This crisis has underlined that the EU, in large part, remains a Franco-German union.
Smaller nations - who increasingly play the role of onlookers - are concerned that if the European institutions are bypassed their influence will be weakened and that they will have joined a Franco-German union.
This week the Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen warned against proposals that bypass the EU. He and other smaller nations fear an EU that is increasingly a Franco-German union with France in a supportive role.
The union, Britain's second biggest, has said it will ask the giant German trade union, IG Metall, to raise the issue of UK workers' pensions with Deutsche Telekom's supervisory board.
Verdi, the German retail union, immediately objected to the cutback in a very public way.
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Bribes or backhanders were made to the German Christian Democratic Union, the party headed by former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in 1992.
The German socialist IG Metall union represents workers at Airbus Deutschland.
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They have been buoyed by the success of another xenophobic party, the German People's Union, which took nearly 13% of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt election in April but is not standing in Bavaria.
The Franco-German partnership, the Union's motor for most of the past 45 years, has become less mighty, partly because it is harder for two countries, even two big ones, to lay down the law to 13 others than to seven, in the mid-1970s, or to their original four partners.
It brought to a halt the massive German advance into the Soviet Union, but at tremendous human cost.
It negotiated compensation for victims of the Nazi period during Austria's union within the German Reich under Hitler.
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Mr Schroeder aims to enlist the backing of the European Union for the German and French challenge to US leadership.
You also argue that monetary union need not entail political union and that German unification would have worked better without the imposition of rigid labour markets on the East.
The Volga Germans, who had settled in Russia more than 200 years ago, were deported to Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia in 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
She linked future German prosperity to a prosperous European Union.
They are, not surprisingly, desperately urging their allies in the West to inject new taxpayer-underwritten credits to the new Union now so that German firms and banks can be at least partially paid out before the balloon goes up on a formal debt rescheduling.
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Ms Rice can also claim credit for one distinct achievement: taking a firm line with the Soviet Union at the time of German unification.
Comex gold futures prices are trading higher and hit a fresh six-month high Wednesday morning, following a German court ruling that affirmed a European Union bailout plan.
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It would also have marked the final consummation of a union of the French, German and British defence industries that was originally mooted way back in the 1990s.
The stakes for the European Union of a difficult Franco-German relationship are high.
The left-wing French Government and the conservative German administration were close allies in the European Union during Mr Kohl's time in power.
European Union ministers, especially French and German finance ministers, are trying to restrict the powers available to the UK's new Financial Policy Committee, which has its first meeting today.
German banks, which are the biggest European Union lenders, will suffer the most through the defaults and bailouts, causing a depression in Germany like few have seen in their history.
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Pay settlements of 3% -plus demanded by powerful German industrial trades unions, principally the engineering union IG Metall, are a huge new threat to stable prices in the principal anti-inflation European economy.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi acknowledged last week the need for measures to stimulate the economy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a German newspaper over the weekend that a European Union summit in June will discuss measures to stimulate the economy.
An alarmingly high proportion of Union business was hanging fire on a German election result.
German trade-unionists, whether speaking through their union or their works council, are no readier to rush headlong into suicide than anyone else.
The first is that the history of the European Union suggests that a powerful Franco-German axis is hard to resist for ever.
The creation of ever-closer union was once a clear Franco-German project.
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