First, Radoslaw Sikorski told Gazeta Wyborcza. Then Donald Tusk told the German newspaper whose web site is better than it used to be.
Sikorski — who is Poland’s foreign minister, used to be its defense minister and is married to Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum — said that proceeding with the proposed American missile defense sites [...]

Liberation operates a clutch of good blogs; as well as AFOE Satin Pajama nominee Jean Quatremer’s Coulisses de Bruxelles, which everyone knows, there’s also an absolutely cracking blog on French and European national security issues.
They point out here that Slovenia, which took over as holder of the EU presidency on the 1st of January, is [...]

Richard Corbett MEP points to a bizarre feature of British debate on Europe; there is absolutely no certainty as to how anything will be reported or received. David Miliband recently gave a speech at the College of Europe in Bruges in which he stated that it was undesirable that the EU states’ deployable armed forces [...]

“Transition to democracy” was one of the European politics geek’s terms of art ever since 1989; there’s even an AFOE category devoted to transition and accession to the EU. According to Tim Garton Ash, one of his old dissident friends kept a large file of documents under the rubric “TD”; he suggested, wisely, that it [...]

Cards shuffled in the EU’s most important eastern neighbors. The orange parties in Ukraine have reached a coalition agreement that will put Yulia Timoshenko back in the prime minister’s office. Let’s hope she lasts longer this time.
Meanwhile to the north, the party supported by Russian president Putin is expected to win a crushing victory in [...]

OK, so Denmark’s conservatives are delighted; they won a snap election convincingly. But they are now faced with a probby; a new party has appeared on the scene, and they are considering the desirability of forming a coalition with it.
However, it’s headed by a Palestinian refugee; as the BBC says, a coalition with their far-right [...]

So Serbia will get a Stability and Association Pact with the EU (SAA). The pact was initialed last week; barring a catastrophe, it will be formally signed in January.
An SAA is the step before formal EU candidacy, so this is good news for Serbia. It looks like Brussels is trying to strengthen the [...]

Well, sort of. Bosnia’s government is still run according to the Dayton Plan, which settled the war back in 1995. So it’s really complicated.
Short version: the representative of the Serb entity, the Republika Serbska (RS), has resigned from the Council of Ministers. The Presidency (which is really a council composed of three [...]

Jamie Kenny and Nosemonkey wonder why Labour is pro-EU. Enlarging on this post a little, I think it’s worth looking at some data. I suspect the data support that post. For example, despite all the bashing, a solid majority supports EU membership and has done consistently over time.
Further, the public does not worry very much [...]

Ezra Klein is having a bit of fun with Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that the U.S. “will be to the left of France” if the American electorate is “not careful” and doesn’t elect him:
We could elect Dennis Kucinich and 10 more Democratic senators and we wouldn’t get anywhere near France. France is a country where the [...]