Never before has imperialism been so condemned as now. European colonialism continues to constitute a raw and living memory in the collective minds of its hundreds of millions of victims and their descendants, even while each and any aspect of racism is noisily condemned in the United States. Empire, in other words, has come to represent the world-historical face of racism writ large.
Read Here | The National Interest
Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb.
Read Here | The Spectator
The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have awakened the continent from its decades-long economic and political slumber and reinvigorated the EU integration project in ways that were unimaginable just six months ago… This crisis may forge a Europe that is more confident and more assertive on the world stage—one that will help strengthen and define the twenty-first-century global order.
It took four days of almost constant and uninterrupted negotiations, but in the end, a deal was made: EU leaders agreed on a roadmap out of the coronavirus economic crisis in the early hours of this morning, with the package predictably hailed as “historic” by almost all involved. Historic it might be, but that is hardly a positive development: instead, it will further intensify EU integration in areas where an “ever closer union” is unwise…
The era of cooperation with China may be over soon. Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand are beginning to regret saying “yes” to China’s strategic overtures. The leaders, once eager to assert a little independence from their often-overbearing superpower ally, now find themselves aligning with the United States…
The daring capture of Félicien Kabuga, the hunted Rwandan fugitive, has been in the news for three weeks now. But the untold backstory—of how an American squad of operatives nearly snared him 17 years ago—has remained a secret. Until now… Kabuga’s dramatic seizure summoned memories of another era; one in which accountability mattered, and people paid for their crimes.
Grandeur, however, has been denied the former Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who died this week. In the cascade of eulogies following his death, the man who not only served twice as president of France but also as prime minister and mayor of Paris, was rarely called a great man. This is not a matter of ideology or politics. That Chirac’s former opponents on the left would refuse him greatness is not surprising, but what is more surprising, perhaps, is that few of Chirac’s former colleagues and friends have insisted on his greatness either.
Many have been lamenting the dark path that Europe and the transatlantic relationship are currently on, but there hasn’t been much discussion of where that path leads. European weakness and division, a strategic “decoupling” from the United States, the fraying of the European Union, “after Europe,” “the end of Europe”—these are the grim scenarios, but there is a comforting vagueness to them.
For decades, Europe has served as a steward of the post-war liberal order, ensuring that economic rules are enforced and that national ambitions are subordinated to shared goals within multilateral bodies. But with the United States and China increasingly mixing economics with nationalist foreign-policy agendas, Europe will have to adapt.
NATO is celebrating its 70th birthday next week, but rather than blowing out 70 candles, the foreign-policy establishment is pondering whether it should still exist. In truth, we’ve been having this argument since 1992, after the Soviet collapse, and maybe since France pulled its military out of the alliance in 1966…
