Library blog

Martin Schulz was re-elected as President of the European Parliament, by a sizable majority. He will preside over a parliament that has been presented as a reflection of a crisis of confidence, hit by a political earthquake.

The June Think Tank Review is out, referencing papers published in May 2014. As could be expected, a large share of the think tank papers published last May were devoted to the European elections.

In a speech in 1988, Jacques Delors made the prediction that in ten years, 80% of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social affairs will be of Community origin.

'The European Council and European Governance: The Commanding Heights of the EU' edited by François Foret and Yann-Sven Rittelmeyer. This book, part of the Routledge Studies on Government and the European Union series, provides an introduction to the institutional changes brought by the Lisbon Treaty, a perspective on the institutionalisation of the European Council, and insight into its emerging inter-institutional position.

On 12 and 13 June, a group of librarians from the Central Library of the Council of the European Union attended this year's Eurolib general assembly, held in The Hague.

This is our last post gathering material on the European elections, before the ballots actually open in some Member States.  EU Heads of State or Government will convene on 27 May to "discuss the outcome of the elections and to look at what we can learn from its results", as president Van Rompuy puts it in the invitation letter, not to "decide about names".

With the EP elections now just a few days away, we thought we would share some of the sources we followed over the past weeks.

The May Think Tank Review is out, referencing papers published in April. With EP elections approaching, our selection reflects the think tank community's concern on the forthcoming ‘re-setting’ of membership and leadership in EU institutions.

As our readers know, the library tries to monitor think tank events in the 'Brussels bubble', especially those that generate a flow of documents. So we could not really miss, last week, the policy briefing by the European Policy Center with the UK Minister of State for Europe, David Lidington, who addressed a rather large audience on "The policy priorities of the next European Commission - a UK perspective".

we like to mark this year’s anniversary of the declaration of 9 May 1950 by pointing to the collections of documents put together by the Fondation Robert Schuman and by CVCE. They offer a good perspective on the intergovernmental beginnings of the adventure launched by Schuman and the other founding fathers.