Serbia’s government seems to be collapsing.
The cause is, of course, Kosovo. Most of the EU countries have now recognized independent Kosovo, which pretty strongly implies that they won’t accept a Serbia that still claims Kosovo into the EU.
Last week, the nationalist Serbian Radical Party introduced a resolution in parliament calling [...]

Just a quick post to point our readers to a very interesting article in The New York Times by Parag Khanna entitled Waving goodbye to hegemony. Hat tip goes to EUlogist and a comment he made over at Nosemonkey’s EUtopia. The article talks about the redistribution of world power after the end of the Cold [...]

Parag Khanna has a monster screed - eight pages - in the NYT on the subject of “turning away from hegemony”. The hegemony concerned is that of the United States; the argument is that US power will decline relative to that of China, India, big second-tier powers, and Europe. This is a topic that cannot [...]

Okay, so Kosovo is likely to declare some sort of independence in the near future.
“Some sort” covers a lot of ground, but it will be something formally unacceptable to Serbia, and thus to Russia. The negotiations have another three weeks to run, but it’s clear they’re going nowhere; the Kosovar Albanians want [...]

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 [...]

Over at the Small Wars Journal’s blog, they’re wondering if part of the problem in dealing with failed states, the aftermath of wars, peacekeeping and the like is that it’s nobody’s job to provide a police force, and specifically a real civilian one that does things like investigating crimes.
This was, of course, a bitter problem [...]

Montenegro initialed a Stabilization and Association Pact with the EU on March 15. That’s a step on the road to EU candidacy.
Nobody outside the Balkans noticed. Even inside the Balkans, nobody got too excited. Montenegro is a small and rather poor country, and EU membership is still years away. Hell, all [...]

While everyone is focused on the French elections, the Balkans, or the contreaty relaunch (in increasing order of wonkishness), it’s not going too well in the Ukraine. Back in the winter of 2004, you couldn’t move for bloggers taking sides on the Orange Revolution, but hardly anyone has noticed the progressive disappointment since.
Well, all [...]

Right on time for the 5oth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the European Union’s Communications Department, is thinking seriously about establishing a digital “embassy” in the (currently more hyped than) popular virtual reality Second Life. According to a pressetext.at (in German) report, EU spokesperson Mikolaj Dowgielewicz explained that an EU office in Second Life [...]

Why do the leading candidates in the French presidential election seem to have utterly strange European policies?
Take Nicolas Sarkozy. He supposedly believes in “rupture” with old ways and a dash for a new free-market, hard-nosed, toughness cult future. And Euroscepticism is at the heart of this. But at the same time, he has promised [...]