European Politics

Created
Tue, 13/05/2025 - 01:04
A few weeks ago the historian Perry Anderson published an essay “Regime Change in the West?” in the London Review of Books. Like many of Anderson’s essays this is a wide-ranging splurge full of bon mots and *apercus” delivered from some quasi-Olympian height. My attention was caught, though, by the following couple of sentences which […]
Created
Wed, 29/01/2025 - 19:34
At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, […]
Created
Thu, 13/06/2024 - 01:37
Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call legislative elections in France, following a strong showing for the extreme-right-wing Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen constitutes an extreme risk. No doubt he thinks that either the RN will fail to get as many seats as they hope under France’s two-stage election system or he calculates that since he […]
Created
Tue, 09/04/2024 - 16:20
I’ve posted a few times over the years about a trip I made with my partner to Leipzig in East Germany back in 1984, and I confess that the now-defunct country retains a kind of fascination for me. My rather banal judgement then and now is that the country, though marked by annoying shortages and […]
Created
Thu, 04/01/2024 - 22:43
In a recent post about unfair epistemic authority, Macarena Marey suggests that In political philosophy, the centre is composed of the Anglophone world and three European countries… One can think of “the center” in terms of people or of topics. Although Marey’s post is clearly about philosophers not philosophies, and I agree with her, one […]