One of the wonderful things about getting older is that you start to see how things come around again. As a ‘fresh-faced’ (not really) postgrad, I watched as the main British parties found themselves promising a referendum on membership of the single currency. Today (even less fresh-faced), I’m watching them do something similar on EU […]
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Radosław Sikorski, Polish Foreign Minister, is rapidly gaining a reputation across Europe as a man who speaks his mind. Whether he’s telling the Germans that he worries about their inaction on the eurozone crisis, or the British that they suffer from ‘false consciousness’ about EU membership, he appears unafraid to say the things that others […]
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It’s autumn apparently, which means party conference season is almost upon us. Hence it was slightly less surprising to see Nigel Farage beaming out of the morning papers today (Guardian and Telegraph). Less surprising because UKIP has had a good summer, polling well (and often above the LibDems) and benefiting from the unwillingness of other […]
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A popular supposition of academics is that we live in an age of problem-solving, where political actors bypass traditional hierarchical structures to focus on resolving particular issues in a flexible and pragmatic way. And in many cases, that is true. However, yesterday’s ‘super Wednesday‘ – with the German Constitutional Court’s decision on ESM, Barroso’s State […]
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This week I have been engaging in a number of thought-provoking discussions with academic colleagues at the UACES annual conference, held this year in Passau. As well as my main interests in euroscepticism and in learning & teaching, I also found the Euro-crisis as a recurrent theme underlying much of what we all were looking […]
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The summer break has given me the chance to step back from the usual flow of things (even if ‘flow’ might seem an ambitious description of the EU right now), and has let me spend some time with one of my other interests in life, namely cycling. Sadly, professional cycling seems to be not so […]
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