This morning, EU Commission President Barroso delivered his “State of the Union” (text, video). We at Bloggingportal.eu have called for a Barroso Buzzword/Bullshit Bingo to be played, and I have proposed my own list of 10 words/phrases to be said during the speech. Here is how I succeeded: Europe 2020 – check 1x Crisis – [...]
1 1/2 months ago, I’ve requested a meeting protocol of the Chefs de Cabinet of the EU Commission. As blogged before, my initial request received a negative reply.
I appealed this decision, and – as I have also blogged – on 6 September I was informed that the Commission needed an additional 15 working days. Yesterday, I have received the following answer: […]
[…] Already last year, we at Bloggingportal.eu have made fun of this “State of the European Union” (#SOTEU), and Jon was the first to call for a revival of our Barroso Bullshit Bingo. […]
From time to time you stumble over interesting types of documents of the EU institutions, such as the European Parliament Library Briefings. One thing I’ve come across these days are the “Annual Activity Reports” of the different directorates general (DGs) of the European Commission, i.e. the kind-of-ministries of the European Union. Now while these documents [...]
Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen‘s paper “‘The shady side of sunlight’” for the Annual Conference of the European Group for Public Administration tries to argue why transparency is bad and problematic. His view seems to be based on two main arguments: If there is more transparency, government will be demystified and people become cynical. If there is more [...]
I must say that I very much enjoyed the UACES conference in Cambridge last week, especially some of the finished and ongoing research I was able to witness. Listening to the presentations, discussions and interventions, I’d say some of the people who were there would make pretty good EU bloggers. Here are some of the [...]
As reported one month ago, I’ve requested a meeting protocol of a meeting of the Chef de Cabinets of the European Commission, which I need for my research. Having requested the document on 30 July 2011, the Commission refused to grant me any access on 12 August, and so on 12 August I filed a confirmatory [...]
I must say that the Polish EU Council presidency has not been in the focus of my attention for the first two months of its term, which may be due to the sort-of-summer break politics takes in Brussels. Or because their online communication is not that catching. Or because I wasn’t following as closely being [...]
On early Sunday morning, I’ll be heading via train from Berlin to the UACES conference “Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2011” in Cambridge/UK. UACES is the academic organisation that also runs this blog platform, and the conference is a space for the presentation of ongoing academic research on mainly EU-related matters. Among other things, I am [...]