The Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent Bruno Waterfield has made an interesting contribution to a pamphlet by the Manifesto Club, No Means No! Essays on the Eve of the European Council Meeting.

Ignore the populist eurosceptic rhetoric of the title, there’s actually a lot of interest here. (Seriously, sensible eurosceptic chaps – I know you’ve got to try and attract attention and so some sensationalism is necessary to liven up what is a very dull subject, but if you’re going to win over undecideds rather than just preach to the converted, a little more subtlety is necessary. If it wasn’t for the fact that Waterfield asked nicely and sometimes joins in the comment-box discussions here, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading past the title, and would have missed a lot of good stuff.)

The basic argument is as follows:

The EU has evolved, not as a federal super-state that crushes nations underfoot, but as an expanding set of structures and practices that have allowed Europe’s political elites to conduct increasing areas of policy without reference to the public…

The EU has never been about abolishing national interests, but always about managing them in a manner convenient for Europe’s political classes, in a public-free zone, with consensus arrived at through bureaucratic procedures derived from the secretive world of diplomacy…

The lack of accountability and the expediency of EU politics means that in many areas, including foreign policy, the EU’s inter-elite bureaucratic requirements have overridden principles of internationalism, democratic rights or justice. EU decision-making is essentially value free. Consensus comes first, meaning that principles can be traded off against the expediency of making deals, or ‘effectiveness’.

…the EU is not a system of representation or a public authority. It is a set of institutions and relationships organised for the convenience for national state bureaucracies

As such, Waterfield’s essay goes to the heart of this ongoing dispute about both the “democratic deficit” and future direction of the EU that’s a perennial favourite among those of us who like to blather on about the thing, and ends up effectively a short overview of the more secretive aspects of EU decision-making – and a very useful one at that. I do urge you to go have a look, while below the fold I’ll blather on at length.

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My only real criticism (bar a tendency to rely on the work of Marxist historian Perry Anderson, the former editor of the New Left Review) is my perennial one when it comes to attacks on the EU’s secrecy and lack of democracy: I can’t help wishing for a little more context. It would in particular have been nice, both for the uninitiated and to put things in perspective, to have a bit of comparison with other systems of government.

For example, Waterfield notes that the unelected Coreper meets five times a week and handles 90% of EU legislation, mostly secretively. Fine – if the people who sit on Coreper have ambassadorial status, doesn’t that effectively make them senior Civil Servants, like the UK’s Permanent Secretaries and Directors General? If so, a) what’s so bad about them being unelected when their equivalents in national governments are also unelected, and b) what’s so bad about initial policy discussions being secretive, when most initial policy discussions are (usually) secretive at a national level as well?

Waterfield also quotes Danish eurosceptic Jens-Peter Bonde (though referring to him merely as an “expert” – which he is, but he’s also a former co-chair of the eurosceptic Indepeandence and Democracy Group in the European Parliament, a position he shared with UKIP’s Nigel Farage). Bonde may well be right that “70 per cent of all EU legislation is ‘de facto’ decided in 300 secret working groups in the Council” (it would certainly back up the arguments of those of us who always argue that “EU legislation” is nothing of the kind, always being formulated instead by the member states), but surely there are countless equivalents to these working groups in national bureaucracies, or else no legislation would ever be drawn up anywhere? Are the national equivalents more open?

Indeed, can new policies and new legislation even be drawn up completely transparently, considering that the vast majority of legislation needs to balance the needs of competing groups while irritating and alienating as few people as possible? When drafting a new law, surely all possibilities need to be considered, which would lead to minutes showing that various insane extremes were discussed – and the press would have a field day. So I can’t agree with Waterfield when he claims that “A national interest is and should be a public thing” – what about discussions relating to foreign policy and diplomacy (and, arguably, all discussions between EU member states fall into these categories)? Too much openness and transparency about discussions could lead to severely damaged relations with other powers. (As Waterfield himself notes later on, “To place a record of negotiations into the public realm risks unravelling consensus between governments.” Sometimes things need to be kept secret – in the national interest.) The question is whether the EU is more or less open and accountable than other governmental bodies.

Nonetheless, on the role of the Council Waterfield is certainly compelling in his arguments that this highly secretive final arbiter of EU decision-making is gradually watering down the people’s power to influence anything at all when it comes to the EU. To whose advantage? Considering the rising tide of resentment we’ve seen in the French, Dutch and Irish referenda, and the gradual swelling of discontent that can be witnessed among the world of the Euroblogs, it’s certainly not helping the EU. It’s the governments of the member states that make up the Council – so little wonder that it is national politicians who get the most out of the arrangement, while (as so often) the EU as a whole takes all the blame.

You see, the Council, I would argue, is not “the EU”. When people think of “the EU”, they still think of the Commission, and possibly the European Parliament. Yet in recent years the Commission has been pushing for greater openness and deregulation and Parliament for more power; the Council has been resisting. The problems and the madness more often stem from the Council than from anywhere else; the stupid/unhelpful comments come more from the national politicians than the Commission (even though the Commissioners are all former national politicians, many of whom hope to return to national politics after their terms are up, they tend to have their rhetoric tempered somewhat while at the Commission, forced by their positions to see the whole picture where those who sit on the Council look primarily to their narrow “national” interest).

So why do we still refer to things decided in Council as “EU decisions”? The EU as a body didn’t decide – the governments of the member states did, often by overruling other parts of the EU. As such, it is them – not the EU as a whole – who should get the blame. Indeed, almost everything that is wrong with the EU – from the continued disaster of the Common Agricultural Policy to the general lack of purpose through to the constant uproar over the accounts not being signed off – can be blamed on the governments of the member states, not on the EU machinery itself.

Brussels bureaucrats may always get the blame, in other words, but it is the politicians and bureaucrats of the various member states who are the real problem.

(One final aside – after reading Waterfield’s essay I think it’s high time for those of us in favour of European integration to stop falling into the eurosceptic/anti-EU trap of referring to ourselves as pro-EU. Hardly any “pro-EU” bloggers are in favour of the EU in its current form – I’m certainly not. Instead, it’s time for us to start referring to ourselves as pro-European again.)

So, will the European Citizens’ Consultation forum, launched yesterday in a variety of EU languages, actually prove a success?

Based on past attempts, I don’t hold out much hope – these things are usually either ignored (remember Timothy Garton-Ash’s European Story initiative? No? Precisely…), or quickly swamped by foaming-at-the-mouth British eurosceptics making “witty” comments and generally making their fellow countrymen look like a bunch of rude idiots (read the comments at Margot Wallstrom’s blog or on the Debate Europe forum recently?)

So, which is it going to be – ignored or hijacked by the anti-EU brigade?

Pessimist? Moi? Well, after five years of vague attempts to encourage constructive online discussion of the EU (albeit with precisely zero resources), and having witnessed the EU-focussed blogosphere expand by only a tiny fraction during that time despite several concerted efforts, I have good reason to be.

The EU, you see, is very, very dull and very, very complicated. Dull and complicated things are not the most attractive at the best of times. (And yes, I have indeed noted this before. Many, many times.)

How to make people want to discuss the EU more? Simple: give them some indication that their input is valuable. At the moment, there is none: “Come vote for an MEP (usually on a party list system) of whom you’ve never heard to go to Brussels and Strasbourg to vote on things over which they have little control (being proposed by the Commission and easily vetoed by the Council) and about which you’ll never hear (unless they make the tabloids)!” – Hardly the most rousing call to increased democratic engagement, is it? Yet that’s all the peoples of Europe have currently got.

Little wonder that European elections – and referendums – always end up so parochial. And little wonder that the EU itself continues to inspire so little interest among the people it supposedly exists to benefit.

A few more post-Irish Referendum thoughts – because the EU really, really needs to know what it is that it should be doing if it’s to work out what is the best way forward from its ongoing Constitutional/Lisbon Treaty navel-gazing. More suggestions for priorities gratefully received in the comments.

Two starting assumptions for this list:

1) Institutional reform remains necessary (largely thanks to the short-sightedness of the earlier treaties: it is, after all, entirely possible to have rules for a club of 6 or 15 that also work for a club of 27 – it’s just that the people drawing up those rules made them inflexible), but it’s not essential for the EU to continue to function

2) Neither the Lisbon Treaty nor the Constitution really dealt with what I see as the EU’s two biggest problems (the Common Agricultural Project and the dominance of Russia in the continent’s energy supply) anyway

So, on with a few vague thoughts on the main problems and priorities, in approximate order of importance:

The Common Agricultural Policy
- if anything, more of a priority than institutional reform
- Since expansion to 25/27 the balance of economic power within the EU has shifted yet again, making the current balance of CAP payments (with wealthy France getting 22% of all CAP payments in 2004, despite having only 17% of the EU’s agricultural land, while EU countries with 35% of agricultural land between them received only 18%) ever more indefensible.
- The concurrent rise of a global food shortage further heightens the inanity of a system that sees (to oversimplify) farmers paid for producing nothing and good food go to waste, while simultaneously diminishing the ability of third world countries to compete effectively.
- The CAP also eats up around 44% of the EU’s annual budget, and accounts for the majority of the accounting dodginess that keeps leading to the EU’s accounts not being signed off year after year

Energy supply
- With the current “fuel crisis” only likely to worsen (peak oil, anyone? Even if you don’t buy that argument, it doesn’t take a genius economist to work out that finite resource + increasing demand = rising prices)
- Europe’s own energy resources are, shall we say, inadequate for the long-term stability of a continent with the best part of half a billion people
- Russia is increasingly gaining a monopoly on the supply of natural gas to Europe, and this dominance is only going to increase. Russia (or, more accurately, state energy company Gazprom, whose former Chairman is, erm… the current President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, and likely to be replaced by, erm… Vladimir Putin) has also shown herself quite happy to withhold supply to gain concessions
- Stability of energy supply is essential for the European economy – short-term that means security of supply from Russia (and Central Asia and the Middle East), medium to long-term it means finding viaible alternatives, be that nuclear, wind, wave, solar or whatever

An ageing population
- Average life expectancy in the EU may have dropped a bit with the accession of economically less well-off eastern European states over the last few years, but the general trend is clear: Europeans are living longer than ever before
- Whether encouraging the reform of pensions, retirement ages, working hours and the rest should be an EU competence is an area of much controversy (myself? Not convinced it should be) – but one of the few indisputable findings of that Tomorrow’s Europe deliberative poll event I attended in Brussels last year was that the people of Europe feel that their governments/the EU should do more to ensure that its citizens are provided for in old age
(As a semi-related aside – though one that’s utterly unrelated to the main point – why are we limiting the amount of time people can legally work? If people want to work more, let them – they have more to put into their own pensions and savings, taking pressure off the state, and end up paying more taxes, taking pressure off the state. Why should anyone ever be prevented from working if they want to?)

The lack of agreement on the EU’s core purpose
- Is it primarily a trading union, or should the EU be pushing for a “Social Europe” – those strike me as the two extremes, though there’s any number of additional disagreements. Are they incompatible?

The lack of consultation with the people
- Whether you’re a believer in the EU’s “democratic deficit” or not (and it’s certainly not as clear cut a case of a lack of democracy as some claim), one of the few similarities between the French, Dutch and Irish referenda on the Constitution/Lisbon Treaty on which most commentators have been agreed is the sense that the “No” votes came in part due to disillusionment with the political class
- Europe is a continent with more than its fair share of experience of dictatorship and absolutism, with a large majority of EU member states having experienced periods of military/undemocratic rule within living memory, during which time literally millions of Europeans have been killed and murdered by the self-same nation states who have now banded together for the good of the continent – to now deny the citizens of Europe a say in their future smacks of taking the piss; and yet the people have never been asked what they want from the EU

The lack of knowledge of the people
- The one point of agreement from those who voted “No” in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum was that they didn’t really know what the Lisbon Treaty was all about – but I’d wager it’s not just the Lisbon Treaty that’s a mystery. I’d put at least a tenner on there being a majority of EU citizens who similarly couldn’t tell you the difference between the Council of Europe, the European Council and the Council of the European Union, another tenner on their not being able to tell you the difference between an EU resolution and an EU directive, another tenner on them not being able to explain the powers of the European Parliament, another tenner on a majority not being able to pick either European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering or European Commission President José Manuel Barroso out of a line-up, and yet another tenner on a majority thinking that the European Court of Human Rights is an EU institution (clue: it isn’t).
- Without some understanding of how the EU functions and what its competences are the people will not – by definition – be able to make sensible choices. (For example, that poll finding on pensions I mentioned above? The one problem with that is that I’m not convinced that the participants were made sufficiently aware that pensions are not an EU competence; nor was there a question asking whether they thought pensions should be an EU competence)
- This is certainly related to the old arguments about the lack of a European demos, but even more fundamental – because a demos cannot emerge until the base level of public knowledge is sufficient to support one; if there is no demand for EU information and discussion, there will be no supply
- This is not something the EU can easily tackle without being accused of propagandising

Possible others included for completeness’ sake (though I’m not necessarily convinced about either):
- Climate Change (the argument runs: if the world is warming the food crisis will worsen and Russian dominance increase as the steppes become viable agricultural land; it may also lead to infrastructure damage and increased migration)
- Migration/Immigration to the EU (the argument runs: non-European immigration is on the rise, and this is threatening to overwhelm European public services and/or European culture)

Gordon Brown, 2000: “Some people might think Ken Livingstone is funny, but saddling London with him for four years is no laughing matter”

The same has repeatedly been said about the man Johnson over the last four weeks along with a number of wild allegations based largely on out of context quotation – much the same as the whole “Ken’s an anti-Semite” nonsense.

More worrying have been the unsupported assertions based on little more than the outdated 1980s belief that all Tories are evil – my parents are Tories, and I can assure you that they are not. More to the point, people were voting in the mayoral elections who weren’t even born when Thatcher was in power. Using her as the all-conquering bogeyman simply isn’t a viable electoral strategy any more. (It’s a bit pathetic it ever was, if you think about it – after all, it was the Tories, not Labour, who got rid of her…)

Ken did a halfway decent job over the last eight years , along with a bunch of very impressive achievements. I have little reason to believe that Boris can’t do similarly – and no reason to think he’ll be a disaster. His acceptance speech certainly started on the right bipartisan (even tripartisan) note, and he’s blatantly not a typical Tory no matter the colour of his rosette, educational history and accent. I’m hopeful.

Furthermore, anyone who thinks that Boris and Boris alone will be calling the shots in London simply doesn’t get how politics works. Or how the Mayor’s office works, for that matter – it simply doesn’t have as much power as everyone seems to think. Ken was just very good at giving the impression that all the successes were thanks to him and him alone.

All this hyperbole being spewed about Johnson from normally sensible left-wing sources* – not to mention the dismissal of over a million Londoners who picked him as their first choice as merely “doing it for a laugh” – is doing the British left no good at all.

Boris Johnson is not some monster – by painting him as such when he blatantly is not is going to rub off badly on you, not him. Just as it rubbed off on Labour badly when they tried the same trick with Ken back in 2000. (That certainly helped push me towards voting for the guy…)

If the left/Labour can’t get over the snide remarks, personal attacks and class prejudice that seems to imbue every aspect of their relationship with the Conservative Party – and, ideally, come up with some practical left-wing policies rather than populist and ill-considered appeals to the middle-classes and big business – they are going to continue to slide in the polls to the point of embarrassing defeat.

And serve them right. (Labour promising cuts to corporation tax while the Tories run to the defence of impoverished single mothers? Come on, guys…). The worry is the knock-on effect – not just driving people who care to the extremes of right and left, but meaning that the Tories don’t have to fight for power.

Boris had to fight, and fight hard – because Ken was a formidable and principled oponent. He’s not going to forget that in a hurry; he’s going to be fully aware that a sizable chunk of the capital don’t like him and that a sizable chunk of the country want him to fail. And it’s going to make him work even harder.

But the way the rest of the Labour party is going, the next election is going to be handed to the Tories on a plate. They won’t even need to bother knocking on doors at this rate. And power gained that easily is never going to engender respect – either from politicians or public. Labour have had a free run for most of the last decade or more, and just look what happened to them…

* I won’t link to any specifics as I hope they’ll see how silly they’re being soon, but have a gander at some of the tripe the Guardian’s been spewing over the last few days for an idea of the tone and content

I’ve been planning a long piece on this for months, ever since that whole openDemocracy thing I did back in the autumn (which is, it turns out, what got me shortlisted for that Reuters award thing, rather than this place), but haven’t quite found the time.

The short version (guaranteed to rile the eurosceptics): nope, the EU’s not democratic – and nor should it be if Britain’s interests are going to be maintained. (I’ll try and explain in more detail at some point, but it’s unlikely to be overly soon…)

Anyway, back to the original starting point for this post. Amongst the usual stuck record of eurosceptic complaints under Timothy Garton-Ash’s latest offering about the EU over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free yesterday (I sometimes read these things just to remind myself why I’m not slipping back into full-on eurosceptic mode, despite the repeated disappointments, annoyances and embarrassments that come with being pro-EU*), this little beauty leapt out, by poster “tooter”. It’s one of the best succinct rejoinders to the perennial “the EU’s not democratic” complaint I’ve seen in quite a while, and echoes many of my own views:

I think this “democratic deficit” thing is overdone. The appointees you are on about are put there by people we elect. Great chunks of our government is run in the same way – the House of Lords being the most glaring example, but there are others, Quangos, the Judiciary (!), the PM (!) to name but a few.

Take one example, the European Central Bank. I read over and over again, as an argument against the Euro, about sinister “faceless bureaucrats” who will run our economy for us from Frankfurt. Well the ECB is accountable to no less than FOUR of the European institutions.

Who is the Bank of England accountable to? Can anybody name even two members of the MPC without googling? Are they not, therefore, “faceless bureaucrats” running our economy from London?

What do the europhobes think we are living in now?

He/she later came back with a quick, even snappier follow-up, reiterating the point:

“We British have something called a “Parliamentary Democracy”, as do most of Europe. We never elect our Prime Minister, we elect Members of Parliament. It is these Members who choose the PM. The PM is an appointee. As are the entire House of Lords. As are the Judiciary. As are the Generals, senior civil servants, heads of Agencies and othe Quangos, the Cabinet, Chief Constables, Bishops etc etc

So, europhobes, how “undemocratic” is the EU again?

I too am intrigued by the answer to this. Because the arguments against the EU employed by eurosceptics who have moved beyond petty patriotism (which, to be fair, is an increasingly large proportion these days – and to be clear I mean patriotism in the strict sense, with no nasty connotations) increasingly revolve around criticisms of inefficiencies and failures that are also invariably present at a national – even local – level of government. Because, after all, no system of government ever devised is perfect.

Yet when it comes to the EU, for the eurosceptics it seems that nothing less than perfection will do.

Or am I being incredibly unfair and/or missing the point?

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* By the way, I really, really need a better term than “pro-EU” to describe my attitude to the whole thing. Because as should be clear to regular readers I’m not a loyal cheerleader for the EU by any means, and advocate fairly radical reform. I remain a supporter of a European Union of some kind, and of close cross-border political and economic co-operation – and in some case integration – of the kind the EU helps facilitate, but not necessarily this European Union.

In the good old days, this would have labelled me a eurosceptic in the true sense (inasmuch as I am sceptical of the benefits of a number of things the EU is doing) – but now that that term has become synonymous with “anti-EU”, what’s left for those of us who are neither europhiles nor eurosceptics, but occupy that vague middle-ground of being largely in favour of EU membership while wishing the whole thing was just a bit, y’know, better? Because that does, after all, account for the attitude of the vast majority of the British population – it seems very odd that there’s not a term for us all…

Someone got in touch to ask some questions about citizen journalism and the July 2005 London terrorist attacks. My response ended up getting rather lengthy as I went off on one, so I reckoned I may as well post it. Could prove interesting to some, even if it is another of those blogging about blogging things I thought I’d stopped doing.

> On the topic of Citizen Journalism

1: What do you define as Citizen journalism?

I see it as largely just a new term for a combination of the old “eyewitness report” and “vox pops“, only with added levels of self-satisfaction from media types (journalists assuming that everyone wants to be a journalist) and with the added benefit (for news organisations) that they don’t have to go to the trouble of sending a reporter to the area to find (and verify the claims of) the eyewitness in question, or stand around on a street corner with a microphone asking the plebs what they think. Now the eyewitnesses and plebs come to them, making the whole thing much cheaper and easier – hence its boom.

Sometimes, however, it seems to be conflated with/used as a rather silly synonym for “blogger” – silly because very few bloggers produce journalism in the sense of reportage, it’s mostly just comment. (I wouldn’t count Polly Toynbee and Richard Littlejohn as journalists for similar reasons – although I’d chuck in their lack of any kind of objectivity, logic or writing ability, naturally…)

There is the rare occasion that a blogger happens to be on the spot during a major story and so can do a bit of primary research for a change, and possibly get quoted in the press (such as many London-based bloggers during July 2005, or Ukranian bloggers during the Orange Revolution of November 2004, my first experience of such a phenomenon), but that hardly makes them a journalist any more than my Mum would count as a journalist because she once had a letter published in the Telegraph.

2: Do you feel citizen journalism is a threat to traditional media outlets such as newspapers or television news?

Yes – because the current trend towards ever more audience interaction means too many news outlets are using such content without fact-checking them first (hence Sky News using “citizen journalist” pictures of the floods in Yorkshire last year that turned out to be agency pictures of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or photoshopped to include things like flying saucers or Madeleine McCann). It’s ruining the reliability of professional news outlets, dumbing them down, leading to all sorts of (usually inadvertent) copyright infringement, giving less space for proper reportage and investigative journalism, and is even – in the case of newspapers/magazines that allow comments on EVERY article – degrading and detracting from genuinely quality journalism by seeming to treat the comments as somehow as worthy of the reader’s consideration as the original piece.

3: How do you feel citizen journalism will effect the future of traditional journalism? Will it overtake it entirely, fade into the background or continue to co exist?

It’ll hopefully fade into the background as more and more high-profile practical jokes are played on news organisations desperate to be hip and with it by including the stuff, and as more and more news organisations realise that by allowing comments on news articles they risk damaging their brands by being associated with the kinds of inane ranting that generally comes to dominate such places, and as their message boards start getting them into trouble with the law (as has happened a few times as comment posters incite racial/religious hatred, break court orders, post confidential information, libel people and the like).

Comment-led blogs will continue pretty much as long as the internet does, though – everyone likes to rant about the news, and they’re just the latest in a long tradition of pamphleteering that dates back to the dawn of the age of the printing press, simply using a new medium.

I also very much hope that the rise of good-quality free comment pieces online via the blogs may finally lead newspapers to abandon their current drive towards comment-led content (the Guardian and Independent are especially guilty of this), and start to return to an emphasis on high-quality original reportage. I doubt it, though, sadly. Original investigative reporting’s simply too expensive, and gives little financial return.

4: What do you feel are the advantages of operating as a citizen journalist? Are there any disadvantages?

Proper citizen journalists – in the sense of non-professionals who actively go out to investigate and cover breaking news – are a pretty much a myth, inasmuch as there are very, very few blogs which run off the back of original, first-hand reporting. There have been a few examples of this – there was one blogger who got his readers to fund his stay in Iraq a couple of years back (though his name escapes me Update:here he is), and there are a few big bloggers in the US who bring in enough advertising revenue to survive on their blogging income alone – but the idea of someone who has the time and resources to hunt down stories all on their own on a regular enough basis to get noted is just silly.

After all, “citizen journalists” have no funding, no resources, no access to the newswires, no way of getting to the story – and are still rarely taken seriously by people they may want to approach for an interview. This is why most examples of citizen journalism that have been high profile have been random, unpredictable incidents like disasters (the 7/7 bombs, the Buncefield explosion and the like) where someone’s happened to be on the scene, and happened to have a blog. In these cases someone briefly becomes a citizen journalist before going back to writing about what they normally write about – they don’t then turn into Tintin and start charging off in pursuit of the next big story.

The vast majority of what gets dubbed “citizen journalism” is merely comment, usually based on what’s in the day’s papers – and that’s no different to someone ranting down the pub or round the watercooler (although in rare cases it can be far more entertaining and informative than some of the rubbish people get paid to churn out in the national press). The few big scoops claimed by blogs – like the Drudge Report’s stories about the Monica Lewinsky affair and Prince Harry in Afghanistan – have generally come off the back of investigative work by professional journalists – Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff in the case of Lewinsky, Australian mag New Idea and German paper Berliner Kurier in the case of Prince Harry.

5: When reporting, do you consider the ethical and legal practices prevalent in Traditional Journalism such as impartiality, objectivity, privacy and defamation? Do you strive for detachment or do you think it adds to the piece in some cases?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I make sure not to libel anyone, try not to break copyright too much (says the person who’s illustrating this post with a copyrighted image of Tintin, the ultimate journalist), and generally try not to swear these days, but the blog’s a bit of fun that I do in my spare time, with most posts rough first drafts, nothing more. If people want me to produce more professional content, they need to start paying me…

(I also very much contest the assertion that objectivity is prevalent in traditional journalism – have you read a newspaper recently? They all have agendas, be it promoting Rupert Murdoch’s business interests, general political stance, or blowing non-stories out of all proportion because the people at the heart of it are pretty middle-class teenagers, as with the recent Ecuador bus crash.)

6: Why did you decide to start your blog? Were there specific issues you felt needed to be taken up?

Back in March 2003 I was bored with all the build-up to the Iraq war that was dominating the news, so looked to European politics for an alternative. I also fancied a bit of a brain challenge, and knew that the EU is so insanely complicated that it would keep me going for years trying to work it out. Plus I thought it would be a good way of keeping my writing up, as I was going through a lean patch work-wise at the time. There was no political agenda – and still isn’t – and I had precisely no expectation that anyone would end up reading what I was writing. If I had had any issues I wanted to take up, I’d have written to my MP – because at the time the web still hadn’t quite been proven as a worthwhile campaigning tool. (And I’m not much of a one for campaigning anyway…)

7:Do you find, not being a certified journalist, that sometimes it is difficult to

I think part of the question’s missing… (And what is a certified journalist anyway? Do we have those in Britain? I’ve been doing this for a living for the best part of a decade, but have never had anything to prove that it’s my job. Do shop assistants or farmers need to be certified as such?)

8: Do you feel it is important for citizen journalists to maintain a high quality of reporting? Do you find it difficult?

It doesn’t seem to matter to the big news organisations that pick them up – especially if you include the texts and emails that get used daily on the news as citizen journalism. It’s mostly illiterate, ill-informed rubbish.

For bloggers, yes and no – most of the biggest political/current affairs bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic are rubbish in terms both of content and writing ability, and it often seems that to become popular you have to pander to the lowest common denominator, meaning standards have to drop.

I try to keep a moderately high standard largely because I make my living through writing and editing – to have a load of crap on my blog may stop people from hiring me, while to have quality content can get me more work. (And has done a lot, actually…) But then again, as I write for a living, every word I type and put out for free on the blog is also a word I’m not being paid for. It’s like a dentist going around doing free root canal work – very nice, and all, but it doesn’t pay the rent, so I’m not going to spend that much time on it if I can help it.

9: how do you choose the news you report? Is it personal interest or something else? How do you go about researching and reporting it?

Personal interest combined with (now) a vague feeling of obligation to the readers – I’ve been doing this five years now and have become one of the leading English language European politics bloggers, so there are some subjects I really have to cover, even if I’m personally bored with it. I’ll still fail to update for several days at a time if I’ve got too much work on, though…

In terms of how I go about researching posts? Google. Pretty much all I do is compile information from other sources into a more or less coherent, alternate take on a story or subject. I’ve done a bit of first-hand investigative stuff in my time, and it’s not really for me. I enjoy digging through books and articles and forming a defensible, interesting opinion based on as many different angles as possible – preferably an opinion that I haven’t seen anywhere else (otherwise, what’s the point?). It all comes through being a trained historian, I guess…

10: How important do you believe accuracy is in blogging? Is it essential or should it be sacrificed to convey a message in some instances?

Depends what kind of blogging you’re doing – but generally speaking if you’re inaccurate you’ll get called on it, assuming anyone’s bothering to read your stuff. If you get a reputation for inaccuracy online, same as in proper media, no one will bother reading your stuff.

Unless you’re entertaining about it or deliberately pander to the lunatic fringe, of course… In which case inaccuracy’s a positive bonus in the online world, as long as it fits in to your own little fringe group’s particular conspiracy theory.

11: As someone who has had experience with traditional journalism, how do you feel it could benefit from Citizen journalism? Would it do well to take aspects from Citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism in the way I define it? No benefit whatsoever – quite the opposite, in fact, as it mostly just exposes news organisations as gullible cheapskates.

As a synonym for blogging? All it’s really done is show traditional media organisations how effective the new technology is at building an online presence (largely due to the SEO aspects built in to most blogging software combined with quick and easy archiving and categorisation tools – and the fact that it’s very cheap, and negates the need to pay vast amounts for a custom CMS).

It’s no coincidence that so many newspaper sites have moved towards providing all their content for free, started trying to get in with social networking sites, and added blogs and comment boxes during the last few years. Back around the late 90s/early 00s, before blogging had really become noticed, media organisations had no idea how to use the net, and were scared of it – it’s largely bloggers and individual web developers that have shown them how online publishing can be done effectively.

12: Would you agree that Citizen journalism has a role to play as a watchdog for traditional media? Checking for fallacy and bias?

Yes and no. Pointing out conflicts of interest in the press is certainly useful – but more often than not the people pointing out such things are themselves subject to infinitely more bias than the people they claim to be exposing. See, for example http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ and the like – everything becomes a conspiracy or evidence of some deep institutional problem. People who devote themselves to finding bias and conflicts of interest are rarely impartial, usually have an agenda of their own, and tend to start to find them everywhere before talking of grand conspiracies, and so discredit the genuine findings when they come.

This is why if I want to find out about dodginess in the press, I read Private Eye, not blogs.

13: How often do you yourself partake in traditional media? Do you watch many news reports or read newspapers or online news agency sites?

I generally have News24 on in the background all day while working, and try to catch Channel 4 News, More 4 News, Newsnight and Question Time when they’re on (with The Daily show my preferred method of getting news and comment from the US). I also check a bunch of news sites daily (BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Times, Telegraph, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, Le Monde, The Economist, Reuters, the Press Association, Deutsche Welle, Der Spiegel, Radio Free Europe, The Moscow Times, EU Observer, EurActiv and a few others – usually via Google News), have several hundred blogs and other news sites in the RSS reader that I check through at least once a day, plus there’s the email news alerts and roundups, and I subscribe to Private Eye.

I’m a news junkie, in other words. Why go into current affairs if you’re not?

I rarely buy newspapers these days though – I just don’t have the time to sit back and enjoy flicking through (most of my news reading – and blogging, for that matter – is done in five-minute spurts between proper work), so they end up going straight into the recycling unread.

14: Do you believe the democratisation of information has led to a ‘dumbing down’ or has it improved the quality of information available?

It’s definitely dumbed down. But it’s not just thanks to the increasing trend to “involving” the great unwashed through patronisingly reading out their texts and emails on the news (many of which I have no doubt are made up to ensure sufficient balance and grammatical sense, though I have no evidence to back this up bar knowing how these things work when you’re on a deadline), but also because the growth in the web as an alternate publishing medium has helped exacerbate the already existing trend towards a decline in newspaper sales, thus further decreasing newspaper advertising revenue, and so decreasing the amount of money available to spend on decent journalism. It’s all a lot more complicated than that, obviously, but still…

Seriously, think about it – who cares what some random person off the street thinks? If I wanted to know that I’d go down the pub, or pop on some message board somewhere – not head to the venerable Times of London or the British Broadcasting Corporation. When I look to the news media for analysis, I want verifiable expert analysis from sensible sources, not a load of ill-considered rubbish from effectively anonymous armchair pundits – especially when a lot of those pundits are going to be party sockpuppets whenever the news concerned is remotely political. (Cf. any online discussion about the Israel/Palestine conflict, the London mayoral race, etc. etc.

(There’s also surely no such thing as “democratisation of information” in the sense you seem to be using it – information just is, and the majority of information submitted by individual citizen journalists is usually more or less unconfirmed and so more or less worthless. It’s only working en masse that citizen journalists are remotely effective – individual contributions simply can’t be trusted most of the time.

News organisations haven’t really allowed their editorial policies to be shifted by the new drive for greater audience participation – they’ve been shifting towards greater populism in pursuit of sales for years, and have always been looking for ways to cut costs. If you can fill the pages with free content and still sell copies and ad space, why pay for proper journalists?)

On the topic of July 7th

(My July 7th terrorist attack liveblog, for those relative newcomers who haven’t read it)

1: How did you become involved with the events of the day? Were you sent out specifically or did you happen to be there at the time?

I work in London, heard rumours about a bang on the tube shortly after I got in to work, wondered why the office was so empty, and put out a request for information on the blog as there was nothing on any of the news sites or the radio. I wasn’t really expecting it to be anything bar the usual London Underground cock-up, but happened to have got a post up within a few minutes of it happening, which meant I was one of the first places to crop up in any blog searches looking for info. It escalated from there – largely thanks to the boy McKeating leaving a comment asking if I was liveblogging it, and a bunch of people arriving through searches mistakenly thinking that I knew what the hell was going on.

2: What was the general atmosphere at the time?

Confusion and worry for unaccounted-for friends and colleagues, combined with a bit of concern about how we were all going to get home that evening, and anger and defiance that someone would attack our city. That pretty much summed it up. It also got the entire office (at least, those who made it into work) down the pub at lunchtime, which was something of a rarity at the time. Blitz spirit, they call it – though that all went to pot in the coming days and weeks, sadly…

3: Did you encounter any journalists on the day? If so how were you treated by them?

Not really – they all got in touch later, once they got around to their retrospective pieces. The general attitude towards me was exactly as I expected – fairly patronising, as if they assumed that I was about 14 and would be dead chuffed to have a “proper” journalist deign to speak to me as if I was a grown-up, and would start fainting with excitement at seeing my name in print. This even after I had pointed out to them that I was in press week on the magazine I was working on at the time…

4: Did you go out of your way to gather information on the event or did you report as an afterthought?

Initially as an afterthought – but after the major news websites (BBC, Sky, etc.) had crashed under the weight of traffic around about 10am and I started getting emails and comments telling me that I was some people’s only source of information, I did start actively hunting down eyewitnesses (read: mates and fellow bloggers who worked in different parts of London) – plus I started getting loads of emails from other people around town with news and rumours, and started whacking them up. It became a bit of a hub for news and rumours in the end – the 8th most linked blog post of 2005, which is no mean feat. Even if 52 people did have to die to get me there.

5: What was your involvement like on the day? Did you contribute interviews, video footage or own reports to the news media?

A lot of my stuff was widely quoted over the following weeks, as I seemed to catch the general mood of defiance (something that went down particularly well with the Americans, who like to picture us Brits as all wearing bowler hats and drinking tea while bombs fall all around) – the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, New York Times, La Stampa, Time, Newsweek, Observer, CNN and a bunch of others all quoted my stuff, sometimes at length. I later did an interview on BBC London TV news during the piss-up I organised for the St John’s Ambulance volunteers who’d helped out on the day (funds raised via the blog’s readers) after they contacted me, and was apparently given a full-page profile in the Ottawa Citizen, though they never got in touch directly (and I still have no idea what the Ottawa Citizen actually is – it might be as high profile as the West Bromley Advertiser for all I know).

As for contributing footage and reports to the news media – no way. That’s what they pay their journalists for, and I’m buggered if I’m going to work for free for anyone other than myself. If they can con other people into doing their jobs for them by calling it “citizen journalism” then good on them. Me, I call it laziness – with just a touch of cheapness thrown in.

Hunting around for a handy overview of just what’s been happening at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, depending on who you read you’ll get some wildly different ideas. I’ve been confused for much of the morning. Here’s a brief indication of why:

Der Spiegel‘s “Germany Puts the Brakes on US Expansion Plans” is countered by the International Herald Tribune‘s “NATO backs U.S. missile defense plan for Europe”

EU Referendum‘s claim that “NATO has thrown Ukraine and Georgia to the bear. President Bush’s attempts to put them on track to future and very distant membership of NATO has failed” is then contradicted by Radio Free Europe‘s report that “pro-NATO forces in Ukraine and Georgia celebrated the announcement, which offered stronger-than-expected support for their entry bids”

Repeat for pretty much every issue under discussion at the summit (for which, see this very handy round-up).

People always like to look for tangible, obvious outcomes from these things. But this is international diplomacy. Worse than that, it’s strategic military international diplomacy where all but one of the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council are involved (and we know how infrequently that lot manage to get along). Making compromises left, right and centre – leading to a stalemate in which, well, the status quo has largely been maintained – was the only sensible course of action. The thing was always going to end up a waste of time and money.

But the real fun is that despite the fact that NATO is now overseeing operations in Afghanistan (that well-known North Atlantic power) and looking to a more global role, this summit has made one thing increasingly apparent: the Cold War may have ended, but NATO’s principal opponent remains Russia.

Pretty much every compromise on the European front, every bit of backing down, appears to have been done to placate the Kremlin – because the principle areas to which NATO is looking to expand its influence (largely under the prompting of the US) lie in former communist countries, be it Ukraine and Georgia or Croatia and Albania.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there’s been a growing tension between Russia and the West in recent years – from ex-FSB men assassinated in London to the resumption of patrols by Russian nuclear bombers through the vendetta against the British Council in Moscow. Then there’s the war of words with Belarus, Europe’s oft-forgotten fanatically pro-Moscow wildcard (a country that misses the USSR so much its secret police are still called the KGB and there are constant rumours that it is planning to formally merge with Russia), cyber-warfare against Estonia, and the ongoing standoff over Kosovo’s independence. Even the EU’s (and NATO’s) difficult relationship with Turkey is getting caught up with the Russian situation thanks to the Russo-Turkish partnership in the Bluestream and Nabucco pipelines, both of which are helping to make Europe increasingly reliant on Russian energy supplies.

The relationship with Russia, in other words, increasingly seems to dominate all European diplomacy. Where during the Cold War the presence of the USSR may have ensured that western Europe and the EU was operating under the constant fear of nuclear attack, Moscow’s then lack of engagement in western European affairs allowed everyone to get on much as they pleased. Since the end of the Cold War – and especially since Putin came to power – Moscow’s long-sought-after engagement with the West has if anything caused even more problems.

During the Cold War it was America who stood guard and kept watch, now Europe (both the EU and non-EU countries) has to be constantly on the alert for far more subtle Russian encroachments than columns of Red Army troops or falling H-bombs – encroachments largely economic, and mostly achieved through that strange form of diplomacy at which Putin so excels: smiling with fangs.

With such a large, unpredictable neighbour to the east – especially one with the ability to shut down a sizable chunk of the European economy on a whim (as has already happened to Ukraine) – little wonder there seem to have been few major advances at this latest NATO summit. In fact, I can barely see the point of holding these things until Russian attitudes to the West shift further in the direction of friendly cooperation (no signs of that any time soon) – because Russia’s never going to accept public humiliation, which is how the current regime seems to see any kind of outside involvement in what remains of the bear’s sphere of influence.

So the real points of interest after such standoffs between Russia and the West are never going to be the big issues. We’re not suddenly going to have a Kremlin change of heart on any of the major issues any time soon. And if and when such a change of heart comes, it’s certainly not going to come at one of these big public summits – far too humiliating. Where such shifts in Russian attitudes – either pro-engagement or heading towards hostility – are first going to be seen is in the details. The precise wording, the precise terms of any diplomatic agreement between Russia and the EU, US, NATO or individual European countries – the small print that the journalists rarely have time to scan in their rush to hit deadlines and get an angle that gives the subs a good shot at an interesting headline – that’s where we’ll first spot the changes when they come.

These summits are, in other words, little better than MacGuffins. The real diplomacy is going on off the radar, with lots of little standoffs in places like Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

NATO may well be starting to look globally – but Europe needs to do the same to keep tabs on just what its unpredictable neighbour is up to, because Russia has more ability than any other state to screw Europe over. If Russia’s got its fingers in a lot of pies, we need to be keeping an eye on all of them, and not get distracted by the occasional fuss over the more obvious ones like Ukraine and Georgia (both of which have had high-profile popular pro-democracy uprisings in recent years, which are always of appeal to the press). To do so would be to fall for the oldest trick in the book.

I may well have only made the shortlist for the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Award because the selection panel felt that in this day and age they needed a web-only publication to be sufficiently down with the kids (at least, I assume that’s why I’m on there alongside people like the Europe Editors of the BBC and The Economist…) – but the fact that I am on there at all demonstrates one of the fundamental problems at the heart of Britain’s turbulent relationship with the EU.

Because, you see, the Reporting Europe Award is designed “to honour a leading journalist whose writing and reporting on Europe has made a real impact”. Now, by no stretch of the imagination am I a leading journalist. Nor have I had a huge impact, even in the small world that is online discussion about European and EU politics.

But think about it a moment. Bar Mark Mardell, by far the highest profile Europe/EU-focussed journalist in the UK (and my fellow shortlistee) thanks to occasionally cropping up on the BBC news of an evening while we’re all sitting down to our tea, how many high-profile Europe-focussed journalists are there in the UK? How much coverage of European politics is there, for that matter (even when the French President popped over for a visit, most coverage was focussed on his good-looking new missus rather than anything he said or did)? In particular, though, how much coverage is there of EU politics: the goings on in Brussels and Strasbourg at the Parliament, Council and Commission?

I keep regular tabs on all the major British papers’ coverage of EU politics via a combination of RSS and Google News, and I can tell you – there’s hardly any. American politics? By the bucket-load – even when there’s not a presidential election imminent. Brussels? No chance – not unless there’s an obvious impact on the UK (or, more likely, an impact on the UK that some pressure-group or other has highlighted in a press release…)

Of course, this is all entirely understandable. Most news organisations exist to make money, and so fill their papers/bulletins full of the sort of exciting, interesting news people want to find out about. The EU, however, is both insanely complex and mind-numbingly dull – little wonder that hardly anyone is interested in EU politics.

Both pro- and anti-EU types have, from time to time, moaned about this lack of EU coverage – both groups believing that the more information you have about the EU, the more you are likely to join their side. Yet in Britain, to really get an idea of what’s going on in the European Parliament, what the European Commission’s got planned, what the European Council’s been discussing and the like, you have to know where to look in advance (namely – and primarily – EU news sites EU Observer and TheParliament.com, and the EU’s own impossible to navigate Europa website). Most newspapers simply won’t cover that sort of thing unless there’s something obviously major going on.

Contrast this lack of coverage with the amount of information we get about what’s going on in Westminster, where each newspaper has numerous reporters with press passes nipping in and out of the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall on an hourly basis, and you can start to see the problem. Because you don’t have to agree with the eurosceptic claim that 80% of all British laws originate with the EU to acknowledge that the EU has a sizable impact on the way Britain is run, yet the number of British journalists devoted to giving us EU-related news is minimal at best. (Which is, no doubt, why no one seems to be able to give an accurate idea of just how many British laws really DO originate from the EU…)

This lack of coverage was one of the key issues in the independent report into the BBC’s EU coverage a couple of years back (the one that was reported by the largely eurosceptic British press as finding the Beeb to be institutionally pro-EU), which noted:

“Many newspapers and other media have committed positions on Europe. The public themselves feel illinformed. Much is at stake. As the public service broadcaster, the BBC bears a heavy responsibility for raising the level of public awareness and understanding of EU matters without itself taking sides in the debate.”

Yet despite this, the BBC only has finite time to bring EU matters to the public’s attention – something Mark Mardell noted a month ago while explaining why he didn’t report on the MEP expenses scandal – there’s no way it can give us a good idea of what’s going on in Brussels every day while still covering Westminster politics alongside the usual kidnappings, murders, train wrecks and the war in Iraq (or should that be train wrecks LIKE the war in Iraq?).

But this isn’t just a problem for the BBC. Big EU stories – and allegations of endemic corruption in the European Parliament is a pretty big EU story in anyone’s books – simply aren’t as interesting to the public at large as UK-specific news, be it political or social. Even the most rabidly anti-EU newspapers rarely give EU affairs any real prominence, because the public simply don’t care. Why waste valuable column inches on something few people are going to read, and that will attract little in the way of advertising?

Hell, you can even take a look at the blogs covering EU affairs and spot further evidence of the trend. By far the most prolific (and popular) English-language EU blogs are both eurosceptic – the in-depth withdrawalism of EU Referendum, and frothing-at-the-mouth europhobia of The Brussels Journal – because it is only the eurosceptics who really care. There seems to be no such thing as “a passionate pro-European” (to borrow Tony Blair’s phrase – with Blair himself being a prime example of what I’m talking about) prepared to devote the sort of time and energy to covering EU politics that opponents of the EU do on a daily basis. Why? Because the rewards are so paltry, the readership so minimal – and the petty annoyances of eurosceptic trolls appearing in your comments boxes to accuse you of being a traitor to Queen and country seems to put most people off fairly sharpish.

All this has led to a self-perpetuating distortion of English-language EU news coverage in favour of eurosceptic analysis. People hunting for news about the EU will rarely get it from their regular news sources; when they do the news is usually unrepresentative thanks to being UK-specific; and when they hunt online for more information, they’re far more likely to come across eurosceptic sites than they are unbiased or pro-EU ones. The impression that the EU is only ever up to no good becomes further reinforced, and so on ad infinitum – and, in turn, the newspapers see the apparent growth of eurosceptic voices online, see the piles of anti-EU letters coming in from the vocal eurosceptic obsessives, and their eurosceptic editorial policies become ever more reinforced.

Yes, I am indeed blaming the British press for Britain’s seemingly increasingly eurosceptic nature – but as much for their lack of coverage as for the dominance of eurosceptic editorial policies.

Even ignoring the fact that the majority of people couldn’t tell you the difference between the Council of Europe and the Council of the European Union, without regular, reliable, impartial EU news coverage, how are the people of Britain ever going to be able to come to an informed decision about what they think about EU membership?

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that there is a severe paucity of EU news reporting out there – so perhaps it’s not so surprising that some lone blogger with a stupid pseudonym is being allowed to compete for a prize with the big boys, so shoddy a job have the British press done of it for much of the last half century…

Richard North at eurosceptic blog par excellence EU Referendum draws my attention to this piece in the Times by William Rees-Mogg, which contains the line:

Most Eurosceptics want Europe to be reformed, not destroyed

This is something of which I remain firmly convinced – but not our man North:

Oh dear! After all these years, and all the failed attempts at seeking “reform”, has it not yet dawned on the man that the EU is incapable of reform[?]

Ignoring the fact that this ignores Rees-Mogg’s actual contention (he doesn’t profess to be in favour of reform himself, merely that a majority favour reform over withdrawal – an unfortunate reality for the withdrawalists of EU Referendum), a question:

How can hardcore anti-EU types maintain that reform is impossible yet simultaneously believe that the EU is heading towards a superstate – which would, in itself, be an immense reform?

North points to an old article in which he explains his logic for rejecting the possibility of EU reform. Yet his “proof” is to refer to an old Milton Friedman article looking at the United States’ Food and Drug Administration, in which Friedman claimed the institution’s very set-up prevented change. Even were this not itself a somewhat dubious contention, backed up more by assertion than by evidence, a monolithic US government agency being compared to a multi-part, multi-country international organisation hardly strikes me as overly fair.

You see the way I reckon it, yes, with current attitudes from the various member states, radical reform is unlikely – just have a gander at the failed compromises that are the Treaty of Nice and Lisbon Treaty, both unsatisfactory to all parties but the best they could manage.

There are several different trains of thought among EU member states as to what the EU should actually be – and whenever efforts to reform come up, as they do on average once a decade, reconciling all these different desires has indeed proved impossible.

But as all major reforms – even after the expansion of qualified majority voting that the Lisbon Treaty brings – still require unanimity, this makes the appearance of an EU superstate all but impossible as long as less integrationist countries remain members (and it’s not just Britain that isn’t keen on ever-closer union).

“OK”, you might think. “So you admit EU reform’s impossible?”

No. Because I reckon the current situation is going to change. How much longer are the likes of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – the core of the original EEC, and still more or less the most enthusiastic member states – going to put up with the frustration of their plans being thwarted? How much longer are those countries who aren’t keen on merging their economies much further going to put up with the perennial drives for greater integration from euroenthusiasts?

We’ve already had countless rhetoric-heavy spats over various aspects of EU reform – not just between Britain and Brussels (as with Thatcher’s battle for the rebate), but between numerous other less fervently federalist member states and the expansionists.

Sooner or later, these clashes are bound to result in an official suggestion of a two-speed or multi-speed Europe – maintaining the union while allowing everyone more or less to go their separate ways.

The idea of a multi-speed Europe is not a new one, and is increasingly gaining ground. Over the last few years, it is a concept that I’ve seen crop up time and again, from House of Lords debates to The Economist, former French president Jaques Chirac to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former Commission president Romano Prodi to the EU’s own website.

As Prodi said in an interview last year:

it is good if you can go forward together, but you cannot go at the speed of the last wagon.

We already have a two-speed Europe. Euro and Schengen are examples of this and they are very important projects. Moreover, a two-speed Europe does not mean that countries that are in the second group cannot move to the first. Two-speed Europe sometimes means more choices.

So, while anti-EU claims that the EU is heading towards a superstate seem to be backed up purely by decades-old (mis)quotes from the likes of Jean Monet (and the occasional modern superstatist aberration like Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker), my hopes that genuine EU reform may be on the cards seem to have rather more to support them.

So then, how can this whole “the EU can’t be reformed” thing – the mantra of all withdrawalists – be justified? The Lisbon Treaty itself is an acknowledgement that the current system is not up to scratch – and an acknowledgement that getting a satisfactory compromise is increasingly difficult (being as it is an unsatisfactory attempt to rectify the previous unsatisfactory compromise that was the Treaty of Nice).

Especially since the failure of the constitution there is an increasing consensus throughout the EU – both among the populations of the member states and increasingly among the EU machine itself – that some serious, radical changes are needed, beyond the mere stop-gap measures that the constitution (and Lisbon Treaty) aimed for.

Introducing a new, multi-tier, multi-speed system (on top of the existing two-tier Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries) is the most obvious – and, most importantly, easiest – way to give everyone what they want. I see no reason why it won’t eventually happen – the only question is how long is it going to take?

I missed my blog birthday. Two days ago was the fifth anniversary of the birth of this blog. Since that time, the world of EU politics blogging has changed massively.

Back then, in March 2003, I wasn’t aware of any other blogs attempting to cover the same subject (though I think A Fistful of Euros may have started by then) – most people were obsessed with something or other going on in Iraq, if I recall. The technology was clunky, there were no blog search engines, no RSS feeds, no WordPress – nothing that makes blogging so easy these days. Little wonder I gave up so quickly, leaving the thing to stagnate for a year after a mere three posts. But hey, I revived it, so it still counts as this blog’s real birthday, I reckon – even if regular updates didn’t start until August 2004.

Anyway, time for an overview of EU blogs, I reckon. Please note – this list is sadly not comprehensive, and a number of blogs that appear not to have been updated in the last couple of months have been left off. I’ve also left off blogs with more of an emphasis on individual countries rather than EU politics as a whole.

If you have an EU politics blog and you’re not present here or on my Netvibes RSS roundup, drop me an email via nosemonkey [at] gmail.com and I’ll add you. I plan to keep both this and the RSS roundup regularly updated.

And so, without further ado…

I have also compiled an EU blog and news RSS resource at http://www.netvibes.com/nosemonkey featuring most of these – and a number more, as well as my Must-Read EU blogs list.

Not necessarily the biggest in terms of readership, but some of the longest-running, best-known and most consistent – EU politics blogs that have become hubs for online EU debate and discussion.

A Fistful of Euros
- One of the longest-running Euroblogs, covering a broad range of politics and culture, though never quite as frequently as one might like. Multiple authors, all from a loosely liberal perspective, yet usually fairly impartial when it comes to the EU itself. Also home to the annual European Weblog Awards. If they’re still going… Technorati

BlogActiv
A new launch from the people behind EU news and policy site EurActiv, with a bunch of thinktanks, academics and the like contributing to a blog hub about European affairs. Hasn’t been going long enough for me to have identified individual blogs hosted there worthy of highlighting – though Stanley’s blog is looking very promising – so any pointers much appreciated. Technorati

The Brussels Journal
- Describes itself as “The Voice of Conservatism in Europe”, and often reads like a parody of the US Republican Party (in fact, when it first launched I thought it was a spoof). Obsessed with “islamification”, “dhimmitude” and non-white immigration, seemingly convinced that every European government is part of some vast left-wing conspiracy, and often the very personification of “Europhobe”, it would be easy to dismiss The Brussels Journal were it not for its knack for spotting stories everyone else has missed, and its impressive readership – boosted by multiple links from right-wing US blog networks. Technorati

Certain Ideas of Europe
- The Economist’s EU blog, skipping all over the continent with (almost) daily news and expert analysis. One of the best newspaper blogs out there. Technorati

Coulisses de Bruxelles
- Liberation’s Brussels blog (in French), by their veteran correspondent Jean Quatremer. Decently regular and with a handy, knowledgable French perspective, it’s pretty much the leading French language EU politics blog. Technorati

EU Referendum
- The biggest and one of the longest-running of the anti-EU blogs, written by two contributors to the eurosceptic Bruges Group thinktank. With multiple daily updates, active forums and a generally high level of research, it’s a blog that cannot be ignored, even if it does occasionally slip into the kind of over-excited rhetoric that does its cause no favours and merely entrenches opinions. Technorati

European Tribune
- A European off-shoot of big liberal US blogs The Daily Kos and The Booman Tribune, the real benefit is in the community – as shown via the “Diaries”, miniature blogs by the site’s regular users that contain numerous gems. Sadly, though, the Diary section doesn’t have its own RSS feed. Technorati

EurSoc
- Long-running eurosceptic blog, run more on a magazine format – though it has at long last introduced comments. A broad range of usually in-depth, knowledgable articles, regularly updated. Technorati

Jon Worth’s Euroblog
- A former president of the Young European Federalists, Jon Worth is a strongly pro-EU Labour party member and web developer. Part of his time in the real world is spent running training courses on EU politics, so he knows his stuff. He’s also the most active advocate of Euroblogging out there, always coming up with new ideas to increase online discussion of the EU. Technorati

Margot Wallstrom
- The blog of the Vice President of the European Commission, responsible for Communications. Light on policy, heavy on “this week I have mostly been…”, but with a high readership and visibility. Wallstrom has also been championing online engagement, and encouraged a number of other Commissioners to start blogs of their own (which can all be found here). In the process, she has become the key hate-figure of the online anti-EU movement. Technorati

Mark Mardell’s Euroblog
- On-the-spot reporting from around Europe from the BBC’s Europe Correspondent. Fun, readable, regular, and with a good eye for detail. Also has an active comments section – albeit dominated (as usual) by enthusiastic eurosceptics. Technorati

Nosemonkey’s EUtopia
- This place. It’s one of the longest-running loosely pro-EU blogs out there and – I’d say – probably unique in that I’m a former eurosceptic turned pro-EU with no party affiliations whatsoever, so I’m not being overly arrogant in including it here. Formerly known as Europhobia. Technorati

Alex Stubb
- Impressive multilingual blog from this centre-right Finnish former MEP – now Foreign Secretary. Got to love the cheesy photos – they’re some kind of genius. Technorati

L’Avenir d’Europe
- The blog of the UMP’s “European Workshop”, set up on Sarkozy’s orders to look at ways of engaging more closely with the EU. Technorati

Bernard Poignant MEP
- French Socialist member of the EP’s Fisheries and Regional Development committees and President of the National Federation of Socialist and Republican Elected Representatives. Fairly regular updates in French. Technorati

Bruno Waterfield
- The (eurosceptic) Daily Telegraph’s man in Brussels. Launched only in February 2008 (following the demise of the rather good blog from Waterfield’s predecessor David Rennie), early signs are very promising indeed. Regular, witty and knowledgeable – if a tad excitable sometimes. Technorati

Centre for European Politics Blog
- Coming from the Royal Holloway, part of the University of London, this is a relatively new, relatively detached academic take on EU politics, seemingly aimed at students, but readable and accessible to all. Technorati

Centre for European Reform Blog
- Irregular, usually considered and well-researched coverage on eclectic topics from this critically pro-EU thinktank. Technorati

Daniel Hannan MEP
- Strongly eurosceptic, highly opinionated Conservative MEP blogging at the Telegraph. Regular, very well-informed coverage, and readable with it. Yes, he’s partisan and biased, but he explains why well and convincingly. Technorati

Daniel Riot
- Good, regular coverage from a European political journalist of several decades’ experience, one of the founders of Europe&Us – can also be found here. Technorati

England Expects
- Not exclusively EU-focussed, but written by an entertaining eurosceptic working at the European Parliament as UKIP’s press officer and Chief of Staff, who seems to have a knack for picking up on interesting stories and gossip that everyone else misses, so definitely worthy of inclusion among your RSS subscriptions. Technorati

eToile
- The blog version of handy magazine site Toute l’Europe, run by Le Centre d’information sur l’Europe, an organisation co-founded by the French government and the European Commission. Technorati

Federal Union Blog
- Improving consistency and regularity in recent months means this offering from the Union of European Federalists is increasingly worthy of visits for a rare pro-EU take on developments. Technorati

FT Brussels Blog
- Quality offering from the Financial Times, though not as regular as one might wish. Another superb example of a newspaper doing blogging well. Technorati

Janez Potocnik
- European Commissioner with responsibility for Science and Research. Not an overly regular blogger, and (like many politicians’ blogs) often reads more like a press release. Still, this sort of thing should be encouraged. Technorati

Jens-Peter Bonde MEP
- Not really a blog, but has regular weekly updates and, as the homepage of the joint president of the eurosceptic Independence and Democracy Group, a worthwhile place to stop online for some non-British anti-EU opinion. Technorati

Jim Murphy, Minister for Europe
- The UK’s largely anonymous minister nominally in charge of relations with the rest of the EU. A post that’s been increasingly ignored under Labour. Other UK Foreign Office blogs, including that of Foreign Secretary David Miliband, can be found here (http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/) – worth checking from time to time, as new ones are always being added. Technorati

Joanna Drake
- Head of the European Commission’s Representation to Malta. A regular insight into just what the job involves in the EU’s tiniest member state. Technorati

Mariann Fischer Boel
- The Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner. Appears to be the most enthusiastic of the blogging Commissioners after Margot Wallstrom. Technorati

Marie-Noëlle Lienemann MEP
- Regularly-updated French-language blog of the independent-minded French Socialist MEP, a specialist in environmental and housing policy. Technorati

Mary Honeyball MEP
- Labour member for London, so one of my representatives in Brussels/Strasbourg. She has started to update almost daily, though the posts remain short and lightweight, more like mini-press releases, but she does allow comments, so should be encouraged. Technorati

Open Europe Blog
- Entertaining and readable daily EU coverage from the eurosceptic thinktank. One of the better EU thinktank blogs – although it has had a tendency to come across as rather hysterical at times in recent weeks… Technorati

PES Manifesto
- An interesting blogging experiment, as the Party of European Socialists work out their 2009 manifesto online in blog format, inviting contributions from voters EU-wide. Technorati

Richard Corbett MEP
- Long-running blog of the deputy leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party and spokesman on constitutional affairs. Quick to defend the EU from its critics, and often a target of the ire of anti-EU bloggers in return. Technorati

Social Europe Blog
- The blog of the Social Europe Journal. Regular and in-depth analysis, showing much promise. Technorati

Socialist Group Blog
- Coming from the heart of the European Parliament. Fairly regular, often quite interesting. Technorati

Telos
- Blog of a nonpartisan French thinktank looking at France’s place in the world, with a strong emphasis on the EU. (In French, with some English coverage.) Technorati

Through the European Labyrinth
- The blog of the eurosceptic UK-based think tank the European Foundation, set up by loud-tie-wearing europhobe Tory MP Bill Cash. Technorati

Valery Giscard d’Estaing
- Octogenarian former French president and author of the failed EU constitution, old man Giscard is pretty much the living embodiment of the EU elite. And is usually decidedly proud of it. Regularly updated europhilia. Technorati

Wolfgang Munchau’s Euro Blog
- Sporadic but often interesting posts from this Financial Tiimes columnist and former Co-Editor of the Financial Times Deutschland. Really, really needs an RSS feed, though… Technorati

WSI Brussels Blog
- From the World Security Institute in Brussels, and with an obvious focus. Almost exclusively focusses on providing daily link/news roundups these days. Technorati

The 8th Circle
- “Corruption, democracy, and Eastern European politics.” Welcome addition to the world of Eastern European blogs, covering the region – and its relations with the rest of the EU – with rare insight and intelligence.

Alphasources
- Focussing primarily on European (and occasionally Japanese) macroeconomics, this is a handy addition to any reading list for those of us still struggling to get to grips with the complex interrelations of the European economies.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
- Long-running right of centre anti-EU blog, with a talent for somewhat surprising opinions and amusing (if often a tad infantile) humour. I mean that in a nice way, though.

Babel Blogs
- Big multilingual blog hub/host. More cultural and youth-oriented than most of the others here, with only intermittent political coverage, but active and (seemingly growing, so silly to ignore). Dropped from the Big Boys section after checking its Technorati ranking.

Berlaymonster
- Brussels-based political gossip. Offers some fun insights into how things work of precisely the sort that the EU needs if it’s going to re-appear from up its own backside, but has got decidedly irregular of late.

Blog About European Union & Romania
- Does exactly what it says on the tin. A recent discovery, and one that looks quite promising.

BlogEuropa –
- Somewhat sporadic posts in both English and Spanish from a group of senior Spanish academics. Would be aces if it was regular.

Blogging from Brussels
- Yes, that’s right – an EU politics blog written by a GIRL! Or, alternatively, a left(ish) leaning Swedish media officer at an unnamed Brussels-based think-tank, looking at European politics in the widest possible sense.

Brussels Media
- “A blog about the EU media landscape in Brussels” with an emphasis on the role the internet is starting to play in the EU public sphere.

The Devil’s Kitchen
- In terms of traffic, no doubt worthy of a place among the big boys, but this rage-filled, sweary libertarian and former UKIP supporter only occasionally casts his eye in the direction of Brussels.

DJ Nozem
- Top, often amusing analysis of EU politics, though sadly not regular enough. Well worth a look on the occasions Nanne can be bothered to update (hint, hint…).

Erkan’s Field Diary
- Very useful, regularly-updated collection of articles and comment about the EU from a Turkish perspective, with a particular emphasis on potential Turkish entry.

EU Corruption
- “Despite appearances this isn’t a eurosceptic blog. But transparent and honest government is good government.” Critical and often insightful, it can only be hoped that it keeps going – we need more of this sort of thing.

EU Digest
- Handy linklog collecting articles on European politics with brief extracts. Multiple entries per day.

EU for US
- “The European Union filtered by a quiet American”, featuring well-constructed, considered posts musing on life, politics and philosophy around once a week.

EU Pundit
- Long-running pro-EU blog. Often intermittent. Often obscure.

EU Realist
- If by “realist” you mean “sceptic”… Long-running, detailed anti-EU coverage. Occasional good, interesting analysis, but sadly mostly reams of text cut’n'pasted from elsewhere. (Come on Ken – more of your own stuff!)

Euro Watch
- Has been going for years (since 2002, in fact) and is a stupidly handy resource, packed full of in-depth yet easy-to-understand economic analysis and data – and with sub-blogs on the economies of France, Germany, Italy, Greece and Spain. Essential reading.

europa-eu-audience
- “The Institutions of the European Union endeavour to be transparent, open and accessible. They want to be seen in the best possible light by the public at large. We share this objective, and intend to contribute to its achievement.” – focussing primarily on EU politics on the web.

European Avenue
- EU news linklog, mostly rounding up EU content from the UK broadsheet press.

The European Parliament
- One of the most promising of the newer EU politics blogs. Regular, readable and insightful, it definitely deserves a place on your RSS reader.

A European View
- Sadly irregular European politics and culture. Fun, personal and readable.

Europe&Us
- Increasingly multilingual France-based European politics coverage, worth a look, and arguably worthy of a place among the big boys.

Evil European
- Another intermittent pro-EU blog, though with good stuff when it comes. There’s very few regular English language pro-EU blogs, you’ll find…

Free Europe
- Long-running, highly opinionated anti-EU blog. Strong on rhetoric, light on allowing comments, and with no discernable RSS feed.

Global Power Europe
- An international perspective, as the name might suggest, written by a chap studying for a PhD at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge. Usually very long, in-depth posts, but sadly not overly regular.

Gulf Stream Blues
- European politics from an American perspective. Good stuff, frequently updated, well worth a look.

Ironies Too
- “A continuing chronicle of how democracy is being destroyed across the entire Euopean Union” – unsurprisingly, this is another eurosceptic blog, albeit one that’s readable, regular and interesting for a change. Worth a look, and long-running.

Jan’s EU Blog
- Usually (but not always) in English, and somewhat sporadic, the blog of the president of the Young European Federalists.

Julien Frisch
- Only launched in July 2008, even in its first few weeks this blog managed to attract attention for its frequent, eclectic and insightful posts on all things EU-related. If the same rate of posting is kept up, it could soon become one of the big boys…

Kosmopolit
- Updated sadly infrequently, but with a regularly-attended linklog that’s well worth a look in itself. International relations from a pro-EU perspective, with an emphasis on Eastern Europe.

Marco Bucik
- Sadly not overly regular pro-EU politics from another high-up member of the Young European Federalists.

The New Federalist
- Multilingual group blog, with a good amount of English coverage and lots of French. Run by the Young European Federalists, so very much pro-EU. It arguably belongs among the big boys.

A Northern Perspective
- The latest incarnation (I think) of a long-running blog looking at the EU from a Swedish perspective.

Re: Europa
- Irregular posts, but always interesting when they come. Pro-EU politics from Germany. (I think… Correct me if I’m wrong, RZ!)

Scratching the Surface
- A Danish feminist perspective on EU politics. Fairly irregular (perhaps a post a week?), but long-running and an intriguing slant.

Shift Magazine Blog
- Fairly new and still getting up to speed, looking at a broad range of European politics and culture.

Stanley’s Blog
- The first blog from the Blogactiv stable to merit its own listing – regular, informative and insightful, and already deserving of a place on the “must read” list.

The Tap
- From EU Referendum’s “Umbrella Blog” stable, little wonder this is another British eurosceptic. But despite a tendency to repeat many of the anti-EU/centre-right memes, there are nuggets of unexpected insight and better analysis than we have come to expect from the majority of anti-EU British blogs.

Tim Worstall –
- Anti-EU classical liberal economist and one of the most popular individual blogs in Europe, if he focussed on EU matters he’d be listed among the big boys, but his tastes are wide-ranging. Recently joined UKIP, and describes himself as a “Euronihilist”.

The Transatlantic Assembly
- European politics and international relations from a group of international lawyers. Sadly all too infrequent.

The Turko File
- “Blogging Turkey’s road to membership in the European Union” – we need more of this sort of thing: blogs analysing specific countries’ relationships with the EU. We’re inundated with British eurosceptics doing this sort of thing, and there’s a moderate number of French ones, but outside these two they’re surprisingly rare. Yet they’re also essential to understanding how and why the EU is doing what it’s doing.

UKIP Watch
- As you might expect, keeping an eye on the goings on in the UK’s leading single-issue party. Often decidedly revealing, though (unsurprisingly) a tad partisan.

Who do I call?
- Blog campaigning for a single EU president, merging the President of the Council with the President of the Commission, set up by pro-EU federalist bloggers Jon Worth and Jan Seifert. An interesting experiment in online campaigning (which remains rare at EU level for some reason) that seems to be doing well.

Yellow Stars pro Europe blog
- “Christian Democrat and Pro European Union blog in support of a European world order!” Irregular posting (averaging just 4/5 a month) on eclectic European subjects, but well worth a look when new content appears.

Whitebull
- Blog spin-off of EU video news YouTube channel EUX.TV, there’s some good stuff here, as well as all their latest videos. Launched in May 2008, fingers crossed they keep the blog going.

3e Intelligence
- EU and global energy, environment, climate change and sustainable development policy analysis from a former EurActiv man with an impressive CV in European politics. Regular, readable and insightful – just what you want from a specialist blog.

The Antitrust Hotch Potch
- EU law blog focussing on competition policy.

CAP Health Check
- Effectively the blog of the rather good FarmSubsidy.org, which campaigns for transparency in Common Agricultural Policy payments, the main focus is the run-up to the policy review due in 2008.

Carbonara
- Focussing on EU carbon emissions policy.

Common Agricultural Policy –
- As you might expect, a blog with a focus on the CAP. And a very good one at that.

ECJ Blog
- Tip-top law blog with a focus on the European Court of Justice. May no longer be active, though.

EU Energy Policy Blog
- “We believe a sustainable energy policy, more competition, and better regulation will increase global welfare. We believe ideas, theories and facts improve policies. We believe the EU lacks an energy policy and national energy policies fail to match EU goals. ‘We’ stands for a group of scholars, mostly economists, from all over Europe, including California and Massachusetts – two new member states enrolled for the purpose of this EU blog.”

EU Law Blog
- Can you guess what it covers? Interesting stuff, with some great insights into the murky workings.

Eurozone Watch
- Excellent place to start if you want to get a grip on Eurozone politics and economics. A must-read.

Grahnlaw
- “Euroblog: For a democratic European Union: politics, future and history. Blawg = law blog = legal blog: European and Finnish law.” Strong, in-depth analysis.

Law of the EMU and Euro
- Does exactly what it says on the tin. Eurozone law.

Public Affairs 2.0
- A superb blog focussed on European public relations and communication policy and innovations, especially online. Should be a regular read for anyone trying to keep up with online EU politics developments.

REACHSPOT –
- All things REACH, the EU’s new chemicals regulations legislation.

To find more Francophone politics blogs, start with this handy visual guide

Agir pour l’Europe
- Pro-EU federalist blog looking at how pro-EU types can best bring the continent together. Not overly regular, but interesting nonetheless.

Le Croche-Pied
- Good, regular stuff from a Northern Ireland-based sometime reader of this blog, running for a bit over a year now.

Dominique Reynie
- Written by a professor of political science at L’Institute d’etudes politiques in Paris, with a strong focus on public opinion and electoral politics

Euros du Village
- Big French group EU politics blog, similar in some ways to European Tribune, that’s been running for a couple of years. Now also with an English language edition. I’ve met the chap who runs the place, and he’s got some very good ideas that I’m looking forward to seeing implemented over the coming months and years.

Europa Blues
- Another critically pro-European approach (“a European despite himself”), critical of the EU elites and an advocate of widespread reform. A French Nosemonkey, perhaps?

Un Europeen jamais content
- Running for a couple of years, regularly updated and eclectic in content. Well worth a look.

Europemondi
- Looking at the EU’s role in a globalising world.

Nouvelle Europe
- One of the big boys of French EU blogging (with some English language coverage), focussing on the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe in the wake of expansion.

Publius
- One of the longest-running French EU blogs, and a personal favourite. Top stuff.

Quoi de neuf en Europe
- Eurosceptic blog from a lawyer specialising in EU law, long-running and regular.