Politics & Public Policy

It’s time for the final blog post of the calendar year for me, as I prepare for the Christmas break. My mind naturally turns towards thinking back over the past 12 months and I find myself looking at a situation much like that a year ago. Last Christmas, the talk was of Cameron’s much-trailed speech, which […]

After the election on 29 September 2013, Austria is facing another five years of the same coalition government under the Social Democrat Werner Faymann (SPÖ) and his junior partner, the conservative Christian People’s Party (ÖVP). While the Austrian media is almost unison in attesting this renewed government a sense of gridlock, one decision has caused […]

Earlier this year, the European Commission started to work on a new EU energy and climate change package, which will define European climate initiatives until 2030[1]. Whatever the EU plans to do at home will influence its negotiating position at the international negotiations in Paris in 2015 (COP21), where the international community seeks to hammer […]

In the fall of 1675 farmers in the French North-West region of Brittany took to the street to protest against fiscal oppression in what is now called the “red caps revolt”. In the fall of 2013, the red caps are back. This time, the offending tax is environmental – it taxes road haulage – and […]

Forty years on, the EU environmental policy is a much-publicised success of European integration[1]. After a slow start in the 1970s to tackle trans-boundary environmental issues and level the playing field for European businesses, EU environmental policies now cover water, air or noise pollution; habitat and biodiversity preservation; sustainable production and consumption and the fight […]

My previous blog post focused on the Commission’s problems of implementing its infrastructure strategy due to strong and diverse national interests. This blog post focuses on two different national discourses – the Danish and the British – on infrastructure investments and argues that national infrastructure investment are rooted in different state traditions, in relation to […]

After being in the back front of higher education policy making for a good decade – between 80s and 90s of the past century (Corbett, 2006, 2011), the European Commission got a new opportunity to establish itself as an influential actor in the European higher education sector[i]. And it managed to do so quickly and […]

My blog last week got picked up by British Influence, a pro-EU pressure group, who asked if they could re-post it on their website. Off the back of that, I got drawn into a Twitter exchange with Iron Lad, a self-professed libertarian and UKIP supporter. Suffice to say that we didn’t agree on much, as we slid quickly into the ‘who […]

The free movement of people is a cornerstone principle of the European Union.  Why change it?  But that’s exactly what the British government has announced today that it wants to do. EU membership works both ways.  Other EU citizens can come here; we can go there. Britain has benefited greatly from other EU citizens coming to Britain to fill […]

Sunday 1st December 2013. Mass protests in Ukraine. They come just one week before the day when 22 years earlier Ukraine was instrumental in signing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into obsolescence; and 20 years – to the day – after the historic Rome meeting of the Conference (now Organisation) for Security and Cooperation in […]