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EU Politics

The recipe for European Citizens’ Initiatives

Over the years I’ve continually argued that the European Union needs to improve its representative democracy – it needs to develop federal institutions, and give citizens a genuine voice at elections. Yet while, in essence, I still believe in that, I nevertheless have to admit that representative democracy is struggling […]

Technology

United States politics: so right and so wrong

The political geek in me is always so impressed by elections in the United States. Look no further than the combination of marketing and psychological insight used in voter targeting, the glitz of the speeches and roadshows, or the graphic design and imagery of the campaign websites. But beyond that […]

EU Politics

The chasm at the heart of European politics

At the start of last week I was a guest lecturer at Roskilde University, presenting about blogging and the EU. You can find the slides I used on Slideshare here. In the discussion following the presentation I was posed a question by Angela Bourne, one of the academics that had […]

EU Politics

The EU and peace

There have been two lines of attack from UK EU-phobes to the news that the EU has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One has been to point to the current economic travails of the EU, and the political strife that has caused, and to criticise the award as a […]

EU Politics

The strange case of Radek Sikorski in Oxford

The Foreign Minister of the EU’s 6th largest country (Radek Sikorski, Poland) arrives in the UK and gives a speech on 21st September lambasting Britain’s policy towards the European Union and the reaction is… almost non-existent. Isn’t that a bit odd? Let me explain a little more. At the time I read […]

EU Politics

Academic research on EU blogging

I was one of the people interviewed for Javier Ruiz Soler‘s European Studies Masters Thesis “Who blogs what? A qualitative study on the role of the Euroblogosphere in a context of a European Public Sphere.” The PDF of the thesis is here (Javier has given the interviewed bloggers permission to […]