Europe

An Interview with Guy Verhofstadt

Michał Matlak: Do you have your preferred option for settling Brexit? Guy Verhofstadt: My preferred option is clearly No Brexit. Brexit is a bad development for the European Union, and it will be a catastrophe for the UK, especially in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

October 16, 2019

The Bright Side of Populism?

It may be seen, in southern Europe, that protest parties play a key role in renewing democratic systems—in particular by showing that there can be real alternatives. But that presumes that such parties leave behind the temptations of both populism and technocracy.    

June 8, 2018

Austria's New Populists

Austria’s Freedom Party—a party that was once described as a “party of former Nazis for former Nazis”—will have a second chance at the presidency in early October. Could Austria become the first Western European country since World War II to have a far-right president?

July 25, 2016

Refugees: A Solution

Most of the building blocks for an effective asylum system in Europe are available; they only need to be assembled into a comprehensive and coherent policy.

April 9, 2016

Why Belgium?

Why has Belgium become such a focus of European jihad? And why has it been so difficult for Belgian authorities to contain the problem?

March 24, 2016

Europe's Year of Crisis

Donald Tusk: What’s exciting in politics is power, of course. But politics is also fascinating when it makes it possible to resolve critical situations, to negotiate, to bring others round to your way of thinking.

February 18, 2016

How Democracy Can Save Europe

The European crisis, which we process from headline to headline as a matter of currencies and bailouts, is really a test of large-scale democratic capitalism. The hope was that a debt crisis, when it came, would by necessity produce a unified fiscal policy. But fiscal policy is at the very core of a democratic system, and the EU is not yet democratic. Instead, the German government has indulged its population in the dangerous fantasy that European imitation of German austerity will solve the problem. As a result, domestic politics in Germany and on the European periphery threatens to undo the European system. To resolve the crisis, German leaders must persuade Germans and other Europeans to take the bold step of supporting a functioning European democracy. Here is how to do it.

February 7, 2012

Diaspora Disneys

Hanukkah commemorates Jewish persistence against overwhelming odds, when oil lamps meant to last a single day stayed alight for eight. Five years ago, I heard of what seemed another miracle.

December 23, 2011

Goodbye Serenity

My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Becoming a displaced person after that, one among millions, ending up in country after country, learning one foreign language after another, mispronouncing its words in school or when asking direction in the street, struggling to read and make sense of the history of the place, worrying about some war being declared and even bigger bombs falling on my head—all this contributed to my need to know what plans are being hatched behind our backs.

December 5, 2011

How to Save Europe

The financial crisis is the next great test: it will mark the success of one of the great political and social experiments of our time if the Europeans come together to remedy it; it will be tragic for Europe and for the world if they do not.

October 26, 2011