Eurozone Watch has two articles about Germany and Italy that offer support for an optimistic view of the European economy. For a start, Sebastian Dullein argues that a comparison of Germany today and the US after the early 90s recession shows that Germany might be on the brink of a productivity surge. Dullein argues that [...]

I was recently fiddling with the German Federal Railways’ on-line European timetables, when I noticed something very strange. They have the best cross-European timetable, no doubt about it, but some odd things happen if you’re heading too far east. For example, when I asked it for a route from Paris to Tallinn, everything went a [...]

The treaty is basically the constitution minus some symbolic things (and an exemption from the Fundamental Rights for the Brits.) Henry Farrell had it right a couple of days ago.

This is a quite substantial set of changes. It should be presented to people so that they can vote on it (and taken off the [...]

As you all know EU member states are preparing for an important EU summit to discuss a new treaty replacing the failed constitution project. For a summary of what’s at stake, you can have a look at this BBC News page. I do not have the time to discuss the summit at length, but there [...]

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 [...]

The German newspaper whose web site is now marginally better organized reports that Germany will offer a legal means to regularize the residence status of people who have lived in the country for several years without having, shall we say, dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s at the local immigration office. State [...]

So what exactly happened with the allegedly Russian-orchestrated DDOS attack on Estonian Internet interests? Some people have been talking about the first act of “cyberwar” against a sovereign state, others about a bizarre fuss about nothing. AFOE asked Gadi Evron, a world expert on botnets who runs Israel’s CERT and who took part in the [...]

Orac reports on the curious case of a Bulgarian witch doctor, practising in Serbia in a creditable interpretation of the Bologna process, who advised a patient suffering from premature ejaculation to sexify a hedgehog. It turns out in comments that Bulgaria actually licences shamans.
Bulgaria is now a member state. I’d like to see the DG [...]

Who can forget it?
I spent the day driving from Bosnia to Austria with an American colleague. We were on a mission to the IKEA shop in Graz, to buy furniture for our office. But we spent the evening discussing the collapse of the Conservatives and the imminent change of government; the constitutional reforms for Scotland [...]

It is simply intolerable that a EU member state’s government should try to dismiss an MEP elected by the people. I think everyone can agree on that, right? It’s for the public to decide who should represent them. It’s for the member states as a whole to decide on the overall organisation of the EU. [...]