French president Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to boycott the April NATO summit celebrating the 60th anniversary of the organisation, unless he is allowed to choose where he sits at the conference table. The president appears not to want to follow the established rules whereby seating is arranged by alphabetical order. Instead, he has insisted he should be seated next to NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, according to a report in German Spiegel Online. The French president knows exactly where he wants to sit at the NATO table (Photo: NATO) Under a compromise deal, Mr Sarkozy would sit on Mr de Hoop Scheffer's right whenever TV cameras are in the room, while German chancellor Angela Merkel would sit to the left of the NATO chief.
The president appears not to want to follow the established rules whereby seating is arranged by alphabetical order. Instead, he has insisted he should be seated next to NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, according to a report in German Spiegel Online.
The French president knows exactly where he wants to sit at the NATO table (Photo: NATO)
Under a compromise deal, Mr Sarkozy would sit on Mr de Hoop Scheffer's right whenever TV cameras are in the room, while German chancellor Angela Merkel would sit to the left of the NATO chief.
The thought occurs to me that maybe it was this way with earlier leaders, but they and the press were more circumspect about their motives. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
