It was naïve to believe, mid-pandemic, that austerity had been “buried” in Europe. Like a zombie, the idea has risen from the dead and still retains powerful advocates. In early June, President of the Bundestag and former German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble published an opinion piece in the Financial Times that has attracted much mockery […]

Nordic governments frequently broadcast their ambition to do more together on the international stage. Kristin Haugevik and Ole Jacob Sending explain why we still shouldn’t expect to see any profound increase in joint Nordic foreign policy positions and actions – and especially not when it comes to relations with greater powers. In their Vision 2030, […]

The approach of the European Union’s institutions to the Conference on the Future of Europe is muddled, with risks for the outcome. The European Union after several delays opened the Conference on the Future of Europe on 9 May 2021. Its purpose, according to a March 2021 Joint Declaration from the presidents of the EU institutions, is […]

Brexit may expose the special arrangements that EFTA states have to the EU. The European Union has over time developed quite a comprehensive system of affiliations with neighbouring states. Both actors in the UK and in the EU have discussed these affiliations as possible templates for how the UK and the EU could organize their […]

Will Berlin finally acknowledge that economics is a social science and not theology? How to escape the pandemic? For some – the Italians Mario Draghi and Paolo Gentiloni or the French Emmanuel Macron and Thierry Breton – the pandemic has called into question the previous economic policy equilibria and so they are asking for the […]

Elinor Ostrom provides the ideal framework to understand the European Union. Jan P. Vogler explains why. The EU is often subject to biting criticism by its opponents: political speechwriter Aram Bakshian contends that the EU has “a single giant bureaucracy and an imposed-from-above social model” and journalist Leo McKinstry suggests that it is “a federalist […]

The Next Generation EU superfoods are on their way. Can they save a starving Italian patient? Italy entered the Covid-19 crisis enfeebled by years of anaemic growth, stagnant public and private investment, high unemployment, a heavy debt load and tendentially feverish interest rates. Hopes for its recovery were pinned on the Eurozone’s standard recipe of […]