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From 21 to 25 September 2015 the bi-annual Congress of the German Association for Political Science (DVPW) took place at the University of Duisburg in Western Germany. More than 800 participants attended the event. As one of these participants, three observations seemed to be of particular interest to me. First, in comparison to the previous […]
A guest contribution by Başak Alpan, from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Here’s one of the few good things about being a political science professor in Turkey: elections are never only boring econometrical calculations that no one is interested in, but each election gives you an ample amount of shock, perplexity, and challenge to cope […]
A tribute to Luke Foster. It’s his calm, reassuring voice I’ll miss most. After having, very much in accordance with his personality, bravely managed to ‘keep calm and carry on’ while fighting against his illness and enduring the different therapies that went with it, Luke Foster passed away a few days ago. Although the news did not come as […]
A contribution by Tamas Matura (ESSCA Budapest). Even though the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and most Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries established diplomatic relations as soon as 1949, the Cold War made them drift away from each other. Only the last decade has brought new momentum to the bilateral relations between the two sides, […]
A guest contribution by Moses Onyango and Jean-Marc Trouille. In many parts of the world, geopolitics are confronted with two anti-nomic trends. On the one hand, numerous countries are engaged in a process of regional economic integration, epitomised by the more advanced model of the European Union (EU), and which requires ‘internal’ borders between participating […]
The Volkswagen emissions scandal has many dimensions, some of which have not even started to unfold yet. The sheer perversity of the software used by the company with the aim of hiding the real level of nitrogen oxide emissions of its cars is most likely to become a textbook case of corporate hubris and cynicism […]
It is difficult not to be impressed by the remarkable breadth and multidisciplinary outreach of contemporary European Studies that was exposed at the UACES conference in Bilbao. Paper and panels were fed and underpinned by the political sciences, but also by economics, law, sociology and anthropology. Yet the newspapers read during the return flight from […]
I have been crossing the river Rhine north of Strasbourg between Iffezheim (Germany) and Roppenheim (France) for as long as my driving licence can remember. In the late 70s and early 80s, passport control and the usual question whether there was anything to declare were part of the ritual (although in a much more relaxed […]
There’s of course nothing wrong with the commemoration of historical battles. Quite the contrary: each time I took students to the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy, they got a better idea of why European integration might actually be a good idea. And most of the four-year-long commemorative flow on World War I is produced, if […]
These days, the People’s Republic of China and the European Union celebrate the 40th anniversary of their diplomatic relationship. At the age of 40 one might assume that this relationship has indeed ‘grown up’ by now. But has it, really? Here are three indicators supporting this view and three against it: FOR: China established diplomatic relations in 1975 with the […]
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