German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not one for high emotions. Public speeches are calm and measured. During debates in the Bundestag, she drives home points using repetition rather than rhetorical flourish. Her press conferences at the increasingly regular summits in Brussels are renowned for being low-key affairs. Bad or good news is delivered in the same tone of voice. For colour and indiscretion, journalists go next door to the French briefing room. Merkel is de facto in charge of the running the eurozone. She is criticised on substance. But her style of delivery has not helped. Many see it as prescriptive and lacking in passion. To her critics, she has – particularly at the onset of the crisis - missed occasions to say why the eurozone is worth saving, how Germans benefit from it an...

Being a sports fan who cannot bear to be parted from the England cricket team and the football, my subscription with Sky is a necessary, if expensive, evil. Likewise, I have a subscription to watch NFL American Football games. While I may be a fully paid up member of the web-generation, it is amazing to be able to watch TV on my lap-top. But there are two things which are vexing. Firstly, my Sky subscription is useless when I am outside the UK. Secondly, because Sky has also bought rights to NFL games, I find that a few games (usually the ones most worth watching) are 'blacked out' when I try to watch in the UK. Not only is this unfair - after all, I have paid for both subscriptions - but it also highlights one of the reasons why selling broadcast rights on a country- by- country bas...

The Christmas season has been unusually mild for us north Europeans. However, our political leaders have seemed determined to bring a bit of chill. In fact, so gloomy have their new year’s message that I suspect Merkel, Sarkozy et al have organised a sweepstake to see which of them can come up with the gloomiest new year's message. Merkel and Sarkozy started by warning that 2012 would be another very tough year, with the heavy rhetoric about saving and stabilising the euro and the European Union – not to mention the world economy. Europe’s getting poorer, more spending cuts are needed, economic Armageddon still needs to be averted. Forgive me for having heard it all before. The eurozone has apparently been in the ‘last chance saloon’ for so long that I’m surprised there have been no sig...

Europe is obsessed with the growing stock of public sector debt; fiscal austerity has become the watchword of our time. Little does it seem to matter that fiscal austerity means reducing aggregate demand, thus leading to economic stagnation and recession throughout the EU as all the main forecasts are now suggesting.1 Even the credit rating agencies are worried, as S&P’s downgrading of France and eight other countries shows. Whether it’s Angela Merkel or David Cameron speaking, public debt is denounced as deplorable, and all are told to get used to hard times. As Larry Elliot puts it: “The notion that economic pain is the only route to pleasure was once the preserve of the British public school-educated elite, now it's European economic policy”.2 In Britain, immediately after the ge...

Has there ever been a time in EU history where a treaty is being negotiated that a) virtually nobody wants b) does not solve the problem at hand c) whose contents are already, or could in future, be part of general EU law and d) deteriorates in quality the more it is negotiated? Some of these points applied to other treaty-making rounds. But not all of them at once. The whole point of this treaty exercise - which is using an inconvenient intergovernmental track because of the UK - is political. Germany needs some sort of pact that makes it look like it will be almost impossible for member states to be big and careless spenders in the future. A fiscal straitjacket. The document could then be served up when Germans are feeling unenthusiastic about mutualising eurozone debt,  or grea...

On 19 December 2010 Alexander Lukashenka claimed victory in a presidential election that, according to domestic and international monitors, was marred by irregularities and falsifications. This re-election saw the largest protests in Belarus in a decade and was followed by an unprecedented wave of repressions again political opponents and civil society, as well as a complete freeze in relations with the West, and by the deepest economic crisis since Belarusian independence. Speed and scale of these developments came to the surprise of even the most astute experts of Belarus. 79.6 percent was the official count of votes supporting Lukashenka. By contrast, independent polls saw him score merely 51.1 percent. According to them, 20.5 percent is the share of Belarusian citizens that would ca...

With the death of the playwright, dissident and former president Vaclav Havel on Sunday the Czech Republic has lost its philosopher king and Europe one of the few figures who can comfortably be compared to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela in terms of intellectual clarity, personal bravery and mule-like stubbornness in the face of oppression. Many people played their part in helping bring down communism and piece together a divided continent. But few did it with the consistency of purpose as Havel, whose 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of authoritarian regimes across eastern Europe. In one of the most memorable passages in the essay, Havel ponders why a greengrocer feels compelled to place a “workers of the world uni...

After years of self-denial, EU policymakers are outing themselves as technocrats. From now on decisions will be scientific and evidence-based. The years of European vanity projects, dogma and ideology are over. Even our parliamentarians have given the idea of technocracy an enthusiastic I Like This. In a resolution on Wednesday, for example, the European Parliament called for an evidence-based assessment of the EU’s counterterrorist policies. It all goes to show how much we want to believe that European decision-making is a logical and linear process – a process in which law-makers identify the problems that require EU-wide treatment, adopt the right solution and then tweak it in the unlikely eventuality that it does not work properly. The trouble is that EU decision-making has it...

Overshadowed by the frantic negotiations to save the Euro-zone, but in many ways no less important, high-level EU and U.S. representatives met in Washington DC at the end of last month to midwife still nascent official cooperation on energy policy between the transatlantic partners. The importance of these talks for the post-economic crisis world is difficult to overstate. The EU-U.S. Energy Council, as the formal coordination mechanism is called, will likely set the standard for the developed world in working towards greater energy security, harnessing new energy technologies, and addressing environmental concerns. This is why U.S. Secretaries of State and Energy, Hillary Clinton and Stephen Chu led the recent talks together with EU High Representative Catherine Ashton and Energy Commi...

The Muslim Brothers and the Salafis have three things in common. First, both are in favour of political Islam. Secondly, both Muslim Brothers and Salafis were surprised to win the first elections in Egypt that big. And the two first are the reasons why – thirdly – they deeply hate each other. The Egyptian elections are organised in three phases. In each phase nine governorates vote for party-lists and for independent candidates in a majority system. The independent candidates need to have an absolute majority in order to be elected, which means a second round in most of the cases. On the elections of 28 November the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood had forty percent of the votes, the Salafis a surprising twenty four percent. And this in the most liberal governorates o...