For the first time in its history, the European Union will arm foreign governments in the name of fighting terrorism, protecting civilians, and stabilizing fragile states, using a €5 billion […]

En France, encore une fois, l’on débat de la laïcité. Comme Patrick Weil nous rappelle, la laïcité c’est d’abord du droit, qui protège la liberté de conscience de chacun.e, et […]

Represented in governments across Europe and at the vanguard of the founding of the European project, Christian Democracy was one of the most important postwar political ideologies. Yet surprisingly few […]

In a review for the Point, Scott Spillman discusses Men on Horseback by the Princeton historian David Bell. Bell’s book is a study in the modern phenomenon of charisma, which Max Weber called “the great revolutionary […]

European summits are odd affairs, in which the high and mighty are reduced to pulling all-nighters, like second-year students obliged to endure a college bull session–which by some accounts these […]

Justine Lacroix, Jean-Yves Pranchère et Anton Jäger ont eu l’amabilité de partager quelques-unes de leurs réflexions critiques à propos de mon livre Slow Démocratie, paru à l’automne 2019.   Le […]

Ceci est le second texte dans notre échange sur Slow Démocratie, par David Djaïz (Editions Allary, 2019).    Few will remember the “Slow Science” movement. In 2011, a group of academics […]

Ceci est le premier texte dans notre échange sur Slow Démocratie, par David Djaïz (Editions Allary, 2019).    Le livre de David Djaïz dresse un tableau clair et pédagogique de la […]

L’« euphorie » de la mondialisation est derrière nous. Après quatre décennies d’exaltation d’un monde plus ouvert, prospère, interdépendant et interconnecté – une terre plate, une planète sans frontières – […]

There are now numerous Covid rescue plans on the table for European leaders to consider. There is no need to run them down here because Prof. David Cameron of Yale […]

It took a pandemic, but Germany’s Angela Merkel has at last agreed with French president Emmanuel Macron that a fiscal response to the crisis is necessary, that it will be […]

La présente pandémie n’est pas une crise pour l’Inde—au contraire, elle représente trois crises distinctes mais interconnectées, selon Mathieu Ferry, Govindan Venkatasubramanian, Isabelle Guérin et Marine Al Dahdah. D’abord, la […]

Le Pacte vert d’Ursula Von der Leyen n’est rien qu’un éco-blanchiment, écrivent Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler dans un article pour The Guardian. Les sommes sont insuffisantes. L’importance du capital […]

Emmanuel Macron se veut un président « progressiste » et « modernisateur ». Dans un entretien pour l’Atlantico, Luc Rouban et David Sessions (qui a écrit pour Tocqueville 21 sur l’oeuvre […]

  Must our political discourse be civil? Is incivility a mark of defiance, or its own form of virtue-signaling? Are rejections of politeness and refusal to debate deliberate moral choices, […]

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As […]

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s second weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. […]

  If the lesson of last month’s election to the European Parliament is that the “establishment” is struggling, then count Lithuania out. Voters across Europe shifted from traditional center-right and […]

It is now two weeks since the European Parliament elections, and the dust has yet to settle. It was a remarkable election in many ways–unprecedented, really. Normally, EP elections are […]

  In the wake of the Brexit referendum, the socialist Red-Green Alliance and the far-right anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party appeared on camera together, issuing a common call for Denmark to […]

Slowly but steadily, European politics is Europeanizing. While the last round of European elections seemed addled by disputes over the size of bananas and the color of passports, as the […]

The polls were wrong. Despite a lackluster campaign, interest in this election was higher than predicted, and turnout rose. The contest between Macron and Le Pen ended about as expected, […]

Slovakia, my home country, made global headlines in March with the election of our next president: Zuzana Čaputová, a liberal lawyer known for her environmental activism. Compared to worrisome developments […]

The otherwise dull-as-dishwater campaign for the European elections has produced one amusing passe-d’armes involving two rather surprising combatants: Nathalie Loiseau, the head of LREM’s list, and Edwy Plenel, the editor of Médiapart. […]

This year’s European Union elections are arousing even less interest than usual in France. It’s not hard to understand why. European elections are always a referendum on the sitting president, […]

Yesterday, former French president François Hollande addressed a student conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School and then met with faculty and students to discuss European and trans-Atlantic politics (in the picture […]

As France’s political parties wither away, French civil society may be organizing itself to fill the void. Perhaps that is too optimistic a read of what those perennial civil-society reformers, […]

It’s back to the Renaissance: France and Italy are at war. Will we witness a new Battle of Marignano, where the French were victorious, or a Battle of Pavia, where […]

After what Le Monde has called “Eight months of hostilities” between France and Italy, the Quai d’Orsay recalled its ambassador from Rome. The stated reason was a meeting this week held between Luigi Di […]

The Gilets Jaunes, contemners of a political system they regard as rotten to the core, are in the process of discovering that the anti-political invariably leads to the political. Two […]

I look beyond French borders to consider the evolving political situation in Europe’s four largest economies in the winter issue of The American Prospect.   Photo Credit: ActuaLitté, Emmanuel Macron and […]

To hear the Gilets Jaunes tell it, you’d think the government has nothing on its mind but how to squeeze the last centime out of the harried taxpayer. But every […]

My latest on the state of France in The New Republic.   Photo Credit: Copyleft and Foto-AG Gymnasium Melle, Macron & Le Pen, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.  

One of the most frequent criticisms on the French left of La France insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (a criticism I have addressed in other writing) is that the “populist” movement and […]

Emmanuel Macron has won a Pyrrhic victory. From the beginning of his presidency he has made winning Germany’s assent to a “Eurozone budget” a strategic goal. Conventional wisdom, which despite […]

Angela Merkel has never been a leader in a hurry. She took six months to form her current coalition government. She has taken even longer to respond to Emmanuel Macron’s […]

“When France sneezes, Europe catches cold”: in these days, Count Metternich’s famous quip could arguably be extended to nearly all European democracies, whose precarious health reverberates on the whole Continent. […]