Latest Blog Posts

Only a short post this week, as I’m attending the first European conference on Learning & Teaching in Politics, IR and European Studies at the University of Maastricht (yes, there again). Obviously this week potentially represents an important moment for the EU, with its possible resolution of the Spitzenkandidat issue at Ypres. Certainly, to listen to some of the British press, the […]

Coming to Brussels this week, it’s be heartening to see so much discussion of key international developments, coupled to an emergent sense of collective identification. Sadly, the World Cup and the Red Devils’ successes remain of limited interest to me. However, I do find it telling that the heat of public debate that followed the European elections […]

It is with great interest that I read Borja García García‘s exchange with Simon Usherwood on football and Euroscepticism. One point particularly caught my attention. I fully agree with Simon Usherwood’s statement that “If anything, as much as the EU does figure in supporters’ minds, it is the challenge to national teams posed by Bosman […]

I was of all places in Brussels, at the presentation of the European Week of Sport, when Simon Usherwood proposed to write something on Euroscepticism and the theme of the week, the World Cup. Because, yes, it is that time again, football’s biggest tournament is upon us and this time it comes from Brazil. Unlike […]

Maybe it’s all the sun we’ve been having this week, but some foolish impudence leads me to write about football, a subject about which I know little and possibly care less. After an exchange of tweets with @DrBorjaGarcia yesterday, we decided that we’d tackle (sic) the question of the relationship between the World Cup and euroscepticism, each […]

I’m just back from Montreal, where I was invited by the EU Centre of Excellence at the Université de Montréal and McGill University to participate in a roundtable on the European elections. My plan was simple: to go and talk about how well eurosceptic parties of different stripes had done, but how they were likely to be […]

It’s voting day here in the UK, so I’m off to the polling station to exercise my democratic rights. When I vote, I’ll be choosing who represents me in the world’s only supranational, directly-elected Parliament, a body that speaks for half a billion people. And because of a decision made some 15 years ago, there’s […]

I’m visiting the University of Maastricht this week, using the EU’s ERASMUS+ teaching exchange programme. It’s a great means of seeing how other institutions work, and of sharing practice with others, but it’s not so well known: if it hadn’t been for a chance email that dropped in my inbox last summer, I’d not have been able […]

Tonight I’m speaking on a roundtable in Edinburgh on ‘Reporting Europe‘, where we’ll be considering how the media covers the EU and the influence of euromyths in the debate. I wrote about this last year, but it’s a good time to revisit the issue, given the quality (or perhaps ‘quality’) of the media coverage of the European […]

For the past couple of days, I’ve been competing in the inaugural EU Twitter Fight Club, where tweeps from different parts of the (notional) European public sphere have been trying to show off their tweeting ability (very broadly defined).  To call it a pleasure would be a stretch, but it’s certainly been informative for me, both […]