Charlie Hebdo has everyone up in arms with their latest cartoon. People have variously said they are enraged, that it is racist, that it is disgusting. For me it most definitely is not funny, but it encompasses such complicated contradictions in one image, in such a painful way, that I […]
Back in July I made a first compilation of Youtube films about the European Union, in German, that were actually very funny. You can see those here. Now, thanks to Publixphere, here are a few more. Enjoy! Showdown in Brüssel: Sonneborn vs. Oettinger Everyone’s favourite Digital Commissioner was subjected to […]
Earlier today I blogged about Politico Europe. My blog entry outlined some good points about it, but found failings too, and was the result of many conversations with many respected people over a couple of weeks. One of the points I raised was that Politico does not react well to […]
It is now 7 months since the US publication launched its European operation. Enough time to reflect on what does, and does not, work with it. In this blog entry I am going to try to give a fair and balanced view of the publication so far. I have canvassed […]
“The sleepy Luxembourg village of Schengen, the place where the European Union’s border-free zone bearing the village’s name was agreed in 1985, is a symbol of how joyous a borderless Europe can be. It is 1km from the centre of the village, across the bridge over the Mosel, to Germany, […]
This week the company, in European Court of Justice Case T-544/13 Dyson Ltd v Commission, Dyson lost its action for annulment of the Regulation on energy labelling of vacuum cleaners. The ECJ’s summary of the outcome is here (PDF), and the decision was reported by The Guardian and, with some […]
I listened to a speech by President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, in Berlin this morning at the Soul for Europe conference. It was typical Schulz, full of bottled up indignation and frustration, railing at national solutions to transnational problems, and how challenges like climate change and the refugee […]
“Europe finally abolishes mobile phone roaming charges” was an appropriate headline in The Guardian yesterday. For this was the end of a long, and also pretty tortured, journey, and one that tells us quite a lot about the nature of EU decision making. I’m going to try to tell this […]
“Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal’s anti-euro Left banned from power” screamed Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph on Friday last week. The Telegraph even followed up with a piece about why Portugal’s situation was a threat to everyone else. Everyone from Daniel Hannan to Owen Jones jumped on it, and […]
The FT wrote yesterday how the European Commissioners Janez Potočnik (then with the Environment portfolio) and Antonio Tajani (then with the Industry portfolio) both knew in 2013 about potential differences between car emissions in real conditions and in lab tests. “There are widespread concerns that performance [of cars] has been […]
So, having taken apart the behaviour of European Commissioners on Twitter earlier this week, the critique has poured in – most of it to me personally in private, and some of it on Twitter. In this blog entry I am going to examine each main avenue of the critique, piece […]
In Gartner’s hype cycle, users of a technology encounter a trough of disillusionment after the initial peak of inflated expectations. The use of Twitter by the 28 Members of the European Commission (Twitter list here) feels like being in such a deep trough that it’s almost as if this is […]
