After lots of tweets and e-mails exchanged it seemed best to summarise everything in a blog post… I’m going to be in Brussels for 48 hours 25th-27th November, and as I haven’t been in the city for a while it seemed like a good idea to catch up with all...
Two grandees of UK politics were at it again today. Peter Mandelson, while at least acknowledging an in-out referendum for the UK, was nevertheless pompous and deluded in the FT: “pro-Europeans […] should acknowledge that their case has largely been won by default and that it needs to be re-articulated...
It was a normal enough evening. I was sat in a bar in Copenhagen, catching up with an old friend who was visiting, and I then checked Twitter. This from my good friend @Kosmopolit, and this from @Nosemonkey (tellingly including the words Ha ha ha!) alerted me that somehow I...
The European Commission, and Commissioners themselves, have progressively taken to Twitter over the past couple of years as a way of communicating with (at?) EU citizens. So how are they doing? This blog entry gives a quick summary. My starting point is that a good Twitter account is an engaging...
Back in 2004 the European Parliament made waves by preventing the Barroso I Commission from entering office, mostly due to the views of one nominee – Rocco Buttiglione. The problem was with Buttligione’s views on homosexuality and the role of the family. Fast forward 8 years and the European Parliament...
Over the years I’ve continually argued that the European Union needs to improve its representative democracy – it needs to develop federal institutions, and give citizens a genuine voice at elections. Yet while, in essence, I still believe in that, I nevertheless have to admit that representative democracy is struggling...
At the start of last week I was a guest lecturer at Roskilde University, presenting about blogging and the EU. You can find the slides I used on Slideshare here. In the discussion following the presentation I was posed a question by Angela Bourne, one of the academics that had...
There have been two lines of attack from UK EU-phobes to the news that the EU has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One has been to point to the current economic travails of the EU, and the political strife that has caused, and to criticise the award as a...
The EU has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But who should collect it? Have a go at the quick poll below, and if you have other suggestions leave them in the comments!
The Foreign Minister of the EU’s 6th largest country (Radek Sikorski, Poland) arrives in the UK and gives a speech on 21st September lambasting Britain’s policy towards the European Union and the reaction is… almost non-existent. Isn’t that a bit odd? Let me explain a little more. At the time I read...
I was one of the people interviewed for Javier Ruiz Soler‘s European Studies Masters Thesis “Who blogs what? A qualitative study on the role of the Euroblogosphere in a context of a European Public Sphere.” The PDF of the thesis is here (Javier has given the interviewed bloggers permission to...
I have been repeatedly criticised on Twitter this morning by @PaulMBrady65 for saying I am a federalist, but refusing to vote for a federalist party in European elections. Here is a quick explanation why (I can’t easily get the nuance into 140 character tweets). As a starting point, my commitment...