Uncategorized

Following the 2014 European Parliament elections Anchrit Wille considers the normalization of the European Commission.

Food for thought in China-Europe relations is again as abundant as ever. ‘Hang on’, one might be inclined to intervene, ‘it’s been the APEC-summit this week – since when is Europe either Asian or close to the Pacific?’ Moreover, the Asian style dress code (aka “silly shirts”) for the APEC family picture gives room for interpretation of the symbolic […]

How are Sino-European relations doing today? “Rather well, since you ask.” This could have been President Xi Jinping’s reply to a hypothetical question he could have been asked during his recent visit to Brussels. For slightly over ten years since the launch of the EU-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, links between the two giants are wider […]

For better or for worse, sport, politics and big business are closely linked. Nowhere is this more apparent than around  sport mega-events, where political and economic agendas are omnipresent. Between Sochi and Rio de Janeiro, the year 2014 has again provided ample illustration for how the immense social reach of sport is instrumentalised for global […]

  Like many team sports football is essentially competitive. Even among friends the game provides more pleasure if played with the aim of winning. But each competition needs rules that are perceived as just. Nothing is as likely to kill the interest of the game than the perception that there is no level playing field […]

The 44th conference of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) took place in University College Cork last week. It brought together about 400 scholars, including one hundred postgraduate students to discuss recent research in EU studies. As the biggest EU studies association, UACES and its general conference afford a great opportunity to gauge the state of […]

Football has always been a major producer of stereotypes. The invention of ‘national playing styles’ at the beginning of 20th century drew, inevitably, massively on extra-sportive stereotypes accumulated over the centuries and safely stored in national narratives of perception and self-perception. The fact that for over a century, football discourse has been produced (and endlessly […]

The Press Complaints Commission has upheld three of my complaints against the Daily Mail. The commission ruled that the newspaper breached The Editors’ Code of Practice on accuracy with its story about buses and planes from Romania and Bulgaria to the UK being full-up and sold-out. On New Year’s Eve last year, the Daily Mail […]

Last weekend, the European Council (the heads of state or government of European Union [EU] member states) appointed Italian foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, as the next High Representative (HR) of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The holder of this post is responsible for ‘conducting the EU’s foreign policy. As was the case […]

20 years ago, on the 1st of September 1994, two German MPs from the CDU led by Helmut Kohl published a position paper, which bore the innocuous title ‘Reflexions on European Politics’ and which became quickly named the ‘Schäuble-Lamers Paper’ after its authors. The propositions and recommendations formulated in this rather dense document of a […]