Uncommon Decency

Sir Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, claimed during the 2016 referendum on Brexit that "the last thing on earth Churchill would have been is an isolationist. "Oui", I think he would have wanted to stay in the EU". On the other hand, David Davis, the leading pro-Brexit politician, argued that this vision of Churchill as a remainer was in "defiance of history. Winston Churchill",...

In numerous ways, Hungary and France couldn't be more different from one another. Hungary is a landlocked set of hills and plains in south Central Europe, flanked to the North and East by the Carpathian mountain range, and to the West and South by the Drava river. It is a meagre remnant of its former self, having lost two thirds of its territory in the 1920 Trianon Treaty upon losing the First Wor...

On January 29, 1848, at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, the liberal intellectual and MP Alexis De Tocqueville rose to proclaim: "Gentlemen, I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano [...] Do you not feel—what shall I say?—as it were a gale of revolution in the air?" Within weeks, Tocqueville's prediction came to pass—and more. Throughout 1848, nearly all of Europe revolted. The...

"Politics in America, Britain, and other Western nations", reads the blurb for the Edmund Burke Foundation's National Conservatism series of conferences, "have taken a sharp turn toward nationalism—a commitment to a world of independent nations". In the US and the UK, this inflection point crystallized in 2016 with the result of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. In continenta...

"A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy", wrote Henry Kissinger, "will achieve neither perfection nor security". In an era where few countries have the means to back their moral postures on foreign policy, the statesman's comments should not fall on deaf ears. Kissinger knows a thing or two about the inefficiency of empty posturing. Born in 1923 in Weimar Germany, he left hi...

France looks back on November 13, 2015 with a mix of pain and horror. That day, a group of ISIS-trained jihadists launched coordinated attacks on the Bataclan nightclub, the Stade de France, and a handful of Parisian cafés. The onslaught left 130 dead, shell-shocked French public opinion, and forced a reckoning across Europe about the threat from radicalization. In September 2021, the French Repub...

Mere hours after Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine's borders, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made this chilling statement : « We buy 50% of our coal from Russia. If we exclude Russia from the SWIFT payment system, the lights in Germany will go out. » In our 44th episode a few weeks ago ( « Europe Braces for Winter » ), we wondered whether soaring energy prices could lead to mass blackou...

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear". This oft-quoted passage from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks sounds eerily apt to describe Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine over the past week and its shock effect on the so-called rules-based international order. We at Uncommon Decency...

In 1997, the Chicago School guru and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman eerily foresaw the challenges that a common European currency would eventually face through the following decade. "The drive for the euro", he wrote that year for Project Syndicate , "has been motivated by politics, not economics. The aim has been to link Germany and France so closely as to make a future European war impossible, a...

Charles de Gaulle famously asserted that the French presidential election was an "encounter between a man and the people." This inherently Bonapartist spirit of the Fifth Republic lives on to this day, as illustrated recently by Emmanuel Macron's diplomatic offensive on behalf of the European Union (EU) over Russia's military build-up along Ukraine's border. In the span of just a few days, the swa...

When exactly are electoral observation missions warranted in a democracy? Hungarians are heading to the polls on April 3 rd this year, and a substantial share of the opposition to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seems to fear that the election will be neither free nor fair. Last month, a coalition of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) officially requested that a team of election monitors be sen...

" Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal São lágrimas de Portugal !" "O salty sea, so much of whose salt Is Portugal tears!" Verses like this one by the acclaimed 20th century poet and critic Fernando Pessoa were somberly recited in his native Portugal throughout the 2010s, as the country went through a bruising cycle of financial insolvency, economic downturn and fiscal austerity. Amidst the gloomiest...

"When asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing the United States, you said Russia—not Al-Qaeda, Russia. The 1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. The Cold War has been over for twenty years." The seasoned politicos in our audience might recognize Barack Obama's quip on former Governor Mitt Romney in a 2012 presidential election debate, back when America hoped to "...

If the European Commission (EC) had to be described in a single word, "technocracy" would come fittingly close. Commissioners and EU civil servants are selected on the basis of subject matter expertise to carry out the thanklessly tiresome tasks of patching together the bloc's budget, governing the single market and negotiating trade deals on behalf of the 27 member states. Culture wars, on the co...

"Democracy always includes a form of incompleteness, it is not self-sufficient. The terror during the French Revolution dug an imaginary emotional, collective void: the king is no longer there!". Thus spoke then Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron in 2015. The French have tried to replace the king ever since the death of Louis the XVIth in 1793. General de Gaulle bequeathed to France its presidential...

But for a handful of hardcore survivalists, the announcement caught most EU watchers flat-footed. Klaudia Tanner, Minister of Defense in the now disbanded Kurz government, alerted her Austrian compatriots earlier this month of the possible need to stockpile food if the blackouts that many fear end up materializing. Others have been hedging their bets for a while, too. Earlier in May this year, Spa...

"The judges of the nation are only the mouth that pronounces the words of the law, inanimate beings, who can moderate neither the strength nor the severity of the law." When Montesquieu wrote these words in The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, he laid out the ideal framework for the interaction between lawmakers and judges. Montesquieu's ideal vision contrasts with the messy reality of the judiciary, w...

Europe—that is to say, a continent far surpassing the European Union (EU) in size and historical depth—is in the midst of several crises, each testing its resolve and resilience in different ways. The political class, to begin with, is no longer trusted to carry out its duty honorably by the majority of European societies. This past week, the United Kingdom has further aggravated this sense of dis...

In the summer of 1941, as Italy warred its way to a series of territorial annexations in east Africa and the Mediterranean, a little-known anti-fascist activist by the name of Altiero Spinelli languished in prison, his restless mind fantasizing about Europe's postbellum future. Named the  Ventotene Manifesto  after the island where Spinelli was jailed, the resulting document would become the bluep...

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the wartime memoirs of French historian Marc Bloch were published posthumously as Strange Defeat (1946), after the Gestapo tortured and ultimately killed their author for his resistance to Nazi occupation. To characterize France's defeat in the summer of 1940 as "strange", however, would be a vast understatement. In the short span of six weeks through Ma...

"France does not know it, but we are at war with America. It's a permanent war, an economic war, one seemingly without deaths and yet a war to death." This quote from former French President François Mitterrand illustrates the ancestral gallic defiance toward the US "hyperpower," one that continues to inform French strategic thinking. So when the US entered secret negotiations with Australia and t...

In our electoral war room eight months ago, we at Uncommon Decency argued that the French political landscape ahead of the presidential race next May was ripe for a populist upset. In other words, that the scores of pollsters predicting a Macron-LePen runoff contest could be proved wrong by France's ever so facetious electorate. That upset might just have a name now: Eric Zemmour. A former politic...

Once nicknamed the Scholzomat for his robotic approach to politics, Olaf Scholz led Germany's social democrats to an unlikely electoral victory on the 26th of September, stunning Germans and outside observers alike. Sholz is now in a strong position to become chancellor of Germany, but given the electoral fragmentation of the Bundestag, he will need to rely on the support of two other parties in w...

Casting about for a definition of Europe, the eminent French poet and essayist Paul Valéry told a student audience in Zurich, circa 1922: « Any people and land that has been successively Romanized, Christianized, and as regards to the mind, disciplined by the Greeks, is absolutely European." Laid waste by deathly totalitarian ideologies, then hoisted back to relevance on the strength of its collec...

Football's oldest international fixture, Scotland-England games have routinely showcased a fever pitch of politically-infused rivalry, and this year's Euro 2021 proved no exception. Not only were the Scots ecstatic to draw against their English "Auld Enemy" at Wembley in their first major tournament since the 1998 World Cup—many of them even cheered Italy's narrow win in the final. At odds with it...