With my father born in Hungary and my mother in Austria, both before 1918, I am second-generation Austro-Hungarian. Born in Budàpest, I spoke German and Hungarian but have unlearned successively my German and eventually my Hungarian. That was after my mother, by then widowed, had taken me to Austria in 1946. Tainted by the seven...

At the 2018 conferences of CIST (Collège international des sciences territoriale) mine was one of only two in English.  (Faludi 2018) Not to worry: I met exciting people and my extended paper (in French: Faludi 2019) went into the Dossier des Annales de Droit.  Like me, Kahn and Richard (2020) underscore the EU‘s being – my term –...

The occasion being the on-going ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ (https://futureu.europa.eu/) the chief editor of EU Observer Koert Debeuf proposes recreating the European Community as an add-on to the EU as is. Quite the opposite of a doomsday scenario, Debeuf (https://euobserver.com/opinion/152309utm_source=euobs&utm_medium=email) presents this as a realistic alternative to the ever larger, ever closer and...

Thirty years ago Slovenia split from Yugoslavia, large parts of which are still a gaping hole in the EU. Central European members are keen on closing it, were it not for Bulgaria first wanting to settle accounts with North Macedonia. (See also my blog ‘Balkan Ghosts’.) She insists on this wannabe candidate acknowledging that its...

What does Viktor Orbán have in common with the German Constitutional Court? They both defend a ‘Westphalian’ system under which sovereign states are seen as masters in their own house. Accordingly, the EU is no more than the sum of its parts. Attacking the European Parliament ever so critical of him, Orbán for instance wants...

Reading Estelle Evrard (2021) about legal geography and spatial justice in borderlands evoked memories of Edward Soja speaking about the relation of society and space – also described as spatiality, or the relationship between people and things, including other people – at Radbout University Nijmegen maybe twenty years ago. Evrard is from the University of...

In a film about neutral Sweden during World War II, the protagonist, a young women hiking in the woods near her home sees an escapee from Norway fall dead into the brook marking the common border. The German officer of the occupying force calmly puts away his gun, saluting the Swedish border guard having rushed...

Many youthful German speakers have been reading Karl May. His first six of many dozens of volumes recount the adventures of one Kara ben Nemsi and his indefatigable servant-companion Hadschi Halef Omar Ben Hadschi Abul Abbas Ibn Hadschi Dawud al Gossarah. (My stepfather could still recite the full name decades after he had read the books.)...

The announcement of Europe Day 2021 reminded me of my visit to Tirana. Polis University there wanted to celebrate the then French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert Schuman inviting Germany and also other countries to join what would become the European Coal and Steel Community. Presently, the day he announced this intention at a press...