August 21, 2015
After three years of inhaling the diesel fumes of Paris, I have had the chance to spend a few weeks in Metsovo, in northern Greece. Known to the Greeks and the Bulgarians as Vlachs and to the rest of the Europeans as Aromanians, the Latin dialect-speaking community of Metsovo are a warm and welcoming lot… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
August 3, 2015
In Wolfgang Schaeuble’s Germano-centric EU, no institution is more important – apart from his Politburo-like Eurogroup and the Office of the Chancellor – than his Ministry’s Council of Economic Advisers. The most influential adviser among them is Professor Hans-Werner Sinn from Munich, a Christian missionary-manqué turned tele-economist. Like any good German, Professor Sinn has but… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
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E.U., Economy & Euro, English, EU Priorities and Opinion, Security |
July 30, 2015
To those in the know, the Italian peninsula was not only the cradle of the Roman Empire or Rome the centre of the Catholic faithful, but also the birthplace of capitalism and of countless statecraft innovations and institutions still widely used around the world today. During the middle ages, the Italian city-states thus discovered and… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
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E.U., Economy & Euro, English, EU Priorities and Opinion, External Relations, Security |
July 23, 2015
Very few American experts grasp the motivations behind the construction of the European Union. As a result, American specialized literature abounds with misguided comparisons, such as that between the US Civil War from the 19th century and today’s tense situation between Europe’s North and South. Yes, the EEC was initially formed in 1957 to prevent… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
July 19, 2015
Some seventeen centuries ago, emperor Diocletian realized that the Roman empire had grown too big and too diverse to be ruled from a single centre. Diocletian therefore decided to split it in two, the west ruled from Rome by a fellow army officer and the east controlled by himself. The east-west division became more or… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
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E.U., Economy & Euro, EU Priorities and Opinion, External Relations |
July 13, 2015
With protracted negotiations still going on in Brussels, I would like to provide my readers with an opinion I have expressed in February this year, in an email exchange with my younger Blogactiv colleague Dimitri Rapidis from Athens. I still consider today that the total absence of a Plan B has severely weakened the position… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
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E.U., Economy & Euro, EU Priorities and Opinion, External Relations |
July 11, 2015
On the 9th and 10th of July 2015, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has held a landmark summit in Ufa (Russia), its 15th to date. Ufa has simultaneously hosted the BRICS summit, which was meant to further strengthen economic ties between its five emerging economic powers. Founded in 2001 by Russia, China and four Central… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
May 13, 2015
Last week’s electoral win by the Conservative party has marked the Labour party’s fall from political grace in Britain. The victory was obtained through political manipulation (as opposed to political leadership) and electoral wizardry first tested in the land down under. Alas, Britain does not have Australia’s natural wealth, nor China as a huge, close-by… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
March 18, 2015
Over the past fifty years or so geopolitics has not very often come to have a big influence over major economic decisions in the Western world. Case in point, as President Obama’s speeches have proved it over and over in recent years, American officials are known to dislike geopolitics quite a lot. On the other… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
March 3, 2015
A number of trade unions have recently denounced McDonalds’ fiscal optimisation policies. According to the unions’ experts, between 2009 and 2013 McDonalds paid only 16 million euros in profit taxes across the EU states in which it operates instead of the 1.06 billion euros it should have paid if tax avoidance schemes had not been… » read more
Posted by Spotlight on Geopolitics
