This week I found myself in one of the leafier parts of the stock-broker belt, giving an after-lunch talk on the Brexit process. As we pushed the meat-and-two-veg around the plates of the clubhouse, I listened to tales of how the Germans were trying to do what they didn’t manage in the world wars, and […]
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On 23 May 2018, the Euobserver website reported that research projects developing the next generation of weapons can now apply for EU funding as part of the EU’s 500 million Euro defence investment programme. Controversially, research projects whose activities could (among other things) result in the development of Lethal Autonomous Robots (LARS) – sometimes called […]
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A fundament of negotiation – and indeed of politics – is the notion of interaction. They are necessarily relational constructs: us and them, me fighting the system, let’s work it out together. If politics can be about an agent’s interaction with a set of societal values rather than any one individual or group, the negotiation […]
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If you’d asked me back in the spring of 2017 whether there’d be long periods of inactivity in the Article 50 process, then I’d have said no. The agenda looked so full, and time was so short, that I doubted that even the traditional closing of the shop in the Brussels summer would be able […]
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In 2002, Robert Kagan famously wrote an article claiming that “the US is from Mars, the EU is from Venus.” He inferred that US belligerence in its push for war with Iraq, compared to the EU’s insistence on a diplomatic settlement, was a predictable consequence of the more masculine and feminine characteristics associated with these […]
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Somewhere in Whitehall, there’s a small office. In it, a bright young thing is working hard on Brexit. As the afternoon sun bounces down to the tiny window that provides the only fresh air, a spark flares up in the bright young thing’s mind. They dash down the corridor to their line manager, bursting through […]
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