It hasn’t attracted a lot of attention, but seven of the EU-15 have now thrown open their doors to the free movement of labor from the new member states (NMS).
A bit of background: when the NMS joined in 2004, the EU-15 gave themselves the right to keep the walls up for up to seven years. [...]

Prodi’s majorities in Parliament are still slim, and factional infighting is likely to remain Florentine, but Berlusconi’s political fortunes continued to float away in municipal elections just passed.
The municipal elections held in Italy from May 28 to 29 did not offer Berlusconi the revenge he was seeking. Massimo Giannini, the daily’s deputy editor, looks at [...]

An establishment voice casts further doubt on whether French elites see possible progress in the European Union
Jacques Julliard, the weekly’s deputy editor, explains in an interview with François Sionneau that he does not see how the constitution could return to the agenda. “Projecting five to 10 years into the future - the most that is [...]

Today, when annulling the Council decision about the transger of European airline passenger name records (PNR) to the US, the European Court of Justice made an important decision, highlighting both the weakness of current privacy protection schemes and essential problems in the European institutional set up. While it is not unlikely that privacy concerns, particularly [...]

Blegging for information here.
Apparently we’ve passed a Services Directive. Remember the Bolkestein Directive that everyone was excited about? Well, same same, except not. The new version, I’m told, is a much-watered-down version of Bolkestein.
Only thing is, casual googling doesn’t turn up much. Am I badly confused? Or is this just [...]

The New York Times’ Jeff Z. Klein decided to go to Germany early so he could tell his travelling countrymen how to best organize their trip to and through Germany during the football world cup next month. Now he’s all figured it out, and it’s easy: If You’re going to “The World Cup’s World Class [...]

Europe’s newest state, Montenegro, has just been given the go-ahead for the first step towards EU membership, as Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn agrees with the Montenegrins that a Stabilisation & Accession Agreement could be signed by the end of the year. Rehn is due in Belgrade next, although you’d have to be very optimistic [...]

Wisely, most European governments that were opposed to the war in Iraq have constrained themselves since it has become evident that the fall of Saddam’s statue in April 2003 and the American crash course in Democracy has not (visibly) helped to speed up the region’s modernization or led to a self-reinforcing trend of ethnic accomodation [...]

If you’re ever in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, you’ll want to swing by the Government building.
(It’s called the Government building because, well, that’s where the government is. The Parliament, the Prime Minister, the President, and half a dozen or so government agencies are all squashed into one huge building downtown. It’s sort of [...]

In a comment to his earlier assessment of the OECD’s new economic outlook, Jasper is raising an interesting, almost philosophical question that I think is worth a discussion in its own right. He claims that -
Economists should study the economy so they can finetune it to suit the needs of the people living inside this [...]