Opinion pieces

  • Staring into the abyss, by Charles Grant
    E!Sharp, 01 July 2005

    Twenty years of progress towards a united Europe have come to an end with the French and Dutch votes against the constitution, with future expansion of the EU likely to be the biggest casualty, argues Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform.

  • Europe - Don't write the obituaries yet. A new France could put Britain on the sidelines, by Mark Leonard
    New Statesman, 06 June 2005

    The gleeful obituaries are piling up, not just for the EU constitution, but for the country that torpedoed it. France is in a mess, we read; its politics are paralysed, its economy is over-regulated and it just can't accommodate itself to globalisation with an Anglo-Saxon face.

  • Europe - Did we make the right choice?, by Hugo Brady
    Yorkshire Post, 03 June 2005

    Though often criticised as being undemocratic, popular referenda have been pivotal in the history of the European Union. Recent events in France and Netherlands aside, perhaps none more so than the 1975 poll confirming Britain's membership of the then European Economic Community.

  • Short Cuts: Reputations: Political song and dance, by Mark Leonard
    The Guardian, 03 June 2005

    "People have been texting saying: don't worry, it's all total politics." These words might have soothed a tearful Javine when she failed to rack up more than 18 points for the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest, but they were not much comfort to the beleaguered French and Dutch "yes" campaigns left reeling by the results of Europe's most popular kitsch-fest.

  • European democracy: Where now?, by Aurore Wanlin
    Open democracy, 02 June 2005

    The rejection by French and Dutch voters of the treaty establishing a European constitution has precipitated one of the deepest crises in the European Union's fifty-year history.

  • Europe must keep its 'soft power' , by Carl Bildt
    Financial Times, 01 June 2005

    In the aftermath of the French rejection of the European Union constitution, on the eve of the Dutch referendum and amid political uncertainty in Germany, there is a growing risk that the EU will start to backtrack on its commitment to continued enlargement.

  • The UK should see enlargement as an opportunity to revive the Lisbon process, by Alasdair Murray
    Progress online, 01 June 2005

    At the Lisbon summit in 2000, EU leaders signed up to an ambitious economic reform programme: the Lisbon agenda, designed to close the economic gap with the US.

  • Tony Blair invite les Européens à réfléchir au non français, by Charles Grant
    Le Monde, 31 May 2005

    Il faudra attendre lundi 6 juin pour savoir officiellement si le Royaume-Uni renonce à organiser son propre référendum sur la Constitution de l'Union européenne.