EU Scream

Strategic autonomy has become the mantra for European Union officials. It started as a broadly French idea: that Europe needs sufficient military power to promote peace and security independent of the US. The idea has evolved to include power in trade and technology to enable Europe to avoid getting squeezed by China and America. Now with Joe Biden as US president-elect, the concept is again up for debate...

Brussels is increasingly expected to serve as the European Union's sheriff on rule of law. But its ability to enforce adherence to democratic norms and values remains weak. Mehreen Khan of the Financial Times talks about the EU's latest showdown with Poland and Hungary. She also discusses illiberal trends in France and her own brush with the country's newly restrictive climate for free expression...

Politicians mostly talk about shutting migrants out. That endangers migrants' lives and obscures an important truth: that Europe already relies on large numbers of migrants for farming and manufacturing. The reliance includes significant numbers of irregular migrants and refugees. But getting honest about this phenomenon has long been taboo for Europe's political class...

Can the European Union do more to hold back the kinds of malign forces that overran the US Capitol claiming to defend democracy? It's not an idle question. Democratic shortcomings in the European Union are regularly invoked by the far right to whip up nationalist sentiment. The effect has been to weaponise the European project against itself. Rather than a citizens' insurrection, what's foreseen in the EU is a period of deep and prolonged citizens' reflection...

Political scientist Daniel Ziblatt is best known for co-authoring the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. The book is an indictment of US Republicans and their failure to resist Donald Trump. Daniel's work also examines how conservative parties have largely determined whether democracy thrived, as in Britain, or died, as in Weimar Germany...

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...

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 political groups...

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 taking the scalp of Mrs. von der Leyen...

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...

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 diversity less excusable than ever...