Commentary

Transatlantic Curiosity

As part of an international conference that will be held in Montreal on 14 November, European, Québec and Canadian specialists and academics will be examining the case of Europe like a team of surgeons on a patient. Their objective: issue a diagnosis on the state of Europe by looking into its (...)

Friday 4 November 2011

Oil Sands and Fuel Quality Directive, or the Impossible Quest for Facts

On 4 October, the European Commission voted in favour of the review of the Fuel Quality Directive, resulting in a first setback for Canada’s oil sands in Europe. To the untrained eye, this debate is basically a battle between the powerful oil industry and the extremely influential (...)

Friday 28 October 2011

Why JEF should grow, and some ideas on how to get there

JEF is at a crossroad. We are not able to get more members to join us, and though we might not feel that our organisation is stagnating, we are facing some serious internal challenges close to stagnation, which must be solved for JEF to develop in the right direction. After all, we do come up (...)

Wednesday 26 October 2011

Are we still going to need JEF in 5 years time? Yes, so let’s re-balance!

When our vision has come true, when a federal Europe is established, then JEF and its partner organisations have fulfilled their historical function. Until that time has come, and as long as we are not satisfied with the state of affairs in Europe, JEF is the kind of organisation Europe (...)

Wednesday 26 October 2011

Can a separation of the European Parliament be the solution?

There has been quite a public on Europe lately. Newspapers were full of it. European countries at the periphery on the attack of the financial markets. Nights meetings of the Finance Ministers and European leaders, a presented drama that serves well the journalists needs. The politicians are (...)

Thursday 20 October 2011

Global Democracy – from utopia to necessity

The US and the EU are going separate ways. And contrary to what it may seem, the room for political manoeuvre is smaller in the US than it is in the EU, despite the fact that the toolbox in the hands of the former is richer than the one in the hands of the latter. Indeed, the US has a federal (...)

Wednesday 19 October 2011

Part-time Ashton? Challenges facing the EU’s High Representative

In 2011, Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR), has attended little over 40% of the European Commission’s weekly gatherings of its commissioners. Of the 29 meetings held so far, the Labour peer was present for just 12 of them. For a politician (...)

Tuesday 18 October 2011

The European Empire, the people and the democracy

The debates on European democratization are as powerful as ever. At the Amsterdam summit, Lionel Jospin, when noted that we should try to find ways to overcome the democratic deficit, answered “ok, what if we talk about the challenge of democracy instead”. Now it’s possible to analyze the issue (...)

Monday 10 October 2011

Making or breaking the European Union - Barroso’s U-turn?

Seldom in the history of European integration have the EU’s political elites faced a crisis as complex and diverse as the current one. At critical times in the process of European integration, courageous leaders showed the way forward when they mustered the necessary audacity and vision. At the (...)

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Appeal for a Visa-free Europe

We, the undersigned members of the Coalition for the European Continent Undivided by Visa Barriers, call upon the leaders of the European Union and Eastern Partnership (EaP) states gathered at the EU-EaP summit in Warsaw on the 29th-30th of September, 2011, to reiterate their pledge to (...)

Thursday 29 September 2011

JEF campaign against visa

October 2010 was a happy day for many JEF-ers since the JEF Resolution on Visa liberalisation was adopted in Malta; but also for all the Bosnians and Albanians, due to the Visa liberalization that was finally approved by the EU Parliament. The free Visa action was organised when Bosnia and (...)

Wednesday 28 September 2011

Metric Martyrs and Bendy Bananas: When is a Euromyth, a Euromyth?

With levels of Euroscepticism in Britain unabating and daily press declarations that the EU has banned everything from the Queen on our passports to old-fashioned tea rooms, is it time to question how much of this EU reporting is actually true? It is no secret that the British public are (...)

Wednesday 21 September 2011
Pages : 0 | ... | 168 | 180 | 192 | 204 | 216 | 228 | 240 | 252 | 264 | ... | 384