Western Europe Archive

Last week, the United Nations held the Stockholm+50 conference, a two-day international meeting celebrating 50 years of global action on climate change. The first iteration of this event in 1972—the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which also took place in Stockholm, Sweden—saw countries come together to acknowledge their responsibility to “defend and improve the human environment for present and future generations,” and led to the creation of the U.N. Environment Program, which is still active today. Five decades after that first meeting, Stockholm+50 was intended as an opportunity to reflect on the progress that has been made, and to “springboard” further action toward accomplishing […]

European Union leaders agreed this week to a partial ban on Russian oil imports, overcoming a veto by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. But the agreement commits only to banning seaborne imports to the EU by the end of 2022, leaving Russian oil imported by pipeline untouched. Seaborne imports account for two-thirds of the oil the EU purchases from Russia, leaving one-third outside the ban’s scope. However, Germany and Poland announced at this week’s leaders’ summit in Brussels that they will not use the exemption, pledging to phase out both seaborne and pipeline imports by the end of this year. […]

The revelations of outrageous behavior by the civil servants and advisers closest to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have become so predictable in their mixture of bureaucratic procedure with B-movie farce, that it now seems surprising when a day goes by without another incident splashed across the morning headlines. The leaks about raucous parties in offices used by Johnson’s team at 10 Downing Street during pandemic lockdowns began to filter through to journalists late last year. Ever since, the Conservative Party and the British government Boris Johnson has led since August 2019 have struggled to break free from an image […]