On 29 August, Iceland will hold a referendum on whether to start talks on joining the European Union. Ahead of that vote, the Conservative Brexiteer and former member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan wrote an op-ed last week telling Icelanders they have a great arrangement being in the European Economic Area, having access to the EU’s single market without having to be in the EU, and they should stick with that rather than joining.

Nowhere in the piece does he mention that as part of the single market, Iceland has to follow EU laws except in agriculture and fisheries policies. Nor does he mention that, because they aren’t an actual member but rather a pseudo-member, Iceland doesn’t get to vote on these laws. And that’s because, like all Brexiteers, he approaches everything under the false pretext that the EU is not a democracy and laws are dictated by bureaucrats. So if the laws are dictated by bureaucrats either way, why bother being a full member?

Except that’s not true. The EU has a bicameral legislature made up of a directly-elected lower house (the EU Parliament) representing the people and an upper house made up of national ministers representing the governments (just like the Bundesrat in Germany, or the US Senate until a century ago). The Commission may propose laws, but the legislature fundamentally changes them and nothing becomes law without their approval.

I decided to make this video from Barcelona explaining two things that are not well-understood: that the EU is a democracy and that it has a government. I saw the degree to which people don’t understand this in the reaction to an op-ed published this week in The Guardian by Alberto Alemanno explaining how the far right has entered the EU’s government. Many people seemed confused by the idea because they don’t think of the EU as having a government. And, particularly in the UK where the issue of the EU has become a polemic subject with many misunderstandings, I saw many pro-EU people aghast at the idea that the EU could be bad. But as I noted on BlueSky, the EU is not innately good or bad. Just like a country, it depends on what government is running it. The EU has been governed by the centre-right European Peoples Party for two decades, and recently that party has entered into an ad-hoc alliance with the far right. As Alemanno explains in the op-ed, this has resulted in a situation where the far right is calling the shots without even technically being in the governing coalition: a situation very similar to what’s happening in many European national governments now.

What makes Hannan’s argument all the more absurd is that Brexiteers told British referendum voters they would have single market access after Brexit, but then once it became clear they would need to follow EU law in order to get it (without being able to vote on it), they said this would be unconscionable and the UK ended up with a hard Brexit. So apparently such a humiliating arrangement is good enough for Iceland, but not for a mighty empire like Britain.

Incidentally, Hannan also doesn’t mention that as an EEA member Iceland already pays for its EU single market access. He pretends that its EU budget contribution as a member state would be an entirely new cost. I honestly don’t know if these types of op-eds are the result of ignorance or malice, but the end result is the same: the public is misled.

Here are some of the links I mention in the video:

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EU home affairs ministers held an emergency video summit yesterday to discuss the Ceuta crisis. By the time they met, almost all of the estimated 72,000 people who crossed into the Spanish territory last Thursday had been returned to Morocco. None were able to leave Africa and make it to the EU mainland. Logically then, the question should have turned to establishing why and how 72,000 people were allowed by Moroccan authorities to stream into the Spanish enclave.

But the ministers were not interested in asking questions - even if many politicians in Spain are. The purpose of yesterday’s meeting was damage control - to try to pretend there was European unity on this issue when there very clearly had not been. Morocco was not mentioned at all. Reportedly that was at the insistence of Spain - which is worried about Moroccan retaliation if they point the finger of blame at Rabat.

Julien Hoez and I both wrote this week about what disgraceful moment this was for Europe, so we came together today to do a Substack live to discuss the latest. I’m in Spain and based on my conversations with people here I can tell you there is abolute fury with the EU about the lack of solidarity shown. In his piece on The French Dispatch today, Julien explored the evidence for this being a hybrid attack by Morocco and why European governments are not only unwilling to investigate it, but are also paying Morocco off as a result of the crisis.

More on the leaked US State department memo that said the US should support rival claims to European overseas territories like Ceuta and the Falklands as punishment for Europe not joining the Iran War here.

Substack posts mentioned in this video:

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Ireland took over the rotating presidency of the EU Council this week, and while here covering the launch I stopped by the Port of Cork in Cobh, formerly known as Queenstown. From here at “Heartbreak Pier”, where I’m standing in the video, my great great great grandfather Daniel Keating Jr immigrated to New York in 1860. This was the last thing in Europe he ever saw.

He was escaping wretched poverty and starvation as a result of the potato famine, which had hit his town of Skibbereen outside Cork particularly hard. He sailed to America in search of a better life - and more than anything, in search of hope. He might have been bemused to know that 146 years later, his great great great grandson would make the same journey in reverse. Not for economic necessity as was the case for him, but also in search of hope.

In this video shot in Cobh port, I talk about how when I emigrated from the United States to Europe at the end of 2006, people in both the US and EU couldn’t quite grasp the concept. The US doesn’t have a tradition of emigration, only immigration. We’re taught from a young age, in both Europe and America, that the US is the place where dreams come true. Why would anyone leave? Having grown up in American society, I wasn’t all that surprised that people in the US didn’t quite get the idea that I was leaving and did not have the intention of coming back. But what really took me aback was that Europeans also didn’t get it. Time after time, I encountered confusion at the idea that I would leave the US and not want to go back.

So on this 4th of July, I reminisced about this time period, back before the Trump era when Europeans found it strange that an American would want to leave America. It’s a topic that’s been coming up a lot during the readings and interviews for the French edition of my book, Le Continent Captif. I’ve stressed this idea of being an emigrant rather than an “expat”. But I’ve also stressed how different this experience is for an American vs any other immigrant, because we can never really escape our home country. It follows us wherever we go.

I hope you enjoy the video, and happy 4th of July for those who celebrate.

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Italian-American relations have been thrown into chaos this week after a very public spat between Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. But as I wrote earlier this week, this is about much more than who asked who for a selfie. This was an abrupt change of strategy not just for Meloni, a former Trump ally, but for Europe as a whole. The far-right Italian primer minister is one of if not the most politically smart leaders we have in the EU right now, and she is without a doubt the most powerful woman in Europe. So the fact that she has chosen this moment to publicly break with Trump tells us a lot about the point of weakness the US president is now at following the Iran War debacle.

I talked about what the Meloni-Trump spat means for Europe, and whether other leaders will follow her in growing a spine, with Luke Johnson from the Public Sphere Substack. We also talked about the backstory behind the treaties governing the use of US bases in Europe, the context behind all this that was largely missing from a lot of the media coverage.

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On Thursday night, at the June European Council summit, EU prime ministers and presidents discussed whether they should switch to a tougher strategy on EU-China relations. Frustrations with China dumping exports into the EU market (while not allowing EU companies access to the Chinese market) have reached boiling point. Even Bejing’s biggest European trade partner Germany is ready to do something about it (or at least, that’s what Chancellor Olaf Scholz is saying publicly).

But not everyone is in agreement. While France (backed by Italy) is pushing for a tougher line, Germany has been more reticent while Spain has questioned the wisdom of starting a trade war with China just as Europe is being abandoned (and threatened) by its longtime ally the United States.

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On 4 June, Le Continent Captif, the French edition of my book The Owned Continent, was published.

I’m now doing promotion rounds for the book in French (keep an eye on the events section of the website) and the first stop was a reading at Librebook multilingual bookshop in the expat-heavy Brussels neighbourhood of Ixelles. It follows a reading of the English book there in March.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the reading, we had a really good discussion there with some excellent questions.

The reviews are coming in from France. This one from l’Express has a headline focused on one very small part of the book saying European federalists should embrace the fact that English has become a lingua franca for the union understood by more than half of EU citizens. I knew this would strike a nerve in France, which has fiercely resisted this development for years. But it’s really not at all the point of the book, I’m not even advocating for any action on that front! I’m simply asking for people in France to stop denying the current linguistic reality in Europe.

Anyway the review itself is quite positive and focuses on the actual topic of the book (resisting American dominance), I think the headline editor just saw a click-bait opportunity to lead with this one small part of the review. Fair enough, I guess I shouldn’t complain if it gets more people to read it. But I really hope I don’t end up getting sidetracked by this one point in all my French interviews, it really isn’t important enough to merit such long debate in my opinion. But I know other people feel differently, and I’m willing to defend my position that resisting English is counter-productive for Europe.

You can purchase the French or the English edition at Librebook, Waterstones or The European Bookshop in Brussels. For more purchasing options, click here.

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GLOBSEC, an annual event that combines Davos and the MSC with a focus on central Europe, took place in Prague this week. Dave Keating from Gulf Stream Blues and Julien Hoez from The French Dispatch were both there moderating panels, and in this live video they discussed their observations from the conference and what it says about the readiness of Europe’s leaders to accept reality when it comes to the new USA.

Also discussed: what is needed to make the EU ready to stand up to America and finally become a sovereign independent power - and why the establishment’s visceral reaction against treaty change is a major mistake.

Posts mentioned during the video:

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In today’s Substack video I talked about the summit of EU prime ministers and presidents taking place in Cyprus today and the planned dinner discussion about the EU’s Article 42.7 inserted into the 2009 Lisbon Treaty and how it would work in practice.

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My quick take on what yesterday’s surprise tsunami of a defeat for Viktor Orban means both in practical terms for the EU and Ukraine and in more symbolic terms for the White House’s regime change efforts in Europe.

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Following similar threats over the past days from his secretary of state and secretary of war, Donald Trump has today said he is considering taking the United States out of NATO in retaliation for European countries not joining his war on Iran. But his words reflect a far more troubling reality than his empty threats: the US is already effectively out of NATO, even if it technically remains in.

“I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump told The Telegraph newspaper in an apparent cold call. The comments came hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News that if Europe doesn’t join this war then the US may leave NATO and pull its troops and bases out of Europe. “NATO wasn’t just about defending Europe, but allowing us to have military bases in Europe for our