To the extent that the EU was able to cobble together a single position on the Serbian election, it was clear that they wanted President Boris Tadic’s Coalition for a European Serbia to do well — hence the offers of an Association agreement during the election campaign and the introduction of fee-free visa travel last [...]

Stupider than you can imagine. Evidence, the map over at this fine post from Sadly, No!. Read the whole thing, but as well as introducing the best title for a blog post ever, they’ve caught “Gates Of Vienna” pretending that in the future, Europe will be divided into Islamic states (with incredibly silly names), Russian [...]

For me, the interesting bit in this Jean Quatremer story about the race to be the first EU president is right at the end.
On sait simplement qu’il y a des « négociations secrètes » sur le sujet avec Londres : elles porteraient sur la création d’une force aéronavale commune et la surveillance de l’espace européen [...]

Just a note on the Georgian/Abkhaz/Russian situation: the Abkhazians claim to have destroyed another drone, with a formidable Russian SAM system (NATO = SA-11). (H/T: Wired.) If the Russians have really given them one of these or possibly even these, they must mean it.

The subdivisions of the Georgia currency are called tetris. That is all.

Well, MMDCXXXVI, actually.
That’s how many posts WordPress tells us we have put up in four and a half years of AFOE. It’s been a while since we marked an anniversary. Europe Day seems as good a time as any to thank the authors, the guests, and especially the readers who have made and continue to [...]

Here’s an interesting if rambling article from Wednesday’s New York Times about the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary.  You can tell it’s written by an arts writer and not a reporter because it lacks any simple punchline.   To the extent that there is a thesis, it comes in a quote from Peter Gyorgy –

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Slovakia today won EU approval to adopt the euro on Jan. 1 2009, thus becoming the 16th member of the European single currency zone. The EU Commission announced today on its Web site that Slovakia had reduced both the fiscal deficit and inflation sufficiently to qualify. At the same time the [...]

In what seems like incredible clumsiness on someone’s part, the Culloden hotel (outside Belfast) got a request from Northern Ireland’s regional development agency which was interpreted as calling for the hotel’s minority staff to keep a low profile during meetings of a big foreign investment conference later this week –

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Just a short linkdump post. Newsweek has an interesting opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria entitled The Rise of the Rest that ties in nicely with my previous post Uncomfortable thoughts and philosophy. Zakaria is much more positive about the emergence of new global powers, even when he understands the transition engenders some degree of anxiety:
American [...]