Two weeks after the shootings in Paris and ten days after the memorable rallies of 11 January, emotion gives way to lucid analysis. There should be no illusion: France stands all alone. Of course, there were millions of individuals all around the globe who instantly displayed the “Je suis Charlie” slogan in order to show […]
30 years ago, on 14 January 1985, Jacques Delors, who had just taken office a week before, pronounced his programmatic ‘Declaration on the orientation of the Commission’ in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He did so with ‘intellectual humility’ and ‘political determination’, two attitudes that seem to characterise rather well both the man […]
Time flies, no news on that front, but 2014 seems to have flown particularly quickly. One of the reasons for this impression may be the accumulation of global economic and political challenges. And 2015? Here is my list of the top three challenges for the new year: CHINA Challenge no. 1: Corruption. Despite a certain continuity […]
The debate has been ongoing for as long as the expression ‘European integration’ has existed, and it is not likely to stop any time soon: is the self-proclaimed ‘European Community’ underpinned by a set of ‘shared values’? ‘Values’, like ‘culture’, is a sufficiently vague term to allow very divergent interpretations. It is one of these […]
Brussels in December: damp, windy, grey. An hour to kill between the meetings at the Berlaymont and the Thalys at Gare du Midi. Three snapshots taken on the way, each of them with a funny symbolic twist. And each of them accompanied by a good New Year’s wish for the EU. First stop: on the […]