The EU

 Events in the first half of 2014 are likely to present somewhat of a headache to those working in Europe’s climate and energy sector, but they could also provide a solution. Much of Europe is addicted to Russian energy imports, impinging the continent’s ability to isolate Russia as a result of its recent engagement with […]

  Yoav Freidman, Hannah Moscovitz and Hila Zahavi The conference “Approaching Europe: Israel and the Knowledge-Based Society”, jointly organized by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Bologna Training Center (BTC) and the Israel office of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, sought to examine the European experience in higher education policy and reform, focusing on the European Higher Education […]

Anti-EU parties have made huge gains in the European Parliament elections 2014 and caused what the headlines are describing as an ‘earthquake’. But despite this, pro-EU parties still retain the most seats in the European Parliament, and the European Peoples Party* – strong supporters of the European Union project – is still Europe’s biggest party with […]

It’s voting day here in the UK, so I’m off to the polling station to exercise my democratic rights. When I vote, I’ll be choosing who represents me in the world’s only supranational, directly-elected Parliament, a body that speaks for half a billion people. And because of a decision made some 15 years ago, there’s […]

Yesterday morning on BBC radio 4 Prof Michael Sandel animated an episode of the Public Philosopher on the thorny issue of “Why vote?” in the context of Thursday’s local and European elections.  The episode opened with Sandel asking members of the public why they would not vote in the forthcoming election. Expecting answers based on […]

On the 9th of May 2014 I presented a Paper at the Conference on Freedom of Expression held at the University of Helsinki from 7 to 9 May 2014. Inspired by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), I was trying to combine substantial rights and their constraints, ethics and politics, discourses […]

I’m visiting the University of Maastricht this week, using the EU’s ERASMUS+ teaching exchange programme. It’s a great means of seeing how other institutions work, and of sharing practice with others, but it’s not so well known: if it hadn’t been for a chance email that dropped in my inbox last summer, I’d not have been able […]

Martina Vukasovic It is 10 years since the largest EU enlargement wave (sometimes referred to as “EU Big Bang Expansion”) and 15 years since the formal beginning of the Bologna Process. The former Yugoslavia countries provide an interesting example of integration of the “new member states” in the Europe of Knowledge. Slovenia entered the EU […]

The study of the European Union (EU), as we all know, is a commitment to a particular set of theoretical attachments as much as it is an interest in the institutions within the region of Europe. Terms such as ‘multi-level governance’, ‘supranationalism’, ‘neofunctionalism’ and ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ are seldom deployed outside of European Studies, or even […]

Tonight I’m speaking on a roundtable in Edinburgh on ‘Reporting Europe‘, where we’ll be considering how the media covers the EU and the influence of euromyths in the debate. I wrote about this last year, but it’s a good time to revisit the issue, given the quality (or perhaps ‘quality’) of the media coverage of the European […]