For all the bedlam (that’s das Durcheinander to you), modern Germany isn’t so bad. Bismarck’s Second Reich lasted 47 years and ended in the Great War. The 14-year Weimar Republic was easily dissolved by the Nazis, while the Third Reich …
Will East Germans ever feel at home?
In May 1949, something extraordinary happened: exactly four years after Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, a new Germany was born. A democratic constitution was signed, which turned three of the country’s four occupation zones into the West German state. …
Europe’s fate rests on Georgia
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the foreign policy of Georgia’s ruling party has been nothing short of schizophrenic. For years, Georgian Dream has been flirting with both the European Union and paradoxically with Moscow, Georgia’s age-old enemy which invaded the …
Inside the Orbán insurgency
Will Viktor Orbán really march to Brussels and, as he claims, “occupy” the heart of the European Union? The EU’s enfant terrible has clashed with the bloc for years, but he is no Nigel Farage. He doesn’t want to abandon …
The betrayal of Ukraine’s occupied villages
Ukrainian villages hold a special place in the region’s collective imagination. Nikolai Gogol, one of Russian Empire’s foundational authors, established them as a favourite place of demons, witches and the undead. Today, they remain a haven for magical realism and …
Putin’s ruthless new plan to win
Over his 24 years in charge, Vladimir Putin has filled his cabinets with an array of mostly indistinguishable and eminently replaceable politicians. Some have lasted for just a few months in the upper echelons of the Kremlin machine, but the …
The fall of France’s sacred monsters
The French version of MeToo is coming to Cannes this year, and it’s going to be a very different kind of film festival. A reckoning is in the air, one that has been decades in the making. The actress Judith …
How Eurovision became a carnival of nationalism
As the protests in Malmo over Israel’s inclusion in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, like the anguished defences of taking part by British and Irish contestants show, the kitschy spectacle is an inherently geopolitical format. In the interests of fairness …
The EU is turning into a Remainer nightmare
With the EU elections less than a month away, one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that the pro-EU, anti-Brexit crowd must be experiencing. In a curious twist of fate, the EU is turning into everything Remainers feared Brexit would …
Ireland’s populist insurgency
The first thing that strikes you about Dublin is how different the political stickers on lamp posts are: while in Belfast the overriding theme is either pro-Palestine or Irish unity, in Dublin’s central O’Connell Street, it is “Defund The NGO …
China is not the answer to Nato
The timing of President Xi Jinping’s visit to Belgrade yesterday was far from accidental: exactly 25 years before, Nato forces bombed the city’s Chinese embassy during Operation Allied Force, the two-and-half month campaign against what was then the Federal Republic …
Poland’s honeymoon with Ukraine is over
“Enough hospitality, you ungrateful sons of bitches.” So read a banner flown by protesting Polish farmers in Warsaw in late February, which also showed a stick figure kicking another character draped in the colours of the Ukrainian flag out of …
Why Meloni is rewriting Italy’s constitution
At first glance, the Italian constitution reads like soulless legalese: a thicket of jargon and impenetrable articoli. But the power it wields should not be underestimated. La Costituzione dictates the way the peninsula is governed — and, if rewritten as …
The scandals haunting Pope Francis
The cardinals are already meeting to discuss who should be the next pope. Some of the liberal ones, who feel safe because they’re in favour with the ailing Pope Francis, can be seen comparing notes in a bar near the …
Karl Polanyi’s failed revolution
Few 20th-century thinkers have had such a lasting and profound influence as Karl Polanyi. “Some books refuse to go away — they get shot out of the water but surface again and remain afloat,” Charles Kindleberger, the economic historian, remarked …