Europe's new Iron Curtain -- on a cash-only basis
As a backdrop to British P.M. Gordon Brown's hat-in-hand trip to D.C this week to palaver with Barack Obama (who will also have his hat in hand as they try to figure this thing out), a growing rift in Europe threatens to rebuild the Berlin Wall.
In this case, Eastern Europeans will try to storm the Western European gates to get jobs. (Well, I guess that was part of their motivation during the Cold War, too.)
It's not just jobs, but the severe lack of same that threatens collapse of their societies, the Eastern Europeans say.
The Times (U.K.) has more from Brussels:
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western leaders were told yesterday that five million jobs could be lost in the "new" European Union countries of the East unless radical action were taken to bail them out.
There's no chance of a shooting war breaking out, because none of these European countries has any money. But the Times points out that there's at least a rapid build-up of ill will:
The plea, led by Hungary, was rejected in a bad-tempered meeting of the 27 European leaders, dominated by fears that Western EU countries would rather prop up their own large industries and jobs at the expense of the East.
