EU Scream

Decolonisation is a new way of confronting racism. It means rooting out colonial-era attitudes of white superiority that linger in our societies and institutions. The push for decolonisation in the US and parts of Europe took wings with the Black Lives Matter movement. But the EU still is nowhere near starting the process of decolonisation. Its reticence was underlined this month when top EU diplo...

Georgia Meloni was 19 and speaking to French TV when she praised Italian dictator and Hitler ally Mussolini. Back then the likely next prime minister of Italy was dressed all in black and flanked by burly men. Twenty-six years later things look very different. Meloni favours bright white pant suits and presses the flesh with European dignitaries. The normalisation of the neofascist far right in It...

There are many things to love about France. But a stated policy of colour blindness is not one of them. Among those leading the charge against a French conception of universalism that makes discussing race so awkward is Grace Ly . Her Chinese Cambodian parents fled the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s for France, where she has found success and celebrity with books like Jeune fille modèle and the...

Europeans howl about U.S. backsliding on abortion rights but they don't exactly have their own house in order. Take the case of Bianca. She's a Romanian. She was studying medicine in Germany. And she discovered she was pregnant in Korea. Bianca eventually made her way home to Romania to terminate the pregnancy. But the doctor at her regional hospital was obstructive and barely paid atten...

Legal scholar Sahar Aziz says people who identify as Muslim are often perceived in racial terms, like black and brown people, in white-dominated societies. That makes Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic the subject of similar forms of racism. She also says protecting observant Muslims in Europe may be more difficult than in the United States, where religious observance is more commonplace. In th...

Was Emmanuel Macron right to talk so much with Vladimir Putin before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? And did Macron cross a line from well-intentioned engagement into something like naive appeasement? French journalist Guy Lagache spent the first six months of this year in close proximity to Macron, making a film that ended up focusing on the French president's Putin strategy. S...

Author Rafia Zakaria turned the feminist world upside down with her bestselling book Against White Feminism. White feminists, she writes, fail "to cede space to the feminists of colour who have been ignored erased or excluded from the feminist movement." In this episode Rafia talks with the Brussels-based journalist and think-tanker Shada Islam about the prevalence of white feminist thin...

Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has threatened to be a public relations disaster for hard-right gatherings like CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Previous editions featured Putin supporters — and a CPAC meeting getting underway in Budapest will feature Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who remains on highly cordial terms with the Kremlin. So what playbook can participan...

Would you pick up a gun and fight for Ukraine? The injustice of the Russian invasion has led white-collar professionals like Florent and Tomas to trade suits and ties for camouflage and Kalashnikovs. Florent, who is French, and Tomas, a Lithuanian, met for the first time in February at the Ukrainian embassy in Belgium. They teamed up for the trip to Ukraine and they're now back in Brussels to...

When Thomas left Brussels for Ukraine to train as a foreign fighter, he joined up with the Georgian Legion, a paramilitary group that's fought for years to stop Russian aggression. In this episode Thomas and his unit arrive in Kyiv, as part of efforts to try to stop Putin's army from taking the capital. Please note: this is a reedited version of the episode Foreign Fighter Diaries — Part...

Thomas lives in Brussels. But last week, seemingly out of the blue, he upped sticks and left. He was already heading into Ukraine when he began sending his first dispatches — simple but captivating voicemails. Thomas is now in the international brigades, which are comprised of foreign fighters from all over the world. Like Thomas, many of the fighters were responding to Ukrainian president Volodym...

Policy differences between Europe and Africa have been widening, and while there may be warm words about a new partnership when the leaders of the EU and African Union meet in Brussels, there are unlikely to be breakthroughs on key African demands. One area where Europeans and Africans have long seen eye-to-eye is fighting jihadists, and Europe has not hesitated to ally with African autocrats who...

Europe is green. Europe is humane. Europe has defeated populism. These views are common among the EU chattering classes. But they often seem more reflexive than reflective, and some of them amount to shibboleths — beliefs that are outmoded or no longer as useful as they once may have been. In this episode Mehreen Khan of the Financial Times unpacks the European shibboleths that rank among her favo...

Freedom of information. Openness. Access to documents. These are names for laws people can use to ask authorities to share information and records. The European Union adopted its access regulation at the turn of this century. But as work went digital, the access rules have failed to keep pace. A lot still goes unrecorded. Or it goes unregistered, and can't be accessed easily, if at all. &quot...

Enrico Letta was prime minister of Italy for less than a year before he was ousted by a rival, Matteo Renzi. But a lot happened during Letta's time at the top. After six years in Paris, he's back in Italy and leading the centre-left Democratic Party with a conspicuously progressive agenda on issues like gender equality and LGBT+ rights. Speaking at the Global Progressive Forum , Letta de...

Liberal lawmaker Sophie in 't Veld says the European Union's survival depends on overcoming creeping sclerosis, ending acquiescence to autocrats, and embracing the kind of political spectacle that captures the public imagination. In her new book, The Scent of Wild Animals , Sophie writes that too much EU politics takes place behind closed doors, with no sensory experience for citizens. H...

With the next big climate conference about to get underway in Glasgow, major breakthroughs look elusive. Among the spectres at the feast are raging geopolitical tensions, high energy prices, the ongoing pandemic and — in the wake of Brexit — a lack of diplomatic vigour from Europe. Nick Mabey  is a founding director of the non-profit environmental group E3G who helped create Britain's first e...

Concerns are growing that the big climate conference in Glasgow next month will not do enough to avert climate breakdown. Obstacles to progress include international tensions between the US and China, and between the UK and Europe. Someone who knows first hand how hard it can be to make climate negotiations succeed in such conditions is Connie Hedegaard . In 2009 Connie presided over the Copenhage...

During the first few months of 2015 the world watched in awe — and often admiration — as a scrappy government in Athens tried to stare down Europe's financial and political establishment. The standoff failed spectacularly. Greece ended up with more loans on even tougher terms. In their bestselling book The Last Bluff , co-authors Viktoria Dendrinou and Eleni Varvitsioti judge the Greek govern...

This summer some 450 undocumented workers and migrants in Brussels refused food during two months. They were protesting Belgian immigration rules that human rights officials and campaigners like Lilana Keith of PICUM say arbitrarily obstruct them from legal and stable residency. The hunger strike provoked an outcry against the Belgian government. Yet there was no intervention from the European Uni...

There is a double standard at the heart of the European Union’s powerful executive body, the European Commission. Women — mostly white women — benefit from affirmative action when applying for jobs. But people of colour seeking advancement do not benefit from special consideration. Commentator and columnist Shada Islam says the Commission’s progress on gender makes its foot-dragging on racial dive...

Parallels with the Soviet era are increasingly evident in Poland where the ruling coalition hounds judges and captures courts. Adam Bodnar , the country's human rights commissioner , lambasts European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for a "lack of leadership” amid an antidemocratic onslaught that's also damaged media pluralism. Laurent Pech , the head of the Law and Politi...

Ursula von der Leyen appears secure in her job as president of the European Commission. That's despite a troubled vaccine rollout in which delayed deliveries can cost lives and livelihoods. But preserving the status quo in Brussels comes at a cost. Mehreen Khan of the Financial Times unpacks why the European institutions are not much interested in asking what's gone wrong — let alone in...

The hard left is often associated with the colours red for revolution and black for anarcho-syndicalism. But the movement is more and more green these days too. The trend is exemplified in many ways by Manon Aubry of the political party La France Insoumise . Since 2019 she has been a co-leader of the Left in the European Parliament where she is the youngest person to head one of the chamber's...

James Crisp has Boris Johnson's old job in Brussels covering EU affairs for The Daily Telegraph. James often writes with that jaundiced eye on the European project you'd expect from a correspondent on a venerable Conservative UK newspaper. But James continues to command respect for sharp and informed questioning of EU authorities. This episode starts with James recalling a family trip to...