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 [...]

When scientific paradigms collide everyone should duck, at least that is the best advice I can offer at the present moment. The provisional German retail sales for January are now in, and they don’t make especially pleasant reading:
“European retail sales dropped for the first time in 10 months in January as spending in Germany [...]

I was a little surprised to read in the Christmas edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (not yet online, subscription wall, in German) that Robert Mundell seems to have changed his mind. In his seminal 1961 paper about monetary integration, he famously stated that “the optimum currency area is not the world”. Now it appears [...]

Trying to get away from the emotionally traumatising, this article caught my eye. Clearly it relates to my earlier post, and does have a Spanish connection, if only a rather tangential one.
I thoroughly endorse what the Financial Times has to say. We need multilateralism now more than ever. We should not simply think ‘Europe First’, [...]

Remember this debate about the relative living standards of Sweden and Alabama? One little commented result of the euro, krona and pound?s rise against the US dollar over the last two years is that measured in current exchange rates European countries? income per head now compares rather more favourably against the United States.

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Since the 1960s Germany has had the largest economy in the EU but Nigel Griffiths, the UK trade minister, thinks all that might change :
“I think that construction and manufacturing alone as sectors could ensure that within 10 years we [the UK] overtake the German economy. We’ve got to see whether we cannot [...]

Well, not quite the Bermuda triangle - but the Cayman Islands might do just that.In what is likely going to become a case study regarding the complexities of European multilevel governance, pooled sovereignty, and the complex relations of institutional Europe and the world, it seems a legal challenge brought forth by the government of the [...]