Authoritarian rulers are known for having an ambivalent relationship with reality. If promises do not match actual developments, then discrepancies must be made invisible. The problem is that the longer one denies those discrepancies, the greater they usually become. Too little is done then. It’s hard to fight issues that don’t officially exist. In Turkey, discrepencies can no longer be ignored.
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Will the economy remove Erdogan from office?
The logic of sanctions – or: Why gas pipelines won’t decide the Ukraine conflict
Much of the world wants to prevent Putin’s Russia from invading Ukraine. The means of prevention: setting the price, Putin would have to pay, as high as possible. The west has ruled out military means to inflate the price. For a good reason. The costs of a military conflict between Russia on the one hand and Europa and the USA on the other would be immense, not just for Putin.
Read moreItalians take their time: How the country elects the president
🇮🇹 / Italian president Johannes Eber Good morning, you may wonder why Italian’s voting for the next president started on Monday but it is still not decided who will follow president Sergio Mattarella, whose term will end on 3 February. So here is
Read moreYou’d better understand the Serbs
🇷🇸 / Novak Djokovic / #73 By Johannes Eber When I was a teenager, Germany had an athlete as a national hero: tennis player Boris Becker. I had never been interested in tennis, Germany had never been interested in tennis. That
Read moreWhat you (probably) don’t know about Ukraine
There is so much writing about Ukraine these days. For good reasons. The threats from Putin’s Russia could lead to war.
I asked myself what I could add to help understand that conflict. Thinking about it, I realised that I know very little about the basics and Ukraine’s history. Maybe you feel the same.
So I’ve put together some facts I hadn’t known before delving into preparing for writing this post. Even if the following points have nothing to do directly with the current situation, they might be a bit enlightening. Because as always: knowing the past helps to understand the present.
Read moreIs Milorad Dodik a secessionist?
When I was in my early twenties, the Bosnian War dominated the daily news. Horrible pictures of people fleeing snipers in Sarajevo, in Srebrenica.
When peace returned (at least on paper) in the mid-1990s, my attention on the region disappeared. To be honest: Until a few months ago I would probably not have found the Republika Srpska on a nameless map. Republika Srpska is one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The region is back in global public because of one man: Milorad Dodik
Read moreHow powerful is the EU presidency?
A certain topic pops up in the news at regular intervals. That is the EU presidency. Mostly it is on the news when the presidency changes (it does every six months). Like now, when France took over from Slovenia at the beginning of this year (and got most of the attention for removing an EU flag from the Arc de Triomphe after causing a stir). But what actually happens in the meantime? Does the EU presidency matter for the European Union?
How important is the presidency for the European Union?
Read moreDon’t set the price, set the rules!
Why higher taxes on meat and milk aren’t a good idea Johannes Eber – Good morning Europe blog There is an ongoing debate (in german) in Germany whether some food should become more expensive. The new German Minister of Agriculture,
Read moreA better plan: How to spend the money from the EU’s recovery plan
Which tasks do we need the European Union for? The short answer is: We need the European Union to produce those public goods that extend beyond the nation state Infrastructure can be such a good. If one country builds a cross-border railway line, its residents benefit from it. But not only theirs: the people in whose country the train route leads, benefit too. Though, since only the benefits of the building country’s population (voters) are regularly included in political decisions, too few cross-border train routes are built.
Read moreShould nuclear power and gas be classified as green energies? There is a better way
The EU commission wants to classify both nuclear and gas as “green” investments. On the evening of New Year’s Eve, the commission had sent member states a draft of its awaited so-called “taxonomy” list, laying out a classification system that determines which energy sources can be labelled green for investment purposes. What would the consequences of such classification be?
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