Latest blog articles
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Last September, the European Commission adopted a proposal for a Directive on European cross-border associations (COM(2023) 516 final). “The proposal aims to improve … the conditions for establishing and operating European cross-border associations (ECBAs)”. According to the Commission, the current...
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Not out of possibility, but out of necessity
The last couple of weeks of 2021 were dominated by the cross-border nature of the COVID-19 crisis, and the fight against it. While the Netherlands went into the holiday season under a lockdown, complete closures were largely absent in Germany and...
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While the story of the company is a little history of European integration in itself, it was the decision of the European Court of Justice in the case Van Gend & Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen (1963) that gave Van Gend & Loos a place in European Union law. The case itself was...
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During the corona crisis, national measures in the three countries on the Limburg borders are not coordinated equally well. As a result, there is currently a situation in the border region where certain border entrepreneurs fall between the cracks, such as in the Dutch newspaper NRC on April 2nd ("E...
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During the Easter weekend there was a lack of clarity about what the rules are at the German-Dutch border. What is actually still allowed when it comes to travelling from the Netherlands to Germany and vice versa? Both the government in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and in the Netherlands have...
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Cross-border non-coordination
Yesterday I was in Maastricht at the Belgian border which is no more than 1 km behind my house. I wanted to see it with my own eyes: the border was closed. The Belgian government has put up barriers to prevent us from entering their country. For five years we at ITEM... -
Things aren't going so well on Earth. We are suffering from systemic problems. Resource wastage, ecosystem collapse and climate change make it impossible to claim that things on Earth are working efficiently. But the Gnomes have solved all of these problems.
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The public-private divide is one of the 21st century’s flat earth theories. Its conceptions of private rights and obligations and limitations on state power are commonly used in corporate law, contract law and numerous other fields of legal, political, economic and other social scientific research...
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The EU is negotiating trade agreements in secret because orthodoxy, mysticism and a wishful thinking-based approach to policymaking have returned to power in Europe.
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After months of media bombardment about ostensibly lazy Greeks who are unwilling to pay their taxes or their debts to the fellow countries of the Eurozone, the latter of which generously helped Greece out of its self-inflicted dire financial straits, many in Europe have breathed a collective sigh of...