This is Europe

A series that takes a pan-European lens to explain the challenges that transcend borders and confront our continent.

The abaya, a long, loose dress worn by some Muslim women and girls, has been banned in French schools. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters

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When Gabriel Attal, the French education minister, went on national television for an interview to mark the start of the new school term, he had a clear message: “I have decided that the abaya can no longer be worn in school”. He elaborated: “When you walk into a classroom, you should not be able to identify the pupils’ religion by looking at them”. An official statement came a few days later confirming the ban on the long, loose dress worn by some Muslim women and girls. The practical effect of the announcement is that any young woman who turns up at the gates of her school wearing an abaya faces being barred from attending class or mixing with her classmates.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last month Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s CDU, suggested his party should work locally with the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

EuropaUnión EuropeaUE a debate

There was a time when clear blue water separated Europe’s mainstream centre-right from the Eurosceptic populists and xenophobes of the hard right. A Christian Democrat such as Helmut Kohl or Angela Merkel would have had nothing in common with – and nothing to do with – a nativist such as Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders.

No longer. In the run-up to the 2024 European Parliament elections, once-sharp lines between pro-European conservative parties and the nationalist far right are blurring as both seek to tap into public anger or anxiety over migration, the cost of living, the green transition and gender diversity.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘That sense of permanence is there for anyone willing to listen to the Aegean.’ Eftamartyros church on Sifnos, Greece. Photograph: sarikosta/Shutterstock

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It was mid-August 1997; I was in my 20s and heading from Athens to the Aegean island of Sifnos with three friends. We hopped on a ship at the port of Piraeus and sailed out into the blue waters. Arriving late in the evening, we spent that first night on the beach, close to the port of Kamares.

It was bliss: the lapping of gentle waves a few metres away and the distant music from the bars as we gazed at the stars and the blazing meteors crashing through the atmosphere. You felt you were shedding your old skin like a reptile; it was painful and liberating; it was existential.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘When floods devastated parts of northern Italy, hard-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, actually blamed climate policy.’ Meloni visits flood-hit Faenza in May. Photograph: Palazzo Chigi Press Office/Reuters

ReflexionesNaturalezaEuropaUnión Europea,

When floods swept Europe in July 2021, killing more than 200 people in Germany, Belgium and neighbouring countries, it was a disaster that came as the climate crisis was moving to the top of Europe’s political agenda. All of a sudden, climate was no longer an abstract threat that could be batted into a distant future; it was already here, causing shocking weather events, destroying lives and leaving people homeless.

In northern Europe especially, spurred by the Fridays for Future school strikes, the climate crisis had already spilled into politics, pushing policy into action. But in 2021, measurable progress towards the goal of net zero emissions by 2050 began to be made.…  Seguir leyendo »

Soldier from Royal Welsh Battlegroup during a Nato exercise on the Estonian Latvian border, May 2022. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y Seguridad, , ,

However Russia’s war in Ukraine ends, Europe is staring uncomfortably down the barrel of a decade of defence. A wounded, vengeful Russia will remain a threat as long as Vladimir Putin, or like-minded successors, are in power. There is no way back to the post-cold war security order, which was cracked by Moscow’s assault on Georgia in 2008, ruptured by its annexation of Crimea in 2014, and finally shattered by its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year.

The end of Europe’s “holiday” from defence is going to be expensive and impose painful choices between guns and butter, which the left will find particularly uncomfortable.…  Seguir leyendo »

A protester holding placard saying ‘Justice for Nahel’ during a march in Nanterre, Paris, 29 June 2023. Photograph: Telmo Pinto/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

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Since the video went viral of the brutal killing by a police officer of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot dead at point-blank range, the streets and housing estates of many poorer French neighbourhoods have been in a state of open revolt. “France faces George Floyd moment”, I read in the international media, as if we were suddenly waking up to the issue of racist police violence. This naive comparison itself reflects a denial of the systemic racist violence that for decades has been inherent to French policing.

I first became involved in antiracist campaigning after a 2005 event that had many parallels with the killing of Nahel.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bernard Arnault (third from right) with his wife and children. Photograph: Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images

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If you scroll through the first 10 or so pages of Google results for the charitable giving of the world’s on- and off-again wealthiest man, Bernard Arnault, you’ll find … practically nothing.

The most high-profile things that do come up when searching for evidence of the generosity of the founder and CEO of the French luxury goods behemoth LVMH look more like acts of billionaire one-upmanship. LVMH paid for the architecturally stunning Fondation Louis Vuitton museum, which showcases Arnault’s collection of modern art. The rival billionaire owner of the luxury brands group Kering, François Pinault, has his private collection of contemporary art on display in the Bourse de Commerce in Paris’s 1st arrondissement.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘Putin’s Russia spent decades courting German political elites.’ The Russian president, left, with the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Berlin, 2005. Photograph: Herbert Knosowski/AP

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Under the veneer of western unity in support of Ukraine, reactions to the war across Europe have been informed by different countries’ readings of their own history, of earlier conflicts on this continent, and by their conceptions of Russia’s national character. There is no automatic consensus within democratic societies about the lessons of the past, nor should there be. Remembrance is often selective, and the way ahead involves a discussion about what went wrong before.

Nowhere has this process of revisiting the past in search of the right decisions for the future been more fraught since the Russian invasion than in Germany.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘This year’s Biennale present the joyous, hopeful face of a fragmenting world.’ The installation Ghebbi by AD-WO. Photograph: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Laboratory for the Future, was inaugurated on the same day that the leaders of the G7 industrialised nations met in Hiroshima. As different as these events appeared, both signalled the end of globalisation. Both also displayed the promise and perils of a fragmenting world.

Of all the arts, architecture is the most globally homogenising. Erecting tropical copycats of Paris and London was a staple of European colonial policy. Today, the same glass-and-steel tower blocks dot interchangeable financial capitals the world over.

But the 2023 Biennale’s curator, the Ghanaian-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko, is using international architecture’s most influential event to critically reassess that one-world narrative.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘Ukraine’s resistance has secured Moldova’s existence, and Moldovans are now sowing the seeds for their European future.’ A pro-EU rally in Chisinau, Moldova, 21 May 2023. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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While Russia’s war on Ukraine rages on and Kyiv prepares its counteroffensive, Moldova, the former Soviet republic sandwiched between Ukraine and the EU, is fortunate to be still standing. Had Russia succeeded in its original war aims, not only would it have captured Kyiv and Odesa, but from there it would have been a matter of days before Russian forces had reached Chisinau.

Moldovan authorities have no doubt this was Vladimir Putin’s plan. The prime minister, Dorin Recean, is crystal clear: Moldova survives only thanks to Ukrainian resistance. If Moscow had been able to spread the war to Moldova, there is no way it would have been able to put up the kind of fight the Ukrainian armed forces have.…  Seguir leyendo »

Emmanuel Macron at a ceremony marking the 78th anniversary of the victory of 8 May 1945 in Paris. Photograph: Eric Tschaen/Sipa/Shutterstock

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As France was commemorating the end of the second world war in Europe this month, Emmanuel Macron cut an isolated figure on a near-empty Champs-Elysées, surrounded by steel security barriers to prevent any member of the public from getting within shouting, let alone pot-banging, distance.

For the first time, and by police order the French people were barrred from a large area ringing the official 8 May remembrance of the liberation. Six years after his first presidential victory and a year after winning a second term in the Elysée, Macron can scarcely show his face in public without being booed, heckled or insulted.…  Seguir leyendo »

Vladimir Putin, presidente de Rusia. Foto de consorcio por Gavriil Grigorov

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En los tiempos de Brézhnev —en los años de juventud de Vladimir Putin—, el 9 de mayo era una fecha señalada para el militarismo, de ensalzamiento de las armas y del poderío. Podría olvidarse, al menos por un momento, que la guerra por elección de Leonid Brézhnev se libraría y se perdería en Afganistán menos de dos décadas después de que los festejos del 9 de mayo comenzaran. Del mismo modo, la guerra que será probablemente la última de Putin se está librando y perdiendo hoy en Ucrania.

Durante ambos conflictos, la ciudadanía occidental se preocupó, comprensiblemente, por la posibilidad de una guerra nuclear.…  Seguir leyendo »

Putin Is Fighting, and Losing, His Last War

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In the Brezhnev era of Vladimir Putin’s youth, May 9 was an occasion for Soviet militarism, a celebration of weapons and might. It could be forgotten, at least for a moment, that Leonid Brezhnev’s war of choice would be fought and lost in Afghanistan less than two decades after he began the May 9 celebrations, much as what is likely Mr. Putin’s last war is today being fought and lost in Ukraine.

During both conflicts, people in the West worried, understandably, about nuclear war.

Today’s Russia issues an unending stream of nuclear threats. In the West today, unlike during the Cold War, these are discussed in psychological rather than strategic terms.…  Seguir leyendo »

A protester on a skateboard rides over burning bins during a recent demonstration in France. Photograph: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

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The French adventurer Sylvain Tesson may have put it best when he wrote: “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell”.

The images from France over the past two months have seemed hellish enough – mounds of rubbish, sometimes on fire, serving as backdrop for violent clashes between some of the more extreme protest groups and body armour-clad riot police. Enough for my parents to repeatedly ask over FaceTime if it was really OK for me to be out and about in my neighbourhood, which borders a main protest square. (It was, I assured them each time, just France being France: the overaggressive nature of the confrontations and the dismissive and “arrogant” government response simply the self-fulfilling result of everyone assuming this was just how things would unfold.)…  Seguir leyendo »

Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Poznan, central Poland, April 2020. Photograph: Jakub Kaczmarczyk/EPA

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When the iron curtain was swept away on that miraculous night of 9 November 1989, it exposed some of the deepest differences between geographical neighbours the world has ever recorded. The 13:1 GDP per capita gap between Poland and soon-to-be united Germany was twice that between the US and Mexico.

That same night, my pregnant mother and her brothers were workers in the shadow economy on an eco-farm near Frankfurt, helping to meet the needs of a newly minted class of environmentally aware Germans. My family admired that country where “you never got lost on a highway”. People in Germany drove immaculately clean cars and manual labourers could play Stille Nacht on several instruments – which they did at the farm for Christmas 1989 – leading my mother to marvel at an education system that could so universally equip people not just with marketable skills but also with an ingrained sense of beauty.…  Seguir leyendo »

A protest near the Russian embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, February 2022. Photograph: Sergei Chuzavkov/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock

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Four years ago, I wrote a novel in which the feeling that there was a “deficit of future” was so acute that every nation in Europe wanted to hold its own referendum on the past. Until then, referendums had always been about the future. But the moment arrived when the horizon closed, and we started to only look back towards the past. A referendum on the past would involve choosing to return to the happiest decade or year from the 20th century in each nation’s history. A deficit of future always unlocks huge reserves of nostalgia for the past: which decade would nations choose?…  Seguir leyendo »

‘The symbolic importance of this ceremony can hardly be overstated.’ King Charles III and Camilla arrive in Germany. Photograph: Ian Vogler/AFP/Getty Images

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King Charles III will not only travel to Berlin during his state visit to Germany this week, but also Hamburg, the country’s second largest city and home to its biggest port. Hamburg is a trading hub known for its anglophilia, with close connections to Great Britain that go back centuries that were revived during the British occupation of the city after the second world war, when the former enemy quickly turned into a close partner.

When you take the long view at UK-German relations, this part of the king’s trip is at least as important and meaningful as his appointments in the German capital.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Ukrainian flag illuminates the EU Commission, European Council and European Parliament buildings in Brussels to mark the anniversary of the war on 23 February, 2023. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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Nine years ago, Maidan, the main square of my home city Kyiv, was filled with people carrying EU and Ukrainian flags. Maidan, or the Revolution of Dignity, was the last successful European democratic revolution. The protesters won. They – we – managed to overthrow a regime that was actively preparing Russia’s political annexation of Ukraine. Nine years ago, the human ocean of Maidan carried on its shoulders the coffins of activists who had been shot dead by police. The tragedy was immense but the space for mourning was limited: the annexation of Crimea began and we realised that the Kremlin had gone to war against Ukraine, against us.…  Seguir leyendo »

Riot police and migrants at the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, June 2022. Photograph: Javier Bernardo/AP

EuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Inmigración

European Union leaders want to reinforce their controversial “fortress Europe” policies by clamping down even harder on inward migration. This reveals a deep and self-defeating disconnect between the 27-nation bloc’s internal actions and its international aspirations.

The EU’s self-image is that of a benign power and a force for global good. European leaders spend a lot of time telling the world about the virtues of “European values”. There is even an EU commissioner whose sole task it is to promote the “European way of life”. Other countries are constantly taken to task, often through the imposition of sanctions, for their failure to align with international human rights standards.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘The administration of Joe Biden has now passed the world’s most generous package of climate incentives.’ Photograph: Héctor Vivas/Getty Images

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European governments have for many years basked in a sense of climate superiority over the US. We had the most ambitious climate goals; we were the constructive actor at Cop conferences; we had carbon-pricing mechanisms; and since 1990, we have reduced emissions by 28% against just 2% in the US. The US, by contrast, had climate-denying Republicans.

The Biden administration now has the world’s most generous package of climate incentives – a $370bn green subsidy package, which goes by the misnomer Inflation Reduction Act. But instead of celebrating the US handouts and tax breaks for investment in such things as electric vehicles and solar panels, many European governments are furious.…  Seguir leyendo »