Latest Blog Posts

French election campaigns are usually desperately navel-gazing. Foreign policy issues are all but absent from the debate. And even in ‘ordinary’ times, all mainstream evening news programmes consider international news a toxic audience killer. But the war in Ukraine has swept everything else in the background and changed the campaign dynamic. It has also put […]

If the EU did not exist, it’s highly likely that the countries and continent of Europe would now be in a far worse situation. For hundreds of years, European countries were more used to resolving their differences by violence, war, and subjugation. There was no easy, let alone democratic, means to decide the running and […]

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Joanna Ciesielska-Klikowska from the University of Lodz, in Poland.

After the EU referendum, many of us were suspicious about the role of Russia in clinching the narrow ‘win’ for Brexit. Evidence was mounting that there had been deep involvement and interference by Russian ‘agents’ whose aim was to destabilise the EU by enabling Britain’s departure from it. It was no secret that Russia’s Prime […]

This week I went to a conference on ‘British politics after Brexit‘. We didn’t talk about Brexit very much, among the swirl of partygate, shifting opinion polls and questions over the viability of the Union. Which prompts a question about whether Brexit changed much and whether there’s still much impact of Brexit. I ask these […]

The Court of Justice of the European Union is one of the most contested transnational institutions in Europe. It nonetheless cemented its authority over nearly seven decades of integration and remains a cornerstone of the EU. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) wielded extensive power for most of the second half of […]

There is no doubt that French politics have been ever strongly tilting to the right for months now. It’s not even exaggerated to claim that the political discourse is dominated, if not polluted, by far-right vocabulary and semantics. Want to study first-hand the mechanisms of the Overton window? This is the place. Paradoxically, at the […]

Just 24-hours after the EU referendum on 23 June 2016, I posted this on my blog: ‘Just over half of those who voted bought manky lies dressed up as a better life after Brexit. They were told they’d get their country back. Their lives would be transformed.  ‘More jobs, homes, schools and hospitals. Less migrants. No […]

I need some work done at home and invited firms to quote. “That’s a smart van,” I said in passing to the managing director of a limited company that visited last week. “Oh, we’ve got six of those,” he replied. We went through the project. In the past, companies had sent me quotes with the […]

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Theofanis Exadaktylos from the University of Surrey, in England.