Here is some interesting reading and debating material for our readers (hat tip Sargasso). Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt has published an essay through Bertelsmann entitled The Financial Crisis: Three Ways Out for Europe (pdf). Teaser (emphasis mine):
What counts in this new world order is the multiplicity of empires and civilisations, not the dominance [...]

Shot taken from Samurai Champloo
About a year ago there was this email exchange between me and some of my AFOE colleagues in which I talked a bit about my daily job as a subtitler. Actually, I was venting. During this exchange I was invited to write a post about subtitling for AFOE.
The image at the [...]

Karl Marx said that ideology is part of the social superstructure, merely a decorative overlay on the brutal truth of the economic base. Millian liberalism was really just an expression of the pounding steam engines, Jacquard looms and downtrodden apprentices of 1840s Manchester, just as absolutism had been built on the assumption that society would [...]

We can all probably agree that Italy’s fit of xenophobia towards Romanians is pretty bad, but it has had one positive consequence; ITS, the extreme-right/nationalist grouping in the European Parliament whose membership can be summed up as “if you want to make some minority unwelcome and you’re in the minority yourself, you’re welcome here”, has [...]

Adam Tooze, who (it says here) is a senior lecturer at Jesus College, Cambridge, has a book out; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is getting some very good reviews, and this one will be no different. Tooze’s thesis is that the Nazi German economy was a more [...]

Looks like I won’t be writing a post like this next year.
[Hat tip to His Imperial Majesty.]

According to the Economist last week “Reports of Europe’s death are somewhat exaggerated“. I can only whole-heartedly agree. I think though, it only fair to add, that reports of Europe’s impending old age are almost certainly not, indeed generally it might be felt that the significance of this phenomenon were rather underestimated, than overstated.
Let me [...]

So, somebody has a brilliant idea to solve all Europe’s problems. What is it? It’s to set up a European economic government for the EU. It’s not exactly new - several people in the Jospin government thought so, including Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It might have something going for it.
But what is it? The EU already has [...]

The European Commission still can’t tell participation from a horse’s arse. Neither, sadly, can the advocates of closer European integration. At least the ones who the Commission (and all the other institutions) thinks will help them win friends and influence people.
Example the first. Three organisations - the European Movement, plus something called “Notre Europe”, and [...]

Ali and Nino, the closest thing that modern Azerbaijan has to a national novel, was first published in German in 1937, sold in various translations, hit US bestseller lists in the early 1970s and bears the name Kurban Said as its author.
But the question of the author’s identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed [...]