European countries never do very well in the gimmicky league tables or comparative indices of nations that thinktanks love to devise in order to meet the bills. You know the sort of thing ? the World Competitiveness Ratings or the Index of Economic Freedom. I thought it was time to come up with one that [...]

PKK ended its five year ceasefire a couple of days ago. This is very significant, and very terrible.
There’s been a lot of progress in Turkey, but the kind of moderation and impovement of the Turkish attitude and treatment of its Kurdish minority that would put the conflict completely to an end was several years [...]

Iain’s post on Tuesday identified the belief of some that the EU represents a giant Papist conspiracy. I can’t help but wonder what they’ll make of the report in today’s Guardian that a group of Polish Catholics are investigating whether Robert Schuman is a candidate for sainthood, specifically relating to his work in founding the [...]

The 2003 Transatlantic Trends survey , conducted for the German Marshall Fund, Compagnia di San Paolo and Fundacao Luso-Americana, has recently published and the results from it make for some interesting reading. Some of the findings confirm what you might expect, while others confound expectations somewhat.
There’s a key findings report available in English, French, German, [...]

I spent this morning at the stadhuis - the city administrative centre - trying to find out what had happened to my immigration file. You see, my resident’s permit expires in a week, and my renewal application was filed on August 19th, when my work permit was renewed.

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One of the long-running stories in the British media over the summer has been the antics of British tourists in the Greek resort of Faliraki on the island of Rhodes. Stories of the misadventures of ‘Brits abroad’ have been a staple of the British media over the last few years, fuelled by TV programmes like [...]

I finally got around to looking at the Guardian’s new campaign blog, KickAAS, which is dedicated to abolishing agricultural subsidies, certainly a laudable goal., and while I don’t know if it’ll be a regular read, it’s surprisingly non-boring. It’s also interesting as a phenomenon, especially for those buying into the hype on poli blogs.
Via their [...]

There’s an utterly mad article in this week’s Spectator, in which a rather overheated Tory called Adrian Hilton argues, with apparent sincerity, that the EU is a grand Papist conspiracy to subject Protestant Britain to Roman Catholic tyranny. I mention it, not just to point and laugh, but because one passage in it illustrates [...]

Michael Everson is one of the more interesting characters in my strange little branch of human knowledge. I’ve never met him, but I’m pretty sure we have some mutual acquaintences on various standards committees. He is one of the people behind the Unicode character encoding standard and has been particularly instrumental in getting [...]

Welcome to A Fistful of Euros. In celebration of Labour Day - the bank holiday that Americans and Canadians get in lieu of that subversive communist holiday May Day - we are finally on line. This is the blog you want for creative, English-language coverage of European affairs.
Add it to your bookmarks and [...]