Historian criticises EU for divided approach

British journalist and historian Timothy Garton Ash has written that the current crisis in the Gaza Strip as well as the crisis over gas supplies from Russia show the European Union to be “weak” and “divided”. He made the case in an article for the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, a little over a week after the Czech Republic took up the EU presidency. The historian criticised it was difficult to take EU foreign policy seriously, given divisions within the union, citing – as a case in point – separate simultaneous missions in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of the week, one was led by Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, another by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy.