World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

The United Nations has just released a rather sobering report on the state of the world’s future.  These reports are highly general and only deal with the least tractable of global pressures–demography and very basic resources.  At that level, however, constraints on economic growth are going to be very severe by the middle of the century.  The prognosis is very grim.

The German view on fiscal austerity prevailed within the EU summit today.  Only Britain and the Czech Republic voted against the fiscal treaty that would give great authority to the EU over national budget and spending policies.  Even at this stage it is hard to imagine the treaty have a significant effect–I cannot believe that the member states would subject themselves to such external authority.  But the passage of the treaty gives Angela Merkel some credibility among German voters that she is not going to continue to finance the economically weaker states without some measure of control over their spending habits.  We’ll see how much more austerity the European states can handle.