Current Affairs

This month 59 years ago – on 13 August 1961 – Berliners woke up to find that a wall was being built to split their city in two. To say it was a huge shock is an understatement. It was not until 28 years later – in November 1989 – that Berliners ripped the wall […]

The BBC call them migrants; the Prime Minister and some other media call them illegal; some Tory MPs and Nigel Farage call them ‘invaders’. They are none of those. They are mostly desperate, destitute, stateless men, women and children fleeing from war, torture, oppression and persecution. Nobody risks their lives across treacherous waters in unsuitable and unsafe boats unless they are deeply distressed and determined, with nothing […]

On 20 July 2020, British MPs voted by a majority not to have any say or votes on future UK trade agreements. Can you think of any other professions where you could vote not to do your job but still be paid for it? Postmen and women voting not to deliver letters? Train drivers voting […]

The reforms in the EU’s economic and financial governance structure in response to the Euro crisis have been put to the test by the Coronavirus pandemic. While the resurfacing of the sovereign debt crisis has highlighted the inadequacies of the Union’s fiscal policy reforms, the relative stability of the banking system so far hints at […]

The aim of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is to harmonise asylum procedures across the European Union. As several crises have shown, however, this goal is far from being achieved, and a reform of Europe’s asylum policy is long overdue. Radu-Mihai Triculescu argues that such reform should also incorporate the perspective of street-level bureaucrats […]

Last week, almost as an aside to another conversation on Twitter, I noted that the UK was always going to have a much more difficult time of it all with Brexit than the EU because it (the UK) has to build and rebuild a huge pile of government functionality, while the EU just keeps what […]

The coronavirus measures implemented by the EU and member states have had differentiating effects, which ultimately may lead to further fragmentation of the European political system, argues EU3D researcher Filippa Chatzistavrou. The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a global health and economic crisis. According to the World Bank, it has caused the worst economic recession with […]

Some people say it was undemocratic for Britain to join the European Community in 1973 because ‘the people’ weren’t asked in a referendum. But that’s not how decisions are made in Britain. In the UK, referendums are usually nothing more than opinion polls. They are not legally binding and therefore not capable of making decisions. […]

Brexit is based on blatant mistruths and lies. You may not believe this now, but we will all believe it next year, when Brexit finally arrives, cold, clammy and callous, naked and exposed. Every reason given to leave was a stinking falsification. When, one day, there is a public inquiry into how our country was […]

I was very glad to have attended the EPOW seminar series this week, where one of my longer-standing thoughts about Brexit finally got some more robust grounding than the impressionistic approach I’ve taken to date. Sara Hobolt was presenting her co-authored paper on the impact of attitudes towards Brexit on attitudes towards your own country’s […]