The EU

Julia Metz Day by day, the European Commission consults with more than 30,000 experts that convene in about 1,000 expert groups. I argue that in order to understand the ubiquity of expert groups we need to look at how and why the European Commission uses its expert groups in the policy process. In my new […]

A guest contribution by Moses Onyango and Jean-Marc Trouille. In many parts of the world, geopolitics are confronted with two anti-nomic trends. On the one hand, numerous countries are engaged in a process of regional economic integration, epitomised by the more advanced model of the European Union (EU), and which requires ‘internal’ borders between participating […]

Last week, I wrote about intensity and direction as tensions in the campaign groups: this week I want to look at another faultline, namely that between ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’. I use the quote marks, because radicalism is very much in the eye of the beholder, so it is hard to move beyond any subjective interpretation. Indeed, it […]

If you want to check for impurities in a swimming pool you don’t have to test all the water. You can just dip in a test tube to analyse a sample of the pool to get an accurate guide to the state of the rest of it. And so it’s been with the Daily Mail. […]

The Volkswagen emissions scandal has many dimensions, some of which have not even started to unfold yet. The sheer perversity of the software used by the company with the aim of hiding the real level of nitrogen oxide emissions of its cars is most likely to become a textbook case of corporate hubris and cynicism […]

It’s not been often that I’ve had cause to write about Labour and the EU in the past four or five years: apart from Ed Miliband’s semi-drift into referendum commitments last year, there hasn’t really been much of a policy. A general sense that it’s A Good Thing, but largely a continuation of the positional policy-making that […]

It is difficult not to be impressed by the remarkable breadth and multidisciplinary outreach of contemporary European Studies that was exposed at the UACES conference in Bilbao. Paper and panels were fed and underpinned by the political sciences, but also by economics, law, sociology and anthropology. Yet the newspapers read during the return flight from […]

Dorota Dakowska and Robert Harmsen Why are Central and Eastern European countries said to be particularly exposed to European and international organizations? How did the Bologna Process become a central reference in many domestic reform projects in the region?  This special issue of the European Journal of Higher Education (Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015) aims […]

What a difference a summer makes. Only last June the Evening Standard’s front page lauded that Britain’s support for continued membership of the European Union was the highest ever. Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday’s front page turned that around, with a poll showing that for the first time most British people want to quit the […]

Some of the media seem to be in a state of panic this week with the news that the number of foreign-born people living in Britain has reached 8 million, and net migration to the  UK has reached record levels. So what’s the big deal here? Not all those born abroad can be described as […]