For years the EU has outlined a common foreign, security and defense policy (CFSP, ESDP) and has even created the EU battle troops (EUBG) and established its own European External Action Service. However recent developments in Libya once again clearly showed the insignificant role of these EU activities. One could ask, if those new systems [...]

“HOW many presidents does it take to represent the EU at a diplomatic conference? Three. That’s the number of European “leaders” going to future G20 talks.” (The Sunday Express Comment) Former US Foreign secretary Henry Kissinger once asked what’s the EU’s phone number. Few months ago EU finally started to act according the Lisbon Treaty [...]

“Blogactiv.eu” –article, posted by “Challenge for Europe” on 19th June 2009  highlights the importance of EU’s Community Initiatives as most successful popular direct contacts between the EU institutions and the citizens in their local communities. “The EU mobilized European citizens in getting together, discovering sustainable practices elsewhere, while getting involved in decision-making at home. It [...]

There is one dilemma while voting EU elections in Finland. You draw the number of candidate to election ticket which will create the total amount of votes to party the candidate represents. If the Party gets enough votes the most voted candidates in their list will be the next MEPs. The dilemma is that the [...]

A common utterance “money talks” is sometimes used also related to elections. One could suppose that if voting matters the parties or candidates are investing more to win elections. Normal marketing is sometimes not guaranteeing enough votes so in many societies more crude means are used such as election fraud/rigging, non-transparent and illegal political campaign [...]

While European Parliament elections soon are coming I was curious to see how EU propaganda machinery with their countless millions of taxpayers’ money is putting their best to attract public to cast their vote. So I opened Europarltv which launched a series of videos explaining the history the Parliament, how it works and why to [...]

Despite the efforts to save energy a strong scenario for near future is that the quantity of gas needed in EU region will remain same as today if not bigger. sources of gas are widely known the essential question is how the gas is arriving to European markets. Environmental and technical aspects can be handled [...]

Lunatic risk assessment can seriously damage your health (and economy, and freedom). Swine flu has been in headlines nearly two weeks.  The media hype is not in any scale to the real thread, it can be good entertainment like circus in ancient Rome and a tool to put the common people’s focus on trivialities.   For [...]

When EU normally is disseminating EU doctrine to outside world there some times could be nice idea to apply some practice of others in Brussels. This came to my mind while reading news from Bosnia. Protesting over the inability of their politicians to elect a city mayor more than five months after the last elections, [...]

This post was first published in TH!NK ABOUT IT site 25th February 2009. During last twenty years war for humanitarian reasons has came quite popular in political vocabulary e.g. in Balkans and now with Georgia case. The ideal to use power in the service of ethics is good. The problem is the low level of [...]