brouillettea's blog

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's plan to slash the government's bureaucracy may not cure the country's economic woes, says CEU economics professor John Earle. In a new piece in The Moscow Times co-authored with University of Wisconsin-Madison's Scott Gehlbach, Earle says "cutting Russia’s bureaucracy is a misguided solution to the wrong problem. The country’s problem is not that its bureaucracy is too large. It’s that the bureaucrats it does have aren’t responsive to the people they serve.

In a new piece in today's Financial Times, John Shattuck calls CEU a "laboratory for critical thinking and open society." Read the full article here.

By admitting its human rights problems, the US helps other nations admit theirs, says CEU President and Rector John Shattuck in a new opinion piece published in The Christian Science Monitor this week.

"Human rights are a growing area of diplomatic competition,' he writes. "Since the United Nations defined the playing field in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the list of countries that say nothing about human rights has dwindled to very few. Unfortunately, that will not prevent certain countries from trying to exploit the process."

CEU paves the way to a career in Brussels, says CEU alum Justus Schoenlau (MA International Relations and European Studies, 1998), interviewed by top German weekly Die Zeit.

Click on pdf below to read the full story, translated from the original German.

The original article in German can be accessed here.

George Soros weighs in on Obama's bailout missteps in a new piece in The New York Review of Books. Although Obama was right to bail out the banking system, says Soros, "Where the Obama administration did go wrong . . . was in the way it bailed out the banking system. It helped the banks make their way out of a hole by supplying them with cheap money and relieving them of some of their bad assets."

Dorothy Bohle, head of political science department at CEU, has called for a refreshed debate on the role of the markets in determining the fate of EU citizens and countries following the bail-out of Greece, recession and the strains on the Eurozone from international obligations, domestic unrest and the spirit of European solidarity, The Global Herald reports

David Nassar, founder of Hotspot Digital, offers his take on the Internet at Liberty 2010 conference co-hosted by Google and CEU last week. Nassar was among the 400 bloggers, cyberactivists and digital media experts who gathered for a three-day conference CEU to discuss internet freedom, online expression, privacy and censorship.

George Soros on Tuesday condemed Europe's treatment of the Roma, calling widespread hostility by the public toward the region's largest ethnic minority a "mockery of European values" and a "stain Europe’s conscience." His statement came in reaction to the French government's recent explusion of members of its Roma population, which put an

Read Time Out Budapest's article on this week's LGBT Conference for Diversity at CEU.

The Chronical of Higher Education profiles CEU Rector John Shattuck, read article here.