EU: As the Irish presidency held talks with Tony Blair, Göran Persson and Joschka Fischer and prepared for further meetings with José María Aznar and Leszek Miller, Germany's Der Spiegel argued that the major obstacle to agreement on the European constitution lay not, as many had suggested, with Spain and Poland but with France, writes Enda O'Doherty
In his initial exploratory talks, the news magazine reported, Bertie Ahern ascertained the readiness of the Polish, Spanish and German governments to move towards each other; only France's Jacques Chirac was reluctant to change his position. The Taoiseach, according to Der Spiegel, now regards Chancellor Schröder as his greatest ally in reaching agreement on this crucial issue given the close political relations between France and Germany.
The attempt to solve current difficulties seems to involve a vast number of meetings, bilateral, trilateral and so on. Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durão Barroso insisted that while countries had the right to meet in whatever formation they chose: "The idea that two, three, four or five countries get together to cook up the meal to serve for the others to eat would be bad for Europe."
One meal to which not everyone was invited was the quiet dinner at the British foreign secretary's official country residence, Chevening in Kent, on Monday evening. Mr Straw's guests, the Financial Times revealed in an exclusive on Wednesday, were his French and German counterparts, Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer, the latter just off the plane from Dublin. As the European press tumbled to the news of the meeting 48 hours later, a senior Foreign Office source patiently explained that there was nothing to get excited about and absolutely nothing was "going on". It was simply that it was easier to discuss policy in small groups. Rome's La Repubblica did not agree: this was the two-speed Europe already at work, wrote Enrico Franceschini, but also an interesting signal of rapprochement between Britain and the two continental powers after their great rift over Iraq.
Portugal was somewhat disconcerted during the week to be told that its progress in meeting targets set by its own presidency in March 2000 was "mediocre". The so-called "Lisbon Agenda" aimed to make the European Union the most competitive economy in the world by 2010, not least by stimulating scientific research. With only 5.1 per cent of its graduates having completed courses in science, Portugal is at the bottom of the EU heap according to new Eurostat figures for 2001, Público reported. The average over the 15 states is 11.1 per cent. Top of the class, at least for science education, is Ireland at 19.8 per cent.
Commenting on the controversy over French secularism and the government's proposal to ban the wearing of Islamic headscarves in the classroom, Milan's Il Foglio referred to what it said was the difficult situation in many French schools with a high proportion of children of north African origin.Quoting a recent book, The Lost Territories of the Republic, written by a number of Parisian teachers, Il Foglio contended that in such schools historical topics such as the Algerian War, the Dreyfus Affair or the Holocaust could simply no longer be brought up. It also wrote of the increasing violence in poor north African immigrant communities directed against girls who choose not to dress or conduct themselves as "true Muslims".
Berlin's Die Tagesspiegel made little effort to pretend to great distress at the (at least temporary) silencing of the American Mars robot Spirit. Spirit's photographs could hardly compete anyway with those in fabulous full colour of Europe's Mars Express. And while the (British-made) robot Beagle might well be lying in a crater in a thousand pieces, it after all, Tagesspiegel said, was just "a pretty technical toy". The important thing was that the spacecraft's high resolution camera (developed in Berlin) was sending back pictures whose capacity to advance our knowledge of Mars was enormous. Ah yes, Vorsprung durch Technik, as they say in Germany, Europe, Mars ...