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Hello world! and welcome to this new UACES blog “EU on what track?” where I intend to write about EU transport policy and sustainable mobility, mainly focusing on market opening and regulation of EU transport markets, its implications for the environment and transport users. Indeed the EU increased emphasis on railway market opening as an […]

For the second year running I attended the EU Open Days in Brussels. This event, organised by the European Commission and the Committee of the Regions, and now in its tenth year, brings together local and regional actors from across Europe, along with representatives from the European Commission and Committee of the Regions. Over 6,000 […]

Mesut Özil has style, and there’s plenty of evidence on youtube for that. But Mesut Özil also has influence on the style of others. The Guardian to start with: for decades the British quality newspaper had stipulated in its well-known ‘House Style Guide’ that capital letters should have no accents. But Özil’s arrival at Arsenal […]

Today I attended the Southern England Local Partners annual European Congress in Poole. This was an important event for the delegates in the room, mostly representatives of local government and the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). The highlight of the programme for many was the keynote speech, a presentation from the UK government on how the range of […]

Germany has voted. And – surprise, surprise – the voters have confirmed the first female Chancellor ever of their Republic for the second time. Surprising then that there was next to no mention of gender equality among the major topics of the election campaign. Not so surprising when one recalls that only last April the […]

  This evening the Champions League will be back. At 20:45, the coins will have been thrown and both the game and its powerful marketing machine will be kicked off yet again across the continent, from Copenhagen to Istanbul, from San Sebastian to Piraeus. There is a lot that can be said against the Champions […]

Academics studying the EU should be the real eurosceptics. Not only can we translate the greek word skepsis as "enquiry”, modern science owes much to philosophical and methodological scepticism. However, it seems that academics interested in the EU have struggled to come to grips with a the phenomenon of political euroscepticism which appears to be quite a different thing compared the philosophical notions of skepticism.

There are not many Germans who made it into the hall of fame of English football. There are not many Germans either who were made OBE (‘Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’), especially if they started their stay as POW (prisoner of war) in 1945. In fact, there’s only one who […]

The opening plenary session started on the same impressive multi-disciplinary note as the first day of the conference. Headline contributors included EU legal scholar Dagmar Schiek and economist Malcolm Sawyer - both from the University of Leeds - as well as Dermot Hodson and Fabian Amtembrink.

The 2013 UACES annual conference has just come to a close. This year there were five panels focusing on the role of local and regional actors. This is compared to only one or two in previous years. Not only is this evidence of increasing academic interest in the field, but also reflects the growing prevalence […]