Second paragraph of third chapter:The climax of such a tempestuous year [1973], in December, was another summit meeting of the Nine in Copenhagen, hijacked by Arab oil ministers. The leaders battled with a heavy agenda of items on which their ministers could not agree: economic and monetary union, the financing of regional development policy, a ( Read more... )

Here's a lovely thing. The Slovenian Presidency of the EU has made available a book from each of the 27 EU member states for us all to read. Nine of them are picture books, and there's a graphic novel; seven are represented by short stories, four are rather bravely represented by poetry, three have novels and the last three are represented by ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:The art of lobbying is to achieve congruence of the diverging interests of politics, business and society.
I picked this one up in 2013 partly out of a general interest in sharpening the saw, but mainly because the author and I were on opposite sides of a particular Brussels lobbying issue at the time, and I wanted ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:Under the treaties, the decision on its seat belongs not to the Parliament, but to the national governments. They reached agreement at the Edinburgh summit in December 1992, chaired by John Major, "on the location of the institutions and of certain bodies and departments of the European Communities" (OJ C-341 23/12 ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third essay (John Kornblum, "Six Vignettes about Europe"):2. In today's Europe, as Marshall McLuhan put it: "the medium is the message." Raised on Europe's mantra of peace and stability, many Europeans actually feel a sense of superiority from the success of what they see as their innovative "peace policy." They believe that ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:The electronic frisker on the door swallowed his I.D. card and returned it instantaneously. Then the security guards waved him through with their N-series, and after two minutes on the travelator he was there. Most employees of the daily paper were away for May Day, but some of those working on the Sunday were ( Read more... )

Second frame of third entry ("Something is Missing", by Juliana Penkova):
( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter (on the migration crisis): The demand for action had a different character from that which accompanied previous crises. The Ukraine crisis of 2014-15 was a matter of war and peace; the Union itself had hardly any resources or powers to bring the conflict under control, so active intervention by the member states ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: The somewhat surprise election of U.S. President Donald Trump was followed by predictions of a collapse in the transatlantic relationship. President Trump, whose view of the world is highly transactional, had campaigned on a platform hostile both to NATO and even the general concept of long-term alliances. During ( Read more... )

This is the fourth of my political blog posts for this week, having previously reviewed Free Radical by Vince Cable, The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart and After Europe by Ivan Krastev. I had actually read these four books separately over February and March, but I think that weeks of meditation on them collectively has enriched my thinking on ( Read more... )