It’s party time in Barcelona. There’s no circus in town, but there is just about everything else. In fact many of you may be surprised to learn that today is a public holiday here, and indeed it may surprise you even more to discover that the holiday is only Barcelona. This situation is strange for [...]

Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has been named as the new NATO Secretary-General, and will take up the position on January 1st when George Robertson steps down. From the reports, it would seem he’s a sensible choice for the role, and seems likely to continue the work of Robertson and his predecessor, Javier [...]

Kevin Drum says thinking about the war in Iraq: that there was a perfectly sensible case for war, and wonder why the Bush administration didn’t use it:
We can’t keep up sanctions forever, and they’re hurting the Iraqi people anyway.
Saddam’s past history is pretty unambiguous, and if we lift sanctions there’s not much doubt that [...]

Today, I attended a lecture Columbia University political scientist Jean Cohen gave at the annual congress of the German political science association. She made a long, complicated theoretic argument about the future of sovereignty in a global society to support her real point that the (alleged) American imperial project needs to be stopped.
Interestingly, on [...]

This is a slightly revised version of an early Europundit entry that I thought deserved a second life.
What will enlargement mean?
There has been a lot of talk lately [back in May at least] about what the long-term consequences of enlargement will be, and also about the rift that the Iraq war has caused in [...]

Latvia has voted to join the EU. The yes side received approximately 68% of the vote on a 70% turnout.

I just watched the press conference Gerhard Schroeder, Jaques Chirac, and Tony Blair gave after their talks regarding Iraq in Berlin today. The last question came from a British journalist whom I wasn’t able to identify so far. But her question was quite interesting.
She asked the British Prime Minister whether he wasn’t embarrassed talking to [...]

Estonia said yes, Sweden said no (or rather Let’s wait and see,) will Latvia say no? Plus Cancun, the new constitution…
Football?

Two years ago today, I got off a Lufthansa flight from LAX to Munich and passed through Schengenland customs. I had originally been scheduled to fly on September 12, from San Francisco to Brussels via Frankfurt, but when it became plain that no one was going to be flying on September 12th, I called [...]

The Guardian recently hosted a debate on ‘What kind of Europe do we want?’ between writer (and Guardian columnist) Timothy Garton-Ash and Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore. The full transcript of the debate is available in pdf format, but there’s also a shorter summary that covers most of tha min points the two made. Given [...]