Category: Future of Europe
-
It’s Only Over When It’s Over
When the British government announced that 52 percent of the population had voted to leave the European Union, this seemed to be a final decision. Right-wing populists from Marine le Pen in France to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands euphorically congratulated the Leave voters and already demanded their own national referendums. Global stock markets lost…
-
Britain Has Voted Out, and Europa Is Weeping
This is the feeling of the axis of history tilting: not a smooth, mechanical turn, but the ground shifting and trembling beneath your feet. What even yesterday seemed so solid is now running through your fingers like silt. The possibilities that gave you hope have vanished behind a cloud, and now there is only a…
-
What Happened to the Uniforms?
The interwar years were the golden age of political imagery. As during the revolutionary era of the late-18th Century, the rise of new mass movements was accompanied by an equally potent visual vocabulary, disseminated via new technologies that could reach potential supporters like never before. In contrast to earlier eras, however, the 1920s and 30s…
-
It is Our Duty to Help the Refugees
These days it is not easy to write an article about the refugee issue since the conditions change every day. Still, in my view we can identify three main tendencies, which have surfaced recently: 1) the return of borders· the re-introduction of border controls and even the construction of walls and fences, 2) a shift…
-
Brexit or BrexIn: Britain Decides its European Fate
Following the conclusion of David Cameron’s EU ‘renegotiation’ deal at the EU summit in Brussels on February 19, he announced a day later that the referendum is to be held on June 23 – marking the effective beginning of the campaign which will settle the ‘Brexit’ question. We have been here before. In 1975, Britain…
-
Toxic United Europe
My name is Armanda. I am 25 years old and a student of Economics at the University of Bologna, Italy. In November 2014, Eurojust has published the Official Report on the Strategic Project on Environmental Crime with the aim of analysing the current situation and the difficulties that national authorities face to prosecute the increasing…
-
The Really Big Deal
My name is Julian. I am a 29-year old political analyst based in Berlin working for an independent, non-profit think tank. Finally, the dust of institutional reshuffling which started with the 2014 European Parliament elections has settled. The last act of this procedure was the approval of Jean-Claude Juncker’s college of Commissioners by the European…
-
Towards a Pan-European Activism? The #FixEurope Autumn Camp 2014
My name is Rica. I am a student of political science and German language and literature at the University of Bremen. Between October 20-24 eighty political and cultural activists from all over the European continent gathered in a castle in the German Uckermark close to Berlin and discussed the rather complex question of how to…
-
It’s Time to Fix Europe
My name is Giuseppe, I am 26 years old. I work in a library. I have a degree in Classical Literature and now I am studying Philosophy. I live in Eboli, a small town in southern Italy. Everything breaks sooner or later. There is a point in time, the last act in a series of…
-
The New Architecture of EU Governance and the Upcoming Challenges
My name is Héctor. I am 25 years old and I am a political and international relations analyst. I work at a think tank in the beautiful city of Barcelona. What I write here reflects solely my own views. I recently attended a meeting where a study on citizens’ perceptions of the European Union was…