No one here have said anything about the recent unraveling of the stability pact. That felt after a little weird after seeing that US bloggers Daniel Drezner and Atrios, of all people, have both commented on the issue.
(Edward did write about it on Bonobo Land though)
Drezner links to this article from the Economist, [...]

Not long ago, I asked Where’s Publius?
Today’s Frankfurter Allgemenine reports:
The European Convention Talks Back
Appeal to the Intergovernmental Conference
Modeled on the “Federalist Papers”
Call by 63 Parliament Members
Brussels, Nov 13. Four months after the end of the EU Reform Convention, members of the body that was entrusted with working out a draft constitution are attempting to exercise [...]

File this one under People Who Ought to Know Better. Odder than the fact of the argument is the frequency with which I see it.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

DON’T STRETCH EUROPE’S PROMISED [...]

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 [...]

I found this article from Dagens Nyheter (temporary link) very interesting.
“‘If anything, I think we work more effectively now than we did before, even though we’re almost twice as many’ an EU diplomat tells Dagens Nyheter.
‘People stop to think one more time, if what they’re going to say really adds something new or [...]

“When the proposed Constitution issued from the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Alexander Hamilton foresaw that opposition to it would be great, and though he thought the document would probably be adopted he couldn’t be sure. Three members of the Convention, all of them prominent, had refused to sign it, and others, [...]

EU unilaterally blocking Russia’s entry into the very very multilateral WTO.
How many poles is this multipolar thing going to have, anyway?
+++
Putin Doesn’t Like EU Terms for Entry
October 9, 2003
By Natalya Shurmina
YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin sharply
criticized European Union “bureaucrats” on Thursday for pressing the
country to raise domestic energy prices as a condition [...]

My Bulgarian ‘assistant’ still won’t let me forget Chirac’s last faux pas: that the biggest favour the candidate countries could do for themselves was to stay quiet. It looks like we’re going down the same road one more time. I really don’t think it is possible to effectively ‘buy’ opinions. I mean in the [...]

Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic writes:
MOSCOW LOST THE COLD WAR, BUT DREAMS OF WINNING THE GLOBAL WARMING WAR: Why won’t Russia ratify the Kyoto Treaty? It would seem very much in Moscow’s interest to do so.
The United States has dropped out of Kyoto negotiations, but most other Western nations remain in. Russia now holds [...]

A shameless plug:
The Center for Applied Policy Research, a think tank attached to the University of Munich does good work on the nuts and bolts of a large number of EU issues. In particular, their Bertelsmann Group for Policy Research will be covering the IGC as thoroughly as it covered the Convention and the previous [...]