The diagramme above comes from an excellent report entitled “The Nordic Way” [PDF], produced by Swedish think tank Global Utmaning, and linked from this Bagehot piece about the Nordic countries. The paper itself is worth a read, although take it with a small pinch of salt as it presents a […]
It has not been an easy week for the government (and indeed UK politics as a whole) when it comes to sovereignty, rights and responsibilities. A non-binding motion in the House of Commons yesterday was passed 234-22 in favour of maintaining a blanket ban on prisoners voting, putting the UK […]
NOTE: if you’re arrived here thanks to the seven59.dk post about this programme, this is NOT a blog that is in ANY WAY associated with the programme. These are my own thoughts as a listener to the programme, no more. I don’t work for the BBC and have no association […]
Loads of organisations and companies make their press photos available on Flickr – good. But other than look at the pictures, what is anyone supposed to actually do with them? This was the issue raised this morning when I pointed out that the attendees at today’s European Council are all […]
Foreign Ministers of EU countries are meeting today in Brussels, while at the same time protests against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt enter their 7th day. On his way to the Brussels meeting Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted this: [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/31952709766610944″] The right question to pose – but what prospect […]
Essentially journalists, politicians, bloggers and the general public have two frames of reference when talking about the European Union. Either it’s talked about in terms similar to the descriptions used for international organisations (the UN, NATO) or in terms similar to states. Take for example the question of whether the […]
We’ve all been there – every time we’ve bought a mobile phone it comes with a lumpen black charger, and you can bet the plug on the end of the cable will be different for just about every mobile phone you’ve ever bought. Hence loads of useless chargers hanging around […]
Am I a pro-European? A pro-EU person? A Eurosceptic? An EU-sceptic? A Europhile? An EU-phile? A Europe-phile? A Europhobe? An EU-phobe? I don’t know. Does anyone really know? Does anyone actually think about these terms? In UK discourse about the EU it’s all too simple to throw in the terms […]
This blog entry is a partial response to the Presseurop / The Guardian My Europe series The man in question is Princeton Professor Andrew Moravcsik, mastermind of the theory of liberal intergovernmentalism, that goes further than any other to explain the EU’s current predicament. The three stages of the theory – domestic […]
April 2, 2001. Less than a decade ago, but the European Union looked rather different, and the careers of 3 politicians looked rather different. Enlargement to central and eastern Europe was in process at that time, and the Euro would be found in citizens’ pockets less than 8 months later. […]
There’s always an advantage to being the first to use some new technology. Or at least there should be, if it’s done well. While the rest of the world has been thinking up good iPhone (and other mobile) apps for some time, these things are thin on the ground in […]
The screenshot above shows the oldest results from search.twitter.com for “EUCO Berlusconi”, and explains how the Twitterwall story started (I’ve previously posted about here and here). Just to set the record straight this is exactly what happened. First, I realised that tweets containing #EUCO would appear on the Twitter wall, […]
