Politics & Public Policy

In an article for the Yorkshire Post this weekend, American expert in ‘Anglo-American relations’, Dr Ted R Bromund, argued the UKIP case for Britain to leave the European Union.   Dr Bromund, a senior research fellow at The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in Washington DC, wrote that on a recent visit, London didn’t seem so […]

A high-level round table of important players in the European Research Area took place earlier this month to discuss the ethics and values that should lie at the heart of the forthcoming Horizon 2020 programme. At stake is the future of European research.   The European Research Area, or ERA, is bracing itself for a major […]

Today mobility across national borders is seen as increasingly important for competitive labor market, excellent research and higher education. Free movement of people is one of the four freedoms constituting the EU Single Market. Facilitating mobility of researchers is among the core aims of the European Research Area, while the ERASMUS programme supports student mobility.   However, […]

The puzzle is probably as applicable to Europe as to the rest of the world. Looking at the way intelligence agencies have been spying over European citizens, or at the “legacy of poverty” that the austerity policies are leaving behind, we can legitimately wonder if freedom, social justice, democracy and human rights are at all […]

Leaders of the European Union should revive Winston Churchill’s post-war vision for a kind of  ‘United States of Europe’, urged  EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso this weekend. ‘We need to show the same political courage and vision of Winston Churchill,’ said Mr Barroso.  ‘He was a man of foresight with an acute sense of history, often […]

Research in Europe is increasingly targeted towards fostering excellence. At the heart of this policy drive is the concept of researcher mobility, which requires researchers to work not just across borders but also across disciplines and sectors. The demands on modern-day researchers are high. Yet the existing research infrastructure in Europe often hampers researcher mobility […]

The idea to promote familiarity, mutual trust, a collective European identity and support for European integration by giving citizens the possibility to interact across borders is at the heart of a wide array of EU policies, such as the Erasmus student exchange or town twinning projects. This idea goes back to Karl W. Deutsch’s transactionalist […]

While reading through the Guardian website last night, I stumbled across an article published on 9 October this year by its legal correspondent, Joshua Rozenberg. This piece, Never mind human rights law, EU law is much more powerful, related the findings of a UK court in the case of an unfair dismissal and discrimination claim brought by two […]

The past week has been something of a trip to the past for me. For many years, watching eurosceptics and anti-EU groups was characterised by endless cries that they were fighting ‘the system’, outcasts who had seen the truth and railed against almost impossible odds. That idea of righteousness that underpins such a worldview is one that I […]

Anonymous eurosceptics seem to be everywhere, posting en masse in the readers columns of our national newspapers. And whenever I post a pro-EU comment – always under my real name – they’re there at the ready, trying hard to discredit me and calling me ‘dishonest’. Of course, they mostly never seem brave enough to post […]