In the debate on latest economic developments – focussing on Greece – during the Commission meeting on 14 February, the following point was raised (among others): “the problem posed by the discrepancy between the huge sacrifices asked of the great majority of the Greek people and the fact that senior executive pay remained untouched, making the efforts [...]
It’s been a while that we have seen something coming from Brussels that actually reflects a positive and yet convincing vision of the European project. This video is convincing not because it is explains from A-Z what the EU does for us like many of those fancy PR videos that try to sell us EU [...]
Some weeks ago, the Commission refused to give its agreement to the merger of Deutsche Börse and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). I’m not in the position to judge this decision, but the public minutes of the College meeting of 1 February where this decision was taken reveal an interesting argumentation concerning lobbying and leaks [...]
It was back in October when I discovered that on 29 June 2011 the EU Ombudsman had opened an own-initiative case against the EU Council regarding the appeals procedure (‘confirmatory application’) for access to documents requests. In short, the observation was that more or less all confirmatory applications in the Council had been handled outside the basic [...]
I just watched the the Eurogroup press conference with Eurogroup president Juncker, Commissioner Rehn and EFSF chief Regling. I didn’t expect anything substantive – those press conference rarely offer great insights – but than I heard Juncker talk about the future European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – the long-term versions of the EFSF bailout fund – [...]
The Norwegian Government has just published a 900-page long report titled “Outside and Inside - Norway’s agreements with the European Union” (the link leads to the English translation of the 1st chapter). The report summarises the scope of Europeanisation of Norway and the implications this has for the country and involved notable (EU) scholars such as [...]
Fellow Bloggingportal.eu editor Mathew has just published an excellent piece titled “Of technocrats, journalistic balance and telling EU stories“. His post reflects in a way what I try with this blog, that is to think about whether translation between the world of self-imposed balance and reason and the world of purposeful (or purposeless) conflict of [...]
It’s the mid-term exams in the European Parliament, and not just the person on the president’s chair has changed, but so do a good number of the chairs of the parliamentary committees. Some stay apparently, others change. What the exact rules for this castling are? Nobody knows. Mabe the EP web editors could explain… Thanks to [...]
The European Peoples Party (EPP) in the European Parliament is more and more showing face. It votes collectively against more EU transparency. And it defends Victor Orban’s “new” Hungary arguing that all his government did was to abolish “a Stalinist constitution”, following the defence line of Orban. That’s why it is worth listening to Daniel [...]
Yesterday, Martin Schulz (Socialists & Democrats) was elected President of the European Parliament until 2014. But while his acceptance speech, although quite nice, probably will not be remembered as one of the major political speeches in 2012, one line of it still caught my attention (my highlight): “If our Parliament is to become more visible, if [...]