• Bulletin article by Katinka Barysch, 01 August 2005

    Europe is in the grip of a fundamental debate about its economic future, or at least that is what some politicians and many journalists would have us believe.

  • Bulletin article by Alasdair Murray, 01 August 2005

    Of all the items on the agenda of the British EU presidency, perhaps the least expected is a debate on ‘social Europe’. Tired of being crudely caricatured as ‘neoliberal’, Tony Blair has invited EU leaders to an informal summit in October to discuss the future of Europe’s social model.

  • Opinion piece 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.

  • Opinion piece 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.

  • Bulletin article by Alasdair Murray , 03 June 2005

    The French and Dutch rejections of the constitutional treaty throw into stark relief the divisions between two groups of EU countries. On one side are countries - including Britain, Ireland, the Nordic three plus the majority of the new member-states - who (crudely put) favour a more economically liberal and diverse European Union.

  • Opinion piece 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.

  • Opinion piece 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.

  • Briefing note by Hugo Brady, 01 June 2005

    The French and Dutch No votes on the EU constitutional treaty have rocked Europe's political establishment. The EU's heads of government will debate the future of the document at their summit – and the equally fractious issue of the EU's budget – in Brussels on 16 June 2005.