In 2006, there was a European Union Force (EUFOR) deployment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in support of the United Nations election-monitoring mission. To reassure the Congolese that EUFOR came in peace, the EU commissioned a 5 minute video which was broadcast on national television in the DRC. The video has to be…
A Remarkable Weekend
What an exhausting, confusing, chaotic, exciting, unexpected, depressing, remarkable weekend. For the last several weeks, EU leaders have been struggling to get ahead of the story. Instead of leading, they have been reacting to events in the financial markets (and reacting slowly). Every time they thought they had put enough money on the table to…
My Europe
My Europe is a compromise. Politics at the EU level is consensus politics, done through bargaining, horse-trading, lowest-common-demoninator agreements and backroom deals. That is why there can never be a “United States of Europe” and why federalism in Europe will never work; without a common “European nation,” political leaders are forced to struggle for compromises…
Downsizing for Africa
I’m in the process of downsizing my blog, in preparation for my trip to Africa. I had originally wanted to make my site as multimedia-rich as I could, with lashings of audiovisual material. That plan, however, was cooked up before I saw the internet statistics for Ethiopia. There are only 360’000 internet users in Ethiopia,…
UK Bureaucrats Cosy up to Tories
It’s a miserable day in Trento today. It’s cold, raining and the skies are overcast. But I’m still smiling, because the wife’s back with me in Italy after doing research for a couple of months at the University of Bath. David Cameron is also no doubt smiling today, because his party has possibly just dodged…