“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
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Category: EU Politics
Dyson, the European Court of Justice, and energy labels – political change rather than legal challenges please
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
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Enough of your indignant anger, Schulz. Step away.
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
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Important reductions in EU roaming charges agreed – the end of a long and tortured journey
“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
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#PortugalCoup, and Britain’s post-fact politics
“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
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The European Commission is up to its neck in the VW scandal, but for reasons a little more complex than the press is reporting
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.
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Commissioners on Twitter – countering the critique
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
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European Commissioners seem to have missed the social aspect of Twitter and use it for one way, bland PR instead
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
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The speechmakers and the speech consumers
This week I have heard a lot of speeches. I was moderator of the European Commission / Luxembourg Presidency of the EU conference “25 years of Interreg”, and now I am writing this sat at the Digitalisierungskongress of the Grünen
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A little transparency to confront the national responses to the EU’s refugee crisis
Hungary has shut its border to Serbia completely. So the refugees head towards Croatia instead (and Croatia then closes its border), and if the refugees do succeed they may need to cross minefields. Then fears are raised in Slovenia that
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Putting up borders doesn’t solve the refugee crisis. Compulsory quotas now.
Refugees stream from Serbia into Hungary. So Orbán puts up a border fence. But then Serbia struggles to cope with the refugees on its side, and many continue to find ways to cross anyway. Refugees don’t want to stay in
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Will the Commissioner trying to solve the EU’s migration crisis please stand up?
South Tyrol – at the request of Germany apparently – has promised to check all passengers trying to travel north towards Germany over the Brenner Pass, but Schengen has not been suspended (officially). Refugees in Budapest are being rounded up
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