A recent interview with Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister and the new EU Council President, is a good place to begin discussing what 2011 holds in store for Europe. The two most significant (and non-fiscal or monetary) items highlighted by Orban were strategies to manage the Roma population, and stronger integration with Southern and Eastern […]
There is a number of terribly unexciting and obvious, or maybe rather dubious candidates for a European Person of the Year award of course. Thus Benedict XVI slackened his church’s stance on the sinfulness of condoms, yet he was forced to deal with (or at times: ignore) constantly recurring pedophilia revelations in Ireland as well […]
What was the least expected event in Europe this year? Depends on your definition of unexpected. The most literal response, of course, is the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, though a study published three months before the eruption documented increased activity near the volcano. But it did not predict the category 4-level eruption that grounded […]
Hard to say Monday’s election results that keep Alexander Lukashenko in charge of Belarus for at least another four years were surprising. What have been surprising are the calls from heads of several former CIS countries voicing approval of the election results, which the OSCE called “bad,” “very bad,” and “non-transparent.” Most conspicuously, Georgian president […]
Whether you call it “dangling lucrative incentives,” or outright vote-buying, it seems likely that Silvio Berlusconi was able to heavily influence the successful outcome of Tuesday’s censure poll that allowed him to avoid calling new elections and imperil his administration. But one could argue that he truly owes whatever remains of his career to his […]
Hat-tip to Frédéric LeMaître for reminding me of this: Maybe the biggest opponent of the apocalyptic, Thomas Mann-induced vision of a German Europe that Alphaville has been fearing and which I invoked in a recent post, might actually be Germany itself. Ulrike Guérot from ECFR has put forward an argument recently that Germany were in […]
Noting the “ongoing deterioration of the situation on the ground” as Israel resumes settlement expansion, a group of former EU leaders last Friday called on the EU to take concrete action, with “consequences,” to force Israel back to the negotiating table. Among their demands: laying out a final plan, with a clear time frame, to […]
Arguably the most fascinating exercise one can indulge in ever since the early days of the eurozone crisis is to compare the coverage of said crisis in the German media discourse with that everywhere else in Europe. Within Germany, the focus lies on the hard-working, financially frugal Germans who fail to understand why they should […]
This is nothing new per se of course, it has been argued before that European integration proceeds only when faced with an important obstacle. In that sense once again the financial crises have led to a number of heretofore unimaginable cooperative steps of governments giving up national sovereignty. The French President Sarkozy has proposed an […]
Europe in the past has seen its fair share of successful (and unsuccessful) mass movements descending in the street and clamoring for justice of course. The 1968-69 demonstrations spectacularly failed (Prague) or led to ambiguous changes in the social life styles of society difficult to measure (Germany, France). The 1989 mobilizations were an unequivocal success […]
A spectre is haunting Europe once again, yet unlike during the 1840s it is not Communism but instead the continent-wide popular appeal of modern far right, xenophobic politicians and beliefs which menace the traditional parties’ grip on power. While the specific situations in European countries differ widely, common trends and forces are clearly discernible.Let us […]