Uncommon Decency

"To you, who have been born in Italy, God has allotted, as if favouring you specially, the best-defined country in Europe". Thus wrote Giuseppe Mazzini in his landmark essay Duties of Country (1860). Mazzini believed that Italy was unified by geography and language, and that through unification, Italians would gain the power to improve their economic and social conditions. Today Italians remain united by language and geography, but they are dissatisfied and disillusioned with their politics. This weekend's election saw the lowest turnout of any Italian election in history. Fratelli d'Italia's Giorgia Meloni is poised to become the next Prime Minister and the first woman ever to hold that position. Centrists and social democrats spent the campaign warning of the dangers of a right-wing coalition, and accused Meloni of having fascist sympathies. This week, we spoke to Alessandra Bocchi, a freelance journalist, and Thomas Fazi, who writes for UnHerd, about what the Lega/Fratelli/Forza Italia coalition will do in government, the accusations of extremism levelled against Meloni, the future of the Italian left, and the legacy of Mario Draghi. For our Patreon subscribers, there is an extended conversation on Italy's relationship with the EU. We hope you enjoy this episode and decide to subscribe in order to access the full episode.

As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at [email protected]. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

Your favorite euro-realist podcast is gearing up for a new season. In the meantime, here's a short State-of-the-Union primer where we take stock of what we have accomplished over the past 2 years and map out what we intend to achieve in the coming one. On the agenda: our new co-host Julian, our revamped Patreon system (a way to raise the required funds to finance our project whilst offering our Patreons some juicy extra content) and our first-ever Uncommonly Decent job posting. See you soon!

In the spring of 2017, Emmanuel Macron upended France's political system by breaking ranks with a socialist administration and running for President as the leader of a new party that bore his initials, En Marche! Five years after that victory, Macron has again triumphed against Marine Le Pen in the runoff of the presidential race. To be sure, turnout was historically low, and Le Pen climbed from 34% to 41.5% of the vote. Yet Macron is the only French president in 20 years to win a reelection bid. Furthermore, his towering standing in the French political landscape seems matchless. The two traditional governing parties—the center-right Les Républicains (LR) and the social-democratic Parti Socialiste (PS)—are both in utter shambles, whilst their fringe competitors—Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise (LFI)—are not perceived by most voters to be credible governing alternatives. With the field wide open, for now, for Macron's lock on the Presidency, what's next for the country? Will the near future see the beleaguered right and left rebuild themselves? Will Macron's second term be more of the same? To discuss these questions and more, we are joined this week by New York Times Magazine contributing writer Elisabeth Zerofsky and veteran correspondent of all things French John Lichfield. This also happens to be our finale of season four, but do not worry, we will be back in September. Listen in to the end of the episode for a hint of what's next for the podcast.

As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at [email protected]. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

Sir Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, claimed during the 2016 referendum on Brexit that "the last thing on earth Churchill would have been is an isolationist. "Oui", I think he would have wanted to stay in the EU". On the other hand, David Davis, the leading pro-Brexit politician, argued that this vision of Churchill as a remainer was in "defiance of history. Winston Churchill", Davis went on, "saw a very good argument for some sort of a United States of Europe. But he never wanted us, Britain, to be a part of it. That's the key point." As part of Uncommon Decency's biographical series on giants of European history, we felt we couldn't shy away from covering Churchill, having covered Napoleon and Henry Kissinger in episodes 22 and 55, respectively. Churchill's passionate plea for a United States of Europe has been duly acclaimed by historians, but just what place did he envision the UK taking in that post-war European order? To answer that question, we are joined by historian Andrew Roberts, who has written Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), a best-selling biography of the former Prime Minister. In addition, Mr. Roberts hosts the Hoover Institution's Secrets of Statecraft podcast.

As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at [email protected]. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

In numerous ways, Hungary and France couldn't be more different from one another. Hungary is a landlocked set of hills and plains in south Central Europe, flanked to the North and East by the Carpathian mountain range, and to the West and South by the Drava river. It is a meagre remnant of its former self, having lost two thirds of its territory in the 1920 Trianon Treaty upon losing the First World War. France is a hexagon almost seven times the size, bathed by the Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea. The contrast is even starker in demography than in geography. France is a rapidly aging and growingly childless society, its replacement of successive generations increasingly assured by vast waves of immigration, primarily from south and eastern Europe in the interwar period, and then from former colonies in the the Maghreb and Subsaharan Africa after World War II. Hungarian nationhood, meanwhile, has often dovetailed with descending from the Magyar tribes that first settled into the former Roman province of Pannonia nearly a millennia ago. But for all of their substantial differences, the elections held in these two countries over the past ten days have imparted similar lessons about the challenge of incumbency, the appeal of populism, the impact of international wars and the temptation to shoehorn complex events into readily-baked, cliché narratives. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán campaigned on his sound economic record and on keeping his country out of the Russo-Ukraine war. He was re-elected to serve a fourth consecutive term, his Fidesz party gaining a two thirds supermajority in Parliament. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, seems similarly fated for re-election on April 24th after securing a larger gap between his share of the vote and Marine Le Pen's than in the last first-round five years ago. This week, we sit down with our regular US-based co-host Julian Graham to unpack the takeaways from these two races.

As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected]. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

On January 29, 1848, at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, the liberal intellectual and MP Alexis De Tocqueville rose to proclaim: "Gentlemen, I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano [...] Do you not feel—what shall I say?—as it were a gale of revolution in the air?" Within weeks, Tocqueville's prediction came to pass—and more. Throughout 1848, nearly all of Europe revolted. The French ousted King Louis-Phillipe, the last in their history, the Austrians got the aging, arch-conservative Chancellor Metternich to retire, and Hungary attempted to become an independent nation. German and Italian idealists saw this as an opportunity to unite theirs. All of Europe was going through the so-called "Spring of the Peoples", fighting for constitutional rights, representative parliaments, national sovereignty, and other cornerstones of modern democracy. But the Spring of the Peoples was soon followed by a cold winter of repression. The newly-established French Republic shot the hungry Parisian workers dead. The Austrian and Prussian monarchies wrestled back the momentum from the streets of Vienna and Berlin. The dreams of German and Italian unity were crushed by internal strife and the Austro-Prussian armies. The Austrians soon invited the Russians to flatten the Hungarian uprising. Despite the apparent failure of 1848, that year's legacy is seemingly everywhere. 1848 was a learning experience for men like Karl Marx, the godfather of Communism, and Giuseppe Mazzini, one of unified Italy's founding fathers. Only decades after the failure of 1848, Italy and Germany became nation-states, while the democratic ideals proclaimed that year became entrenched across European politics. And yet today it seems that 1848 has been largely forgotten. To ensure this is not so, this week we discuss 1848's European legacy with two esteemed historians, Chris Clark of Cambridge and Jonathan Sperber of the University of Missouri.

As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected]. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"Politics in America, Britain, and other Western nations", reads the blurb for the Edmund Burke Foundation's National Conservatism series of conferences, "have taken a sharp turn toward nationalism—a commitment to a world of independent nations". In the US and the UK, this inflection point crystallized in 2016 with the result of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. In continental Europe, the torch has been picked up by an arc of national-populist parties, from Viktor Orbán's Fidesz to Spain's Vox, Italy's Fratelli d'Italia and Poland's Law & Justice Party. The latest such NatCon conference was held last week this side of the pond, in Brussels, bringing together a colorful assortment of right-wing politicians, scholars and journalists at a ritzy venue a short walk away from the seat of EU institutions. Naturally, the gathering had been planned well before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, and the conference had to adjust to a fast-moving news cycle accordingly. The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war has also predictably shaken up the French presidential race. This week, we sit down with Sebastian Milbank, who covered the NatCon summit extensively for The Critic, to unpack the conference's main themes and to assess the state of play in France a mere 10 days away from the first-round of voting.

As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected]. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

*Contrary to Jorge's introduction, the Edmund Burke Foundation is based in Washington D.C., not Jerusalem.

"A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy", wrote Henry Kissinger, "will achieve neither perfection nor security". In an era where few countries have the means to back their moral postures on foreign policy, the statesman's comments should not fall on deaf ears. Kissinger knows a thing or two about the inefficiency of empty posturing. Born in 1923 in Weimar Germany, he left his country of birth in 1938 for the United States. Months later, the Allies were trounced by the might of the Nazi war-machine. Young Kissinger brought with him many things from old Europe—a German accent, a long-lasting love for his local football club, but more substantially, a realist worldview that had been incarnated in the past by Bismarck and Metternich. The German immigrant fought in World War II with the US Army before becoming one of the most brilliant academic minds in the US, and soon one of the most famous statesmen of the century, serving as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—a true American success story, this young European. Always attempting to see the world as it is and not how it should be, the 98-year-old Kissinger remains one of the world's most respected voices on foreign policy. In this episode, we are lucky to have with us Ambassador Gérard Araud and Jérémie Gallon, each of whom has recently published a book on Kissinger's relationship to diplomacy, Europe and realism. In the current geopolitical turmoil, this episode turned into a fascinating conversation on Europe's and America's relationship to realism and morality in foreign policy.

As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected]. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

France looks back on November 13, 2015 with a mix of pain and horror. That day, a group of ISIS-trained jihadists launched coordinated attacks on the Bataclan nightclub, the Stade de France, and a handful of Parisian cafés. The onslaught left 130 dead, shell-shocked French public opinion, and forced a reckoning across Europe about the threat from radicalization. In September 2021, the French Republic trialed Salah Abdeslam, the only author of the November 2015 attacks to have survived, along with 20 other defendants. The months-long case was an opportunity to serve justice for the victims and to better understand how a slaughter of such scale was possible in the heart of a major European city. It also appeared to close a bloody chapter of European history, since no further attacks of that magnitude have followed. Those committed against the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, in Nice, Brussels, Manchester and many other places also seem to be on the rearview mirror. To lure us further into complacency, ISIS has been militarily defeated whilst Europe's counter-terrorism capacities have considerably improved. Yet for radicalization experts, we would be naïve to believe the danger has passed. This week, we sought to get a better sense of the past, present and future of jihadism in Europe by speaking to two of them: Hugo Micheron, a returnee to the show, one of the expert witnesses in the Abdeslam trial and the author of Jihadisme Européen (2022), and Petter Nesser of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected]. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

Mere hours after Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine's borders, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made this chilling statement : « We buy 50% of our coal from Russia. If we exclude Russia from the SWIFT payment system, the lights in Germany will go out. » In our 44th episode a few weeks ago (« Europe Braces for Winter »), we wondered whether soaring energy prices could lead to mass blackouts, but we never expected that problem to be soon compounded by Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. This naked act of aggression has starkly highlighted Europe's energy dependence on Russia, which provides nearly half of our gas and a quarter of our oil. Such a reliance has logically hampered the European Union's (EU) capacity to hit Russia's massive energy sector despite the Biden administration's calls for the West to profoundly decouple. This week, we turn to Nick Butler and Simone Tagliapietra, two experts on the geopolitics of energy, to take stock of Europe's dependency. How long can the EU survive without Russian gas? And can Russia's aggression spark a much-needed strategic approach to energy ?

As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or [email protected]. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.