly good article by the BBC on the recent strengthening of the French\/German alliance. The timing of these developments is interesting, and I&#8217;m not sure what to make of it. My personal reaction is to think about the current work of the convention on the future of the EU, and to consider that any [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}