Uncommon Decency

A debate has been raging over recent weeks in Brussels and across European capitals, one that many in our non-European audience may find somewhat confusing at times. What is European "strategic autonomy"? The term is being used by French President...

Vernon Bogdanor is one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts, which for a country that lacks a written constitution, means not that he lacks a working subject. In his latest book (2020), Mr. Bogdanor traces the historical undercurrents...

David Goodhart is one of the UK's foremost scholars of populism. His previous book (2017) documented the profound value divides that Trump and the Brexiteers rode in 2016, between an elite of anywheres driven by self-actualization, individualism and...

"A shared commitment to liberty and self-government" is how Michael Kimmage defines the West, a notion at once elusive but also intuitive when it comes to world politics. Prof. Kimmages's (2020) is an attempt to trace the cultural undercurrents that...

What is "illiberal democracy"? What do Fidesz and Hungary's PM Viktor Orbán stand for? To answer those questions we have with us Mr. Schöplfin, a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) with Fidesz, Hungary’s Christian-Democratic ruling...

Five years after the Charlie Hebdo attack, a Chechen Islamist beheaded a middle school teacher for showing a cartoon of Mohamed during a class on freedom of expression. Despite Emmanuel Macron’s bill on “islamist separatism” there’s a distinct...

"White fragility" wasn’t yet a term of art when Ed West published (2020), but our ever-growing culture wars since seem to have confirmed his every pre-existing thesis. Conservatives may still win elections on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the...

John Kampfner was a young reporter in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. He has since experienced first-hand the country's unique journey through reunification, multiculturalism, migration, the European project and its own troubled memory of...

Trump has rattled the transatlantic relationship, but is he as anomalous as he’s made out to be? In (2019), Ben Haddad argues that the trends pulling America away from a position of liberal hegemony buttressing Europe’s security infrastructure...