Category: Current

Out of despair, insight. A comment from a despairing American friend of mine suddenly helped me to understand Donald Trump and his context. “If Thomas Jefferson had foreseen Donald Trump”, he said, “he would have told his fellow revolutionaries that they must stop fighting immediately and make peace terms with

Pope Francis is widely acclaimed today, less for his Catholic wisdom than for the fact that he is perceived by secular (and some religious) opinion as some kind of “progressive”. Whether this will lead many to return to the Catholic Church or reconsider “the truth about man” that it proffers is highly doubtful. There is an element of the bien-pensant in Francis’s papacy,

Simon Winder, Danubia: a Personal History of Habsburg Europe, Picador, 2013* This book, though not without virtues, illustrates the perils of popular history. The book is about the Habsburg past, yet far too often Winder has no convincing grasp of what he is dealing with. It is written in a light, jokey style which sometimes works, sometimes jars. Musil gets a mention, but

When the United Kingdom voted on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union, most people focused on immigration as the root cause. Some said it was xenophobia or even racism. And certainly immigration, xenophobia and racism were major issues in the referendum. But the ultimate cause of the Brexit vote was not immigration. It was economics. Around 3.2 million

HUNGARY AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPE Viktor Orbán Judging from population, natural resources, and human capital, the European Union should be the leading power of the world. For the moment, however, its stagnation obstructs its potential leadership. What we call the European Project has been stopped in its tracks. We

Both the narratives that immigration drives down wages for indigenous workers and that immigration is economically necessary are false. The truth is that moderate migration has economic effects on the indigenous population that in the short and medium term are mar- ginal and most probably positive. Any long term effects

Nowadays it has become exceedingly difficult to interpret and predict global processes. A recent case in point is the Brexit referendum, which produced an entirely unexpected outcome despite having been studied by a host of political analysts in advance. Likewise, the expert consensus was proven wrong by the end result

Britain, like Hungary, needs a foreign policy geared to its long-term interests in a rapidly changing world no longer en route to a liberal democratic end of history. This has become an urgent task in the wake of the 23 June vote to leave the European Union. Unlike the seemingly