There I was thinking that the Euro 2008 opening ceremony was the usual bizarre interpretative dance performance to which UEFA seems addicted — not even good on TV, for which the visuals seem designed — when a singer (must figure out her name) and the Basel crowd did a great job on the Swiss national [...]

The paradox is that countries attempting to screen immigrants by skill level, so that they only get the more skilled ones, end up with an immigrant mix that is less skill-intensive than countries with open immigration.  This apparently is a consensus message from the Munich Economic Summit: countries like Ireland, the UK, and Spain, which [...]

It’s tough to pin Nicolas Sarkozy down. He had spent the last week in apparent populist mode, hence his proposal for a redistribution of the VAT windfall on fuel taxes, and working on a plan to use France’s EU presidency to drive a clampdown on immigration to the EU. Yet he has added [...]

In what is no doubt part of his resurrection bid, French president Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed a  vague-sounding cap on VAT/TVA as applied to fuel.  He has a point.  VAT is an accelerator of underlying price increases, since the amount applies as a percentage of the net price and not is a fixed monetary amount (like fuel [...]

When a long running conflict is finally brought to “closure”, is the deal only an arrangement between elites on each side?  The question is prompted by the Northern Ireland peace process, where great progress in reducing violence and devolving powers has not been matched by more harmonious relations at the community level.  And apparent puzzlement [...]

Here’s an interesting analysis of the political situation in Serbia from the FT’s Quentin Peel.  This is in the context of what had looked like a good result for the Boris Tadic (president) alliance with their 38% vote share — but with a rival alliance of Radicals, Socialists (former Milosevic) and a group linked to [...]

It’s not clear that there’s much useful to be blogged about from a distance on the catastrophes in China and Burma.   But one difference from the past is that the population scale of Asia relative to the rest of the world is now matched by its economic influence.  In past decades, 6 figure death tolls [...]

In the latest twist in the long-running saga of the increasingly Francophone areas near Brussels but in Flanders, a Council of Europe delegation visited three towns where the election of Francophone mayors has not been endorsed by the regional Flemish government.  The delegation sounded pessimistic and floated the possibility that the case could be subject [...]

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 [...]

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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