The proud words on your cover, as well as the title of your main leader, make sense only in the context of the cover’s image showing a wobbly gelatin dessert decorated with many frightened faces (“Europe Stands Up to Russia,” September 6, 2008). Indeed, Sarkozy’s emergency summit of the European Union after the Russian thrashing of Georgia ended up as a demonstration of nothing less than appalling weakness. The cure you offer for Eurowobbles over Russia is not in diplomacy but in the liberalization of the Union’s internal energy market, which would make obsolete separate deals, most notably the one between Germany and Russia. In this context it is good to remember that Gerhard Schröder took a job with Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, the day after Angela Merkel replaced him as German chancellor in 2005. Anyhow, the trouble with your proposal is that it assumes that the Union is a power to be reckoned with rather than a lumbering common market in which each major player, such as Germany, cannot but vie for its own interests as it sees fit. Eurowobbles are for real rather than for lack of trying. Or pretending.