Current Affairs

This post originally appeared on Encompass. When trying to explain why European integration took off after the end of the Second World War, academics typically point towards some combination of factors. As well as the peace project in the wake of Holocaust and of the total war that had ravaged the continent, economic reconstruction and […]

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Daniel Hegedüs from the Berlin Office of the German Marshall Fund of the US.

Brexit has Putin’s fingerprints all over it. We’ve increasingly been suspicious of this for some time, but the evidence is mounting. Motive is the key incentive for any crime. There have never been any benefits for Britain doing Brexit. Not even one. Any apparent motive for leaving the EU was based on a pack of […]

French election campaigns are usually desperately navel-gazing. Foreign policy issues are all but absent from the debate. And even in ‘ordinary’ times, all mainstream evening news programmes consider international news a toxic audience killer. But the war in Ukraine has swept everything else in the background and changed the campaign dynamic. It has also put […]

If the EU did not exist, it’s highly likely that the countries and continent of Europe would now be in a far worse situation. For hundreds of years, European countries were more used to resolving their differences by violence, war, and subjugation. There was no easy, let alone democratic, means to decide the running and […]

After the EU referendum, many of us were suspicious about the role of Russia in clinching the narrow ‘win’ for Brexit. Evidence was mounting that there had been deep involvement and interference by Russian ‘agents’ whose aim was to destabilise the EU by enabling Britain’s departure from it. It was no secret that Russia’s Prime […]

This week I went to a conference on ‘British politics after Brexit‘. We didn’t talk about Brexit very much, among the swirl of partygate, shifting opinion polls and questions over the viability of the Union. Which prompts a question about whether Brexit changed much and whether there’s still much impact of Brexit. I ask these […]

There is no doubt that French politics have been ever strongly tilting to the right for months now. It’s not even exaggerated to claim that the political discourse is dominated, if not polluted, by far-right vocabulary and semantics. Want to study first-hand the mechanisms of the Overton window? This is the place. Paradoxically, at the […]

Just 24-hours after the EU referendum on 23 June 2016, I posted this on my blog: ‘Just over half of those who voted bought manky lies dressed up as a better life after Brexit. They were told they’d get their country back. Their lives would be transformed.  ‘More jobs, homes, schools and hospitals. Less migrants. No […]

I need some work done at home and invited firms to quote. “That’s a smart van,” I said in passing to the managing director of a limited company that visited last week. “Oh, we’ve got six of those,” he replied. We went through the project. In the past, companies had sent me quotes with the […]