When Jan Seifert and I first discussed the idea of One President and launching this website, we had one primary aim in mind: to change the debate about the EU’s top jobs in some small way. Today the first mainstream media – International Herald Tribune – has covered our campaign with quotes and a link to whodoicall.eu in an article entitled ‘The leader of Europe? Answers an ocean apart‘. I’m not entirely convinced that the argument for One President is clear in what is written, but today marks an important step forward for our initiative.
Well, yes, the article primarily dealt with the poll about the influence of European national leaders.
By the way, if anyone wants an indication of how much language and culture influence opinion, look at how the Americans rated Gordon Brown as a European leader.
Luckily, the IHT took up the democratic legitimacy of the coming second president of the EU.
Continue to highlight the grotesque differences between citizens’ voice in presidential elections US and European style (although I don’t see the US as the model, parliamentary democracy being more the European way of life).
490 million citizens and 27 electors. It looks more like the 19th century Congress of Vienna than a democratic Europe in the 21st.
“…with a concrete and resolved action upon a limited but decisive node, which will cause a fundamental change on that point and will progressively modify the very terms of the whole problem set”*
Jean Monnet – Memorandum to Robert Schuman, 3 May 1950
*the original source must be in French but I wasn’t able to find it and I wasn’t able to find an English translation too… so I translated it from this Italian source (http://www.mfe.it/mfe4/monnet.htm#Gradualismo)
[...] Jon rightly points out in his blog comment, we are very happy about any reference or indeed support for this idea which needs to gather wider [...]
Congratulations for your blog.
We reported your proposal (which we definitely agree on) on our blog http://duebalordi.splinder.com, mentioning also the article published ny IHT.
It is written in Italian, of course. Who speaks some Italian can take a look…
Good luck
Grazie per l’articolo!
I’ve put a link to your blog in the Who Do I Call sidebar.
Thank you very much, Jon!
And congratulations again.
[...] can be done with whodoicall.eu – 2 bloggers, €200 Euro and a bunch of folks on Facebook and we end up in IHT. The guys at Fleishman-Hillard in Brussels are making a good effort at introducing clients to Web [...]