Not if people like single market commissioner Frits Bolkestein gets his way they aren’t. According to the FT the European Commission is expected to say on October 6 that Turkey has reformed enough for membership negotiations to begin. If this happens EU leaders will then decide in December whether to endorse those conclusions [...]

I have already posted on my own blog about what I see as the surreal consequences which might follow from this wish becoming a reality. If what I think happens next to the Spanish economy really does happen - and I have no doubt whatsoever that the housing bubble will crash one or other of [...]

No this is not (yet) the title of one of my new pages (although we were looking into living in sin, but unfortunately it’s already taken). No the denial I am referring to is much nearer home for most of us, since it is up there in Brussels. “European Union nations are dragging [...]

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 [...]

So the Dutch Finance Minister - Gerrit Zalm - has a weblog. Not understanding too much Dutch it’s hard to make a very thorough assesment, although it does look rather austere. However, unlike Howard Dean and Wes Clark, it does appear that he is posting himself. But it is not for the fact that he [...]

Now since nothing in life ever comes entirely free, a post to balance my last one (as we say in Spain: one hot one and one cold one). The French are to be given an extra year to get their fiscal act together. This is more a sign of impotence than a seal of approval. [...]

There’s a good article in today’s Le Figaro (a conservative French national newspaper) about the recent summit on a European military project in Arcachon. It’s titled L’Europe militaire ? la crois?e des chemins, and it is pretty pessimistic about the whole project.
A l’actualit? d’une loi de programmation militaire tangible, g?n?raux, ing?nieurs, chefs d’entreprise, parlementaires [...]

Michael Everson is one of the more interesting characters in my strange little branch of human knowledge. I’ve never met him, but I’m pretty sure we have some mutual acquaintences on various standards committees. He is one of the people behind the Unicode character encoding standard and has been particularly instrumental in getting [...]