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 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.
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.
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.
In this end-of-year podcast, Tyson Barker and I discuss what PESCO means for the future of NATO, and tell you what to watch for as 2018 dawns.
Germany's political future is now uncertain after 'Jamaica' coalition talks collapsed. Meanwhile, the global climate coalition is holding strong after a summit in Bonn.
