30 years ago, on 14 January 1985, Jacques Delors, who had just taken office a week before, pronounced his programmatic ‘Declaration on the orientation of the Commission’ in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He did so with ‘intellectual humility’ and ‘political determination’, two attitudes that seem to characterise rather well both the man […]
Time flies, no news on that front, but 2014 seems to have flown particularly quickly. One of the reasons for this impression may be the accumulation of global economic and political challenges. And 2015? Here is my list of the top three challenges for the new year: CHINA Challenge no. 1: Corruption. Despite a certain continuity […]
Today, writing in the Daily Express newspaper, columnist James Delingpole shockingly compares the European Union to Nazi Germany. He claimed that a “faceless commissar in Brussels” was deciding to ban every-day consumer products for no good reason. The newspaper asks its readers to play a new Christmas game called, “EU Ban Bingo” to “guess […]
Brussels in December: damp, windy, grey. An hour to kill between the meetings at the Berlaymont and the Thalys at Gare du Midi. Three snapshots taken on the way, each of them with a funny symbolic twist. And each of them accompanied by a good New Year’s wish for the EU. First stop: on the […]
Looking back to the year of 2014, I guess that the most important academic events for me in addition to the possibility to participate in the conference on Freedom of Expression at the University of Helsinki on 8-9 May, and the CBEES Annual conference “Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe: A new generation on the move” at […]
Last week UCL student and blogger, Lewis Barber, wrote an article for the Jerusalem Post which was titled: “Why I will be voting to leave the European Union…” In summary, this was because, claimed Lewis: The EU no longer represented his values as a human being The decision by the highest EU court to strike […]
This morning’s paper carried a story that first broke on Newsnight about UKIP’s decision to form a European party, the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe. Much of the coverage has made a point of highlighting the reversal of position by the party since 2011, when there was an extensive internal consultation and vote by members. Certainly, to read […]
With the first ten months of 2014 being the warmest January-October period since records started in 1880, many hope that the current climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru will lay the groundwork for a global climate deal in Paris in December 2015. In this context, on October 24 the European Council announced that the twenty-eight […]
On 25 February this year, the European Parliament voted on an EU fund to provide food aid to those suffering extreme poverty in the EU. The EU offered up to £22 million pounds to help subsidise Britain’s food banks, but the money was blocked by the UK government. Today writing for the Mail on Sunday, […]
From 4 to 5 December 2014, I participated in CBEES Annual Conference “Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe: A new generation on the move” at Södertörn University, Stockholm, which conference aimed at “contemporary processes and challenges, and […] the role of the new generations that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea […]
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