Retiring the Euroblog

It's been a fun ride, but all good things must come to an end.

I started this blog in 2005, when I was still living in my native America covering the US Congress in Washington. I had just read Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream and had become fascinated by the European Union, a subject which had surprisingly formed very little of my studies in European History in college. 

Facing disillusionment with US politics (largely but not exclusively due to the Iraq War), I resolved to move to Europe to cover EU politics instead. Figuring out a way to do it was a long circuitous process that involved moving to four different European cities and acquiring a new citizenship. But I got to Brussels eventually, after a three-year stint in London first.

This blog was a way for me to start writing about the European Union while my day job was still as a finance journalist covering private equity investment in London. Looking back at those first entries, it's funny how much I didn't understand. As an American who had never been taught anything about the European Union, I was coming at it from a complete dearth of knowledge. But I soon realized that for this I was in good company in Europe. Particularly in the UK, I found that even the best and brightest knew nothing about how their 'federal' level of governance worked. I resolved to try to do my small part to change that.

It's been a wild ride since then. My two-year sojourn in Berlin from 2015 to 2017 helped me get out of the Brussels bubble and see how things are translating on the ground. Now I'm back in Brussels and, as suspected, finding myself much busier than I was in Berlin. As I've already written, Berlin is not a great city for working - especially in the international field. But it was great fun.

With this new Brussels business, I'm finding I just don't have the time to keep up with this blog. So I'm going to officially retire it. Thanks to all the followers who have kept up with it over the past decade, those heady days in the mid-2000s when we were all just starting our Euroblogs seem like a lifetime away now. 

Of course, you can keep reading and watching my work on other channels: at my website www.DaveKeating.net and on Twitter @DaveKeating. 

An Americaless NATO: should they be pushed before they jump?

Donald Trump threatened to pull the United States out of NATO at last week's summit in Brussels. Perhaps European leaders should call his bluff. A European Treaty Organisation may be the only logical way forward.

As Donald Trump stood beside Vladimir Putin on Monday and stated that he believes the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies, you could feel a collective shudder pass across Europe.

"If Trump isn't even willing to side with his own intelligence agencies over Russia right now, why would anyone think he would side with us?” one Latvian friend sent me in a text. “NATO is finished. And if NATO is finished, Latvia is finished."

There has been much speculation since Monday over why Trump would defy his own intelligence, his own party and even his own advisors in refusing to acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election. But whatever the reason, Trump’s summit with Putin, immediately following his aggressive attacks on NATO during his visit to Brussels, have left many Europeans with only one conclusion: we’re on our own now.

Will Cyprus stay in perpetual division?

With EU-Turkey relations at an all-time low, the reunification of Cyprus seems like a distant prospect. This week I saw an island where the frozen conflict has become largely normalized. Unlike in Berlin, this wall doesn't look like its falling any time soon.

Sometimes, old wounds just won't heal. So it is with the island of Cyprus, where a 180 kilometer scar runs from shore to shore, and has been festering for four decades.

I visited the island for the first time this week, and those wounds were on display right from the start. As my plane flew across Greek Cyprus, over the capital Nicosia, I could see the giant Turkish flag painted on the mountains to the north, taunting the Greeks. It reminded me of the Alexanderplatz TV Tower in Berlin, built to be unavoidably visible everywhere in West Berlin during the Cold War.

The trip was, admittedly, somewhat of a box-checking exercise. Of the 32 European Union and EFTA countries, there are three left that I haven't visited - Cyprus, Slovenia and Romania. I'm heading to Slovenia next month for a conference, and have resolved to do a weekend in Bucharest before the year is done. Then - I win?

A Trumpian trade war, a new German government, and an Italian election mess

A new government is finally ready to take office in Germany, just in time for a threatened trade war from Washington and political chaos in Europe's fourth largest economy.

In rejecting spitzenkandidaten, Macron has let the perfect be the enemy of the good

National leaders, led by Emmanuel Macron, have refused a European Parliament demand that citizens should select the next EU president. The reasons have more to do with institutional rivalries than citizens’ interests.

“Don’t count your spitzens before they hatch,” tweeted Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė ominously as she entered Friday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels. 

The Lithuanian president was referring to the so-called ‘spitzenkandidaten’ process, used in the last European Parliament elections in 2014 for the first time to select the European Commission President as a result of the public vote. National leaders of the 27 future EU member states (that is, all except the UK) were meeting Friday to decide whether to use the process again in next year’s election.

The latest on Brexit and German coalition formation

As Brexit negotiations continue in Brussels and coalition negotiations continue in Berlin, Tyson Barker and I discuss what's next for both of these contentious talks in this month's Brussels2Berlin podcast.