Briefings

The Lisbon Treaty

A streamlined version of the constitutional treaty rejected by the French and the Dutch in 2005, the Lisbon Treaty’s stated aim is to facilitate the workings of the Union of 27 members and upwards. After a rocky road to ratification, it finally came into force on 1 December 2009. With it, a new Europe has been born, and not without difficulties, as this series of articles demonstrate.

 

Briefly

 

Blog

 

French is just too provincial

One of the most consistently informative and entertaining blogs about the European Union has to be Jean Quatremer’s Coulisses de Bruxelles.

Losing Angela in translation

When presseurop.eu was launched in May last year, one of its guiding mottos was Umberto Eco’s “The future of Europe is translation.” But sometimes I’m inclined to think that the future of Europe is lost in translation. I recently checked a statement by Angela Merkel concerning the CD-rom nabbed by HSBC supergrass Hervé Falciani containing data on Germans who have siphoned off their money to Switzerland in order to avoid taxes back home.