The dangers of having a blog approaching its 9th birthday – there’s lots of stuff going on in the back end, and things seem to have broken with the latest WordPress upgrade. Hence reversion to a more simple theme than the old one (which never really worked properly anyway).

The plan: Sort this place out. Then (perhaps) actually write some stuff for a change. I think I’ve *almost* worked out what my position is re: the eurozone crisis now. Almost…

As long-time readers will know, one of this blog’s lasting obsessions is the portrayal of the EU in the British media. Hell, the rampant bias and distortions (from both the pro- and the anti- camps) were pretty much what got me interested in the EU in the first place. Indeed, the reason this blog’s title was originally “Europhobia” was because I started out aiming to focus on what makes us Brits so inherently eurosceptic.

So my participation in a panel discussion / mini-conference this time next week (organised by Bloggingportal.eu) may be of interest to some London-based readers – though I can’t pretend to be as comfortable forming coherent arguments off the cuff while speaking in public as I am jotting my thoughts down in a more considered manner on the interweb. Details as follows:

WHEN: 10th December 2010 – 13:00 – 18:00

WHERE: Europe House, 32 Smith Square, London, SW1P 3EU

WHAT: A non-partisan event exploring the different ways bloggers and journalists can cover the EU in Britain

HASHTAG: #EUuk

EVENT PROGRAMME

13:00 – EVENT START / REGISTRATION / SANDWICH LUNCH

13:45 to 15:15 – FIRST PANEL – “The EU in the British Media”

We’ll be asking our panelists about the coverage of the EU in the British press. Do the media generally do a good job of “keeping tabs” on the EU? Is it true that British euroscepticism is driven by the media, or are the media just following public opinion?

PANELISTS:
David Rennie – Political Editor and Bagehot Columnist, The Economist, Bagehot’s Notebook
Paul Staines – Blogger, Guido Fawkes
Mats Persson – Director, Open Europe
J Clive Matthews – Blogger, Nosemonkey’s EUtopia

15:15 – COFFEE BREAK

15:45 to 17:45 – SECOND PANEL – “The EU in the British Blogosphere”

In this panel, we’ll be turning a critical eye on the British blogosphere. Do bloggers have any advantages over mainstream journalists when writing about the EU? Are bloggers better informed and freer to say what everybody is really thinking? Unconstrained by deadlines and editorial oversight, can they delve deeper into a story? Or are they just under less pressure to maintain levels of accuracy and ethical behaviour?

PANELISTS:

Bruno Waterfield – Brussels Correspondent, The Daily Telegraph, Europe not EU
Gawain Towler – UKIP / Europe of Freedom and Democracy Press Officer and Blogger, England Expects
Antonia Mochan – Head of Media, EU Commission Representative in the UK, Talking About the EU
Jon Worth – Blogger, Jon Worth’s Euroblog

Both panels will be moderated discussions, including time for questions from the audience. There will be wifi provision and a charging station for laptops/mobile phones etc. There are still a couple of places available, so please let us know by e-mail (at info bloggingportal eu) if you are interested in attending. Entry is free.

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You may also have noticed that the blog now has a new look. Hopefully a bit more readable than the traditional light text on a dark background – I’d been meaning to change it for years…

There’s still a few bugs in the system (the categories aren’t displaying properly, for starters – and I need to get a few more images in here to make it look prettier), but I’m hoping to get them fixed soon.

Many thanks to Jon Worth for helping me out by fixing as many as he has done already.

And here’s a nice report from Journalism.co.uk.

I may well be posting some more detailed thoughts here at some point soon – no doubt musing on the concept of a political institution giving journalists money for doing their job in a manner the politicians like (or, indeed, of giving journalists any money whatsoever), the state of political blogging, journalism and EU coverage in general.

For now, however, here’s an updated version of the acceptance speech that I decided on the day that I wouldn’t use (mostly due to not having had the time to formulate it in my head after hearing why I’d won…)

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Although I’m flattered, I genuinely *don’t* think that my post on the percentage of laws that come from the EU [which won me the 5,000 euro prize] deserves to be described as “extraordinary research work”.

“Informative and interesting”, perhaps. “Understandable and convincing”, I hope. Written “with a sense of humour”, I’d like to think. But “extraordinary research work”?

The research that went into that post was less than I would have done on an undergraduate history essay while at university. It was just a tiny fraction of what I would have needed to do for a postgraduate level essay. Compared to a PhD or a book? It’s nothing.

I’ve not done a PhD, but do have an MA in history, have written two books and edited several others – I don’t know what “extraordinary” research is, but I’ve got a good idea of what counts as *proper* research.

You want proper research on the percentage of laws that comes from the EU? Check out this 59-page PDF research paper from the (politically independent) House of Commons Library – amusingly published the very same day that I was in Brussels being handed an award for my supposedly “extraordinary research work” on the very same topic. My post looks like *nothing* in comparison (though – sweetly – it is referenced in the footnotes).

I did my MA before the internet had really taken off as a research tool, when to find things out one had to sit in libraries for weeks, months on end, inhaling the dust of generations of pasty students. When to get to the *really* interesting stuff, one had to hop on a train – perhaps even a plane – to go to the documents, rather than have the documents delivered to you, direct to your laptop. When to uncover something new, one might have to spend years studying a new language to enable the decryption of a document that no one had read for hundreds of years.

We don’t realise how lucky we are. Thanks to the internet, we’re utterly spoiled.

Had I been working ten years ago, that post would have taken me a good couple of days – perhaps as long as a week – to dig out all the information. As it was, it took me a little over an hour and a half.

That’s not “extraordinary research work”. That’s being aware of this thing called Google, and understanding how to use the web to uncover information. Something that *every* journalist or blogger worthy of the name should know how to do.

I’ll accept that I may have compiled that information in an accessible way – hell, I’ve been a professional writer/editor for over a decade so I bloody ought to be able to – but research? That was nothing. And if anyone thinks it is, that says more about the dire state of the general, accepted standard of research that goes into articles about the EU (and most other subjects these days) than it does about my own abilities.

I’m flattered, but let’s be realistic here…

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For those who are interested, a report and some interviews with yours truly – I like the last the best:

Journalists following the dodo?: Interview w/Nosemonkey
Uploaded by tuulitoivanen. – Up-to-the minute news videos.

I’m currently being migrated to a new server / hosting company, and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress at the same time – it appears that this is causing a few issues along the way. Apparently the RSS feed has gone weird, a few images are missing, and so are a few pages.

Hopefully this should all fix itself soon – and once it’s back up and running, I’ll be giving the site’s design a quick overhaul to make it a touch more readable, then cracking on with the promised EU reading list.

Back soon…

Horrifically busy in the real world, hence the longest break in blogging on this site in more than six years. I am, however, still commenting away about the EU (among other things) in 140 characters or less on Twitter on a daily basis – that’s the best place to find me these days. You can get an RSS feed of my Twitter ramblings here – just be warned that it’s not all politics related, some of it’s personal, some of it’s very silly, and some of it’s very sweary.

Twitter has a wonderful ability to suddenly introduce you to new people – a 140 character limit meaning that you can read hundreds of different people’s opinions every day in a way that simply isn’t possible in long-form. If also means I’ve been coming across more ridiculous nonsense than I have in several years, as I keep getting alerted to stories and blog posts from sources I’d never normally come across by myself.

When these are EU-related, they’re normally incredibly familiar – the usual stories that get repeated year after year. Having, as I do, fairly extensive archives, I keep finding myself using old posts to rebut “new” stories – be it over the EU budget, the EU’s role in guaranteeing British freedom, the concept of an EU superstate. Along the way, I’ve got into arguments with anti-EU campaigners from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the Bruges Group, OpenEurope and more.

It’s all great fun. A bit like blogging in the good old days, when I actually had time to read and comment on other blogs.

Having said that, I’m planning to start blogging again soon. I’m writing less and less in the day job these days (unless you count innumerable emails, Powerpoint presentations and planning documents), and am starting to get rusty.

There’s still a question of precisely what to write *about*, though. I’ve covered many of the broad EU issues – often several times. I have no time for party politics or the “personalities” of the Brussels bubble (something I’ve never been a part of anyway). I usually haven’t got the time – or expertise – for detailed policy analysis. And as entertaining as arguing with eurosceptics can be on Twitter, I prefer to keep the blog for considered argument and polite debate – turning the focus back to pointing out the flaws of eurosceptic arguments tends to attract the kind of responses I have no interest in dealing with.

And in any case, these days there are plenty of other EU bloggers to do that sort of thing – you can find them via Bloggingportal. (I remember when this here EUblogosphere were all fields – just me, EU Referendum (sadly increasingly shrill in its anti-EU vehemence these days), A Fistful of Euros, and a handful of others, now long since departed.)

So, back properly soon. Hopefully. At which point I’ll hopefully also find time to give this place a spring clean – some of the site’s code has broken, and a redesign is long overdue to make the text more readable. The only trouble is I’ve lost my FTP details, so can’t get in to change anything…

Details here. I’ve been named the UK finalist in the internet section for my June 2009 post on the percentage of UK laws that come from the EU (also published on Liberal Conspiracy and BlogActiv).

From the announcement:

“An article on the percentage of our laws originating in the EU got the UK nomination for the internet section. The judging panel found James Clive-Matthews’ EUtopia blog overall very entertaining, but selected this entry for its attempt to clarify how the arguments used to make claims about the influence of EU legislation often take original quotes out of context. EUtopia does not draw any conclusions, but lays out the context for the various claims and counter-claims, as such helping to clarify what is often a contentious issue.”

Which is nice.

I would also like to state for the record that nothing I have written on this blog has ever been published with the hope of securing money. It’s all just for my ego – not for anyone else’s, and certainly never to support any political institution or ideology (except on the very rare occasions that I feel that such support is warranted).

So although I find (UKIP press officer) Gawain’s old description of this as the European sycophancy prize amusing, I’d dispute it. Because any blogger/journalist willing to spew out rubbish that they don’t believe in the hope of sucking up to the powerful is never going to be worth reading anyway – and no amount of prixe money will ever alter that.

On a related note: For a more detailed analysis of the percentage of UK laws that come from the EU, check out this detailed report into the subject (PDF). Fascinating stuff – and also tends to support my own vague conclusions.

Insanely busy in the real world, is all. I even missed this place’s 7th birthday…

If you want to find a bit more EU-related commentary in the meantime, your first port of call should be Bloggingportal.eu – a handy aggregator of 500+ EU-related blogs, with some of the best posts highlighted daily.

If that doesn’t sate your appetite for the most insanely complex political system ever conceived, you could also head over to the Nosemonkey’s EUtopia Netvibes Universe, where there’s a whole bunch more EU-related topical stuff.

If you’re really desperate for Nosemonkey-related commentary, you could also try following me on Twitter – though be warned that on Twitter it’s not all EU-related, I tend to be rather more sweary and rage-filled, and there’s also a number of digressions on London, life, movies, blogging, UK politics and the general idiocy of our fellow man.

I should be back and blogging at some point. Whether it’s soon or not it’s too early to say… (I do have a fascinating post planned on the balance of trade at some point, though…)

Forgot all about this, as the interview was originally conducted back in October, but it’s in the latest issue of Shift Mag, which focusses on Euroscepticism. Have a gander at the whole lot here or, below the fold, check out my responses to the following:

1. In the blog nosemonkey, you explain your political views. How have you passed from being a small -“C” conservative and entirely anti-EU to a small -“L” liberal and largely pro-EU?

2.According to you, what are the main shortcomings of the eurosceptic group?

3. Do you think eurosceptics could weigh up in EU decisions if people took them more seriously?

4. Five good reasons to be Eurosceptic and Five good reasons to be Pro- European in Europe today?

5. With the adhesion request of Island, with the “NO-YES” referendum in Ireland, a new phenomenon seems to emerge: “EUR-OPPORTUNISM”. Will it be the strongest cement of European Union for the future? And maybe the sworn enemy of Europe as identity ? What’s your opinion?

6. In your blog, you say you are more in favour of the idea of the EU than the current reality. Can you explain?

7. How can the EU get more legitimacy amongst EU citizens?

Please note, these answers were given a few months ago now, so my views may well have changed… I’ve highlighted a few key points in bold on a quick skim through, though – it’s a long one. The last bit in particular, though, is worth a read, if I do say so myself…

1. In the blog nosemonkey, you explain your political views. How have you passed from being a small -“C” conservative and entirely anti-EU to a small -“L” liberal and largely pro-EU?

It was pretty much down to studying more about what the EU actually does (about which the vast majority of Europeans really have no idea). Once I knew a bit more of the realities, I suddenly started to realise that a lot of my eurosceptic assumptions were based on misunderstandings and ideological prejudice.

This in turn led me to start questioning much of what I was reading in the press about the EU. I had a naive belief in the press – that it’s the job of the press to be critical of ALL political institutions (that’s why it’s called the Fourth Estate, after all), and that if the EU was criticised for pretty much everything it does, that was because it deserved that criticism.

But once I started to learn a little more about the EU, I started to realise that much of what it was being criticised for was not the fault of the EU itself – and in a surprising number of cases nothing to do with the EU at all. Hell, the way the EU’s reported in the UK, in 99% of cases it’s not even clear what’s meant by “the EU” – it can be the Commission, the Council, Parliament, individual MEPs, individual Commissioners, random functionaries, and sometimes even people or organisations that have nothing to do with the EU (I’ve seen papers prepared by lobbying organisations reported as “EU plans” before they’ve even been considered by the Commission, let alone adopted; I’ve seen Council of Europe institutions referred to as if they were part of the EU structure).

This in turn showed up the ignorance of the British press and most British commentators. Which in turn led me to question many of the “facts” that I had picked up over the years that had led me to be anti-EU. If a news organisation is getting the basics wrong – referring to the European Court of Human Rights as “EU judges”, as the Press Association did earlier this year, for example – you have to question the reliability of its coverage on pretty much everything, as well as the opinions of its reporters and columnists.

The shift from conservative to liberal was pretty much entirely due to going to university and suddenly meeting a bunch of people from different backgrounds after a childhood spent entirely in the sheltered world of the middle-ranking middle class, where small-”c” conservatism (with a touch of classical, 19th century style liberalism thrown in) comes as naturally as breathing. If you only stick with one kind of person from one kind of background, you’re likely to adopt their ideology. Closed mindsets and lack of awareness of other opinions (or, to be precise, the *reasons* for other opinions) can only lead to misunderstandings, hostility and conflict.

2. According to you, what are the main shortcomings of the eurosceptic group?

If you approach anything from the standpoint of not trusting it, you’re far more likely to spot problems – but also to blow those problems out of proportion.

The classic train of thought when I was anti-EU – and of many eurosceptics today – was “EU project X works badly, EU directive Y is unnecessary to be legislated at an EU level, and evidence of corruption has been uncovered at EU institution Z – therefore the EU is a bad thing”. All of which initial observations may well be true – but when you start to be suspicious, you tend to look for connections and patterns that simply aren’t there, and can easily come to false conclusions.

Just because X, Y and Z are all bad things doesn’t mean that the EU as a whole is bad – and in any case ignores A, B, C, D, E (and so on), which may work perfectly. But you rarely hear about things that work perfectly – especially when it comes to the EU, and especially in the UK. Good news is not news – only bad news is worth reporting, and only bad news stands out. Plus – when you’re of an anti-EU mindset – any good news about an EU project can instantly be dismissed as propaganda.

So, the first big problem is false logic. Just because X, Y and Z are bad doesn’t mean that everything is. And just because you only hear about bad things doesn’t mean that everything’s bad. Is the Common Fisheries Policy rubbish? Yes. That doesn’t mean that EU legislation to push down mobile phone charges or allow passport-free travel is also rubbish. And if you don’t know 90% of what it is that the EU does, you can’t come to a sensible conclusion about its worth based on what you *do* know.

In other words, everything needs context. As an example, the UK’s contribution to the EU budget is c.£4-9bn (net) per annum – which sounds like a vast amount of money if you work out that a teacher’s salary is c.£25,000 a year (it’s around 160-360,000 teachers), until you put it into a more appropriate context of the entire UK national budget and see that in 2006-7 the UK spent £31bn on paying off the interest on the national debt (that’s 1,240,000 teachers); the European Commission employing c.35,000 staff likewise sounds like a lot, until you see that the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions employs c.180,000 people.

The second major problem – which is a significant part of the reason that I was driven away from being eurosceptic – is that anti-EU groups and commentators tend to repeat misinformation and misinterpretations as if they were objective fact. The classic is the claim that “80% of laws come from the EU” – a claim that has been repeated so often now that many people (even non-eurosceptics) have started to assume that it’s true. I investigated this claim in detail on the blog just before the European Elections back in the summer (http://www.jcm.org.uk/blog/?p=2230), and found it to be absolute rubbish – as are most claims about the EU’s influence. The real figure for most EU member states is somewhere in the region of 10-20% of all legislation *and* regulations – and quite often lower.

There’s two possible reasons why eurosceptic campaigners would repeat the 80% claim (and the many other false claims like it):

2) They know that it’s false, but repeat it anyway to gain support. In which case they’re liars and can’t be trusted.

The third major problem is the tendency to preach to the converted – often in incredibly hyperbolic terms. Claims that the Lisbon Treaty will end national sovereignty or Irish neutrality or restrict individual freedoms are objective nonsense – but play well to that part of the population that are convinced that the EU is evil.

Claims that the EU is working purely for the good of vast corporate/capitalist/neoliberal economic interests at the expense of the people (if you’re a left-wing eurosceptic) or that it’s working to create a Europe-wide socialist state and undermining business with vast quantities of restrictive employment laws (if you’re a right-wing eurosceptic) are likewise both quite obviously stupid if you look at the big picture – but it suits eurosceptic campaigners to narrow the focus to single issues, and then blow those single issues out of proportion to stir up the passions of their supporters.

It’s understandable why anti-EU campaigners do this – the vast majority of what the EU does is tedious, boring bureaucracy on hugely unexciting regulatory issues that it’s very hard to get passionate about. But it’s both dishonest and serves to undermine the legitimacy of the anti-EU cause in the eyes of that part of the population that hasn’t yet made up its mind. When eurosceptics make wild, hyperbolic claims, it’s also all to easy for their opponents to write them off as lunatics and extremists. The vast majority of eurosceptics are neither – but the lunatics and extremists tend to shout the loudest, and discredit the entire cause in the process.

3. Do you think eurosceptics could weigh up in EU decisions if people took them more seriously?

If eurosceptics were actually sceptical, they could and would be taken seriously – because any new political project (and 50 years is still very new) needs constructive criticism in order to improve itself. The trouble is, most eurosceptics are not sceptical – they’re cynical.

The latter helps no one, and only breeds resentment on both sides.

An example I like to use is the republican movement in Northern Ireland – while the IRA were blowing people up and refusing to engage constructively, the republicans gained no concessions and actually made life even more unpleasant for their supporters; now that they’re engaging constructively, they’re gaining concessions and making life nicer for everyone – they’re unlikely to gain full independence, as they’d like, but that’s only because they’ve not got enough support. Same with the anti-EU groups – if they engaged constructively then they’d win some concessions and reforms that may make the situation they dislike more bearable; they won’t achieve the abolition of or withdrawal from the EU simply because they haven’t got enough support.

4. Five good reasons to be Eurosceptic and Five good reasons to be Pro- European in Europe today?

Eurosceptic:

1. The EU is flawed.
2. The EU is less democratic than many would like.
3. The EU is remote from the people, and often seems deliberately so.
4. Parts of the EU organisational structure are secretive and protective of their own interests.
5. There is some evidence of corruption in *some* parts of the EU’s organisation.

Pro-EU:

1. The ideal of bringing people together for mutual benefit is a fundamentally good one.
2. The EU does aid intra-European trade
3. The EU has eased intra-European travel.
4. The EU has helped break down barriers and increase understandings and friendships between nations and the people of those nations
5. The EU allows for regular, multi-level contact between the governments and state machinery of every member state in an absolutely unprecedented manner, allowing for a level of interaction that is entirely impossible using traditional methods of international diplomacy – used properly this can be an incredibly powerful, beneficial tool for all parties.

5. With the adhesion request of Island, with the “NO-YES” referendum in Ireland, a new phenomenon seems to emerge: “EUR-OPPORTUNISM”. Will it be the strongest cement of European Union for the future? And maybe the sworn enemy of Europe as identity ? What’s your opinion?

I don’t think it’s a new phenomenon. Numerous member states have (mostly privately, but sometimes publicly if it’ll help their electoral chances at home – see Maggie Thatcher’s famous “No, no no!”) threatened the veto to get their own way. It’s a hang-over from traditional diplomacy, and will remain as long as national vetoes are part of the EU’s workings. I also don’t think they hamper European identity – they may help to bolster national identity in the country where the veto is being threatened, but if anything they enhance a European identity among other member states – be it, with the Lisbon Treaty, the frustration of having to wait until Ireland/the Czech Republic.

6. In your blog, you say you are more in favour of the idea of the EU than the current reality. Can you explain?

The simple version is that I think that a regular, structured mechanism for international cooperation and economic harmonisation – which is what the EU is at its most fundamental level – can be hugely beneficial to everyone involved. But some of the mechanisms that are in place in the way the EU currently works (notably the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries policies) are hugely inefficient. Likewise, for the EU to be truly effective, it needs to be very careful in choosing which areas it operates in.

This is what the subsidiarity principle is all about – finding the most effective ways of legislating and regulating. Currently, there are various areas that fall under the EU’s remit that I feel would be better dealt with at more local levels (be they national or regional or whatever), and other areas that are currently not EU competences that would be better dealt with at an EU level. At the same time, the current one-size-fits-all approach is not working. More integrationist countries are being held back by more reluctant member states. Aspiring members are being held back by current members worried about the implications for immigration, the economy, voting weights etc. No one member state should be able to hold the EU to ransom by threatening to veto something that the other 26 want to do.

Likewise, no one country should be able to be forced to implement major changes that it isn’t happy with. The problem of the Constitution and of the Lisbon Treaty was the inflexibility of the EU model that requires unanimous agreement between all member states – the EU needs to be flexible to survive, because rigid things tend to shatter into pieces if they come under too much pressure.

7. How can the EU get more legitimacy amongst EU citizens?

The EU is insanely complicated, much of what it does is insanely boring, and the majority of what it does is draw up relatively minor rules and regulations on very specific, usually trade-related issues that have only a very minor impact on people’s daily lives (although, as a whole, all of these tiny rules and regulations add up to a significant impact, it’s through an unnoticeable drip-drip-drip).

If the people are asked “what is the EU for?” then the governments of the member states will be able to clarify what it is that *they* want from the EU, and in future rounds of negotiations for future reforms, we may finally be able to come up with something that leaves everyone happy, rather than the Lisbon Treaty situation we’re now in where everyone’s a little bit annoyed. (Even if, as hardly anyone’s read – let alone understood – the treaty, hardly anyone really knows quite why…)

All kinds of real-world excitement of late, including some very good news on the job front just this morning, has kept me off blogging for a bit.

However, I’ve been informed that if anyone fancied leaving comments in support of what I’ve been doing online with this blog and elsewhere over the last few years over at the EurActiv Awards site, then I’ll have a better chance of winning something or other.

And while I’m blegging support, you may also fancy putting in a positive comment or two to my suggestion to the excellent public-spirited chaps at MySociety that they develop an EU version of the invaluable democratic-accountability-boosting website TheyWorkForYou. This could do more for EU accountability than any number of actual Commission initiatives in one swoop – without any kind of public funding – and so should be in the interest of anyone who wants more EU transparency, both europhiles and eurosceptics alike.

I’ve been a bit quiet over the last few weeks, largely thanks to the real world getting in the way.

One of the major projects I’ve been working on, however, is now in a pre-launch beta phase, and so can be officially revealed: Ideas on Europe – a new group blog that I’ve been developing in partnership with UACES, the University Association for Contemporary University Studies.

Describing itself as a place for “informed analysis, comment, dialogue and debate on all things European”, Ideas on Europe is intended as a non-partisan, multi-national, not exclusively political portal for academics working in the field of European Studies – taking in politics, economics, history, sociology, public policy, culture, geography and more – to engage with those of us outside the ivory towers as well as those within.

At the moment we’ve got nearly 40 contributors on board – a number that’s set to rise considerably – ranging from postgrad students to named chairs at high-profile universities. Some of them have begun to make their first forays into blogging, with posts from Jaani Kaerne (from the University of Tartu in Estonia), EUoplocephalus (from the University of Surrey in the UK), and (in German) Vanessa Buth – as well as a few from me – leading the way.

Among even this initial contributor base, there is a broad range of expertise and experience – with blogs dedicated to subjects like welfare, migration, security, energy, north Africa, and education, as well as more generalist contributors. Now that the site is going public, we should start to see a bit more activity from these early adopters.

Many of the areas we aim to end up covering are currently sorely under-represented in the world of Euroblogging – not to mention the relative lack of academic contributors to the various online debates, most of which are currently dominated by a combination of enthusiastic amateurs and professional political types – so I very much hope that those of us who’ve been active in this section of the internet give the site and its contributors our support, encouragement and advice as it starts to get off the ground over the next few months. Not least because the vast majority of our contributors have never blogged before – nor, indeed, taken part in online discussions.

I’ve already answered some questions about Ideas on Europe’s aims and intentions over at Kosmopolito (which now has its own presence on the new site) and also at Blogactiv, but naturally enough, I’m happy to answer any more that anyone may have here.