The BBC news site carries two stories today that really deserve more attention, especially in light of many debates on European culture and identity. The two stories highlight trends that have been going on for quite a while now and I suppose you could consider these trends to be intrinsically ‘cultural’ as they reflect contemporary [...]

Physics Today has a very interesting, and refreshing, online article (hat tip Sargasso) on Islam and science that ties in neatly with AFOE’s review of Olivier Roy’s latest book Secularism confronts Islam. The article is written by Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. As usual, I shall give our [...]

When I look at contemporary public discourse, no day seems to go by without at least someone mentioning the threat of Islam. Last week Dutch MP Geert Wilders even went as far as to call for a ban on the Koran itself, comparing it in true Godwin style to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, because “it incites [...]

We’ve just returned from two weeks on Formentera, the smallest and southernmost of the inhabited illes Balears. We try to spend some time on the island at least once every two or three years; for it is an unspoilt place, a place time has left behind, a place untouched by the imperatives of vulgar economics.
No, [...]

The flipside of the European dream is that by its nature, the vision of “non-imperial empire” as Barroso calls it is a powerful encouragement to the paranoid imagination. Curiously, the vision remains much the same across different paranoid styles; almost uncannily so.
In Britain, a surprisingly large number of people in the Conservative Party - not [...]

It is Summer, the silly season. So, let me chase some chirping crickets here at AFOE with some silly thoughts on public discourse before my more interesting AFOE colleagues spring into action again. And they will, so stay tuned even if my little essay here should turn out to be a bit tedious.
Public discourse, or [...]

Mark Mardell, of Mark Mardell’s Euroblog, a BBC blog that seems to get better and better over time, has a rather typical post on Europe called A country called Europe. It is typical in that it centres around the issue of Europe becoming a superstate or not. Nothing new here. Some people dream of a [...]

If you want to lecture the French on “economic reform”, it pays to have some knowledge of French economic history. If you insist on doing so despite knowing nothing, “Big Mouth Strikes Again” is not a good headline. Of course, it could be some downtrodden sub-editor’s revenge.
Anyway, Chris Walker writes in today’s Independent that Nicolas [...]

The dismal weather notwithstanding, the family and I headed out to the Waldstadion this weekend to take in a football match. Now how on earth, you’ll have asked yourself straight away, could we have seen a football match at this time of year? The answer is simply: it wasn’t football, it was ‘football’.

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The “Open Europe” boys apparently think that giving the EU a legal personality would be a huge transfer of powers from the UK to “Brussels”. Legal personality, essentially, means that the EU would be allowed to sign cheques - or rather that it could sign for the member states.
Well, that sounds like a big [...]