Oh TTIP. That great hope to rescue the transatlantic alliance. Or that scary fear of deregulation. Or both. Or neither? Juncker is worried, apparently. The Commission is putting pressure on the USA, supposedly. New Austrian President Van Der Bellen says he is against it. Merkel and Obama say they are […]
Holding a British passport, and at the same time being committed to EU integration and the democratisation of the European Union, has never been easy. The months since the UK general election, David Cameron’s EU ‘deal’, and the subsequent referendum campaign, have been harder still. The Leave and the Remain […]
So Austria does not have a right wing populist President. Alexander Van Der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer by 31000 votes, or 50.3% to 49.7% – summary of the result from Der Standard here. But that was too close for comfort. It’s also not enough to point out that Van Der […]
First it was #BERBritsBrexit. Then #HHBritsBrexit. And now we’re organising the next in the series of events about the impact of Brexit on Brits in Germany to Köln on 18th May. Together with local organiser Tobias Flessenkemper, we’ll be discussing: What’s likely to happen – will the UK leave? What […]
On 10th May at 1030 CET I am giving a lecture entitled “EU or Großdeutschland: the German influence in the European Union” at the Europe2Day Forum at the University of Trieste campus in Gorizia. This a bit different to my usual lectures about online communications in the European Union, but […]
My MacBook needed a bit of a spring clean, so I decided to wipe it, reinstall Mac OS, and then re-install all my apps. Rather than just restoring apps from a backup I wanted fresh installations of all of them – easy enough for things like Firefox and Skype that […]
The German tech and politics conference re-publica has been going a decade now, and the tenth edition (in its third and final day today as I write this) is supposed to be about reflection. I’ve been to eight editions of re-publica – I was first a speaker back in 2009 […]
I’m going to set aside my views about the rights and wrongs of Britain staying in the EU for a moment, and instead focus on the way the Remain campaign is trying to make its case. This is especially relevant today after the Dutch expressed their vague frustration towards the […]
I have made the case for why progressives and federalists outside the UK ought to advocate Brexit (for the sake of the political integration of the rest of the EU), and I have also tried to examine in a bit more depth how the outcome of the vote might have […]
So Jackie Ashley is angry I tell you. Angry! We need to be “brutally honest” that the “remain campaign is failing” she writes. Well, what a sodding surprise. A campaign entitled “Britain Stronger in Europe” was never going to light anyone’s fire, was it. Run by Will Straw, relying on […]
Over a beer with some academic friends yesterday, conversation turned to Brexit. Boris Johnson will only become Tory party leader if Britain exits the EU was the consensus among my friends. It’ll be Osborne otherwise. I expressed my doubts yesterday, and have been pondering this more since, and have come […]
If you read ex-PM John Major’s Telegraph piece from Saturday about the dangers of Brexit you’d think all is generally well in the fine and pleasant land of England. Our pick and choose with regard to the EU has worked, he argues, and “we have the best performing economy in […]
