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 in Bielefeld. So, as is my way, I reflect on […]
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 the refugees might well head there – its PM Miro […]
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 Hungary however as they fear Orbán’s government will not treat […]
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 and put onto trains to who knows where? Hungarian PM […]
Barroso Bullshit Bingo had alliteration as good as José Manuel’s buzzwords. #JunckerBullshitBingo might not have quite the same ring to it, but with our beloved Commission President getting ready to make his first “State of the European Union” speech on 9th September, we in the EU blog and Twittersphere are […]
Back on 30th June I was subjected to a non-Schengen compliant border control at Buchs in Switzerland. The full report from the border, including a transcript, can be found here. The essence of the message given by the police officer checking me was that as he was from the cantonal […]
Humour about the EU is hard enough – how do you make the European Union funny without just falling back on crass national stereotypes? And then to try to do that in German, bearing in mind that – well – the stereotype is that Germany is not the funniest place […]
Dear Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Matteo Renzi and Mariano Rajoy, dear Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Alex Stubb and Wolfgang Schäuble, dear Jean Claude Juncker, Martin Schulz and Donald Tusk, You might not sleep much tonight if the summit drags on. But sometime you will go to bed, wake up in the morning, […]
Maybe it is not my place to say anything about Greece. I am not an economist, and I am not at the negotiating table. But I am tired of what I am reading – from politicians, journalists and others on blogs and Twitter – and hence I have drawn up […]
This afternoon I tried to go into the European Parliament. The EU institution that is supposed to represent people like me – citizens of the European Union. I am not a lobbyist or a journalist or an employee of another EU institution. So I could not get in. I approached […]
I gave a speech about EU online communications at Danmarks Medie- og Journalisthøjskole in Aarhus last year, and yesterday John Frølich – one of the professors there – e-mailed me to ask if I could suggest 20 to 30 EU Twitter accounts that his students ought to follow. So rather […]
Tomorrow at re:publica, the annual tech and politics gathering in Berlin, Tobias Schwarz (from Fistful of Euros) and I will talk about 12 years of blogging about European Politics and the EU. Fistful has been around a little longer than my own blog; I’ve been writing here since July 2005. […]
