John Paul II related content 

Mugabe bends the rules to travel to the Vatican. Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, made another trip to Europe last week, despite the ban on providing him with a...

A trip to Bratislava brings to the surface some of the principal undercurrents in central and eastern Europe. The Globsec security conference in Bratislava is carving out...

Poland's prime minister becomes the second Pole to win European prize. Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, was today awarded this year's Charlemagne Prize for his...

Twenty years of perspective may instruct historians, but the most valuable lesson from Poland's first partly free elections comes from remembering how we Poles saw things...

The public-relations plan pursued by Alyaksandr Lukashenka will make Belarus's exclusion from the EU's Eastern Partnership seem minor.

How a dissident became Prague's chosen pragmatist. Alexandr Vondra has a gallery on his website that features many of the staple photoshots of a successful politician – en...

Buttiglione returns to vaunt the common European spirit. What a difference four years makes. On Monday 11 October 2004, the civil liberties committee of the European...

The highest point in the Baltic states is Big Egg Mountain in Estonia, at a towering 318 metres above sea level, about one-thirtieth of the height of Everest. That aside,...

Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland's current first minister and sometime MEP, was once known around Brussels as a rabble-rouser, having famously branded the previous Pope John...

Less than a year ago, Alfred Gusenbauer, as the leader of Austria's Socialist Party (SPÖ), had a secure place among the also-rans of European politics. Clumsy, unlucky, how...

The Polish have a ghastly history as Europe's battlefield. Over the centuries the population has had a choice of viewing: oppression and exploitation from the east or the...

Good guys have it tough these days. Do-gooders barely register on the radar screen of a jaded and cynical world. If they are noticed at all, there is a tendency to indulge in...

Deserted villages with nobody left but the aged and the very young. It is the classic image of countries swept clear by emigration. But it is not an image from the...

In the culturally diverse European Union, the euro coin is an emblem of integration and a symbol of a greater European economic and political identity. But since individual...

A row broke out in the European Parliament this week over an anti-abortion exhibition organised by the Polish League of Families MEP Maciej Giertych. Other MEPs objected to...

At one end of the avenue that runs through Czestochowa, spiritual home of Polish Catholicism, is the icon of the Black Madonna and its pilgrimage monastery; at the other end...

Catherine Colonna, France's new European affairs minister, is already well-known in Brussels. She attended all the European Councils during nine years as spokesperson for the...

Decades ago the architects of what today is known as the European Union knew that their idea of creating a Europe free of war, boundaries and national identity would be best...

Pope Benedict XVI's election could mark a sea-change in the relationship between the Roman Catholic church and the European Union. Joseph Ratzinger's election has divided...

Polish MEP Boguslaw Sonik has written to the President of the European Parliament Josep Borrell to ask that one of the new Parliament buildings in Brussels be named after...