• Opinion piece by Charles Grant
    Financial Times, 07 October 2009

    If the Lisbon treaty enters into force, which seems likely, the European Union will appoint a president to chair the European Council, which brings together the heads of government.

  • Insight by Charles Grant, 02 October 2009

    Any prediction about the timing of the Czech Republic’s ratification of the Lisbon treaty must be heavily qualified; politics in Prague are so complex and opaque that many Czechs find it hard to understand what is going on. 

  • Bulletin article by Charles Grant, 01 October 2009

    Ireland’s decisive yes to the Lisbon treaty is likely to spur Poland and – after some delay – the Czech Republic to ratify. The Lisbon treaty will probably enter into force early next year, and that is good news for the EU, in three ways.

  • Briefing note by Hugo Brady, 22 September 2009

    Ireland will hold a second referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon on October 2nd 2009. Most opinion polls in the run-up to the vote show that a majority of Irish voters now back the EU treaty they rejected in June 2008.

  • Opinion piece by Charles Grant
    The Guardian, 09 September 2009

    Next week the European parliament votes on whether to give José Manuel Barroso a second term as president of the European commission.

  • Opinion piece by Simon Tilford
    The New York Times, 16 July 2009

    Is the brief flowering of economic liberalism in Europe over? It is too soon to read the last rites, but the prognosis is not good.The financial crisis, the subsequent discrediting of the Anglo-Saxon economies and the passing of the most economically liberal European Commission there has ever been have put liberal economic thinking on the defensive.

  • Opinion piece by Simon Tilford
    The Guardian, 05 July 2009

    Britain's Eurosceptics need to come clean. The media and political class have a right to be sceptical about the EU, even hostile to it. But they also have an obligation to be honest about the economic implications of a retreat from full membership of the union.

  • A painful recession in Europe, uncertain prospects for the Lisbon treaty, a looming gas crisis in Ukraine and a lame-duck Commission are some of the challenges that the Swedish EU presidency will have to deal with in the second half of 2009.