Press

Tomas Valasek, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, says in recent times Germany has often shocked its partners by forcefully pressing its demands, leading to all kinds of "recalculations" within both the EU and NATO.

"NATO can hold on to nuclear weapons and at the same time support calls for disarmament," said Tomas Valasek, a security expert at the Centre for European Reform in London who was an adviser to Mrs Albright.

"Poor economic-growth prospects, rather than fiscal ill-discipline, lie at the heart of the currency union's problems," says Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank. "But the EU's inadequate policy response ignores this and risks condemning the eurozone to permanent crisis."

"Free movement is a bit like the euro," warns Hugo Brady, a fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a think tank, recalling the single currency's recent troubles. "It's a thing the EU created and then forgot about, thinking it would never be problematic thereafter. … Free movement is such an accepted part of Europe today that Brussels policymakers don't even think of people relocating from one EU country to another as migration ... But to the man in the street, what the EU calls 'free movement' is in fact intercontinental migration."

"One thing you won't find in Britain is European jingoism, the idea that Europe has all the answers," says Simon Tilford, economist at the Centre for European Reform in London.

Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the CER, thinks similarly [current policy and regime in the eurozone is unsustainable]. Another supporter of the idea of a single currency, Tilford published a scathing critique last week of the current state of the eurozone, warning that it could easily break up. Like Flassbeck, Tilford is concerned about the deflationary bias of policy. "The eurozone can only avoid permanent crisis by convincing investors that growth will be strong enough for the hard-hit members of the currency union to service their debts," he said.

When the laws on free movement were conceived, "it was assumed that this would be about highly qualified, multi-lingual, economically mobile work force moving across borders — not about Roma," said Hugo Brady, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. It is tempting for politicians like Mr Sarkozy, whose fortunes are flagging, to play the immigrant card, but that also risks raising public passions, Mr Brady said, possibly undercutting support for European institutions among a public that is already skeptical about integration.

A 2006 report [The future of European universities] by the Centre for European Reform, encouraged European universities to become more competitive, more entrepreneurial and, although it did not say so explicitly, more American. The authors stated that tuition in Europe is a must, but they also recommended paying faculty on the basis of merit; lobbying aggressively with state and private funding sources, like alumni; and developing alliances with corporate benefactors.

But, as Katinka Barysch of the Centre for European Reform argues, Russian leaders' concept of modernisation is overly statist, particularly given that public institutions function so badly. "An innovative economy needs open markets, venture capital, free thinking entrepreneurs, fast bankruptcy courts and solid protection of intellectual property," she argues. Instead there are "wide-spread monopolies, ubiquitous corruption, stifling state interferences, weak and contradictory laws."