Politics

Last week members of the third strongest and openly neo-Nazi party, the Golden Dawn, destroyed a memorial monument dedicated to a murdered musician, Pavlos Fyssas. They intimidated his family in their house and smashed several bars without any resistance from the security forces.

I am writing to you as a former prisoner of conscience from the times of Brezhnev. All other titles, which I have been awarded throughout my whole life, do not matter in the light of the Ukrainian Maidan, which is now bleeding.

To beat bureaucracy, you have to make your problem theirs, similarly to one of the Murphy’s laws, which we can use to hopefully manage to save our forests.

Introduction of the new directive can be dangerous not only because of extending the state’s and EU’s powers onto a new area of people’s activity. It will be harmful for the CSR itself.

However, there are many who think that future challenges can only be faced by further enlargement and deepening of the European unification process.

Can this situation be a kick start for a new Europe? Are we in the middle of a tragedy or at the beginning of an opportunity?

And I will end with a proposal for a new institutional framework, grounded on the understanding that we should recognize the confederal nature of the European Union, but that we should at last integrate true democracy in it.

The Catalonian president has unilaterally declared the date of an independence referendum – November 9, 2014. The Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, supported by the EU president Herman Van Rompuy, has immediately declared that there will not be any referendum.

Cameron got Britain into an isolation. Isolation that is not splendid at all.

That brings me to my main point; the biggest threat to Europe is economic populism. The European debt crisis has proved what should have been clear much earlier.