How many lessons do European Union policymakers need before they rid themselves of the illusion that Europe’s economy and financial system are to a considerable extent “decoupled” from those of the US?

In six EU countries – the Benelux trio, Denmark, Germany and the UK – we have seen emergency state intervention over the past few days to rescue or nationalise collapsing banks and mortgage lenders. In each case, the action would not have been necessary had it not been for the financial upheavals in the US. Read more

Remember Declan Ganley? He’s the British-born businessman who played a big part in Ireland’s rejection in a referendum last June of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. Ganley often seemed a strange ally for the Irish nationalists, conservative Catholics and leftists who made up the No camp. But I saw him in action in Dublin and there’s no doubt in my mind that he was a formidable campaigner, fatally underestimated by the Irish political establishment.

Thanks to some good reporting by the Irish Times and the Czech newspaper Lidové Noviny, we now know a little more about Ganley. The Czech paper discovered that Ganley had paid a visit to Prague in late July and met President Václav Klaus, the Czech head of state. Klaus is a notorious eurosceptic who, immediately after the Irish vote, declared the Lisbon treaty dead – something not even President Lech Kaczynski of Poland or Gordon Brown, the UK premier, dared do. Read more

Brussels would certainly be a duller place without the sparkling wit of Jean-Claude Juncker. As guest speaker at a think-tank breakfast on Wednesday, the Luxembourg leader was challenged by an over-excited British questioner to admit that the eurozone economy was in a complete mess. Lest matters grew even worse, the questioner asked,  shouldn’t Juncker and his colleagues immediately start arranging the “orderly” break-up of the single currency area?

As the European Union’s longest-serving prime minister and chairman of the ‘eurogroup’, which unites the eurozone’s 15 finance ministers, you would hardly have expected Juncker to answer this question in the affirmative. And indeed, he replied: “No … Something in my heart is telling me that the British will be happy [one day] to join the single currency.” Read more

The less often a country appears in the news headlines, the more likely that it is a peaceful, happy sort of place. But is this true of Kosovo? Its declaration of independence from Serbia in February, and its subsequent recognition by the US and 20 of the European Union’s 27 member-states, were big news at the time. Now Kosovo gets less attention, driven from our TV screens and newspapers by other events in Georgia, or Afghanistan, or Sudan.

An authoritative report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) makes clear that Kosovo since February has had its fair share of good news as well as bad news. On the plus side, in spite of two outbreaks of politically motivated violence in northern Kosovo in the month after the February 17 declaration of independence, the overall security situation has “remained remarkably stable”, the report says. Read more