Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination, Brexit, the Paris Climate Change agreement, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the migrant crisis are amongst the ten main events which shaped Europe in the past decade according to Euronews.
While refugees and migrants have always attempted the sea crossing between Turkey and Greece and Libya and Italy in an attempt to reach Europe, during the first three months of 2015 the number of drownings in the Mediterranean rose to 1,687 from 60 a year earlier, the report says.
The Times of Malta editor Herman Grech is reported by Euronews saying that the assassination of Caruana Galizia presented many lessons that Europe now needed to learn, from the importance of independent media – which has “led the breakthrough,” he said – to the importance of keeping an eye on the institutions of all countries, “even the microscopic ones”.
Caruana Galizia’s murder, from a social perspective it reflected the way the masses turned a blind eye to cronyism and corruption as it fed off the altar of greed, he added.
Brexit has cost two prime ministers their jobs, led to two elections in as many years and dominated British politics since a small majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016. But while pundits at the time saw Brexit as the beginning of the end of the EU — with calls for a French ‘Frexit’, a Dutch ‘Nexit’, and so on — the opposite has in fact proved true, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, London, told Euronews.
When Ukraine announced in February 2014 that “little green men” had started seizing facilities in Crimea, Vladimir Putin denied that the soldiers — which were carrying Russian weapons and wearing Russian military garb — were Russian. In April, he admitted that they were. The annexation may have been eclipsed by the war in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists, which has raged since April 2014, but still “poses a fundamental challenge to the European order,” according to Steven Pifer, at Brookings.
Although Putin has held back from occupying the Donbas region, the annexation of Crimea has alarmed European former Soviet republics such as Lithuania and Estonia and reflects a greater polarisation in Europe, with the EU on one side and Putin’s Russia on the other.
The report also refers to Catalonia’s struggle for independence from Spain that has exacerbated in the past decade, the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Maidan in Ukraine and the #MeToo movement.
Via Euronews
