Western Europe Archive

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Europe Decoder, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about Europe. Subscribe to receive it by email every Thursday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. In Brussels, where Germany’s heavy influence in the European Union looms large, people are still processing the Social Democrats’ narrow “win” in Sunday’s general election, wondering what the next potential steps look like.  The immediate takeaway from Sunday night was that the underperformance of the far-left Die […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Judah Grunstein is filling in this week for Howard French, who will return next week. Has the center held in Europe? The obvious answer would seem to be yes. As has been widely noted, parties on the extremes lost ground in Germany’s election this weekend compared to 2017. And across Europe, far-right and anti-establishment parties similarly seem to be receding in electoral and political relevance. But in other ways, the picture is less heartening, as the impact those parties have had on political discourse has mainstreamed a brand of anti-immigrant, identity-based closure that calls into question […]

This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which gives a rundown of the week’s top stories on WPR. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. The aftershocks from last week’s bombshell announcement by the U.S., Australia and the U.K. that they would be forming a new security partnership whose pilot project would be to assist Australia in building a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines continued to be felt well into this week. The deal signaled a major shift in the strategic landscape of […]

As evidenced by the wall-to-wall coverage this week in this publication and countless others, French President Emmanuel Macron’s recall of France’s ambassadors from Washington and Canberra over the trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia and the U.K. has naturally raised anew worries about the stability of the trans-Atlantic partnership and the cohesiveness of NATO. U.S. President Joe Biden’s hard pivot to the Indo-Pacific is clearly giving France specifically, and the EU and the world more generally, a bad case of whiplash.  But perhaps overshadowed by Paris’ fit of pique over Australia’s cancellation of its multibillion-dollar deal with France to build attack-class submarines in favor of […]

With rising communal and interethnic violence gripping swaths of the country, two coups in less than a year and a deadlocked transition to civilian rule, Mali is arguably facing its most uncertain moment since the 1991 March Revolution, which paved the way for the country’s return to civilian government nearly 30 years ago. Throw in a peace accord with northern insurgent groups on life support, a drawdown of Operation Barkhane—France’s massive counterinsurgency mission across the Sahel—and a rumored deal to deploy Russian private military contractors from the Wagner Group to the country, and it’s fair to say Mali’s immediate and […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Europe Decoder, which includes a look at the week’s top stories from and about Europe. Subscribe to receive it by email every Thursday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Despite yesterday’s conciliatory phone call between U.S. President Joe Biden and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, the trans-Atlantic tensions over the nuclear-powered submarine deal between the U.S., the U.K. and Australia show little sign of abating. Last week’s announcement of the so-called AUKUS security partnership completely blindsided European […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wedenesday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Last Wednesday, the Biden administration unveiled a historic security partnership in the Indo-Pacific region between the U.S., Australia and the U.K., known as AUKUS. As part of the deal’s terms and conditions, the United States and the United Kingdom will help Australia build and deploy nuclear-powered submarines, as […]

In the space of a single news cycle last week, the substance behind the news that the United States and Britain had joined forces to sell nuclear submarine technology to Australia came to be overshadowed by the emotions aroused by this development—namely, France’s theatrically indignant response to having its preexisting deal to sell submarines to Canberra canceled without notice. Paris has invoked “treason” and spoken of being stabbed in the back, comparing U.S. President Joe Biden unfavorably to his predecessor, Donald Trump, all while taking the extraordinary step of recalling its ambassadors from the United States and Australia, something seldom done even […]

In July, British Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the U.K. had agreed to pay France roughly $72 million to fund border personnel and equipment that would be used to stop asylum-seekers from crossing the English Channel. The deal came amid a dramatic rise in the number of channel crossings. In the first half of 2021, more than 8,000 asylum-seekers completed the voyage to land on England’s southern shore. The deal with France was controversial, including within Patel’s own Conservative Party. Noting that this was the second such payment to France in the past year, Tim Loughton, a leading Conservative […]

The newly announced nuclear-powered submarine deal and trilateral security partnership between the U.S., the U.K. and Australia is remarkable for the sheer range of regional and subject matter experts needed to make sense of it. Like the proverbial three blind men and the elephant, it means something very different depending on where you grab hold of it. Some of issues raised by the sub deal, particularly over the technical specifications and proliferation concerns, remain open questions that will only be answered 18 months from now, when the framework agreement is due to be finalized in an actual contract, although that […]

The newly minted Australia-U.K.-U.S. security pact, known by its acronym AUKUS, was announced just days after the 70th anniversary of another regional trilateral defense arrangement, the ANZUS treaty, which comprises Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The genesis of both deals was deeply informed by history and geography.  Signed in 1951, ANZUS built on its signatories’ close cooperation in the Pacific theater of World War II and reflected a common sense of identity between the three signatories—all Pacific Ocean-facing, English-speaking democratic societies of the New World. But ANZUS was always a precarious alliance, never including a NATO-like Article 5 […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Europe Decoder, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about Europe. Subscribe to receive it by email every Thursday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox.   According to the latest opinion surveys ahead of a general election in Germany scheduled for Sept. 26, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, is on course for its worst performance in the party’s history. Together with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU, […]

It’s almost hard to believe that Germany is currently in the middle of a national election. Although the campaign season is in its heiße Phase, or “hot phase,” reminders of the looming vote are rare and subtle: unobtrusive posters and billboards of candidates and a few lingering canvassers. Even in normal times, Germany has strict laws on how and when a party can campaign—but the coronavirus pandemic has reduced the volume even more, moving much of the voter outreach online. The calm even prompted one German newspaper, Die Welt, to run a headline asking, “Is this the most boring federal election […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Kate Jones is filling in this week for Emily Taylor. Ask just about any parent about the impact of technology on their children and they’ll tell you they’re worried, even if most find it near-impossible to identify all the risks, let alone work out how to protect tech-savvy children from them. Online concerns for children include the impact of social media on their mental health; the risks of online grooming of minors by sexual predators; the effect that widespread exposure to pornography has on them; the collection and retention of large amounts of their personal data; and the amount of […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Europe Decoder, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about Europe. Subscribe to receive it by email every Thursday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Europe’s inability to prevent or alleviate the chaos of the departure—or even to have some influence over the withdrawal timeline and logistics—despite European NATO members’ 20-year involvement in Afghanistan has been felt as a deep humiliation here. In an interview Tuesday, European Council President Charles Michel offered […]

There is extensive evidence that the Chinese government is violating the human rights of ethnic Uyghurs, and that these violations include crimes against humanity and genocide. Satellite imagery, testimonials, demographic data and photographs substantiate the extensive allegations against China, which include the use of mass surveillance technologies throughout Xinjiang province, the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, the separation of children from their parents, systematic sterilization, rape, forced labor and organ harvesting. While survivors, relatives and diaspora communities have long sought to draw attention to the systematic […]

It is difficult to speak of European ambitions for international crisis management against the backdrop of the images from Kabul over the past few weeks, which seem to tell a story of the failure of Western interventionist policies. But that discussion is urgently needed. Yes, it will be necessary to assess the lessons of the defeat in Afghanistan. But that war, with its U.S.-dominated state-building, is in many ways a special case that must be analyzed distinctly. In the meantime, there are many other global crises and conflicts in which the European Union, as well as the United Nations and […]