In a context of lack of confidence, depressed investment and aggregate demand as well as deflation risks, all of these phenomena occurring despite a conjunction of favourable factors (cheap oil, weaker euro and very accommodative monetary policy), we propose to take up the proposal of the European Commission to revise the Energy Taxation Directive, introduced in 2011 and withdrawn last year due to the opposition of the Parliament and the Council.

At least since the birth of modern capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, competition has been recognized by many economists and other theoreticians of ethics and social sciences as an essential driver of progress. Either applied to trade, politics or science, competition, they claimed, stimulates innovation and confronts products, services, parties or ideas on a marketplace that rewards the best and sanctions the worst, alike a permanent race where spectators are also expected to be voters, as it should be the case in liberal democracies.

The subject of this paper is to clarify policy interactions between border-free travel, cooperation in the realm of homeland security, integrated border management, migration and asylum policy and regional engagement, then building a policy coherence index for the 28 EU Member States based on official positions of their governments regarding these five aspects.

One year ago, a report concluded a trip to Russia by wishing that during the next visit, the forest will be better managed, intact and thriving. This is yet to demonstrate for Karpogory, 200 km east to the icy port of Arkhangelsk, but a recent expedition to Podporozhye, closer to the former imperial capital Saint Petersburg, gives some ground for optimism.

In the famous Parable of the Talents, the master awards his servants who managed to multiply wealth and punishes the one who preferred to hide the treasure and made a sterile use of it. The story ends on a harsh judgment: “for to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:14–30).

Illicit financial flows are one of the symptoms of unharnessed globalisation. While trade and finance have become more and more international, with an accelerated rhythm since the end of the Cold War, governance has not kept pace and all states, including the most powerful, face the consequences of non-cooperative behavior and free ride, from other state entities as well as from non-state actors whose influence can exceed that of entire countries.