Bulletin of the European Union ─ EU information sources

Are you a student, researcher, journalist, politician (MEP candidate), lobbyist, official or an interested citizen in need of updated information about the European Union in a given policy area?

Google has long ago become a verb, but for systematic information there are other resources worth mentioning.

EU Bulletin

Yesterday, 23 April 2009 the Bulletin of the European Union for December 2008 was published online.



General Report

The annual General Report on the Activities of the European Union (latest for the year 2008) offers students and others an overview of developments and sources concerning different policy areas.

EU Bulletin – final version

The monthly Bulletins present updated information. The new Bulletin EU 12-2008 covers the month of December, and it is the final version.

EU Bulletin – provisional versions

Quicker updates are available on the Bulletin EU Home page. At this moment, two provisional versions are available: The January/February Bulletin was published 25 March 2009, and the March Bulletin 2009 was put online 23 April 2009 (so the time lag was only about three weeks).



Almost up-to-date

Taken together, the General Report and the Bulletin offer comprehensive information with detailed references for further study, leaving the researcher only a few weeks to explore from other sources, to be fully updated on an issue of major importance.

Once you have exact references, you may more easily find additional information on the web pages of the institutions, even the Council.

In addition, the EU Bulletin pages contain useful links to acronyms, a glossary, Pre-Lex with Commission proposals and summaries of existing legislation. (The links to the index and the cumulative index did not work.)

Official Journal

The Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) is the primary source to use for official EU materials, especially final legislative acts and decisions.

News and discussion

If you need the latest news, you can go directly to the press releases by the EU institutions (Commission, European Parliament, Council etc.) or you can follow the specialised news services with additional coverage, such as EurActiv, EUobserver and EUbusiness. For discussion among EU citizens and civil society, you can access Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates 345 Euroblogs.





Ralf Grahn

European Union: Reform before enlargement

A little while ago this blog argued in EU: Enlargement fatigue? (1 April 2009) that the Lisbon Treaty may be an improvement compared to the Treaty of Nice, but it does not create an effective or democratic union.

In my opinion, the main fault of the French and German governments is not that they put a brake on EU expansion, but that they do not envision reform beyond the limited Lisbon Treaty.



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Busek interview

EurActiv’s 17 April 2009 interview with Erhard Busek illustrates the problems: Busek: Western Balkans should join EU as a block.



Busek finds that it is now difficult with 27 members to come to decisions: with 32 or more it will be even more difficult.

If the countries of the Western Balkans accede, their number of votes in the Council and the number of MEPs will be much greater than their proportion of the EU population.

Busek names this as a problem. But he sees that in this way, pressure is created for changing the systems in the European Union. Personally he is convinced that the current voting weight repartition, as well as the lack of qualified majority vote in most of the situations, is the real background of these hesitations. It has nothing to do with region, because it's completely clear for all member states that all the Western Balkan countries should become members of the EU.

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The Busek interview underlines the need for effective decision making and it at least touches upon one important aspect of democratic and fair representation, namely with regard to population numbers.


Ralf Grahn