Articles in this set
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The problems that transparency poses decision-makers.
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And there's not much of it about.
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It used to whistle, but the European car industry is not singing about its future any longer.
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Meaning what they say, more or less.
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Greece gives us the gift of a new form of democracy, baptised in a spirit of unreasonableness.
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Nicolas Sarkozy's ‘visionary' EU presidency created a wolf clothed in a ‘great dream'.
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Europe gives Russia too much to play with.
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It may be 'gravely concerned' by the conflict in Gaza, but somehow the EU seems unhurried by its concern.
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Tassas Papadopoulos, a nay-sayer whose ‘No' proved to mean ‘No'.
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Greece's major cities are convulsed by rioting. Could it prompt a return to true democracy?
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Shop till you drop.
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A golden rule emerges?
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Alexander the Great, emperor of Macedonia and exemplar for modern leaders and diplomats.
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Silence, that favourite tool of EU-Turkey relations, could be deadly.
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The North and the South move towards agreement on how nasty is too nasty.
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Needed: training in how to herd cats.
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Meetings, the intelligent alternative to work.
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After uniting the Orthodox, bringing peace to the world will seem easy.
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Should Peter Mandelson hand back his salary?
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Europe, and Brussels, are showing all too many signs of admiring great Southern traditions: hysteria, demagoguery, spite and babble.
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The European Parliament might do better do concern itself with protecting our privacy than with launching EuroparlTV.
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Committed to consulting with all – except Lady Nicotine.
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The Turkish Cypriots are positing a solution that brings Yugoslavia too forcefully to mind.
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Why bring in new pesticides rules when the old have yet to be assessed?
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A ‘faux-Finn' finds Finns are changing – but, thankfully, not their summer habits.
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Europe's mountain of waste is growing faster than its economy.
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Rubbish and corruption: what glamour can't affect.
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They may have read the Lisbon treaty, but they need to find understanding and reason.
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Put effective types at the service of a bad purpose and the worst arrives quickly.
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For an old Eurocrat, to read this document is like Marcel Proust tasting the Madeleine.
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A memory-span like that of a goldfish is the modern European way and, of course, it makes things easier. But historians may recall a moment in the last century when Jacques Santer and his Commission resigned over (pace the puffed-up European Parliament, for which this was its great moment in the sun) minor irregularities.
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They may have read the Lisbon treaty, but they need to find understanding and reason.
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The land of gods has become one of the most polluted places on earth.
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Put effective types at the service of a bad purpose and the worst arrives quickly.
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One of the shortcomings of the Lisbon treaty is its built-in escape-hatch for those member states which do not wish for any more integration but nonetheless wish to remain in the club. This is known in many languages as “having your cake and eating it”.
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The Fundamental Principles of the Olympic Charter are fine stuff: “...to place sport, everywhere, at the service of the harmonious development of man...establishment of a peaceful society...preservation of human dignity”. And so on.
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It is now 20 years since everyone else realised that communism was mostly a way of making everyone poor and fed up. But certain European leaders were evidently behind the door when this discovery was made. They now find state economic control a pretty neat idea.
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Do not get me wrong about our friend in the North. But when I read his dispatches it's like listening to a child who has no sense of history, although at the end of the day, like a child, he is also telling the truth according to his lights. In some deep sense anyway.
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They claim to be sensible up North, but just below the surface it is chaos, or worse. The Finns, for example. Dull, decent types mumbling harmlessly in their igloos? In your dreams. No, they are hoodlums.
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Every summer they migrate South, the Northerners from the big countries, believing they will become different, freer, even perhaps less ugly (yes, secretly, they believe this).
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Being a neophyte in the world of inter-regional polemics, I am honoured to be insulted by the famous Rein F. Deer (‘A goat song for the South', 14-20 February). But with all due respect, perhaps he should occasionally open the door of his sauna and take a look outside.
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Is a name a precondition for becoming a member of the EU or NATO? What about a name that is a legal formulation almost like a number, or a negative along the lines of ‘the artist formerly known as Prince'? Will any name do? What about FYROM?
Voice from the South
Ness U. Patria ponders southern habits of culture and politics.
