Uncommon Decency

"I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it." You might recognize Hegel's description of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican-born French emperor, ruler of Europe's fate for nearly two decades. Why on earth are my two favorite European podcasters riffing on Napoleon, I hear you ask? Partly because this year marks the 200th anniversary of his death in exile at Saint Helena. But more fundamentally, a connecting thread throughout our show endeavors to define the European experience by way of political, cultural and intellectual History. When it comes to delineating what makes us European, History rarely features if at all; and when it does, the post-1945 imperative of transcending it has a way of shadowing that past which isn't found to be symbolically valuable to supranational ideals. And yet if you are in continental Europe, your legal and administrative structure is most likely directly inherited from Napoleonic France, to cite just one form of inheritance. Does that legacy make Napoleon a great European? Listen to leading historians Michael Broers and Adam Zamoyski grapple with the question.

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Piotr S. Wandycz, the Yale historian, reflected once that "what to the Poles was the Polish cause, to the outside world was the Polish question". To be sure, he was writing in 1980 about the successive European conferences of territorial partition, from Vienna in 1815 to Potsdam in the immediate post-war. But this axiom sounds perhaps more prescient than ever since Poland's much-touted entry into the pacified end-of-History after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Speaking of a "new Polish question" sounds provocative at best, and at worst a parti pris for the national conservative persuasion of the PiS party currently in government. And yet one cannot fully understand the political cycle of the last 15 years without a level-headed reexamination of the imperative of Polish sovereignty and self-determination that had been for centuries so menaced by enemies East and West. Whether we like it or not, these sentiments are again front and center in the political imagination of broad swathes of Polish society. Adam Zamoyski and Marek Matraszek will help us pierce the partisan veil imposed by the liberal internationalist consensus that has, by casting Poland as a backsliding, retrograde, proto-authoritarian state, distorted our common understanding of the uniqueness of the Polish experience. Enjoy!

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In The Origins of Political Order (2011), Fukuyama described the problem of creating modern political institutions as one of "getting to Denmark". The country, in his own words at the time, was "a mythical place known for its stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive institutions". A few miles south of Denmark lie the Netherlands, a country that last week renewed Mark Rutte's mandate to lead a coalition, from a somewhat reshuffled Parliament this time. Our two guests this week highlight a gradual shift in the core of Dutch politics towards a blend of fiscal hawkishness, moderate Euroscepticism and even a less liberal social policy than the Dutch norm. No other country, however, seems to have journeyed further into the proverbial Third Way and the technocratization of vast swathes of government policy. Simon Kuper (Financial Times) and Rem Korteweg (Clingendael Institute) walk us through the Fukuyamaesque clichés borne out in last week's race, whilst giving due warning that not everything is as may rosily seem in the Dutch Low Countries.

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As President Biden tours the American heartland touting his administration's 1.9 trillion USD Covid-19 relief package laced with numerous tax tweaks and giveaways, we are convening two economic scholars to explore the confusing in-between that both America and the EU find themselves in—Bertrand Badré, who wrote Do We (Seriously) Wish to Change the World? (2020) upon serving as World Bank MD, and Martin Sandbu, the Financial Times' European Economics Commentator. On one hand, the imperative to relieve businesses, families and governments of the prolonged financial shock to their finances. On the other, the luring temptation to remake the economy on healthier grounds, socially and environmentally. Is the latter a siren song that could turn against the former? What are the lessons to be drawn from the interaction of policy and economic fundamentals over the past year, Covid-19 itself, and even prior crises in recent memory?

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The forthcoming 2022 French presidential race is, already this early, slated to be one of the most uncertain in Fifth Republic history. In the latest rounds of polling, voting intention gaps between the two candidates most guaranteed a pulpit at the runoff have narrowed down to the demographic size of Marseille. Apart from Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, who will be running in the first round, what are the core cleavages shaping up to be, and what will each candidate's pitch be to a French electorate reaching peak levels of both distrust and disillusion? We have dedicated this bonus to a purely speculative, fun-laced pre-game foreboding into more than a year's time from now. All predictive errors are naturally the fault of other podcasts. Enjoy!

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This show has said its piece about Europe's inimical tendency to freeload on everything American, from defense spending to woke historical revisionism. But if there ever was an American Trap, Frédéric Pierrucci knows what it feels like being inside. Hell, he wrote a memoir about it (2019), but the book's title alone can't do justice to what it felt like being locked up behind the freezing bars of a maximum-security prison in Rhode Island. Frédéric was an Alstom senior executive, and his falling into the throes of a late 1970s US law written to combat corporate money laundering is, in his own telling, exclusively explained by General Electric's predatory acquisition of Alstom's power and grid capabilities in 2015, among the world's largest-ever industrial acquisitions. America is waging economic war against its supposed "allies", Frederic argues, and it is high time that we meet fire with fire. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French legal délicatesse at the New York bar, isn't one to throw around terms like "economic war" lightly, but this conversation between them will hopefully awaken others to the harrowing pain that extra-territorial application of economic law can produce. We come in peace, DoJ!

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After almost 4 years since 17 million Brits voted for this outcome, the UK has finally divorced from the European supranational behemoth. The year-end deal on the new trade rapport between the two sides of the Channel was elusive, but the sighs of relief in Whitehall and the Berlaymont have been music to each other's ears. With two of the most insightful Brexit watchers in the market—Charles Grant, the 22-year President of the Center for European Reform (CER) and Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group, NYU Stern and SciencesPo—, we bring to you a retrospective on the chaotic last 3.5 years of endless back-and-forth, vitriol and deadline extensions. If anything, what has Brexit taught us about the inner forces driving the UK and the EU, and to what extent will it be a template of future divorces of this sort?

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Luigi Barzini, the Italian social critic, wrote in his 1964 American bestseller about his home country that "the Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse". Is the Italian political imagination as fractious as we tend to think? Was Matteo Salvini's clarion call to close Europe's borders a harbinger of a new immigration politics across Europe? If so, what are other canaries in the Italian coalmine that may augur tide changes across the Old World? Chris Caldwell and Alessandra Bocchi have both been more than temporary visitors over the years, and they more often than not seem to concur with Barzini, albeit with nuances. We are so blessed to have these two distinguished writers discuss the Italian malaise on our show, in the wake of Mario Draghi's formation of a new Italian government.

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Europe's year-end investment accord with China was, to say the least, controversial on a number of fronts. The draft of the so-called CAI fails to even mention China's exploitation of its Uyghur minority, a concession made in the narrow-minded interest of securing market access for a segment of the European corporate establishment that has been revealed as wielding undue influence over foreign policy. Furthermore, the deal presented the new Biden administration with a fait accompli that upsets its plans of building a common transatlantic front to hold China accountable for its abuses, without so much as a advance notice. We sit down to discuss the background and the fallout from the deal with Reinhard Bütikofer, the German Green MEP who chairs the European Parliament's delegation for relations with China and co-chairs the newly-formed Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, and François Godement, a world-renowned China expert and Sinologist at Institut Montaigne in Paris.

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In the wake of the Capitol-storming mob of January 6th, a flurry of contradictory reactions from European officials followed, first warning about the viral potential of misinformation to spread on social media, and then against its deliberate taming by online platforms. Was this merely a symptom of the elusive equilibrium between speech freedoms and a sane public square increasingly convened by big tech, or is there a deeper parting of ways between America and Europe at the intersection of civil liberties and technoogy? As the transatlantic alliance grapples with the limits to free speech, we convened a discussion on these questions between Frances G. Burwell of McLarty Associates and the Atlantic Council (Washington DC) and Jacob Mchangama of the Justitia think-tank (Copenhagen) and the FIRE Foundation (Washington DC).

Rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected].