"Are you Catalan?” asked Joaquín Almunia, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, when we first met last year in Istanbul and I spoke to him in Spanish. Not a good start. Insinuating that someone raised in Madrid, as I was, might be from Barcelona is as unwelcome as telling someone from Barcelona that they sound Castillian, or asking a Canadian where they come from in the US.
This time, on a rainy day in Berlin at a conference on fiscal policy in Europe, he made himself unpopular with the German minister of finance, Peer Steinbrück, who was on the stage with him.
