Western Europe Archive

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss President Donald Trump’s week at the United Nations, including his speech to the General Assembly and the Security Council session he chaired. For the Report, Cara Tabachnick talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about how Belgium and other European countries are dealing with citizens returning from fighting with ISIS in Syria. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your […]

PARIS—French President Emmanuel Macron is probably glad to be in New York this week. His meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump—always a risky affair given Trump’s unpredictable bent—surprisingly went off without a hitch. And his address to the United Nations General Assembly offered him another high-profile opportunity to burnish his global image as the defender of the multilateral order. But the real appeal of the trip for Macron is that it took him out of France, where a series of self-inflicted wounds have dented his approval ratings. After winning the presidential election in April 2017 with a lopsided 66 percent […]

BRUSSELS—One morning in November 2015, Ahmed Khaddine, then 25, was in his apartment in central Brussels, typing away on his computer at his desk, when the front door flew open. Before he really knew what was happening, two policemen burst in, grabbed him, pushed his face down onto the wooden floor and handcuffed him before taking him to the police station. For Ahmed, a son of Moroccan immigrants who was born and raised in Brussels, the arrest had been a long time coming. Many years earlier, during his final years of high school, he had begun attending a local mosque […]

AMSTERDAM—If you think the annual rundown of a government’s policy plans has to be a droll, soporific affair, perhaps you should look at the Netherlands. Its version of the State of the Union is a carnival of color, pageantry and whimsy, cleverly concealing the arcane necessity of a national budget, and the delicate state of negotiations over politically charged policy choices. Tuesday was Prinsjesdag in the Netherlands—the Princes’ Day, also known as Budget Day. It happens every year on the third Tuesday in September, when the Dutch monarch, now King Willem-Alexander, formally opens the new parliamentary year, reading a speech […]

More than two years after narrowly approving a referendum to leave the European Union, the British are discovering that asserting national sovereignty is less straightforward than the proponents of Brexit promised. Leaders of the “Leave” campaign in 2016 painted the issue in black and white. Britain had subordinated its sovereignty to Brussels, not least its authority to control its own borders. A fully independent Britain would regain those rights, while also negotiating a favorable, bespoke trade agreement with the EU’s remaining 27 members. With only seven months left before the deadline to leave the EU, it is clear that this […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of a new series on immigration and integration policy around the world. The German Cabinet is set to meet later this month to discuss a draft proposal that would loosen immigration requirements for skilled workers from outside the European Union. The plan in its current form would reportedly abandon a requirement that companies give preference to German citizens before considering foreigners for vacancies, and would also provide qualified foreigners with opportunities to come to Germany to look for jobs. While the proposal enjoys fairly broad support within the governing coalition and its constituencies, it […]

Yesterday’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks passed by with relatively muted commemorations. This is understandable given the passage of time, and how we commemorate increasingly distant events. But if the immediate consequences of 9/11 have faded, the less visible aftereffects of that day’s trauma persist. At times, these aftereffects, no less pernicious for being hidden, spring into full view—most recently on Sunday, when Swedish voters made the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party the third-largest in parliament. It would be relatively easy to trace the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, of which the Swedish electoral results are but the latest example, […]

A little more than two years since a bare majority of British voters opted to leave the European Union, and just over six months before it happens, negotiators are still trying to determine what the post-Brexit relationship will look like. As of March 29, 2019, the United Kingdom will no longer be part of the EU and, while the parties have agreed on a 21-month transition period, time is running out. The U.K. needs to find a way to maintain free trade in goods and services with what is by far its largest trading partner, in order to avoid large […]

French and British fishing vessels clashed at sea last month, marking an escalation in an ongoing dispute over scallop stocks in the English Channel. French fishermen are prohibited from dredging the shellfish during the summer months in order to prevent overfishing, while their British competitors fish year-round, leading the French to accuse the British of depleting stocks. Negotiators from the two countries failed to finalize a resolution to the impasse last week. According to Johan Bergenas, senior director for public policy at Vulcan, this skirmish is only part of a growing global conflict over increasingly scarce fish stocks and fishery […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the battle for Idlib in Syria and the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats’ surge ahead of Sweden’s upcoming parliamentary elections. For the Report, Malia Politzer talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about Spain’s approach to an influx of African migrants under new Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview […]

BERLIN — Earlier this summer, the leaders of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, the sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, threatened to bring down the German government in a showdown with Merkel over stricter measures for refugees and asylum-seekers. The move was largely seen as an attempt by the party, which is facing a challenge from the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to prove it was tough enough on migration issues. It didn’t work out the way they intended. Two months after Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of the CSU, first went head-to-head with Merkel, […]

MALAGA, Spain—On a recent Wednesday morning, Montee Thompson sat on the edge of a concrete planter box outside the central bus station in this coastal town in southern Spain, where palm trees dot the landscape and, during the summer months, tourists come by the busload to sun themselves on the beach. The 36-year-old was unsure of where he was, or what he should do next. Originally from Liberia, Thompson had arrived in Spain the previous weekend, having traveled from Morocco in a small rubber boat carrying 15 other men. The group spent nearly a full day adrift at sea before […]