Close your eyes. Imagine a young person you know and care about. Picture them at age 90. And then think about the kind of world you want to leave them. Is it ridden by conflict and chaos? Or is it peaceful and habitable? Such thought experiments can lead us to change behaviour and priorities. But they also have wider application to government and p…

There's a lot of talk right now about future generations. Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission says she'll create a portfolio with responsibilities for intergenerational fairness. A Summit of the Future to be held in September at the United Nations also helps explain the buzz. In this, the first of two episodes, a conversation with Eliza…

Border violence. Hostage diplomacy. Vaccine purchases. Just some of the areas where opaqueness in EU decision-making can erode public trust and ultimately democracy. These also are areas where accountability journalism like freedom of information requests can help uncover undue influence by lobbies and foreign powers as well as abuses by security s…

How did politics long deemed unacceptable go mainstream so quickly? Pundits have blamed disinformation, social media and growing distrust of elites. But these factors don't adequately explain how illiberalism and identitarian ideologies have spread so rapidly even to countries thought to be immune. It's a puzzle Portuguese political scientist Vicen…

Ireland and Spain are to grant formal recognition to a Palestine state as soon as this month. The move puts Dublin and Madrid at odds with most other EU states and with the United States. Sweden is the only other state to have recognised Palestine during its membership of the EU, and that was a decade ago. In this episode, Tony Connelly, the Europe…

Abortion is a deal breaker for some voters. That's the case in the US where Joe Biden is making Donald Trump pay a political price for his role in overturning Roe vs. Wade. That's also been the case in Poland where a wellspring of pro-choice sentiment helped remove the ultraconservative Law and Justice party last year. So could that same dynamic ha…

What's the best approach to fighting the hard right? Suppressing toxic views? Or contesting them publicly? The answer lies in the middle of course — an open society must retain the means to reject intolerance and hate. But what's clear from recent events in Brussels is that hasty and ham-fisted bans on the hard right can amplify rather than diminis…

Some people love Eurovision. Others don't get it. But beyond the camp and kitsch of the annual song contest there's much to observe about the politics of Europe and the wider region. In this episode, author and broadcaster Dave Keating starts with discord between Sweden and France over language. The sourest notes were struck in the mid-1970s after …

Opposition to French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura performing at the Paris Olympics is whipped up by the "fachosphère" in France. The former head of the EU Border and Coast Guard joins the far-right and accuses former colleagues of a "project" to encourage migration. Those are just two recent examples of the kinds of prejudice and conspiracy theory th…

Donald Trump wanted to buy it; Mette Frederiksen said it wasn't for sale. Greenland and its ownership is for Greenlanders to decide, the Danish prime minister told President Trump five years ago. In this episode Karin Axelsson, EU correspondent for the respected Danish daily Politiken, reflects on why the world's biggest island, which gained autono…

Frontex, the EU border and coast guard, is the bloc's best funded agency costing upwards of a billion euros a year. There are plans for a standing corps of 10,000 uniformed personnel this decade. But something is badly amiss. Migrants keep drowning in large numbers under Frontex's watch. That includes what is thought to be the worst disaster of its…

The world is growing more violent. Worst affected countries include Myanmar, Syria and Mexico as well as those experiencing more obvious crises like Gaza and Ukraine. That's according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project or ACLED. But there's also growing concern about more developed countries with longer established democratic tradi…

Markus Becker of Der Spiegel describes a developing situation in Germany where the popularity of the far-right AfD party has surged over the past year. Revelations that members of the AfD discussed deportations of non-assimilated people and of those with non-German backgrounds has prompted a huge backlash including mass demonstrations. The AfD has …

Terry Reintke unhesitatingly describes some EU lawmakers with anti-European and far-right views as fascists. Her directness stands in sharp contrast to bland circumlocutions more common to Brussels. Now Terry, a German who co-heads the Greens in the European Parliament, wants the chamber to launch an inquiry into whether its extreme right Identity …

The prospect of a wider conflict with Russia under a scenario where Donald Trump is back in the White House has spooked Europe. Thierry Breton, a European commissioner, is among those sounding the alarm. This month Breton made headlines by recalling how Trump said NATO was dead and the United States would never come to Europe's rescue. The journali…

Mario Draghi is the obvious candidate to be the next president of the European Council. The job involves leading the meetings of EU heads of state and government. And it's wide open since incumbent Charles Michel announced he's quitting. But despite Draghi's notable achievements, including saving the euro and crafting game-changing policies on vacc…

Jacques Delors passed away this week. He was the longest serving president of the European Commission. But what made Delors such a towering figure was his headlong rush to unify the continent. Monetary union. Free movement. The Single Market. Delors is the preeminent architect of the modern European project. Fast forward three decades and that arch…

Big Meat had a good year in Europe. Plans to set emission limits for large-scale cattle farms were scrapped. Rules requiring landowners to restore wetlands were mostly gutted. And a keenly anticipated reform of the animal welfare rules was mostly consigned to the deep freeze. Among those promised animal welfare reforms: legislation to End the Cage …

EU industrial policy for silicon chips to space technologies to electric vehicles too often seems to rely on Europeans prevailing in a global race to mine. The phrase "drill, baby, drill" applies as much to metals and minerals as oil and gas these days. But the EU's industry hawks are in denial. This is a race Europe can't ever win. The EU has rela…

The problem of X as a source of hate and a threat to democracy is back at the top of the policy agenda. Elon Musk's social media platform circulated a large amount of false information as well as images of extreme violence during the recent terror attack in Israel. A European Commissioner, Thierry Breton, said that content probably was illegal in E…

We need to talk about a Far Right EU. Nativists and ultraconservatives are being actively courted by the European mainstream including at the level of the EU. There's the advent of prime minister Giorgia Meloni, with her party's roots in Italian fascism, and then there's the popularity in France of Marine Le Pen, previously seen as too extreme. But…

Europeans are comfortable talking about whiteness in the American context. But when it comes to their own continent, not so much. That serves to shut down an important conversation about police brutality, decolonisation and migration. The resistance to discussing whiteness is starkly apparent at the level of the EU and it's another sign the Europea…

News from Spain where a far-right political party called Vox lost seats in the recent general election. Vox are culture warriors in the mould of the US MAGA movement: anti-migrant, anti-LGBT+, anti-Islam, anti-feminist and with a predilection for blocking action on EU climate goals. The response in Brussels to Vox's poor showing was triumphalism. B…

Polish state media still is treated as a legitimate public service by European authorities. Yet many Poles refer to it as a factory of hate. They say Polish state TV and radio first and foremost serve to advance the agenda of the ruling Law and Justice party in Warsaw. And while Silvio Berlusconi of Italy was a pioneer in bullying media, and Viktor…

Philippe Lamberts is advancing one of the most progressive agendas ever to reach the upper echelons of the EU power structure. This month the co-head of the Greens at the European Parliament will convene a conference that seeks to change, well, just about everything. The conference is called Beyond Growth — an umbrella term for thinking about how g…

Conveniently at the heart of the EU Qatargate corruption scandal is a rogue NGO. Conveniently, that is, for EU officials and lawmakers who dislike non-governmental organisations. NGOs frequently end up in an awkward relationship with states and international organisations, says Thomas Davies at City University, and that awkwardness increasingly see…

Families can go wrong. And unless you've been under a rock these last weeks, you'll know that a number of members of the Socialist family at the European Parliament went very wrong. They allegedly took sack loads of Qatari cash on top of their already generous salaries and benefits in return, it seems, for trying to block their own Socialist collea…

Putin's barbarism is somehow felt by us all even though it can be hard to get to grips with the magnitude of what's at stake. One reason may be what writer and academic Tom Nichols calls normalcy bias, an inherent resistance to accepting that large changes can upend our lives. Another may be what Lithuanian arts curator Raimundas Malasauskas calls …

The European Parliament is reeling from corruption allegations involving the Gulf state of Qatar. Members' offices have been sealed. Raids have been carried out by Italian and Belgian authorities. And large sums of cash seized including sacks of banknotes from the father of one of the lawmakers at the centre of the scandal. That lawmaker, Eva Kaili…

The European Union wants India as a strategic ally. And India loves the positive attention it's getting from Europe. Both sides are trying to speed up a long stalled-trade agreement amid steadily tightening relations. But that only serves to magnify a glaring double standard in EU foreign policy. While the EU openly criticises China for abusing its…

Decolonisation is a new way of confronting racism. It means rooting out colonial-era attitudes of white superiority that linger in our societies and institutions. The push for decolonisation in the US and parts of Europe took wings with the Black Lives Matter movement. But the EU still is nowhere near starting the process of decolonisation. Its ret…

Georgia Meloni was 19 and speaking to French TV when she praised Italian dictator and Hitler ally Mussolini. Back then the likely next prime minister of Italy was dressed all in black and flanked by burly men. Twenty-six years later things look very different. Meloni favours bright white pant suits and presses the flesh with European dignitaries. T…

There are many things to love about France. But a stated policy of colour blindness is not one of them. Among those leading the charge against a French conception of universalism that makes discussing race so awkward is Grace Ly. Her Chinese Cambodian parents fled the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s for France, where she has found success and cel…

Europeans howl about U.S. backsliding on abortion rights but they don't exactly have their own house in order. Take the case of Bianca. She's a Romanian. She was studying medicine in Germany. And she discovered she was pregnant in Korea. Bianca eventually made her way home to Romania to terminate the pregnancy. But the doctor at her regional hospit…

Legal scholar Sahar Aziz says people who identify as Muslim are often perceived in racial terms, like black and brown people, in white-dominated societies. That makes Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic the subject of similar forms of racism. She also says protecting observant Muslims in Europe may be more difficult than in the United States, whe…

Was Emmanuel Macron right to talk so much with Vladimir Putin before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? And did Macron cross a line from well-intentioned engagement into something like naive appeasement? French journalist Guy Lagache spent the first six months of this year in close proximity to Macron, making a film that ended up focusin…

Author Rafia Zakaria turned the feminist world upside down with her bestselling book Against White Feminism. White feminists, she writes, fail "to cede space to the feminists of colour who have been ignored erased or excluded from the feminist movement." In this episode Rafia talks with the Brussels-based journalist and think-tanker Shada Islam abo…

Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has threatened to be a public relations disaster for hard-right gatherings like CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Previous editions featured Putin supporters — and a CPAC meeting getting underway in Budapest will feature Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who remains on highly cordial terms with…

Would you pick up a gun and fight for Ukraine? The injustice of the Russian invasion has led white-collar professionals like Florent and Tomas to trade suits and ties for camouflage and Kalashnikovs. Florent, who is French, and Tomas, a Lithuanian, met for the first time in February at the Ukrainian embassy in Belgium. They teamed up for the trip t…

When Thomas left Brussels for Ukraine to train as a foreign fighter, he joined up with the Georgian Legion, a paramilitary group that's fought for years to stop Russian aggression. In this episode Thomas and his unit arrive in Kyiv, as part of efforts to try to stop Putin's army from taking the capital. Please note: this is a reedited version of th…

Thomas lives in Brussels. But last week, seemingly out of the blue, he upped sticks and left. He was already heading into Ukraine when he began sending his first dispatches — simple but captivating voicemails. Thomas is now in the international brigades, which are comprised of foreign fighters from all over the world. Like Thomas, many of the fight…

Policy differences between Europe and Africa have been widening, and while there may be warm words about a new partnership when the leaders of the EU and African Union meet in Brussels, there are unlikely to be breakthroughs on key African demands. One area where Europeans and Africans have long seen eye-to-eye is fighting jihadists, and Europe has…

Europe is green. Europe is humane. Europe has defeated populism. These views are common among the EU chattering classes. But they often seem more reflexive than reflective, and some of them amount to shibboleths — beliefs that are outmoded or no longer as useful as they once may have been. In this episode Mehreen Khan of the Financial Times unpacks…

Freedom of information. Openness. Access to documents. These are names for laws people can use to ask authorities to share information and records. The European Union adopted its access regulation at the turn of this century. But as work went digital, the access rules have failed to keep pace. A lot still goes unrecorded. Or it goes unregistered, a…

Enrico Letta was prime minister of Italy for less than a year before he was ousted by a rival, Matteo Renzi. But a lot happened during Letta's time at the top. After six years in Paris, he's back in Italy and leading the centre-left Democratic Party with a conspicuously progressive agenda on issues like gender equality and LGBT+ rights. Speaking at…

Liberal lawmaker Sophie in 't Veld says the European Union's survival depends on overcoming creeping sclerosis, ending acquiescence to autocrats, and embracing the kind of political spectacle that captures the public imagination. In her new book, The Scent of Wild Animals, Sophie writes that too much EU politics takes place behind closed doors, wit…

With the next big climate conference about to get underway in Glasgow, major breakthroughs look elusive. Among the spectres at the feast are raging geopolitical tensions, high energy prices, the ongoing pandemic and — in the wake of Brexit — a lack of diplomatic vigour from Europe. Nick Mabey is a founding director of the non-profit environmental g…

Concerns are growing that the big climate conference in Glasgow next month will not do enough to avert climate breakdown. Obstacles to progress include international tensions between the US and China, and between the UK and Europe. Someone who knows first hand how hard it can be to make climate negotiations succeed in such conditions is Connie Hede…

During the first few months of 2015 the world watched in awe — and often admiration — as a scrappy government in Athens tried to stare down Europe's financial and political establishment. The standoff failed spectacularly. Greece ended up with more loans on even tougher terms. In their bestselling book The Last Bluff, co-authors Viktoria Dendrinou …

This summer some 450 undocumented workers and migrants in Brussels refused food during two months. They were protesting Belgian immigration rules that human rights officials and campaigners like Lilana Keith of PICUM say arbitrarily obstruct them from legal and stable residency. The hunger strike provoked an outcry against the Belgian government. Y…