Euro roundup: European Digital Agenda etc

http://www.diskursdisko.de/2010/04/juan-leguizamon-nautische-geschichten/

http://www.behance.net/jflegui
found in  Juan F. Leguizamon

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Improving EU economic governance: Impressive Herman Van Rompuy

Winston Churchill is said to have quipped that the Labour leader Clement Attlee was a man who had much to be modest about.

At (s)election time British tabloids, which pray at the shrine of John Bull, were more derisory in their outpourings about the new President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, often misleadingly labeled as the ?EU President?. This funny little foreigner came from, of all places, Belgium. The latest national tragedy is that Van Rompuy has ?failed? to send Nigel Farage (a member of the European Parliament, not the European Council) a get well card.

The EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights: European Parliament resolution

Last week, the European Parliament has voted on a resolution regarding the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The resolution is horrible to read (Rapporteur: Ramón Jáuregiu Atondo) and although I’m pretty interested in the subject it was no pleasure to go through the document. I will thus focus on the more practical, cooperation-related elements of the resolution.

(Non-)smoker’s summer guide to Europe’s bans

EU and eurozone membership paradoxes

The Copenhagen criteria for accession to the European Union require, among other things, democracy. Thus, the EU would not qualify for membership.

Tracking eurozone crisis measures: Collective defence doctrine and foundations

How do the heads of state or government of the eurozone countries add to our knowledge about crisis prevention and mitigation at the time of the Spring European Council?

Household Indebtedness in the EU
Source: European Parliament Directorate-General for Internal Policies

Summary:
Certain Member States within the EU have become heavily indebted in recent years. But the pattern is not even. In terms of absolute volumes of debt, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are the most significant. But relative to the sizes of economies, Cyprus, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom averaged debt to GDP of some 84 per cent in December 2009 whilst Greece, Italy, Slovakia, and Slovenia averaged just 33 per cent.

Europe’s burqa rage

An academic look at the Council Secretariat

Careful readers of this blog will have noticed that I am quite interested in the work of the EU Council, especially because there is a lack of attention on the work of this institution, and so I’d like to share some academic insights about the EU Council’s secretariat that a fellow political scientist, Hylke Dijkstra, has published in recent time.

MAIN FOCUS: Hungary and Slovakia at odds over passports | 26/05/2010

The Slovakian parliament on Tuesday warned Hungary not to offer citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries. Commentators write that the governments in both countries are using the dispute to divert attention from domestic problems.

UK election outcome: lessons for peacebuilding, Diana Francis

Here in the UK we are beginning to digest the outcome of our recent electoral process, which brought us a new coalition government for which no single person voted, so demonstrating the complexity of the relationship between individual actions and their combined consequences. More often than not our current system produces a clear ?winner?, one of the two largest parties having a minority of votes but an absolute parliamentary majority and so being able to form a single-party government. Smaller parties are excluded from power and as a consequence remain small, since not all their adherents are happy to ?waste? their vote.  Such a system is therefore unsatisfactory in terms of both representation and pluralism.

The new UK coalition and international development policy, Dan Smith

There are some big foreign policy questions for a new government to tackle: the effects of the recession combine with the rise of new powers to shake the world order. A new global balance will mean respecting new realities in the distribution of power. William Hague, has already visited Hillary Clinton in Washington and the coalition is starting to flesh out its approach to the EU, especially on the formation of the External Action Service. On this, it will be fascinating to see the degree to which, if at all, the Liberal-Democrats? Europhilia tempers the Euro-hostility of the Conservatives.

Low profile on Europe for UK coalition

Against the backdrop of a European economic crisis of monumental proportions, the creation of the UK?s coalition government must seem like ?noises off? to other European theatre-goers. But at least the deal reached between Conservative leader David Cameron and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats could provide political stability in Britain for several years and remove a potentially destabilising element in the councils of Europe.

Burden-sharing in Lithuania

Here?s the concluding statement of the most recent IMF visit to Lithuania.  As with the Spain statement of a few days ago, it is noteworthy for its bluntness ? these things read much less like bland compromise statements than they used to.  A basic indication of how troubled things are ?