The European Council on Foreign Relations

ECFR this week: 1st June

Date: 1st June 2012  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

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Our director, Mark Leonard, this week published the first of a regular series of pieces that he is contributing to the Reuters blog (the pieces will also be on ecfr.eu). ‘The dark flip-side of European technocracy’ laments the lack of genuine debate over Europe, particularly in Germany, and worries that this may open the door to populists.

“It would be a tragic paradox if the German establishment’s guilt over past extremism hampers its ability to overcome the populists of the future.”

Mark’s article talks about Thilo Sarrazin, a publicity hungry maverick who is making waves in Germany. He is also the subject of the latest blog post by Ulrike Guérot – ‘Sarrazin in America’.

Mark’s other piece on our website is ‘The central challenge to the Western liberal order’, where he argues that the largest global risk in the world at the moment is the threat to the European-inspired legal order.

Elsewhere:

• Julien Barnes-Dacey has just returned from his research visit to Syria (and Lebanon), and wrote about his pessimism about the vanishing chance of a political solution to the crisis in ‘Damascus on the brink’.

• Our China team has also been on the road, and Thomas König wrote ‘On the road in Guangzhou’ about the differences he found between Beijing and China’s industrious and pragmatic southern region. 

• José Ignacio Torreblanca’s latest ‘Madrid View’ blog post is ‘The Alabama syndrome’, drawing parallels and contrasts between economic troubles in the smaller states in the US and in the EU.

• Michael Fullilove was the speaker at a Black Coffee Morning in our London office earlier this week, looking at the differences (and surprising similarities) in foreign policy outlook between Obama and Romney. Here’s an audio podcast from his presentation, and here is a blog post about it by Hans Kundnani.

• Finally, here’s an audio podcast about why the situation in Somalia matters so much to the outside world, taken from a longer interview that I did with Mary Harper for the New Books Network.