The European Commission is preparing a €200 billion “pact for growth” to be presented at the next EU summit in June. READ MORE

“We, devoted allies in the very meaning of this word, have common interests and common concerns, as well as common actions to settle them.  The last is proved, in particular, by firm support from Poland of the prolongation of NATO mission on Baltic States Air Policing", -- said the President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves during yesterday’s and today’s meeting of the Heads of states of Estonia, Latvia and Poland held in Warsaw. READ MORE

One of the more pernicious obstacles to rational policy-making is the "ratchet effect": the tendency for policies, once adopted, to acquire a life of their own and to become resistant to change, even when they have ceased to be useful. For example, you can be confident that we will all be wasting time in airport security lines decades from now, long after Osama bin Laden's death. Existing security measures may not pass a simple cost-benefit test, but what political leader would dare relax them? READ MORE

What is going on in Central Europe? After Viktor Orban’s consolidation of power in Hungary, another political strongman has returned to the helm, this time in Slovakia. Former Prime Minister Robert Fico has once again assumed the leadership of Slovakia following his Smer-Social Democracy (SMER-SD) party’s landslide victory in last month’s elections. Like Orban in Hungary, Fico will preside over the first single-party cabinet in Slovakia since the collapse of communism in 1989. His coalition government between 2006 and 2010 had been accused of abuses of power and a lack of respect toward the opposition, media, and NGOs. And, much like his Hungarian counterpart, Fico could yet use his political mandate to attempt to reinterpret Slovakia’s history, change key laws, or battle with the European Union on nationalistic grounds. READ MORE