Smiles on the Rhine

In Switzerland Germany, actually on the Rhine across from Basel, we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum.

Third, the Convention regulating traffic on the Rhine appears to have been considered in force during the First World War.

The secretariat has also maintained fruitful relations with Federal States, in particular with North Rhine Westphalia, where the secretariat is located, and with Hamburg and Bavaria, as well as with the City of Bonn.

Requests the UNCCD secretariat to continue developing its relations with the Government of Germany, the State of North Rhine Westphalia and the City of Bonn, as well as with academia and the private sector

Politically, it would be a big mistake for Germany to exit the euro, because that would reinstate the Rhine as the border between France and Germany. Franco German reconciliation, the greatest success of the postwar period in Europe, would be in jeopardy.

(b) To recommend that the secretariat continue to develop its relations further with the host country Government, the state of North Rhine Westphalia and the City of Bonn, and with private organizations in Germany in order to strengthen their support to the UNCCD

BERLIN On the banks of the Rhine and in Prague, NATO and the European Union will pay homage to the new American president in early April. There will be pretty pictures and lofty speeches on the future of the transatlantic relationship in other words, business as usual.

Has there been a French president since François Mitterrand who was truly a match for a German chancellor? If France has replaced Germany as the sick man of Europe, it is for political reasons, above all vision, courage, and strength on the northern side of the Rhine, and vacillation, inertia, and weakness on the southern.

On February 23, a day after addressing America s allies in Brussels, President George W. Bush will meet German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the old city of Mainz on the Rhine. After the falling out over Bush s Iraq adventure, the two countries so central to the transatlantic relationship in the past are once again on speaking terms.

But we have good reason to hope that there will be fewer of them. Next winter, it will be sixty years since an army crossed the Rhine River bringing death and destruction the longest such period since at least the late second century B.C., when the Cimbri and Teutones challenged the army of the Roman Consul Gaius Marius in the Rhone Valley.

Merkel had a difficult time in the run up to her recent party conference, because Jürgen Rüttgers, the minister president of the largest German state, North Rhine Westphalia, reminded the Christian Democrats of their historical support for strong social welfare policies. Only Royal may be said to represent softer lines against the hard liner of the governing party, Nicolas Sarkozy.

It takes a very close look at the results of the recent elections in the German state of North Rhine Westphalia to find among the list of Others the tally for The Greys they got 0.1 of the vote. In other words, one in a thousand voted for them, although they claimed to speak for that state s retired and elderly people over 30 of the population.

I hope that it is the fact of European interdependence an interdependence carefully constructed by Jean Monnet, Robert Schumann, Konrad Adenauer, and those who followed in their footsteps and not the memory of the horror of World War II that has caused the armies that used to cross the Rhine in arms to vanish. If so, there is a chance that the globalized economic age to which we look forward will be a more peaceful age than the twentieth century was.