Uncommon Decency

Listeners may recall the clash between two of Western liberalism's sacred cows that unfolded in France last year as part of the so-called " affaire Mila ". This 16-year-old online socialite was met with a ghastly downpour of abuse upon sharing on Instagram her dislike of Islamic mores. So far, so reprehensible, you may think. Except that Mila's impetuous words of blasphemy were soon invoked by hor...

"It was the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable". Writing over 24 centuries ago about the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides' timeless commentary speaks to the tension arising when an emerging power threatens to overtake an established one, raising the odds of open conflict. Just like Sparta and Athens rallied neighboring city-states into their colliding orbits,...

Across most of Europe, Green parties are middling political forces, periodic junior partners in coalitions or the occasion to cast a protest vote for disgruntled left-wingers. And yet in prosperous Germany, Annalena Baerbock could well be Angela Merkel's successor at the chancellorship. Formed at the dawn of the environmental and anti-nuclear geist of the 70s, the party was in principle opposed to...

Listeners may recall Peter Mandelson, the veteran UK Cabinet Secretary appointed EU Commissioner for Trade in the late 2000s upon helping orchestrate Labour's social-liberal pivot as one of Tony Blair's "spin doctors". Mandelson's incarnation of the party's notorious "Third Way" didn't just owe to his Europhile credentials and support for Blairite programs. By racking up a string of landslide vict...

January 2013. Making its way through the dunes of the Sahel desert, a column of pick-up trucks is spotted approaching Mali's capital city of Bamako. The jihadists at the wheel, some of the region's most dangerous, have sensed an opportunity amidst the country's civil war. At the demand of its government, France launches Operation Serval and swiftly annihilates the coup plotters. This spectacular s...

On May 23rd, a Ryanair plane flying from Athens to Vilnius is instructed by a military jet to land in Minsk as it enters Belarusian airspace, on account that Hamas has a bomb planted on board. One passenger in particular couldn't be fooled. Blogger Roman Protasevich, now jailed in his home country, is one of many political opponents to have fled Lukashenko's brutal repression. The strongman's auth...

As a generation, the under-30s in Europe have been fed by the textbook a worldview that sees the European Union (EU) as the sole conduit for enlightened, pacified and efficient relations among the nations of the continent. "Ideals" or "values" is the preferred term for those at the helm of the institutions sprung from these beliefs and a worrying lot of the public they've conscripted into them. Th...

If the West relies on external shocks to border up, Covid may be falling the test of criticality. If anything, the pandemic is exposing Europe's southern frontier as shockingly porous. As many as 8.000 migrants, predominantly Moroccan, have illegally reached the EU enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla over a record span of two days, swimming around the 20-feet, barbed wire fencing that Spain built in the...

A fog of war clouds the Israeli airspace as this episode goes to press. The country's ability to secure its citizens is once again being put to the test by the more than 1,000 rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza over the past 40 hours. This reawakened quagmire sits awkwardly with the pacifying facade deployed a year ago by the Abraham accords normalizing ties with a select few Arab nations. A few wee...

"Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! Though fallen, great!" Lord Byron published these lines in 1818 not knowing what a major figure in Greece's History he was destined to become. Three years before dying in its shores in 1824, the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire to seize their national independence. The plight of the country of Plato and Pericles moved th...

"That is the secret of propaganda: those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in its ideas, without ever noticing that they are being so". These principles outlined by Hitler's master propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, continue to guide the propagators of hate in our times, albeit in service of a wholly new totalitarian ideology. At times vicious, at times more insidious, radica...

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". If you've ever been introduced to a History of global power balances, this quote from the Melian dialogue in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War may ring familiar . And yet mighty states and alliances, at odds with this realist mantra, do not always muscle their way diplomatically to get what they want. Sometimes they may o...

"I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it." You might recognize Hegel's description of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican-born French emperor, ruler of Europe's fate for nearly two decades. Why on ear...

Piotr S. Wandycz, the Yale historian, reflected once that "what to the Poles was the Polish cause, to the outside world was the Polish question". To be sure, he was writing in 1980 about the successive European conferences of territorial partition, from Vienna in 1815 to Potsdam in the immediate post-war. But this axiom sounds perhaps more prescient than ever since Poland's much-touted entry into...

In The Origins of Political Order (2011), Fukuyama described the problem of creating modern political institutions as one of "getting to Denmark". The country, in his own words at the time, was "a mythical place known for its stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive institutions". A few miles south of Denmark lie the Netherlands, a country that last week renewed Mark Rutte's mandate...

As President Biden tours the American heartland touting his administration's 1.9 trillion USD Covid-19 relief package laced with numerous tax tweaks and giveaways, we are convening two economic scholars to explore the confusing in-between that both America and the EU find themselves in—Bertrand Badré, who wrote Do We (Seriously) Wish to Change the World? (2020) upon serving as World Bank MD, and M...

The forthcoming 2022 French presidential race is, already this early, slated to be one of the most uncertain in Fifth Republic history. In the latest rounds of polling, voting intention gaps between the two candidates most guaranteed a pulpit at the runoff have narrowed down to the demographic size of Marseille. Apart from Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, who will be running in the first round,...

This show has said its piece about Europe's inimical tendency to freeload on everything American, from defense spending to woke historical revisionism. But if there ever was an American Trap , Frédéric Pierrucci knows what it feels like being inside. Hell, he wrote a memoir about it (2019), but the book's title alone can't do justice to what it felt like being locked up behind the freezing bars of...

After almost 4 years since 17 million Brits voted for this outcome, the UK has finally divorced from the European supranational behemoth. The year-end deal on the new trade rapport between the two sides of the Channel was elusive, but the sighs of relief in Whitehall and the Berlaymont have been music to each other's ears. With two of the most insightful Brexit watchers in the market—Charles Grant...

Luigi Barzini, the Italian social critic, wrote in his 1964 American bestseller about his home country that " the Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse " . Is the Italian political imagination as fractious as we tend to think? Was Matteo Salvini's clarion call to close Europe's borders a harbinger of a new immigr...

Europe's year-end investment accord with China was, to say the least, controversial on a number of fronts. The draft of the so-called CAI fails to even mention China's exploitation of its Uyghur minority, a concession made in the narrow-minded interest of securing market access for a segment of the European corporate establishment that has been revealed as wielding undue influence over foreign pol...

In the wake of the Capitol-storming mob of January 6th, a flurry of contradictory reactions from European officials followed, first warning about the viral potential of misinformation to spread on social media, and then against its deliberate taming by online platforms. Was this merely a symptom of the elusive equilibrium between speech freedoms and a sane public square increasingly convened by bi...

An old spectre is haunting Europe—in fact, it's as old as Europe itself, but given that it manifests itself in varied forms throughout History, the latest ones have become harder to identify each time. What is driving the ongoing spike in antisemitism across Europe? Who are the perpetrators of recent attacks, what motivates them, and in what ways are they different from past forms? How are identit...

Whilst France undergoes a genuine introspection over how to tackle Islamic separatism in the wake of renewed terrorism, US media have taken to portraying "laïcité" in a strikingly one-sided way, as some sort of thin veil for islamophobia. Where does this skewed lens come from? Why do foreign correspondents, particularly from American outlets, insist on catering to the woke sensibilities of their d...

After a tiresome four years of petty spats over trade and defense spending, transatlantic relations seem off to a reset with Joe Biden in the White House—but what exactly can Europeans expect from an administration that Daniel Fried calls the "most pro-European since George H. W. Bush's" in the late 80s? Ambassador Fried is a longtime career diplomat who most recently coordinated sanctions policy...