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Discusses foreign relations between Great Britain and Germany in light of the June 1999 publication of a joint Anglo-German paper called `Europe, the third way, die neue Mitte,' emphasizing New Labour positions on Anglo-Saxon economics. Political, economic and institutional differences between Britain and Germany; Identification of the group that prepared the paper; Possible gains for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The article looks at the Swiss newspaper, the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" (NZZ). Barring a daring switch from its typeface in 1946, the NZZ has changed little since the 1930s, when it was banned in Germany for suggesting that Hermann Göring was responsible for the Reichstag fire. The emphasis is on international news, business, finance and high culture. A Zurich banker who is one of the paper's 1,500 shareholders claims it is second only to the "New York Times." Falling sales (the paper sells just under 160,000 copies, of which 4,000 are in Germany) and fewer advertisements have led to a 65% drop in the NZZ's share price. A recent decision to break up long stories with sub-headings was taken only after years of debate in the NZZ boardroom, says Thomas Maissen, a professor at Heidelberg and author of one of two new books on the paper's history.

This article examines the link between economics and religion. If you want to avoid an argument over religion at your next dinner party, you might suppose it safe to invite an economist or two. They, of all people, could be expected to stick to Mammon. Or maybe not, if a new paper by Robert Barro, one of America's best-known economists, and Rachel McCleary, a colleague at Harvard University, is any guide. Recently, Niall Ferguson, a British historian at New York University, argued that today's economic stagnation in Germany and other European countries owes much to the decline of religious belief and church attendance during the past four decades. More prosperous countries seem to have lower rates of church attendance, although America--the best instance of a country of competing sects rather than a state religion--is a conspicuous exception. If there is a link between religion and economic performance, then economists ought to have something to say about it.

Valéry Giscard d' Estaing, chairman of the European Union's (EU) constitutional convention, has proved that even at the age of 77 he is a master politician. Using a mixture of regal hauteur, bullying, negotiation and selective listening, he now looks likely to force the disputatious rabble on the convention floor to agree to a single text for an EU constitution, which will be presented at a grand summit meeting in Greece on June 20th. However, the convention is a failure in one crucial respect: it has failed to achieve its objective of sparking a wide public debate and making the EU more comprehensible to the public. A Spanish opinion poll found that a good 90% of Spaniards were unaware of the convention's existence and only 1% knew its goal was to write a constitution for the EU--and by extension for Spaniards. In Germany, a founder member of the Union whose serious papers devote acres of space to EU affairs, another recent poll found that 31% of the public had never heard of the European Commission, the EU's most important institution.