It’s generated amazingly little discussion in the international press, but the Greek and Turkish Cypriots are sitting down and trying to resolve their 35-year-old-and-counting conflict.
The talks started about three weeks ago. They are moving slowly — the negotiators just took a break for two weeks, and they don’t expect to complete the discussions until [...]

Well, okay — they just elected a Communist as their President.
And AKEL, Cyprus’ sort-of Communist Party, isn’t exactly a bunch of ragged proletarians. Excepting some fiery rhetoric, a tendency to wave red flags, and a proliferation of pictures of Che, it’s not too different from a standard European party of the left. AKEL [...]

Earlier this year, Eurobarometer started asking members what they thought about future EU expansion. The results (which can be found here, as a pdf) were pretty interesting.
52% of Europeans support membership for Croatia, while only 34% oppose it. (War criminals? What war criminals?) And 50% support membership for Bulgaria. But [...]

So Greece has a new government, Haider seems to be staging a comeback and next Sunday Spain is going to the polls. On this latter I will post something during the week, meantime, since I confess to knowing next to nothing at all about the significance of the Greek results, or the real state of [...]

I’m certainly no expert on the Cyprus question. But John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has made the claim that the upcoming referendum on the reunification of Cyprus is of monumental importance for the future of Europe, the EU, and the Middle East–so much so that the eventual fate of Iraq (very likely “an imperfectly democratic [...]

I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, but it was only while talking with a colleague this afternoon, and being asked what I thought about the unwillingness of the candidate countries to reform that it came to me: with all this coming and going on the Pact, what kind of message is being [...]