The past 6 months revealed that the root of many problems of the EU is not only to find in the institutions, but also in the leadership. Eurocrats, opinion-makers, you guys failed. Hard words, but look at this: remember the class-fire on the Hungarian media law? From the UK to Romania, everyone had a word [...]

A society is held together along it’s cultural and historic heritage, which are normally wrapped up in constitutions. The European Union is made up of societies which do have common values, but have at least just as many differences. The European constitution – which seemed to be more than a dream some years ago – [...]

Hungary is now in the depths of its presidential term. I decided to point out some of my reflections on the issue, but I would also ask you to do exactly the same by posting a comment. I wonder how Europeans judge the first-ever Hungarian EU-presidency. The everyday routine of the European (public) administration seems [...]

Hungary has been criticised for a lot of actions in the past few months, but nothing serious happened after all. A good old European habit – some could say, because the Union is traditionally hardly able to stick up for its needs effectively. But this time it’s not the matter of political potence, but of [...]

By introducing European Semester, the flagship of today’s European economic programme and by being authorized to somewhat control national budgets, the Commission wants to be seen as primus inter pares among the member states. But there are three possible obstacles too. First – authorization This authorization is not wrong in itself, what we can be [...]

Altiero Spinelli was the heavyweight of the European federalist movement, first as activist, then as a very hardworking MEP. What does classic federalism want? In a nutshell it’s autonomy of the member states, under a common judicial and legislational authority, and the citizens’ democratic rights are provided by the Union. As decades went by federalism [...]

Many people think, some even hope that the future of the EU leads into a federal superstate. The idea is not completely groundless, as the EU member states slowly – but surely – give up more and more of their sovereignty, which is often told to be irreversible (as the matter of fact, the authorization [...]

Honestly, nothing new was revealed at today’s conference in Budapest, where European Council president Mr. Herman van Rompuy addressed the audience, in the company of Mr. János Martonyi (Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Mr. József Pálinkás (president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). Nevertheless, it was worth seeing. See some of the reasons. First [...]

Today’s politicians and political journalists seem to try to set the readers’ mind against nationalism. A month ago The Washington Post published an article, warning Europeans to take serious the rise of nationalist movements, as they put the existence of the EU at risk. The author also says that European infrastructure is dimmed by national [...]

In my previous post I noted that the first step to bridge the gap between individuals and the European level is the flow of coherent information. Now this one is about the second, also necessary step, which is (in one word) legitimacy. Most of us agree that the best method in a democracy to obtain [...]