Current Affairs

These spikes were installed in the entrance of a luxury block of flats in South London. Somebody took the picture and sparked a rapid reaction on social media. Both the local Council and the Mayor of London urged the owners to remove them as soon as possible. I don’t know if they are still there. […]

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 […]

 Events in the first half of 2014 are likely to present somewhat of a headache to those working in Europe’s climate and energy sector, but they could also provide a solution. Much of Europe is addicted to Russian energy imports, impinging the continent’s ability to isolate Russia as a result of its recent engagement with […]

Anti-EU parties have made huge gains in the European Parliament elections 2014 and caused what the headlines are describing as an ‘earthquake’. But despite this, pro-EU parties still retain the most seats in the European Parliament, and the European Peoples Party* – strong supporters of the European Union project – is still Europe’s biggest party with […]

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 […]

Yesterday morning on BBC radio 4 Prof Michael Sandel animated an episode of the Public Philosopher on the thorny issue of “Why vote?” in the context of Thursday’s local and European elections.  The episode opened with Sandel asking members of the public why they would not vote in the forthcoming election. Expecting answers based on […]

Martina Vukasovic It is 10 years since the largest EU enlargement wave (sometimes referred to as “EU Big Bang Expansion”) and 15 years since the formal beginning of the Bologna Process. The former Yugoslavia countries provide an interesting example of integration of the “new member states” in the Europe of Knowledge. Slovenia entered the EU […]

The study of the European Union (EU), as we all know, is a commitment to a particular set of theoretical attachments as much as it is an interest in the institutions within the region of Europe. Terms such as ‘multi-level governance’, ‘supranationalism’, ‘neofunctionalism’ and ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ are seldom deployed outside of European Studies, or even […]