Rubrics » TheFILEstarters
How Soft Is Actually Hard and Tough
The promise we make our students when they apply to our study programs invariably covers success. We promise to prepare them for successful jobs, for successful careers and, if all else fails, for meaningful lives. And they used to believe us because we had a track record of successful alumni. What did we teach those successful alumni? More
The Great Britain Exit with Multiple and “Controversial” Echoes
Without any doubt, the Great Britain exit – more or less anticipated – is a major event with “waves” all over the world and on multiple levels. Brief reflections on some of them: For Romania, the influences in the short term will be minor. Over the medium and long term, there will be changes of functionality and resources within the European Union, Romania being dependent on them to a significant degree. More
How Does Brexit Influence Us?
The British referendum on EU membership struck Europe like lightning on dry wood. Britain’s gesture to draw attention to the greatest problems with the tactical toolkit and strategic vision of the central EU institutions became, owing to a lack of political foresight from David Cameron, a concrete political reality which European Union should take very seriously. More
Brexit – Freer Trade plus More Legislative Independence
For an economist who shares a liberal oriented point of view Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is somewhat puzzling. On the one hand, the claim that EU legislation is suffocating the British economy is fairly understandable. The Brussels bureaucracy has indeed tightened its grip in the last decades on most aspect concerning trade within the European Union (from technical standards to environmental legislation). More
The Geo-economics and Geopolitics of the Brexit Crisis
The many suggested effects of Brexit will take time to manifest in observable fashion in Great Britain, Europe and globally, after the immediate but emotionally charged reactions of markets, politicians and all sorts of analysts. Two considerations have to draw our attention, in my opinion, as Brexit is now being decided. Firstly, nobody should play with the fate of the country just in order to seize power. More
Brexit – Lessons for the European Union
The result of the British referendum (51.9% pro-Brexit) surprised the financial markets, but also the policy-makers (recently, the UK Treasury admitted the lack of a plan for this scenario). The pound depreciated significantly, to the lowest level since June 1985 against the US dollar. At the same time, the uncertainties regarding the future of the UK-EU relations have had a strong impact on the banking sector, given the role of London in the global and European financial industry (the banks’ stock index decreased by over 20% in EU since the 23rd of June, compared with a decline of only 7% in the US). More
Brexit: A Divided Continent and a Divided Country
Durham University is a bubble within the North East, and this has never been clearer than in the aftermath of the EU Referendum. Whilst sentiment within the student body was strongly Remain, County Durham voted overwhelmingly to leave. A five-minute drive from the Remain posters in the windows of almost every student house in the city centre, huge Vote Leave banners hung from every town hall and working mens’ club. More
La Vie en Rose, with a hint of grey
On the evening of November 13th 2015, gunmen stormed into the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, killing 89 people. That very same night, shooters and suicide bombers slaughtered 40 more people in coordinated terrorist attacks in five other locations, in the centre of Paris and at Stade de France. France was at war, as President François Hollande superfluously claimed in the immediate aftermath. More
Football Goes More in Europe than in Schengen, the EU, EEA or Eurozone
The 2016 European Football Championship has a special significance because it is probably the last edition of this competition which takes place in a single country. This is because of the 2020 experiment which will see the tournament unfold in 13 host cities, distributed throughout Europe. If this formula is successful, it will be applied to future editions. More
From Éder to Bastille Day
Rarely in the history of sports has there been a major sporting event under such a great threat of mayhem as the French EURO 2016. There were, of course, the Munich 72 and the Moscow 80 Olympics, the 1990s ethnic conflicts of the Yugoslav Wars (with major impact on the make-up of the representative sports teams of the belligerents), or the two World Wars which cancelled all competitions, but one could reasonably hope those days were truly over. More