Concrete Achievements

Tag: europe

  • Good article by ⁦@stefanauer_hku⁩ ⁦@pbergsen⁩ and ⁦@hanskundnani⁩.

    Good article by ⁦@stefanauer_hku⁩ ⁦@pbergsen⁩ and ⁦@hanskundnani⁩. Agreed that the political (and, I would add, democratic) path to further integration is the only one. chathamhouse.org/2021/10/law-to…

    Which is not to say that the Polish constitutional court is in the right, far from it. But Europe is now dealing in too many political and personal issues to use a fundamentally economic-regulatory mode for integration.

    It’s a mark of the success of the European project but « what got you here won’t get you there »

  • Links from the week of 4 October 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • I’m glad to be part of that living bridge, but would quite like it if the maniac…

    I’m glad to be part of that living bridge, but would quite like it if the maniac populists at either end could stop blowing up the supporting structures. twitter.com/JnbraithwaiteU…

    Seriously, though, it’s exactly these ties of history, blood and family between Poland and the UK, and between both countries and the rest of Europe, that Brexit and the current Polish government undermining of the rule of law have betrayed.

    Brexit forced a choice between British and European, the dire consequences of which are playing out where that mattered most, in Northern Ireland. The Polish government appear to be pretending there’s a choice between Polish and socially liberal.

    Those pretended choices are false and are made with the explicit intention of dividing people and stoking conflict – for the benefit of populist political elites who despise their voters far more than the mainstream parties ever could.

  • Talking with a friend in a bar last night about the need for pan-Belgian media.

    Talking with a friend in a bar last night about the need for pan-Belgian media. @lesoir and @destandaard are all very well but (particularly if the next state reform gives us a whole-country electoral constituency like NL) there’s still too little across the taalgrens.

    @LeVif and @Knack I think share some stories and things like @VRT_Flandreinfo & LENA are great but it would be good to have something that’s bilingual default like @el_Periodico in Catalunya (with identical editions in Catalan and Castilian) – perhaps even in FR/NL/EN.

    The floods and covid have shown, I think, that people in Flanders and Wallonia aren’t just thrown together by circumstance – shared history, families and culture also matter. And pooled resources could make for better reporting on international issues too.

    Finally, Europe’s capital could also use a better home town paper. Anyways, I appreciate the media economics (let alone politics) probably doesn’t open up a path to this, but it feels like a big gap.

  • Reading a couple of books from 2017 (that have been on the pile for a while) and…

    Reading a couple of books from 2017 (that have been on the pile for a while) and contemplating how policy books are « second draft of history » artefacts. So much of what is in them has either been overtaken by events or become a truism.

    (The specific books are Krastev’s After Europe and Mounck’s People v Democracy)

    Particularly after Biden and Covid, reading about the defining roles of the 2015 refugee crisis and Donald Trump feels like rewatching an episode of Tomorrow’s World about Minitel.

  • It has been depressingly educational to see how the media have taken one line in Macron’s…

    It has been depressingly educational to see how the media have taken one line in Macron’s speech that triggers their refugee crisis memories, taken it out of context from all the things Macron said about taking refugees and a better European strategy, framed it

    As the main point of the speech, and now Twitter is screaming that French voters have a choice between a male and female Le Pen. It’s notable that the only French media that made it the main theme was far-right rag Valeurs Actuelles.

    I would have liked to hear a different speech but this was not the speech Twitter thinks it was. If we allow this situation to be reframed for us into the 2015 refugee crisis it will become the 2015 refugee crisis and the far right will be delighted.

    Macron promised a new initiative with Germany very shortly. It needs to be of the right level of ambition and to focus on making the process more welcoming and more collective in Europe while protecting people from traffickers.

    The full speech is here: elysee.fr/emmanuel-macro…

  • Links from the week of 9 August 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 2 August 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 28 June 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • This is great and well worth a read.

    This is great thread and well worth a read. One extra point, is that it seems strategically odd to say conferral principle is at risk. Opening up space for a conferral v Union sovereignty debate, with ECR being the defenders of conferral just gives undue prominence to it. twitter.com/CasMudde/statu…

    AFAIK no-one is actually challenging conferral in reality, even if, in a certain light if you squint, the way in which conferred powers is sovereign-ish. For all the logic of “ever closer union between peoples” is that at a given moment, like a gas cloud collapsing into a star

    some sort of fusion will start and a European sovereignty will emerge separate from a national one. I just don’t see any person or party with significant national political weight arguing for it (and I don’t see the coherence in action either).

    (too early in the weekend: “the way in which conferred powers *are used* is sovereign-ish” in the second tweet).