This blog is hosted on Ideas on Europe
By accident, I’ve come across a very fascinating academic journal article on EU-Africa relations and the role China played in this relationship in the first decade of the 21st century. “The European Union and China’s rise in Africa: Competing visions, external coherence and trilateral cooperation” by Maurizio Carbone, published in April of 2011 in a […]
Last week, the EU Parliament Civil Liberties committee – with the exception of the EPP group – voted in favour of a draft report which in essence supports more access to EU documents (see my blog post). Here is how the EU Council sees the report: “This draft report substantially restricts the possibility to refuse […]
Using social media can be so simple for EU institutions and those working in these institutions if they understand that all that is needed is to listen and to (inter)act. An example: Today, a patent law blogger complained about dysfunctional parts of the relaunched EU Parliament website. With a tweet, I shared this complaint with […]
You may have read that I’ve started a complaint against the EU Commission to the EU Ombudsman. Today I’ve received a letter from the Commission telling me that they are unable to stay within the legal time limits even with the documents requested in September, i.e. the documents to which my initial request from 5 […]
How does the EU do politics? You can best see it in a speech that Maritime Affairs Commissioner Damanaki held to today in Lisbon. The speech starts with a big announcement: “… the Atlantic plays a critical role in Europe’s history and identity. It is of vital importance for EU trade and contains tremendous potentials for […]
There is the tendency by those who follow EU social media to focus on the social media aspects of all this. There is the risk to lose sight that quite some substance is dealt with in EU-focused or EU-covering blogs. Just some examples of very specialised blogs, eg.: on the Common Agricultural Policy, on the […]
This week, the Civil Liberties Committee (‘LIBE’) of the European Parliament has passed by 33 to 17 votes a report on the legislative proposal(s) by the EU Commission to reform the EU’s access to documents regulation.* This means that finally the process on reforming the EU transparency legislation will move on, although I have my doubts […]
“Unfortunately, those looking for documents gave the lowest satisfaction rating, with 13 percent ranking the site either ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.“ That’s one of the findings of a user survey the EU Commission web team have made ahead of the revamp of the Commission’s website. And this was one of the reasons for my life […]
There was one question/remark by a professor who attended my talk on “Europe in Blogs and Social Networks” yesterday – the pre-workshop blog posts are here and here – that quite hit the nail on the head. His question was in how far blogging/social media actually impacted EU politics. And he added that if blogging/social media […]
Hard EU politics – in particular EU law-making – is not made in social media, it is not or almost not influenced by social media communication, but it becomes more accessible through social media as political and institutional activities and conflicts are more frequently visible at the time they occur. That’s the main statement I’ve […]
UACES and Ideas on Europe do not take responsibility for opinions expressed in articles on blogs hosted on Ideas on Europe. All opinions are those of the contributing authors.