Current Affairs

Covid-19 has once again put EU solidarity to the test. While much of the focus has been on the pandemic’s impact on healthcare and the European economy, it has also pushed states further apart on the issue of irregular migration. Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, the issue of irregular migration had been at the top […]

  Over the past two months, I see that religion is playing a significant role in politics, both domestically and internationally. The UK and Ireland archbishops’ warning of the government’s  Internal Market Bill, ongoing confrontation between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the French President Emmanuel Macron over Islam and Secularism, and the Catholic Church’s […]

The eerie quiet of negotiators, um, negotiating means we’ve seen very little of the Future Relationship process of late: everyone’s too busy trying to work up texts and compromises to brief outsiders. Which makes it a good time to consider an aspect of the ratification problem that’s not been much seen so far: what happens […]

Although hard to believe now, for most of the UK’s five decades as a member of the European Union, Britain didn’t want to leave. On the contrary, most Brits wanted us to stay. What’s the proof of that? Well, apart from polling over the years, look at governments and general elections. From 1959 to 2016, every UK government and […]

Lots of people have lots of problems with the Maastricht Treaty, and I’m not one to change that. Instead I’ll throw another issue onto the pile: its lopsidedness. If you’ve read the text – and really, you should have – you’ll notice that there’s a huge difference between the sections relating to the first pillar […]

I find I’m not writing all that much these days about Brexit, either on blogs or on Twitter. It’s not because there’s nothing happening, but rather that all the stuff isn’t amounting to much. Let me give you an example. On my daily walk today, I remembered I’d producing something a while back about why […]

What are Research Infrastructures and what roles do they play in the European integration process? These and other questions are addressed in recently published book Big Science and Research Infrastructures in Europe, edited by Katharina Cramer and Olof Hallonsten. In this Q&A with Europe of Knowledge blog, they explain origins, key concepts and findings of […]

Yesterday saw Michael Gove and David Frost, the UK leads for the current negotiations with the EU, give evidence to Parliamentary committees. They were very upbeat about it all, pointing to the increasing chances of a deal and sounding conciliatory about compromises on state aid, even as they acknowledged the continuing problems elsewhere. I noted […]

In the last decade, the EU’s foreign policy practices have grown increasingly complex. For instance, despite the centralisation envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty, informal groups of member states shaped the Union’s policy on Kosovo and Ukraine. Ten years after its ratification, some believe that the Lisbon Treaty failed to strengthen the EU activities in international […]

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world hard. While medical researchers are racing to find a vaccine, malicious actors are exploiting the new range of possibilities to interfere with IT devices. Cybersecurity has become a prominent feature of the pandemic, especially in the health sector.