Global & International

The Czech Republic is a state whose political system is heavily based upon parliamentary power with government as the main executive body. This tradition, which was firmly set up after the Velvet revolution in 1989, for a long time implied an indirectly elected president with purely symbolic powers. In this way, Václav Havel was twice […]

Christmas and New Year is a time to think about and hope for ‘peace on earth and goodwill to all men’ (and women, of course). Peace is precious, because around the world there are so many conflicts and disasters that make world peace impossible. From conflicts and disasters come death, destruction and displacement. The world […]

Grischa Fraumann At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education (Holmberg, 2016). This post is based on my master’s thesis (Fraumann, 2017) that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy […]

• Click photo to enlarge   All except one of Theresa May’s first Brexit Cabinet were in favour of the EU or its Single Market prior to last year’s Referendum. Now, all her Cabinet are taking the country on the road to Brexit, even though most of them had previously urged that such an action would […]

What does the EU have to do with ‘sport diplomacy’? In a post published on this site fifteen months ago, I reported on the reflections of a high-level group that was set up by Commissioner Tibor Navracsics in 2015 and that produced a report with a series of recommendations in June 2016. Since then, the […]

Today’s big news is that Northern Ireland could get a special relationship with the EU to enable no-border with Ireland. It’s being called “regulatory alignment” between Northern Ireland and the EU. Nobody is yet sure what that means. But in any other name, it might be called staying in the EU Single Market. Or in […]

What a bloody nuisance Parliament is to the Tory government these days, when all the Prime Minister wants to do is get on with Brexit. If only Parliament would stop interfering, she and her fellow Brexiter Ministers could make much more progress. Ditto the law. I mean really, why do we need Parliament and the […]

So, has Corbyn seen the light at last on Brexit? Yes, according to columnist Polly Toynbee writing in The Guardian. After his brilliant performance at Prime Minister’s Question Time this week, Ms Toynbee was moved to write: ‘The Labour leader finally grasps what leaving the EU really means: the greatest harm inflicted on the very […]

Senior Tory Brexiters demanded last night that Theresa May exploit Angela Merkel’s political weakness and suspend plans to offer billions of pounds more to the European Union, according to today’s front page of The Times. Talks to form a coalition in Germany collapsed yesterday, and Mrs Merkel said that she was ready for a rerun […]

In Berlin this week our Brexit Secretary, David Davis, attempted to give a lecture to the Germans. “Don’t put politics above prosperity,” he said. That seems rich as the ideology of Brexit means doing exactly that: putting politics above the prosperity of Britain. But there were other oxymorons in Mr Davis’s speech. He said he […]