Ethnic discord, cultural and linguistic divisions, monarchy, site of the longest political crisis ever recorded; no, I am not talking about Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, or Tunisia, but Belgium, one of the founding countries of the EU, a signatory of the Treaties of Rome in 1957, the heart of the European Union, and home of the […]
You’ll recall the “House of European History,” an EU creation dedicated to truncating Europe’s past. Despite receiving substantial criticism for this narcissistic edifice, the EU has decided to erect yet another monument to its vanity: The “Europa” building. This egg-shaped complex will house the European Council and future EU summits.
This post can also been seen in the FPA’s Latin America Blog Today the world anxiously waits to see whether or not the Greek government will pass its austerity measures in order to save the Greek economy in the long run, hold off another wave of global recessions and perhaps save the Euro itself. While a […]
In many places — here for instance — news outlets have conflated protests against austerity in Greece with European-wide discontent. This is a mistake. There is discontent in Europe, but what people are unhappy about differs from country to country. More importantly, the problems in these countries, even those on the debt-plagued periphery, do not […]
The premise of the whole Greek bailout exercise has rested on its economy improving. So far, it has not: Since the country’s first bailout last spring, unemployment has risen sharply and GDP ground to a halt. So after a year of bailout roulette, the head of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, said Sunday what […]
Several weeks ago, President Barack Obama spent an entire week traveling throughout Europe meeting the heads of states and governments of Ireland, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland, in order to strengthen the transatlantic bridge. On June 7 and 8, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was Obama’s guest in Washington. Besides a sudden secret love-story between the […]
In light of the upheavals in the Arab world, the EU’s failure to foster economic and political liberalization in the southern Mediterranean has been made obvious. In spite of the launch of the Barcelona Process (aka the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP)), in 1995, intended to foster a “secure and stable Euromed region, underpinned by sustainable development, […]
I wonder if something significant is brewing regarding the Karabakh issue. Yes, yes, I know: “something significant” has seemed to be in the offing year after year after year. And no breakthrough ever takes place. But I say this because the three OSCE Minsk Group presidents (Barack Obama, Dmitri Medvedev, and Nicolas Sarkozy) issued a very unusual […]
Daniel Drezner seems dumbfounded by the German government’s actions on both the eurozone bailout and nuclear energy and proposes a Merkel Algorithm as the explanation: 1) A problem festers; 2) Dither and do nothing; 3) Public opinion polls drop; 4) Let things fester some more; 5) Lose an election somewhere; 6) Announce new policy that […]
Several days ago, my co-blogger, Finn Maigaard, and I were chatting via skype with Ms. Giji Gya of ISIS Europe and her team on their latest project: CSDP Maps. This excellent think-tank, well known for its European Security Review series, has been working for several years in developing an extremely useful tool for researchers, practitioners, […]
Imagine if tens of thousands of young Americans marched on The Mall to protest the Electoral College, the appointment of Supreme Court justices and the two-party system because they suddenly decided these institutions were not democratic enough. Something roughly equivalent to that is now taking place in Spain. While the country’s unemployment rate and general […]
Reports out of Tbilisi indicate that at least two people were killed early today (26 May) during a police crackdown on demonstrators outside the Parliament building on Rustavelli Avenue. Police moved in shortly after the midnight, when the permit for the opposition rally expired, intent on clearing the area for today’s Independence Day parade, which […]
Answer: $1.2 billion per year. That is how much Serbia’s failure to capture the man who is accused of orchestrating the massacre at Srebrenica has cost the country in lost investment, according to government estimates. As many have noted, his arrest should now pave the way for Serbian admission to the EU (though this process […]
Azeri journalist Eynullah Fatullayev, who has been serving a variety of prison sentences since April of 2007, was given his freedom today in one of President Aliyev’s amnesties. As readers of this blog are aware, the charges against Fatullayev had ranged from libel to inciting terror to tax evasion – and more recently, to drug […]
Protest rallies in Georgia, begun over the weekend in Tbilisi and Batumi, seem to be headed for violent confrontation today (Wednesday afternoon in the US, early Thursday morning in Tbilisi) after apparently failing to achieve the goals of their organizers or to attract widespread public support. It’s not that the latest opposition movement (called the […]