One of the more notable aspects of the French Presidential elections has been the extent to which all the candidates have been willing to bash the EU and European integration more generally. As the very helpful manifesto comparison tool from Le Monde shows all too clearly, euroscepticism has been rife.
After the first orientation debate in the Council focussed on discards policy, the next Fisheries Council meeting on 26 and 27 April 2012 will continue the debate among member states’ ministers on the future Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) of the European Union. In a summary and preparation document (Update: Revised version of the document of 20 April), the […]
“We can maintain a European public if we observe synchronicity and issue convergence across national publics as well as political resonance on the part of supra-national decision-makers.” (Seifert 2006) On 27 March 2012, the International Trade (INTA) committee voted against a referral of ACTA to the EU Court to instead vote on it right away […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote “Hugh’s Fish Fight or: The blind spot of the EU social media gurus“. As you may know, I am doing my academic research on information flows in EU policy-making and so I was interested whether a campaign like Hugh’s Fish Fight would also have any effect on the attention to […]
The following are quotes from the Commission meeting minutes of 22 February 2012 from their debate about ACTA: “[Reding] concluded by highlighting the rising influence of social networks on the Internet and the need for the Commission to take account of this in its communication policy and in dealing with various dossiers. Instructions had already been given to the […]
In the debate on latest economic developments – focussing on Greece – during the Commission meeting on 14 February, the following point was raised (among others): “the problem posed by the discrepancy between the huge sacrifices asked of the great majority of the Greek people and the fact that senior executive pay remained untouched, making the efforts […]
It’s been a while that we have seen something coming from Brussels that actually reflects a positive and yet convincing vision of the European project. This video is convincing not because it is explains from A-Z what the EU does for us like many of those fancy PR videos that try to sell us EU […]
Some weeks ago, the Commission refused to give its agreement to the merger of Deutsche Börse and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). I’m not in the position to judge this decision, but the public minutes of the College meeting of 1 February where this decision was taken reveal an interesting argumentation concerning lobbying and leaks […]
It was back in October when I discovered that on 29 June 2011 the EU Ombudsman had opened an own-initiative case against the EU Council regarding the appeals procedure (‘confirmatory application’) for access to documents requests. In short, the observation was that more or less all confirmatory applications in the Council had been handled outside the basic […]
I just watched the the Eurogroup press conference with Eurogroup president Juncker, Commissioner Rehn and EFSF chief Regling. I didn’t expect anything substantive – those press conference rarely offer great insights – but than I heard Juncker talk about the future European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – the long-term versions of the EFSF bailout fund – […]
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