Icelanders voted by a slim majority this weekend to reject the government’s request to start accession talks with the European Union. The result percentage was a familiar one to people in the UK: 52.8% no to 47.2% yes, with voters in the capital wanting to be in the EU while rural voters did not. Brexit’s instigators felt vindicated by the result. “Congratulations to Iceland on voting to keep their independence,” posted Nigel Farage.

It was a curious pronouncement because, according to Farage’s earlier statements, Iceland does not currently have independence to keep. Iceland is in the European Economic Area along with Norway, which means they’re in the EU single market and in exchange have to follow most EU rules. They also have to pay into the EU budget – around €55 million per year (per capita higher than some EU members). But because they’re not technically an EU member, they don’t get to vote on determining the EU laws that govern them – an arrangement Farage said would be unacceptable for Britain after the 2016 Brexit referendum. “We did not vote to be part of this outdated cartel that is called the single market. We voted to be free of it,” he said, noting that having to accept the supremacy of the European Court of Justice would mean Britain is not truly free. So apparently, Britain deserves sovereignty but not Iceland.

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I discussed this earlier this month in my video reacting to Tory Brexiteer Dan Hannan’s Telegraph column. It isn’t just arrogant, and it isn’t just hypocritical. It’s part of a broader lie that eurosceptics have successfully convinced the public: that the EU is not a democracy and EU laws are dictated by unelected Brussels bureaucrats. In this alternative reality, why should Icelanders care whether they’re a full EU member or not? If either way they have no say in shaping EU legislation, then they might as well stick with the EEA if it means they can be exempt from EU fisheries rules. And what we can see from this weekend’s referendum is that, in Iceland and elsewhere in the EU, most Europeans live in this alternative reality. Most Europeans do not know they they have a confederal level of democratic governance where their voice is represented. And that is a major problem for this union.

As I wrote in Chapter 13 of my book The Owned Continent, according to a 2013 study by the European Commission, only 56% of EU secondary school graduates knew that members of the European Parliament are directly elected by citizens. 49% said they had learned nothing about the EU and had no understanding of how it works.

Icelanders took a look at their options and decided they preferred their current non-voting EU status than a voting one. That means they either don’t know or don’t care that citizens of EU countries have elected representatives in the EU’s legislature that determine their laws. The ‘don’t know’ explanation can be solved with education. But the ‘don’t care’ explanation is a lot trickier to deal with. And it has troubling implications.

“Voters did not choose the EEA because it offers all the advantages of membership at no cost,” wrote Italian academic Alberto Alemanno today. “They chose it despite its democratic and economic limitations. For them, market integration without a political say remained preferable to pursuing membership.”

Surprisingly, studies have shown that Iceland would pay less on a net basis as an EU member than as a EEA member, because it would get money back. So not only are Icelanders willing to accept laws they don’t get a vote on, they’re also willing to pay extra for the privilege of not voting.

Alemanno says the lesson should be that full membership with voting rights should not be the only option presented to aspiring members, and he says this should show a path forward for the Western Balkans and Ukraine. “The EU still offers no alternative option to full membership: you either complete a long and increasingly uncertain accession process, or remain outside. Iceland demonstrates that a durable position in between is not only politically viable but also attractive, and ultimately that full membership is not the only respectable status.”

I too have been persuaded by the idea of a two-speed Europe as a way to get around the political impasse the union now finds itself in, with core members held back by reluctant peripheral ones. In hindsight I think the UK should have held a referendum on accepting the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and, if voters chose not to be a part of the European Union confederation that treaty created, the UK could have moved forward with building a viable outer-tier European Free Trade Area (EFTA) for reluctant Northern and Eastern countries to join. I think Europe would be in a better place today if this had happened, and that we would have an EU Defence Union capable of independent military action. And I share the concerns of Mario Draghi and Emmanuel Macron that taking on Ukraine as a full member could render the EU unworkable unless there are major internal changes in how the EU works. The Iceland result, therefor, should be an opportunity to revisit whether building a real EFTA/EEA – one that isn’t just a halfway house for Norway Iceland and Switzerland – is a solution for Europe.

But at the same time, there are troubling implications for this strategy. The EEA is basically the caricature of what the Eurosceptics pretend the EU is – which is what made Farage’s characterisation of Iceland as “independent” so absurd. Iceland, Norway and Switzerland (which recreated EEA through complicated bilateral accords) are “fax democracies”. In exchange for being part of the EU single market (which for them is not a bonus but a necessity), they accept being bound by laws made by institutions in Brussels they have no voice or vote in. This wasn’t by design, it was a solution that their governments had to devise after their populations rejected joining the EU in referendums in the 1990s. They had to find a way to be part of the EU while maintaining an illusion of independence for their citizens. And their citizens have accepted that bargain, considering it preferable to the indignity of being in the EU.

Much is made of the reason for this arrangement being Iceland’s fisheries, Norway’s oil and gas and Switzerland’s banking, but this is overblown as an explanation. The Commission had already said ahead of this weekend’s referendum that, now that the UK is out of the EU, they can be more flexible on the fisheries issue than they were in previous accession negotiations with Iceland. Energy sources is not an EU competence and Norway would maintain complete sovereignty over its North Sea oil and gas were it an EU member. And you only have to point to Luxembourg to show that the idea that EU membership would destroy Switzerland’s sweetheart tax deals and banking secrecy makes no sense. This has always been about pride – three wealthy and nationalistic countries for whom national sovereignty is an obsession for various historical reasons. And they prefer to live with an illusion of sovereignty – being out of the EU on paper – than having to be coloured in blue on a map of Europe.

But that so many people are willing to throw their democratic vote away is troubling. Do we really want to extend this system to even more countries? Yes, you can say that these three countries have made the democratic choice to not have a say in shaping their own laws in repeated referendums, so fair enough. But are they really doing so with all the information on hand? Do we really think that all the Icelanders voting in this weekend’s referendum knew the extent to which they don’t get a vote in their own laws now, and how they would if they became a member state? Is this a democratic choice, or a manipulation by vested interests who spread misinformation ahead of the vote, as Morning Post Europe argues today?

There’s even more ick factor when looking at the countries for which this would not be a choice but rather something forced upon them. There is no doubt that the Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova want to be full EU members. If they end up in the EEA, it will be because the EU told them it’s the only option – because we don’t want to introduce new opportunities to veto EU action or we don’t want new poor regions to subsidise, or new corruption to deal with. So the solution is to effectively make them non-self-governing territories of the EU?

Alemanno argues that an expanded and normalised EEA should have some kind of formalised role in the legislative process. That may be the solution. But then at a certain point, don’t you have to ask what the point of being a full member is?

None of these questions are easy. The core problem is that Europe is pulling in several different directions and national capitals are not willing to do what they know needs to be done to make Europe a sovereign and strong actor in the world. And what the Iceland vote shows us is that citizens are still not ready yet either. They either don’t know or don’t care about the risks facing them from a newly aggressive United States and the potential for a strong EU to protect them. And that is not just an Iceland problem.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told his citizens yesterday that they are now at “war” with the United States over trade. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” he said. The language might seem dramatic, but it accurately describes the seismic event that occurred yesterday. Carney was preparing his country for the considerable medium-term economic pain that this trade war will bring. But he stressed that the alternative is dishonour - and subjugation that would be even worse for Canada in the long term. I will be travelling through Canada the first half of September, and I am eager to talk to Canadians about their hopes and fears as their prime minister takes them down a resistance road our European leaders have refused to go down.

After Canada walked out of trade talks following outrageous US last-minute demands on Friday, the US government yesterday slapped a 50% tariff on €200 billion worth of goods imported from Canada, and Canada slapped back with equal retaliatory tariffs. The trade war has begun, and nobody knows when it will end – or whether it will escalate as Trump continues his threats to forcibly annex America’s neighbour to the North. “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us,” Carney said in his speech to the nation. “Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started."

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The contrast with European leaders, who spent 2025 continually surrendering to Donald Trump’s extortion, is stark. The humiliating “trade deal” concessions signed by the UK and EU in the summer of 2025 have proven to be disastrous in hindsight. Countries that did not surrender to the extortion, like China, India and Brazil, saw Trump back off. Countries that did surrender, like the UK, EU, Japan and South Korea, saw Trump almost immediately violate the terms of their surrenders and come back demanding more. Canada has observed all this, and learned the lessons. But Europe has not. "Our government understood before many that America would transform all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies and use economic integration as a weapon,” Carney said in his speech. “We recognised that sometimes its signature was written in pencil."

“With Canada, China and Brazil showing that you can stand up to the US in trade and related talks, I guess there will be a discreet discussion in the EU and Japan on whether they did the right thing,” observed former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt today. “Canada should show the way to the EU: with Trump, only firmness pays off,” observed former French ambassador Gerard Araud. “Here is a speech I would like to hear from Europe,” said former Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni of Mark Carney’s address. But from our current European leaders, we have heard no such introspection.

Bernd Lange, the chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee, publicly declared his solidarity with Canada yesterday: “Trade agreements must be negotiated on an equal footing between partners, and not imposed unilaterally through pressure or blackmail by a stronger partner. Yet that is precisely what the US Government is now attempting to do once again with Canada.” But we’ve heard no statement of solidarity from Canada’s supposed allies at the European Commission. Nothing from President von der Leyen, nor from her trade negotiator Maros Sefcovic. And in the end, Lange doesn’t negotiate trade negotiations with the US, that’s the Commission’s job. He can only try to convince his committee to approve or reject what the Commission has decided (based on its mandate from EU national governments). I imagine he wishes that the European leaders he has to work with had as much nerve as Carney. But they don’t. As far as I’m aware, not a single European national leader has expressed solidarity with Canada over the past two days. That’s how terrified they are of Trump.

While Canada takes decisions showing dignity and courage, Europe takes decisions showing insecurity and fear. While Canada’s citizens demand their leaders show self-respect, Europe’s citizens accept their leaders humiliating this continent with their grovelling to Trump.

The most frustrating part is that it should be the exact opposite. Europe has far more cards to play than Canada, which is much more exposed to the US than Europe. A confederation of 41 million people, which only achieved full independence in 1982, which has the most US-integrated economy in the world, which relies on the US for its defence, is showing more courage in standing up to Trump than a union of 452 million people, the largest single market in the world, with an independent nuclear deterrent and with only 20% of exports going to the US compared to 72% for Canada. Why the difference? Because Canadians understand their own power. Carney “finally called Trump’s bluff,” noted former Obama official Brett Bruen yesterday. “Trump needs a deal more than Carney. Americans are tired of paying for his trade wars – and the Iran war. The only way to sustainably solve this stupidity is showing him Canadians aren’t gonna cave.”

It’s the opposite of what Europeans did last year. On 2 April, Trump declared “liberation day” with a bizarre chart of seemingly arbitrary tariffs on various countries (including some territories with only penguins as inhabitants). Trump proposed a 20% blanket tariff on imports of EU goods, and 10% for the UK (a clear attempt to reward Britain for voting for Brexit).

As I relay in my book The Owned Continent, at first French President Emmanuel Macron was trying to push for the EU to use the retaliatory tools at his disposal to push back against the extortion. He wanted the EU to draw up a list of retaliatory tariffs and threaten to use the EU Anti-Coercion Instrument against Washington. But Macron has very little political capital left in Brussels ever since he lost firm control of the French parliament after his disastrous decision to call a snap election in 2024. And German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had just taken office, had the wind at his back in June 2025 (he’s since plummeted in polls and may be replaced in the next months).

“Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded,” the White House posted on X. Merz and von der Leyen believed them.

Merz wanted to surrender, and the rest of the 26 national leaders went along with this Council group-think. Macron gave up. Commission President von der Leyen, who under the EU treaties is in charge of trade, could have shown leadership and corralled the national leaders into a more courageous response. But von der Leyen is not known for her courage, nor is she known for challenging national governments (especially her own, with a chancellor from her own party). So she dutifully travelled to Trump’s golf course in Scotland, waited patiently for him to finish his putting, and signed the most humiliating surrender in the European Union’s history.

“It’s the biggest trade deal ever” she posted on X afterwards, promising an economic boom as a result. It was clumsy gaslighting. Because what she had agreed to wasn’t a trade deal at all. It was a one-sided capitulation, with the EU making a series of tributes to Washington in order to lower the blanket tariffs from 20% to 15% (Trump had, during the negotiations, threatened to raise them to 30% or even 50%). She even parroted Trump’s words saying the purpose of the deal is to ‘correct a trade imbalance’ – accepting the false premise that the tariffs are reciprocal. It was a ‘peace for our time’ moment for the EU president, even if she had no actual piece of paper to wave on the tarmac.

Others had more accurate descriptions. “It's nothing more than one of the most expensive imperial tributes in history,” said French pundit Arnaud Bertrand. “This does not even remotely resemble the type of agreements made by two equal sovereign powers. It rather looks like the type of unequal treaties that colonial powers used to impose in the 19th century – except this time, Europe is on the receiving end.” French prime minister at the time François Bayrou said, “It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission.” The Financial Times concluded, “the EU has validated Trump’s bullying trade agenda.” John Clarke, the EU’s former top trade negotiator, called it, “the end of time for the EU’s common commercial policy.”

But citizens shrugged. There were no protests, no calls for leaders’ resignation. A continent that has grown accustomed to humiliation over 80 years of American dominance simply sat back and accepted being extorted, just as they had after their leaders agreed at NATO a month earlier to an absurd and arbitrary commitment to spend 5% of GDP buying mostly American weapons.

Even worse - the EU even accepted last-minute demands that Europe invest $1.2 trillion in the US economy over the following three years – including €750 billion in fossil fuel purchases – as well as implicit commitments to alter EU legislation to meet US wishes (some of which has since been implemented with the so-called “omnibus” packages). Quietly, EU and national officials said these commitments didn’t matter because they were undeliverable. They would give lip service to the outrageous demands made at the last minute, and then just simply let them be forgotten.

Carney also received outrageous last-minute US demands, which he detailed in his speech yesterday in explaining why he walked away. The US was effectively demanding that Canada become a vassal state of the US, with Washington able to dictate Ottawa’s trading relationships and even its language policy. The US demanded that Canada could sign no trade deals the US didn’t approve of, and that Canada end its policies supporting the French language. "President Trump demands Canada change its French language, Quebec culture and Canadian identity as a condition for reversing tariffs,” carney said. “This is no longer about a trade deal-it is about a takeover of Canada's sovereignty and identity."

Carney could have quietly signed off on these demands, like the EU did, by saying afterwards that Canada simply wouldn’t deliver them. But unlike our European leaders, Carney has dignity. And he understands that these types of demands are meant to erode the adversary’s sovereignty. The whole point is humiliation, to show that the negotiating partner isn’t actually independent. Accepting them is the geopolitical equivalent of an animals show its hind quarters, signalling to Washington that you are an easy mark and therefor they can keep pushing you further and further. Carney understood that. Starmer (who also signed up to a whole load of sovereignty-reducing ‘symbolic’ concessions) and von der Leyen did not.

“Canada and the EU face the same challenge under Trump: a bold assault against sovereignty disguised as trade talks,” observes Euronews’ Jorge Liboreiro. “For Canada, it’s the French language. For the EU, it’s green and digital regulations. Canada put an end and walked away. The EU still plays along as it pushes back.”

European leaders might think Carney is going out on a limb here and exposing himself to criticism from a jittery public and an opportunistic opposition. But they would be wrong. Polls show only 19% of Canadians are opposed to Carney pulling out of negotiations. The opposition Conservatives support the move. Their leader Pierre Poilievre, who learned the hard way that siding with Trump will lose you Canadian elections, said: “Conservatives support action to protect Canadians and our industries targeted by these unfair U.S. tariffs…Canadians must stand united to defend our country.” against these unfair attacks.” The European public also want strong leaders. Bu the only one they’ve got, the only one willing to stand up to Pedro Sanchez, is Pedro Sanchez – who has been vilified and ostracised by the other EU leaders for daring to do so.

“Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded,” Europe’s leaders were told by the White House. They believed it. Fast forward a year and we can see that the exact opposite is true. Countries that retaliated were rewarded. China was rewarded with new access to American chips. India and Brazil were rewarded by being left alone. The EU, UK, Japan and South Korea did not retaliate, but they were not rewarded. Instead they were punished. Punished with new attacks. Punished with new tariff threats that violated the previous surrender deals. Punished with continued humiliation.

It’s not too late. Europe can change course and our leaders could start defending their citizens from American aggression. But I fear that the personalities of our current crop of leaders render them unable to do so. The UK has dumped their Trump-appeasing prime minister. The jury is still out on whether the new one, Andy Burnham, will stand up to Trump. Germans may dump their Trump-appeasing chancellor in the next months. The European Parliament could choose to dump their Trump-appeasing Commission president in a third impeachment vote (the first two, launched by the far-right and far-left, failed).

Europe is running out of time. If our current leaders don’t have the courage, aptitude or talent to protect Europeans from American aggression, then they should step aside and make way for people who can. We need a European Carney.

Nowhere in the piece does he mention that as part of the single market, Iceland has to follow EU laws except in agriculture and fisheries policies. Nor does he mention that, because they aren’t an actual member but rather a pseudo-member, Iceland doesn’t get to vote on these laws. And that’s because, like all Brexiteers, he approaches everything under the false pretext that the EU is not a democracy and laws are dictated by bureaucrats. So if the laws are dictated by bureaucrats either way, why bother being a full member?

Except that’s not true. The EU has a bicameral legislature made up of a directly-elected lower house (the EU Parliament) representing the people and an upper house made up of national ministers representing the governments (just like the Bundesrat in Germany, or the US Senate until a century ago). The Commission may propose laws, but the legislature fundamentally changes them and nothing becomes law without their approval.

I decided to make this video from Barcelona explaining two things that are not well-understood: that the EU is a democracy and that it has a government. I saw the degree to which people don’t understand this in the reaction to an op-ed published this week in The Guardian by Alberto Alemanno explaining how the far right has entered the EU’s government. Many people seemed confused by the idea because they don’t think of the EU as having a government. And, particularly in the UK where the issue of the EU has become a polemic subject with many misunderstandings, I saw many pro-EU people aghast at the idea that the EU could be bad. But as I noted on BlueSky, the EU is not innately good or bad. Just like a country, it depends on what government is running it. The EU has been governed by the centre-right European Peoples Party for two decades, and recently that party has entered into an ad-hoc alliance with the far right. As Alemanno explains in the op-ed, this has resulted in a situation where the far right is calling the shots without even technically being in the governing coalition: a situation very similar to what’s happening in many European national governments now.

What makes Hannan’s argument all the more absurd is that Brexiteers told British referendum voters they would have single market access after Brexit, but then once it became clear they would need to follow EU law in order to get it (without being able to vote on it), they said this would be unconscionable and the UK ended up with a hard Brexit. So apparently such a humiliating arrangement is good enough for Iceland, but not for a mighty empire like Britain.

Incidentally, Hannan also doesn’t mention that as an EEA member Iceland already pays for its EU single market access. He pretends that its EU budget contribution as a member state would be an entirely new cost. I honestly don’t know if these types of op-eds are the result of ignorance or malice, but the end result is the same: the public is misled.

Here are some of the links I mention in the video:

For three years, the final minutes of the Eurovision Song Contest have been nail-biting moments. Dedicated fans of the contest sat with their hearts in their stomachs in 2025 and 2026 as they watched a split screen with the Israeli contestant and another country’s contestant to find out who won, and who would therefor be hosting the contest the following year. The anxiety was palpable because there is a feeling that the contest would not survive Israel hosting during the conflict in Gaza. It’s one thing for countries to compete alongside Israel, it’s another thing for them to travel to Tel Aviv for a contest Israel is hosting – just a few kilometres away from the horrors taking place in Gaza. BBC commentator Graham Norton spoke for all Eurovision fans in 2025 after Austria was announced as the winner when he said organisers "will be breathing the largest sigh of relief that they're not faced with a Tel Aviv final next year".

Now, because of a rule change enacted by the European Broadcasting Union last week, that possibility has been taken off the table. New rules adopted for 2027 by the EBU, the association of public broadcasters which stages the contest, say that a country involved in an “armed conflict” or a “sensitive geopolitical situation” will “automatically be ineligible to host” should they win the contest. The change is important, because up till now the winner of each year’s contest automatically had the right to host the following year, and there was no formal mechanism for the EBU to overrule that. In 2022, when Ukraine won the contest, the Ukrainian broadcaster mutually agreed with the EBU that conditions were not safe to host the contest in Kyiv in 2023 and so they were jointly hosted with the BBC in Liverpool instead. But Israelis have made it clear that if they had won any of the past three years they would have insisted that Eurovision be hosted in Israel no matter what. The new rules allow the EBU to select another broadcaster to host the contest if the winning country is deemed ineligible, even over the winning country’s objections.

Five countries (Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Iceland and the Netherlands) pulled out of Eurovision this year in protest of Israel’s behaviour both in and outside the contest (more on that here). As a result, Eurovision’s viewership fell by 30 million compared to 2025. There were 131 million viewers this year, down from 204 million ten years ago (Russia’s exclusion in 2022 also caused a big drop). The addition of Canada to the contest next year (more on that below) is unlikely to make up for those lost viewers. According to reports, Belgium may become the 6th country boycotting next year. The EBU said the hosting restriction decision is the result of consultations with participating broadcasters. The next day, the EBU announced that the long-running main sponsor of Eurovision, an Israeli company, has pulled out (more on that below).

But that wasn’t the only step the EBU is taking to address the concerns. Also last week, they reportedly sent a letter to participating broadcasters suggested moving the vote entirely online and banning people from voting for a single country more than once. The leaked EBU letter says, “it has become clear that today's geopolitical climate is driving votes for certain artists for reasons that have very little to do with their performances.” It is clear who they were talking about. Starting in 2024, the Israeli government has been

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For eight decades, the US dollar has stood as the bedrock of the world’s financial architecture – devised at Bretton Woods following World War II. It is a system that inherently advantages the US at the expense of others. Europeans have accepted this imbalance, which Charles de Gaulle called “the exhorbitant privilege”, in exchange for a stable and predictable system. But this deal relied on Washington remaining a trusted partner that took financial decisions in coordination with its Western allies. Last week, we saw definitive evidence that this system is collapsing. And a new one, far more aggressive toward America’s “partners”, is being born.

The US intervened to save the falling Japanese yen in the last days of July, not out of the goodness of their hearts as claimed by Donald Trump on 2 August (“They wanted a little bit of help, and we’re always there for Japan,”) but because they were worried the Bank of Japan would sell US treasuries in order to save the yen. The Trump administration in panicking because US treasury bond yields recently hit a 19-year high as they have come under continued sustained pressure due to the erratic policy coming out of the White House. And Japan is the largest foreign holder of US government debt.

But rather than using dollars to bail out Tokyo so they didn’t cash in their US bonds, the US used the euros that they hold. Selling euros let Washington thwart a Japanese bond sell-off without the risk of further inflation that would have come with selling dollars. Most alarming - they did not inform the European Central Bank before doing so, according to a new report by the Financial Times. It is the first time in history that the US has sold a European allied currency without informing its central bank first, and it has left European financial officials shellshocked. “This has never happened before,” one EU source involved in the discussions (or lack thereof) told the FT, bemoaning a situation where “decades of close co-operation between western central banks that fostered financial stability and economic growth may have come under threat.”

So far, the European impulse when being surreptitiously attacked by the US (or other sensitive partners) has been to deny that they were attacked. That was certainly the case last week when EU home affairs ministers refused to investigate the possibility that Morocco instigated the Ceuta crisis, for fear of upsetting an indispensable partner in managing migration. But this time that didn’t happen. When asked whether the ECB had been consulted about the euro selloff, rather than lying in order to pretend there was no problem, the bank admitted to the FT that they had not been consulted and were blindsided by the move. That prompted the Trump administration to lash out, telling the FT: “we respect the confidentiality of private discussions with our international counterparts, unlike the ECB”.

The big question is whether this was a one-off or part of a new normal – what some are calling “Bretton Woods 2.0” – where the US government unabashedly uses the dollar’s dominance as a tool of control and extortion. The evidence, as well as internal documents from the White House, indicate that it is.

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I’m in Rome today – last night I flew here from Barcelona. Just before boarding the flight, we received news that the Spanish government was demanding Italy end its passport controls on people coming from Spain within three days or they would take “proportionate measures”. By the time we landed, we learned that Italy had already rejected the “ultimatum”, and Spain had responded by announcing passport checks on people flying from Italy for the next three weeks unless Italy ends its checks which are "unjust, contrary to the interests of the European Union and discriminatory towards the Spanish population."

But when we landed in Rome, nobody on the plane faced any ID checks. The aircraft arrived like any other plane from within the Schengen area. It highlighted the absurdity of the situation. Italy is only doing a handful of spot checks, because this is all political theatre. They know that there is no actual threat of the Ceuta invaders crossing the Mediterranean and entering mainland Spain and the Schengen area. But they can’t back down now because they pretended this was so important. The bigger problem, however, is that the European Commission went along with this pretence.

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Countries in the EU’s passport-free Schengen Area (all EU countries except Ireland and Cyprus, with the addition of Norway Iceland and Switzerland) are permitted to introduce temporary six-month passport controls at interstate internal EU borders in the event of an emergency, but these need to be notified to the Commission and sufficiently justified. For years, the Commission has been accepting these notifications with the flimsiest of excuses, and letting countries renew them every six months making them effectively permanent. It’s made a mockery of the system. This was true when Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accepted the reasoning of her co-national and party colleague Friedrich Merz for establishing spot checks at all of Germany’s nine internal Schengen borders because of “the impact of the global security situation”.

And so naturally, last week von der Leyen accepted the flimsy excuse of her new ally Meloni (currently the most politically powerful leader in the EU) that Schengen had to be suspended with Spain “due to recent events in Ceuta” that have caused “a risk of secondary movements within the Schengen area.” The Commission accepted this despite there being no actual risk of secondary movements since Ceuta isn’t in Schengen, and despite the fact that it is unprecedented for a temporary exemption to be made solely and specifically against a member state that the notifying country doesn’t border.

The Commission has for years – predating von der Leyen – let national capitals play political games with Schengen exemptions that were blatantly not justifiable (and not even actually being implemented). But this has kicked into high gear since President von der Leyen took office in 2019, with the reasoning for the exemptions becoming ever more vague and absurd. The national governments are not even pretending these are justified by facts any more – because they don’t need to with this servile Commission president. There are now 22 effectively permanent spot passport checks at the approximately 50 internal borders of Schengen. But as someone who crosses these borders frequently, I can tell you at most of them you’ll encounter a check only extremely rarely. At most, the Commission has just politely asked the countries to end their checks (as they recently did with Germany), but then immediately rolled over and accepted their refusal.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has today effectively said: you want to play political games with Schengen? Hold my beer. As Italian academic Alberto Alemanno noted yesterday: “Tit-for-tat border controls between two Schengen states are childish and self-defeating. The real cost lands on ordinary European citizens and businesses who now face friction crossing a border that was never supposed to exist.” As one of those ordinary citizens who needs to fly back to Spain, I agree. But I also support what Sanchez is doing. Because he’s exposing the absurdity of the situation. If President von der Leyen isn’t willing to do her job and act as the guarantor of the Schengen treaty, then Sanchez will.

He is daring von der Leyen’s Commission to oppose Spain’s exemption while still supporting Italy’s, even though the facts make Spain’s checks more credible. “Ironically enough, Spain may have the stronger case,” says Alemanno. “Italy faces a far higher volume of irregular arrivals than Spain does…What's most troubling is the absence of the Commission. This is exactly the kind of intra-EU dispute it exists to prevent and mediate. Instead its silence, and partly complicity with the 22 member letter, has let two member states spiral into a retaliatory standoff instead.”

Today’s Spanish passport controls on Italians is absurd and Sanchez’s government knows that. The point is precisely that it’s absurd – to expose the absurdity of this whole situation where the Commission is allowing national capitals to play politics with pointless and arbitrary Schengen exemptions.

The Italian government’s statement rejecting Spain’s “ultimatum” was particularly ironic, and the Spanish government is keen to highlight this. “Italy does not accept ultimatums or impositions from abroad regarding national security and border control,” the statement said. But that is exactly what Italy has been doing to Spain, trying to use the EU to dictate how Spain should run its domestic immigration system and how it should police its external borders. And don’t get me wrong, I think external borders and immigration should be run at confederal EU level. But Meloni can’t have it both ways here. Does she want immigration to be a national competence or not?

Let’s get a few facts straight here:

• On 30 July, there was an invasion of mostly Moroccan nationals across the border into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave across the Straight of Gibraltar from mainland Spain.

• Ceuta is effectively not part of the Schengen area and there was no way for the migrants to travel onward into mainland Spain. For this reason, almost all of the people who crossed subsequently returned to Morocco within a day.

• Nevertheless, Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni announced Italy will conduct passport checks on flights from Spain in order to intercept the Ceuta migrants. She also convinced 21 other EU governments to jointly send a letter to the EU institutions blaming Spain for being invaded and telling Madrid how to run its domestic immigration policy.

• I keep seeing people on social media (like this guy) saying “all Schengen countries are entitled to impose passport checks as they see fit.” That is not true. Countries can implement temporary passport checks at internal Schengen borders in an emergency as long as they are justifiable. They can’t just do whatever they want. And it is self-evident that citing “a risk of secondary movements within the Schengen area” because of a group of people who have not entered the Schengen area, 98% of whom have now left Spanish territory anyway, is not justifiable.

• Ceuta is not a migration crisis, it is a political crisis. Though the situation is still murky, there is strong evidence pointing to the involvement of the Moroccan government in this invasion. But both the Spanish government and the EU Council are refusing to examine this line of evidence for fear of upsetting Rabat, a key partner in migration management which is now backed by Donald Trump. Conservatives in Israel and America have been calling for Morocco to annex Ceuta as punishment for Sanchez criticising the two countries and refusing to join the Iran War. This was spelled out in a leaked Pentagon memo in April and by a Republican-written report in the US Congress two weeks before the invasion.

Now, you might be tempted to say, ‘well if the countries aren’t actually conducting the checks, then who cares? You got to Italy with no check.’ But the point is you never know when one of these checks is going to be carried out. We had a friend picking us up from the airport in Rome last night. But we didn’t know if we would have to add an extra hour to the pick-up time for ID processing until we walked out of the gate. So instead of being able to tell the friend when to meet us beforehand, we had to wait until we disembarked to see whether we would be stuck for processing.

In an actual emergency, you could justify this inconvenience. You could actually justify the symbolic damage it does to European unity and connectivity, as I outline in the Gorizia piece below. But the idea of having to be processed for an hour because Giorgia Meloni needed to score some domestic political points, and Ursula von der Leyen refuses to enforce EU rules because she’s so in pocket to Meloni, is infuriating. It will be equally infuriating when we face such uncertainty when flying back to Spain. But I won’t blame Sanchez for that, because he didn’t start this. The fault lies with Meloni and von der Leyen. And I’ll be fine waiting for processing for an hour in Barcelona if it means Pedro Sanchez’s stunt can finally end this absurd situation that the Commission president has allowed to fester.

But the ministers were not interested in asking questions - even if many politicians in Spain are. The purpose of yesterday’s meeting was damage control - to try to pretend there was European unity on this issue when there very clearly had not been. Morocco was not mentioned at all. Reportedly that was at the insistence of Spain - which is worried about Moroccan retaliation if they point the finger of blame at Rabat.

and I both wrote this week about what disgraceful moment this was for Europe, so we came together today to do a Substack live to discuss the latest. I’m in Spain and based on my conversations with people here I can tell you there is abolute fury with the EU about the lack of solidarity shown. In his piece on The French Dispatch today, Julien explored the evidence for this being a hybrid attack by Morocco and why European governments are not only unwilling to investigate it, but are also paying Morocco off as a result of the crisis.

More on the leaked US State department memo that said the US should support rival claims to European overseas territories like Ceuta and the Falklands as punishment for Europe not joining the Iran War here.

Substack posts mentioned in this video:

The French Dispatch

European leaders embarrassed themselves over Ceuta

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a month ago · 13 likes · Julien Hoez

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Thursday was a dark day for the European Union, and not for the reasons that Europe’s far right and their backers in Washington would have you believe. 60,000 migrants invaded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, located on the African coast and surrounded by Morocco, in the largest single-surge border violation in EU history. That was followed by the largest single mass return in EU history - as the migrants found they couldn’t go on to the EU’s Schengen passport-free-travel area without boarding planes or boats that would require documents proving their right to be there. 96% of the 60,000 migrants have already been returned to Morocco.

As the days have gone by, a murky picture has emerged that appears to implicate the Moroccan government in coordinating the attack. The New York Times has heard from the migrants that government officials told them that they would not be stopped by Moroccan officials from entering the sea at the enclave’s border as they normally are. One told them that the officials were only allowing Moroccans through and blocking sub-Saharan black Africans. Videos have been widely circulated on social media showing Moroccan gendarmes overseeing truckloads of migrants being dumped toward the sea.

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The reason why the Moroccan government would do this is clear: they are angry with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s recent visit to their arch-enemy Algeria, amid worries that softening relations will mean Spain will back Algeria’s call for the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara to be independent as Algeria has called for (the disputed territory is now under de-facto control of Morocco). Something similar happened in 2021, when Moroccan border forces relaxed border controls at Ceuta in retaliation for Spain admitting the head of the Saharan government-in-exile into a Spanish hospital. But that time, only 8,000 migrants crossed. Over the past days, the Spanish government has avoided directly accusing Rabat of orchestrating the surge, because they needed their cooperation in those initial days in taking the migrants back. I suspect this will change in the coming days now that most have been returned. The intent by Rabat here may have been to demonstrate that they can take these Spanish territories by force if they want to, and to show that the EU won’t come to Spain’s defence in such an attack. Spain will be keen to counter that impression.

Spanish politicians outside the government have called a spade a spade. “Let’s call things by their name: Morocco is using human beings to attack our sovereignty,” said Eduardo Rubiño, a Sanchez-allied left-wing lawmaker. lawmaker with the Sánchez-allied, left-wing Más Madrid party. Ceuta Mayor Juan Jesús Vivas from the conservative People’s Party on Monday defied his own European political family by saying the situation is not “a migration crisis” because “people have the perception that this, if not orchestrated, was encouraged or permitted” by Moroccan authorities.

Despite it looking likely from the start that the Moroccan government was involved, that didn’t stop Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni from immediately coming out and blaming Spain for the crisis. She was quickly joined in the Spain-bashing by the Danish and Finnish governments – as well as Manfred Weber, the leader of President von der Leyen’s centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP). Immediately on 30 July, before any of the details were clear, he posted: "The devastating images are the direct consequence of the pull factor of mass regularisation.”

They blamed Spain’s recent amnesty policy – giving illegal migrants who have been living and working in Spain for several years a one-year residence permit – as well as a recent Spanish supreme court judgement saying migrants apprehended while crossing into Ceuta and the other Spanish African enclave Melilla by sea cannot be deported immediately without due process.

Meloni called for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen passport-free travel area, something that is not legally possible. She said Italy is introducing passport checks for people flying from Spain to Italy in response to the crisis (I’ll be doing so later this week, so let’s see if it’s true). That’s despite the fact that not a single one of these migrants has travelled on from Ceuta to Europe. Spain’s foreign minister said Meloni’s comments were “improper” for "a partner and friendly country from which we expect European solidarity and not partisan demagoguery".

Then the US government joined in on the criticism, with statements put out by the US State Department and the US vice president blaming Spain for the crisis. “This unacceptable incident is the direct result of the Spanish Government's deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe,” said the State Department statement.

22 EU leaders co-signed a letter initiated by Italy and Denmark specifically blaming the Spanish Supreme Court decision for the crisis. Spain’s Sanchez, France’s Macron, Portugal’s Montenegro and Luxembourg’s Frieden were the only leaders not to sign the letter, addressed to Ireland which currently holds the EU Council’s rotating presidency. It was a striking contrast to the way the EU rallied behind Poland when Russia and Belarus were using migrants as human weapons at the border in 2021. The key difference? Poland has a conservative government.

Prime Minister Sanchez responded by sending an angry letter to the EU institutions criticising the pile-on. “In the current international context, the European Union cannot afford this kind of selfish, polarising and unlawful reaction,” he said. Ireland will chair an emergency meeting on Ceuta tomorrow.

But Europe’s far-and-centre-right leaders were hovering like vultures over Ceuta from the moment this crisis started, eager to exploit it for domestic political gain and to injure Sanchez, the only leftist leader left in the EU. And rather than acting as a leader for all Europeans, and as a defender of Schengen, President von der Leyen chose to echo her political party EPP rather than defend Spain or criticise Morocco. As Morning Post Europe notes this morning: “The Commission President ignored the reality on the ground and the treaties, taking part in a political campaign orchestrated by the European right and far right, and fuelled by actors hostile to the EU such as Russia, the MAGA movement and part of the Israeli government. Only once the crisis was over did von der Leyen finally use the word ‘solidarity.’” The Commission’s response didn’t remind Italy of the Schengen rules that they would be violating by immediately setting up border controls for flights from Spain. There was no praise for Spain, but there was praise for Morocco – with whom their “close partnership” will help to resolve the crisis. Painting Spain is the problem and Morocco as the solution.

It’s a far cry from how President von der Leyen rushed to Meloni’s side in 2023 when the Italian island of Lampedusa was overwhelmed by tens of thousands of arriving migrants – visiting the island with her to express solidarity. This despite the fact that the Commission’s own reports show Spain has managed irregular migration much better than Italy, returning a third more migrants to their country of origin than Italy does and receiving half Italy’s number of illegal arrivals as a result (despite being closer to Africa than Italy).

Von der Leyen’s behaviour was in stark contrast to that of Council President Antonio Costa, himself a Socialist from Sanchez’s S&D group and former prime minister of Portugal. Though he normally only speaks when there is consensus among all 27 national leaders, Costa on this occasion found himself defending one member state against 22, by reminding people of EU law and the facts on the ground which von der Leyen was ignoring. “Third-country nationals in Ceuta do not enjoy free movement to mainland Spain or the rest of the Schengen area,” he posted. “Spain’s firm response, which includes ongoing accelerated returns, demonstrates our determination to protect our external borders.” But he was the only European leader defending Spain and calling for solidarity in those initial days.

“Instead of solidarity with Spain and the people affected, the choice was to blame Spain, a cheap way to score points at home at the expense of a fellow member state managing a hard moment at its border,” noted Italian academic Alberto Alemanno this weekend. “That stance didn’t protect Europe. It handed ammunition to Europe’s worst enemies: the ones who want the Union to look divided, unprincipled, and for sale to whoever shouts loudest.”

Sanchez has been Europe’s most vocal critic of both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, so there has naturally been speculation online over the past days that there was American and Israeli involvement here as well – designed to punish Spain. The Moroccan government is now a close ally of both the US and Israeli regimes following the Abraham Accords. Conservative commentators in both Israel and America have openly called for Ceuta and Melilla to be forcibly taken by Morocco in retaliation for Sanchez speaking out against the US and Israeli governments. However, there has been no hard evidence of any US or Israeli involvement in creating this crisis.

But neither country had to be involved in this incident to profit from it. It is probably no accident that just one day after the Ceuta attack, when Europe’s lack of solidarity and unity was on full display, President Trump reignited his threats to take Greenland. It is a quite something that Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, who has been asking for European solidarity in the face of American threats to Denmark’s territorial sovereignty, was not willing to extend the same solidarity to Spain when its territorial sovereignty was threatened. In her pursuit of a cheap short-term domestic political bounce, she has put the territorial sovereignty of Greenland at risk by showcasing to the world that EU member states do not have each others backs.

It is yet another example of our terrible leaders here in Europe reacting first and foremost with their worst short-term instincts. They allow this union to be continually picked apart by the external forces that want to divide and conquer it. Sanchez is right to be angry.

New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a major break with decades-old British higher education policy this week when he announced an end to the country’s preference for university over vocational training. It’s a policy that was established by Tony Blair three decades ago when he set the target of sending at least half of high school graduates to university - emulating a long-standing policy in the United States.

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap,” Burnham said in a social media video announcing the change, holding both. Having seen what the universal four-year-degree expectation has done to US higher education, where bachelors degrees cost $200,000 and yet are increasingly worthless, I completely agree with him. When I moved to the UK in 2006 and saw that Tony' Blair’s target was taking the UK in the same direction, I was horrified. Why would anyone want to emulate the farcical situation of US higher education?

Under the new policy, the UK will follow the same kind of early sorting process used in continental Europe (which I wrote about in my book The Owned Continent, see excerpt below). From age 14, students will be assessed and asked which educational route they want to pursue - technical or academic.

Burnham hails from the left, the same as my own political origins, and it is difficult for people like us to make this argument. The people arguing against sending more people to university, in both the US and UK, have tended to be from the right. After all, why would you be against more people going to school? Well the problem is, school isn’t free. And as I’ll outline below, you cannot have a policy of free university education while setting a target for half your population to attend. There is no way for the state to pay for that. So what you end up doing is making people pay huge sums to university who aren’t academically inclined and don’t want to be there, but feel social pressure to do it. You see new private universities of dubious academic robustness pop up all over the place to satisfy the new demand. Bachelors degree programs become continued secondary school, and when half of people have one, the value of the degree is obviously lessened. Bachelors degrees are now required even for the most basic jobs.

University used to be free in all of the UK, but because of Tony Blair’s new policy tuition fees in England were introduced three decades ago (first £3,000 then raised to £9,000). In most continental European countries (and still in Scotland) university is free or comes with only small administrative costs.

People on the left in the US love to praise this European free university system, but they never seem to understand that this is because far fewer people in continental Europe go to university. And when they go, they don’t waste time strumming the guitar on the quad and wait till their junior year to decide on a major. In Europe you go to university for something very specific, and it’s difficult to switch from that track mid-process. You study only that subject, it’s not continued secondary school where you study all subjects like in the US. Europeans are shocked when I tell them that people in the US can start university undeclared without yet choosing what they want to study. Unlike in the US, the ‘college years’ in Europe aren’t a time for partying and self-discovery. It’s time for serious work. Because while in America you’re free to waste your own money on a BS degree, in Europe you can’t waste the taxpayers’ money.

The American university Ponzi scheme

I did both my undergrad and graduate education in the US before moving to Europe, so I know of what I speak. The descriptions from my European friends of their time at university bears little resemblance to my own. Here most people go to a university within commuting distance of their family home. They are unlikely to live in dorms (whereas in the US it’s often a requirement). It’s not about the ‘experience’, it’s about the education. My European friends describe four years of intensive study. My American friends describe four years of intensive drinking. But all of us American private university graduates are part of the same Ponzi scheme. Nobody wants to talk about how easy American higher education has become because it would devalue something that we paid a lot of money for.

I went to New York University, the 25th best school in the country on the US News & World Report ranking, and it was honestly a joke. I graduated with a

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A frequent topic of conversation among Brussels journalists is lamenting how difficult it is for us to explain EU news to a public that has not been educated in even the basics of what the EU is and how it works. Over the years I’ve noticed that correspondents in this town try to overcome this challenge using one of two strategies: oversimplify it, or needlessly complicate it. For the latter strategy, they essentially say to their readers/viewers ‘don’t trouble yourselves trying to understand this byzantine mess, only experts like me can understand it’. With this Substack and my TV reporting, I have always tried to gravitate toward simplification. But I’ve often felt quite alone in this. It’s a great irony that while “simplification” is the crusade of the moment being pushed by President von der Leyen’s EPP to achieve deregulation, attempts to simplify the way the EU is described continues to be resisted.

It seems to me there is a whole ecosystem in this town that purposefully makes the EU sound more confusing than it is in order to inflate their value in being able to explain it (consultancies being the most egregious example). And so, I get a lot of pushback from the apparatchiks in this town (particularly national officials in Permanent Representations) when I explain EU lawmaking in a way that is easy for the average European to understand. It’s actually quite similar to the US federal system (which most Europeans know well because of cultural imperialism), with an important caveat.

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There is a bicameral legislature, with a lower house of representatives directly elected by citizens (the Parliament, which functions like Germany’s Bundestag) and an upper house of representatives of member state governments (the Council, which functions like Germany’s Bundesrat – the way the US Senate originally worked). The two houses pass separate versions of legislation which then need to be reconciled into a single adopted legal text, just like in the US Congress. There is then a supreme court (the European Court of Justice) which rules on what those laws mean in case of disputes. And finally there is the executive branch, the Commission, comprising an army of civil servants and agencies which make regulations – just like the executive branch in the US with its various agencies.

The major difference, of course, is that unlike in the US or any European government, the EU’s legislature can’t initiate legislation. Legislation is proposed by experts in the Commission and then amended or rejected by representatives in the Council and Parliament. Personally I think this system works better, because unelected civil servants are far less subject to lobbying pressure than lawmakers who need funding for their continuous re-election efforts (and we see that in the US, legislation is written directly by lobbyists because Congressmen and women are not experts). Civil servants may draft the laws, but the democratically accountable representatives in the Parliament and Council work on the basis of that draft to craft the final law.

And that’s it, simple. So why don’t most people describe EU lawmaking in this way? Because we are actively discouraged from doing so. These institutions have been given names that deliberately obfuscate what they are, in order to not make the EU sound like a state. As I write in my book The Owned Continent, it has also been in the interest of national leaders to make the EU sound so confusing that it’s not worth learning about. They can then take advantage of that public ignorance by taking credit for popular EU things and blaming Brussels for unpopular EU things. This is how they get away with criticising EU legislation they themselves voted for in the Council – because most citizens don’t know what the Council is.

The state that dare not speak its name

This is the subject of Professor Sylvain Kahn’s book published earlier this year L’Europe, un État qui s’ignore, which was summarised in a guest post this week on the Substack Morning Post Europe. Kahn, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris and a podcast host, argues that although the EU is obviously not a nation-state, it is already a state. “The idea that the European Union might be described as a state provokes disbelief,” he writes. “Yet, if one looks at the reality of its political regime, its political life and its activities, the conclusion is unavoidable.”

“For decades, paraphrases have proliferated to avoid the word ‘state’,” he says. “For fear of causing offence? Out of a deep attachment to the conviction that the only state worth the name is the nation-state?” He says the descriptions we use for the EU, a ‘supranational political union’ (as it’s defined on Wikipedia) or an ‘intergovernmental bloc’ are “more doctrinal and normative than scientific”. They are weasel words meant to obfuscate the fact that since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty the EU is an international confederal state. It already has many of the hallmarks of a country, as outlined in this excellent video from Wendover Productions. But of course, it’s missing some key elements that most nation-states have, such as federal-level taxation and a single foreign and defence policy.

One very thought-provoking part of Kahn’s writing is how European leaders, when writing the treaties over the past decades which together form the EU’s de facto constitution, have deliberately chosen jargon over clarity in order to hide the stateness of the EU. That is doing a disservice to citizens, he argues, who deserve to be told the truth. He lays out a few recommendations for how to rename the EU’s titles, processes and institutions to better reflect what they actually are.

“These symbolic changes would help citizens to appropriate and seize the European tool, because today national parties hesitate to clarify these roles so as not to appear ‘subordinate’ to Brussels, which they present as an exogenous agent,” he writes. “In reality, ‘Brussels’ is us. The EU, its public policies, its stateness, only exist through the voluntary and free pooling of the sovereignty of each of its member states.”

I thought it would be useful to lay out those recommendations here, and add some of my own.

The Council of the EU

“The Council of the EU should be called the ‘Parliament of States,’ since the Parliament of Citizens is called the European Parliament,” Kahn argues. It is, as I explained above, a legislature. It consists of member state representatives (national ministers) who meet in various configurations (Foreign Affairs Council, Energy Council, Agriculture Council, etc) to craft legislation and vote on it by qualified majority. It adopts laws. But absurdly we’re not allowed to say this out loud, and we have to labour under the artifice that the Council is like the United Nations.

This not only confuses citizens, it also confuses the people who work at the Council – because member states still treat it as a foreign posting akin to delegations to the United Nations rather than a representative assembly. Each member state has a “permanent representation” headed over by a “permanent representative”. These are the infamous “EU diplomats” that you see quoted in news articles. They insist on journalists using this extremely misleading label in our articles for on background quotes because they don’t want it to sound like they’re part of a representative body. I refuse to use it, and I call them a “national representative” (I once got a complaint from a perm rep about this, I won’t name the country). An average person reading “EU diplomat” would assume you mean a diplomat representing the EU to another country - like the ones at EEAS missions around the world.

The reason these people insist on being called diplomats is because that is their background. The perm reps are all part of the member states’ foreign services. Before being posted to Brussels, a permanent representative might have been their country’s ambassador to Laos. The same goes for their perm rep staff – people from the foreign service who are rotated into Brussels on temporary postings (usually 2-3 years) in between postings at embassies around the world. This means the people working in the perm reps don’t treat the Council as a collaborative legislature but rather as an adversarial intergovernmental forum. And it creates perverse results.

As I wrote in 2021 for IP Quarterly: “The rot of EU dysfunction has one origin: the EU Council—the most powerful political institution in Europe unknown to most citizens. National governments like it that way, but democracy campaigners do not.” Former Dutch MEP Sophie in ’t Veld has also written about this in her book The Scent of Wild Animals, where she describes how the presumptions of the Council create bad and unaccountable policy.

In both of our books we call for treaty change to better define what the Council is. But in fact, a simple name change would go a long way toward fixing things. The Council is already a legislature, the problem is we don’t define it as such. Simply changing the name to “Parliament of States” and having countries separate the perm reps out from their foreign services would be a way to change the presumptions of how the Council is meant to work. It would also increase transparency by making it clear to citizens that the Council is a legislative body where their member state governments take decisions and can therefor be held accountable – just as Germans know how to hold their lander governments accountable when they take decisions in the Bundesrat.

Incidentally, the US Senate also used to function like the Bundesrat - with each state government appointing two senators to represent them in Congress’s upper house. But a century ago this was changed to having Senators be directly elected by citizens in those states, effectively duplicating the function of the House of Representatives. This was not how the US founding fathers intended the Congress to work. They intended it to work like Germany’s Bundesrat, or the EU’s Council.

EU Head of State and EU Head of Government

For 15 years we have been subjected to the continually embarrassing sight of the EU sending two presidents on international visits. That’s because the 2009 Lisbon Treaty split off the European Council of prime ministers from the EU Council of ministers (unnecessarily in my opinion), and created a permanent “President of the European Council” position. It replaced the previous rotating presidency in which a different prime minister chaired European Council summits every six months (a rotating presidency which still continues in the Council of the EU, more on that below).

At the time, there was an expectation that this person would serve as the “President of the EU” – finally answering Henry Kissinger’s famous question “who do I call when I want to speak to Europe”? But national leaders deliberately picked a low-profile coordinator type, former Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, as the first president in order to immediately dilute its importance and power. They didn't want anyone who might challenge their power and actually try to lead, such as Tony Blair who was being floated for the post at the time. They wanted someone who would simply chair meetings and try to find compromise between the leaders. The mild-mannered Van Rompuy, known for his compromise-finding role in fractious Belgian politics, fit the bill.

The problem was that the post had been set up with the pomp and importance assuming someone of higher stature. So the expectation was that this person would represent the EU at international fora such as the G20. Van Rompuy was not interested in doing this alone, so he did it jointly with the Commission President – José Manuel Barroso at the time. This was followed by the duo of Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker. On his way out the door in 2016, Juncker warned that while this had worked because the two men got along, the positions should be merged into one EU president because a future scenario where the two presidents didn’t get along would be disastrous. This proved prophetic, as the next duo Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen famously couldn’t stand each other. It was a power rivalry that culminated in the very embarrassing “sofagate” fiasco in Turkey in 2021.

I have argued in the past that the simplest solution to this awkward situation is to redefine the expectations of the newer role by changing the Council title to “Chairman” in English (this is, in fact, the word used for the title in Finnish media). In the EU we have a very confusing situation where each institution has a “president”, but it’s used in the French way (in addition to an executive post, it can also mean someone who presides over meetings) rather than the English (where it only has the executive function meaning). The President of the European Parliament would be better defined as a “Speaker of the Parliament”. I’ve written in the past that we should accept that the Commission President is the only EU President, and the Council has a chair who presides over summits but does not represent the EU internationally.

But Kahn suggests another solution. “The European Council is, in practice, a ‘collective head of state,’ like in Switzerland,” with its Federal Council, he writes. The Swiss Council has a “first among equals” president. But while this person represents Switzerland as the head of state and government (in tariff negotiations with Donald Trump, for instance), it is technically the Council itself that is the head of state and government.

Perhaps the best solution is to emulate the system that exists in many European countries, with the Council President acting as head of state with a ceremonial role, while the Commission President acts as the head of government with the actual leadership role. As in most European countries, it would be only the head of government representing the EU in international fora.

It’s not a perfect analogy. The EU setup is very different from both a unitary European state like Italy and a loose confederation like Switzerland (the EU is in many ways actually more centralised than Switzerland). While in Italy the President of the Republic is a mostly ceremonial position while the President of the Council (prime minister) is the actual leader, the European Council gives strategic direction and instructions to the European Commission. So a head of state European Council President wouldn’t be understood as a ceremonial role but rather an advisory or strategic role, in charge of conveying the consensus wishes of the national leaders to the EU head of government presiding over the Commission. This would better define and delineate what each person does. And that’s badly needed because right now the roles are overlapping and creating rivalries. It’s also creating a great deal of confusion for the public, who don’t understand why the EU has so many presidents.

High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

Kahn criticises the deliberately confusing title given to the EU’s “foreign affairs chief” (the shorthand that journalists have taken to using). Under the EU constitution drafted in the early 2000s, the title was actually supposed to be “Union Minister for Foreign Affairs”. But after the constitution’s rejection by French and Dutch voters in 2005, they changed it to the long and disempowering title above in the Lisbon Treaty, one of several cosmetic changes made because European leaders concluded that voters had rejected the constitution because it had some symbols of a state. Despite the fact that, as I outline in The Owned Continent, there was no public polling evidence for this.

The person currently holding this unpronounceable position, former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, is currently locked in a power battle both with President von der Leyen and national foreign ministers, who have been gleefully trashing her to any media outlet that will listen. She heads over a department that was also deliberately given an unpronounceable name, the European External Action Service (EEAS). Recent leaks against her that likely came from the 13th floor of the Berlaymont have just highlighted how impossible this job has become because it was been undermined from the moment it was created in 2009. Just like with the Council President position, national leaders deliberately chose a low-profile person with no foreign policy experience, Catherine Ashton, to be the first holder of the post in order to quickly defang it.

It’s the constant story of the EU: national leaders know that the EU needs to be united so they agree to a treaty creating a position giving the EU a single foreign policy voice. But then they immediately undermine it by giving it an absurd title and sidelining the person from day one. National leaders know what needs to be done to make Europe strong, but as soon as they do it their short-term-thinking instincts kick in and they undo it.

In order to clearly define the position and give it actual power, the title should be changed to “Union Minister for Foreign Affairs” as envisioned by the constitution and the EEAS should be renamed the European Foreign Service.

EU Commissioner for Democracy and Demography

Kallas sits both within the Council and the Commission - occupying Estonia’s seat in the 27-member college of commissioners. So while we’re at it, let’s knock it off with the absurd and confusing titles given to the other commissioners as well. Here I’m going beyond Kahn’s recommendations and adding one of my own.

All commissioners, not just the HRVP, should no longer be given these purposefully misleading and disempowering titles like “Vice President for the Clean, Just and Competitive Transition” and instead have normal titles that actually indicate what they do and correspond to national minister roles. I.E., Trade Commissioner, Competition Commissioner, Justice Commissioner, Home Affairs Commissioner, Energy Commissioner, etc.

Part of the reason for these stupid titles is that we’ve been stuck with an unwieldy commission college size of 27 people thanks to the initial Irish ‘no’ vote to the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. Originally the treaty had kept the constitution’s restructuring of the Commission to get rid of the ‘one commissioner per country’ system and instead have smaller member states like Ireland sometimes have one and sometimes not. The Commission is, after all, not meant to be a representative body and the commissioners are not supposed to be representing their home country. They’re supposed to be politically and geographically independent, so there’s no reason for each member state to have someone in the college. But keeping the ‘one commissioner per country’ system was a concession offered to the Irish voters to have them approve the treaty when they voted again in 2009. I doubt that most voters even got the memo - the treaty was approved the second time because the government actually put effort into campaigning for it.

So now we have to invent titles for all 27 of these people, and some of them are ridiculous. Past titles have included “Commissioner for Promoting our European Way of Life”, “Commissioner for Multilingualism”, “Commissioner for Democracy and Demography” and “Vice President for Better Regulation, Interinstitutional Relations, the Rule of Law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights”.

Few national governments would have 27 equally-ranked ministers. What you usually have are the main senior ministers (sometimes called Secretaries of State) and then junior or deputy ministers. But because of the sensitivities of having one country’s commissioner designated as a junior or deputy, a senior team of ‘vice presidents’ has been invented (designed more to assuage national egos than to recognise the competence of the people involved) who have several commissioners vaguely serving under them but not clearly defined as such. It’s a mess.

It’s time to end this absurdity. Have normal titles that mirror what exists at national level, and then assign other commissioners as their deputies as exists in national systems.

The rotating EU presidency

Another extra one from me: We need to end the confusing and expensive practice of the country-based Rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU and instead have the corresponding commissioner chair the ministerial councils. So the EU Energy Commissioner would chair the energy ministers’ council meetings, for example.

I know people will object to this because it would blend the roles of theoretically ‘competing’ institutions. But why shouldn’t the person who crafted the law chair the discussions about it? The chairmanship doesn’t actually give them any power in the voting process, the decision is still for the governments to take. I understand the European Parliament might object to this as well because it makes it look like the Commission and Council are ‘on the same side’ working against them in the legislative process. So another solution might be appointing a permanent chair from among the national ministers for each Council configuration, as is already done for the Eurogroup.

The rotating presidency is confusing for citizens as it gives them the impression that the prime minister of that country is “President of the EU” for six months, which is not even remotely true. The country is just chairing discussions in one specific EU legislative institution. The prime minister who sits in the European Council actually has no formal role in the rotating presidency because the EC has a permanent president. This has particularly become a problem when countries like Orban’s Hungary take over the rotating presidency.

A big part of the reason why the EU seems so distant and aloof from citizens is that European leaders have deliberately tried to confuse their citizens about what the EU is. Consciously or not, these absurd or misleading titles and institutional names have been a part of that effort. If we want a union that is understood and supported by citizens, then we need to be honest about what this union is. It is currently a supranational confederation, which already has many of the hallmarks of a federal state. Whether or not you want it to become a full federation as I do, you cannot deny the current reality just because it makes you uncomfortable to call the EU a state. We will never achieve European sovereignty if we continue labouring under the artifice that the EU is a “UN for Europe”.

The EU is not a nation-state. But it is a state.

Last week, in a much-hyped but little-watched speech, President Trump gave a primetime address alleging (without evidence) that US elections are rigged. The White House and their allies set expectations high ahead of the speech, with Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno claiming, “This could be the most important Oval Office speech since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” But in the end Trump did not announce any action. There was no announcement that he is suspending elections as some had feared. Moreno’s hype looked absurd. But was it?

Trump’s rambling speech, which only the networks MAGA controls – Fox and CBS – decided to air (the others now risk having their broadcast licenses revoked), may not have had any short-term impact. But when viewed in conjunction with the other recent speeches by his administration, we can see the long-term intentions. And they are terrifying.

“The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington,” wrote Professor Robert Shpiner in The Guardian this week. “It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to kill.”

The same day as Trump’s speech, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (whose power far exceeds what his title suggests) gave speeches at an event entitled “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism”. It was an official US government ministerial attended by officials from more than 60 countries. In his speech, Rubio announced that the US counterterrorism architecture built up over the past 25 years to fight jihadist plots will now be retargeted toward the domestic left. The left, he said, is preparing “a revolt of the worst against the best”, accusing them of supporting the governments of Iran and Cuba.

“This is an international conference because we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognise our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq’s Iranian proxy networks who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.”

Then came Miller, who called the left a “fatal cancer of civilisation” whose politics “always becomes a gulag”. He said antifa (antifascist) demonstrators are “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”. A leftist’s protests about their rights being violated “must fall on deaf ears” he told the assembled dignitaries, and authorities must be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilisation”.

The intended audience for these speeches was ostensibly international. These words are consistent with the US National Security Strategy published in December, and the recent announcement that the US State Department will award $3 million grants to MAGA-aligned groups who are ‘civilisational allies’ with the US regime. From the funding call, it is clear that the target is not only the far-left. It is also the centrist governments of Europe and the European Union itself.

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The European Commission announced today it has fined Google €890 million ($1.02 billion) for breaches of online competition laws by giving priority to its own services in search results and down-ranking results for those of its rivals. That is a violation of the EU Digital Markets Act, adopted in 2022 to deal specifically with anti-competitive practices by tech companies. The Commission says Google also violated the DMA by preventing app developers from steering consumers towards cheaper offers from rivals.

This is only the latest in a string of such fines. In April the Commission fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million for DMA violations. The EU executive says Apple violated the DMA’s requirement that developers on their app store should be able to steer customers toward alternative offers outside the App Store. “Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels,” the Commission said. Separately, Meta was found to have violated the DMA’s requirement that they seek users’ consent for combining their personal data between services. They found that Meta’s new Facebook/Instagram policy of “consent or pay” for the use of their data did not fulfil the DMA’s requirement. EU users of Facebook and Instagram were offered a choice in 2023 between consenting to having their data processed or paying a monthly subscription. This “did not allow users to exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data,” the Commission said.

For Google, €460 million of the fine relates to the search-related breach, while €430m relates to the app store violation. The Commission had already ordered Google to treat offers from rivals in its search results in a “fair and non-discriminatory manner”. “Today’s decisions send a clear message; we will not hesitate to use our tools to safeguard business and innovation opportunities opened up by the DMA,” said Commission Vice President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen today. “Google must now bring the non-compliance to an end.”

But tech sovereignty advocates aren’t so convinced that this fine is actually going to discourage Google from continuing the anti-competitive practices. And they add that the Commission’s cautious approach is not going to do anything to stem on a separate issue, they have criticised the Commission for not publishing with this announcement a long-awaited decision on Google’s use of AI summaries of journalists’ work (more on that below). “Plenty of people would dodge the fare if the fine were cheaper than the ticket,” says German Member of the EU Parliament Alexandra Geese, the lead digital policy MEP for the Greens.

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In February 2025, the British media were obsessed with the upcoming first meeting between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump, who had just started his second term. The visit had to go perfectly, they opined, in order to avoid the US president’s wrath. Starmer dutifully showed up with gifts and over-the-top flattery in hand. It seemed for a moment that he had bought Trump’s affection - trading dignity for momentary safety. The British media gushed over Starmer’s grand success. The Daily Mirror called the prime minister "Charmer Starmer" and the Independent called the meeting a "diplomatic win". The Sun called it a "love-in", while the Daily Mail said Trump and Starmer had "struck up an unlikely bromance" which could "forge a fruitful partnership.”

The prime minister seemed to get caught up in that praise, as the British media gushed over Trump’s patronising compliments. All Trump had to say were the words “special relationship” and the UK press was eating out of his hand. “What a beautiful accent” Trump said of Starmer’s voice, calling him a “tough negotiator” and saying the UK is a great country. He said Starmer had tried his best to convince him not to tariff the UK, and Starmer grinned like a schoolboy who got a good review on his homework. But even though Starmer gave away his ace card - an unprecedented invitation from King Charles for a second state visit to the UK - he got absolutely nothing in return. You wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the exuberant UK press coverage, but when Starmer left Washington the situation was completely unchanged. Trump had not given any reassurances on security guarantees for Ukraine or on not launching a trade war against the UK. Just says later, Trump attacked President Zelenskyy in that same oval office. Months later, he started attacking Starmer on a number of fronts. And in June, Trump delivered the most personally humiliating blow - prematurely celebrating Starmer’s resignation from office.

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For decades, the European Union has been the world leader in policies to fight climate change. The EU Green Deal package in European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s first term is the largest climate law in the history of the world (despite President Biden’s ridiculous claims that the IRA was). But it now appears that the EU’s climate warrior era is over.

Today President von der Leyen unveiled an overhaul of the EU’s Emissions Trading System, the bedrock of Europe’s efforts to fight climate change. It’s not a complete suspension of the system as Giorgia Meloni was asking for in March, but as a I predicted back then, the ETS is instead being sent to a death by a thousand cuts. Today’s proposal, which will need to be approved by both houses of the EU’s legislature, would render the system moot by extending free allowances to emissions-intensive industries and allowing generous offsets. Basically, the system will still exist in practice but companies will not have to meaningfully pay for emissions for another decade, which means they will not be driven to invest in low-carbon solutions.

“Free pollution permits were never meant to become a permanent subsidy,” notes Greg Van Elsen from the NGO CAN Europe. “Extending them until 2038 rewards delay instead of industrial decarbonisation. Public support must reward companies that cut emissions, not business as usual or shareholder payouts.”

The extension of free allowances for several more years may seem like just a technical adjustment. But it is sending a signal to the markets that the EU will not stand by its legislation and will simply adjust it whenever the bill comes due if lawmakers face pressure from businesses and foreign governments. This has implications for many other policy areas, and suggests that the Commission will also chicken out once the bill becomes due for new carbon border levies (CBAM). Why should any company bother making investments in low-carbon technology when they can assume they’ll never actually have to pay for their emissions?

The fact that the carbon price is going up is not a flaw in the ETS, it is the whole point. Companies have known for 15 years that the price would go up at this point and they would lose their free allowances. Some companies prepared and made investments in low-carbon innovation. Other companies sat on their hands and did nothing. The laggards are now being rewarded. What a way to stimulate European competitiveness.

MEPs in the EU Parliament, and national governments in the EU Council, are split on this issue – so we can expect a major fight on this. While Italy, Germany and Poland are leading the charge to kill the ETS, France, Spain and Sweden are leading the charge to save it. Von der Leyen’s centre-right European Peoples Party, which also includes German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, will lead the charge to push this through in the European Parliament, with the help of the far-right PfE of Marine Le Pen and ECR of Giorgia Meloni. Polish Secretary of State Krzysztof Bolesta told Politico that the ETS is a threat to “our European way of life” and the EU needs to “ditch dogmatism” in its climate approach. But Sweden’s Europe Minister Jessica Rosencrantz hit back, telling them “the ETS works. Europe should build on its success, not retreat from it.”

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Since its launch two decades ago, the ETS has lowered emissions by more than 50% in the sectors it covers. More importantly, all EU climate policy has been built around it. As the centre-left S&D group noted in a letter to the Commission in July, it is “the cornerstone of the EU climate architecture”. Without it, all other EU climate efforts that have been passed into law over the past two decades fall apart.

Interestingly enough, the climate campaigners who are now desperately trying to save the system were actually against it at first. They warned that “cap and trade” (as it was being called at the time) was a conservative market-oriented solution to climate change that depended on future governments maintaining the credibility of the system. It essentially put off the hard work of fighting climate change by trusting the market to deliver reforms, but only in the future once free allowances stopped being given out. Under the system, the emissions that industrial companies can produce are capped, but they can purchase allowances to emit more. This incentivises companies to develop low-carbon technologies not only so that they don’t need to pay for additional allowances, but also so companies that are well below the cap can make money by selling their allowances.

But companies have been given high levels of free allowances in the first 20 years of the system in order to not penalise them before they’ve had the chance to develop the new technologies. Those free allowances are supposed to be phased out now. But that’s what this proposal would end, delaying that process by about a decade.

And yet, unveiling the proposal yesterday, the commissioners had the nerve to try to say this adjustment to the ETS was responding to the urgency of climate change and energy security. “The part that gets me: The Commission's own text says the ETS should be "lowering the EU's dependence on fossil fuel imports – their words, in the proposal itself,” noted Hans Stegeman, Chief Economist at Triodos Bank. “Then it lets industry emit more, longer, and hedge with foreign offsets instead of cutting at home.” “It's not just bad climate policy. It's also bad regulatory practice. Firms plan investments on the credibility of a price signal. Move the goalposts once, under pressure, and every future target becomes a starting position for the next round of lobbying.”

Did Obama kill the EU ETS?

Climate campaigner sceptics eventually learned to live with the ETS in the 2000s because it appeared that was the way the world was going. Market-based solutions for fighting climate change were being championed by both Republicans and Democrats in the United States, so it was assumed that the US would eventually start its own system. Having one unified method of fighting climate change in the West was better than having a market approach in the US and a regulatory approach in the EU, it was reasoned, and so Europe somewhat reluctantly got behind emissions trading following an initial pilot in 2005. Then they had the rug pulled out from under them – a story I tell in Chapter 7 of my book The Owned Continent:

“When the EU ETS was set up in 2008, the assumption was that the US would be setting up a parallel cap and trade scheme that it could link to. Both Barack Obama and John McCain were promising one as part of their 2008 presidential campaign platforms. But because it was Obama who won and ended up proposing it, the Republican Congress killed it as part of their openly-stated strategy of rejecting everything Obama proposed.

The Obama administration didn’t want to spend political capital on trying to save the climate law, preferring to spend it instead on Obamacare. So the US climate bill was abandoned and the EU was left in the lurch, stuck with an ETS that had no other major system to link to. That meant that European companies would face the prospect of unfair competition with American companies (something solved with free ETS credits up to 2026, transitioning to carbon import levies in 2026).”

The US failure to enact carbon trading 15 years ago was the first nail in the coffin of the EU ETS. But it is the current US administration’s wholesale abandonment of any climate policies (and its aggressive pressure campaign against other countries’ climate efforts) that has been the death blow. EU climate policy could survive with a ‘go it alone’ approach on emissions trading. It was working. But it apparently cannot survive in a scenario where it is being actively attacked by America. Because European businesses are saying they cannot compete in a world where they alone face climate burdens and their American competitors do not. And competitiveness is the Brussels mantra of the moment – at the insistence of Merzoni.

Or did European voters kill the EU ETS?

There are other factors at play here besides the MAGA regime’s hostility toward EU climate policy. Whether they understood it or not, European voters chose this path when they voted in the 2024 European Parliament election in a way that created a right-wing majority in the EU’s legislature.

That the Green Deal legislation happened during President von der Leyen’s 2019-24 first term was largely the result of the 2019 European Parliament election results, which happened at the time of the Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future marches. Green parties saw a big surge across Europe, and voters listed climate change as one of their main motivating concerns. But in the 2024 election the Greens were decimated, losing a third of their seats in the European Parliament. The public has, quite evidently, moved on from its concern about climate change. That may be because the immediate global concerns in the West about imminent democratic collapse and World War III put a more long-term concern like climate change back of mind. Or it may be that the public thinks governments can’t or won’t do anything to fight climate change (surveys have shown that both in the US and Europe people are unaware of the major efforts that were passed over the past five years with the IRA and the Green Deal). But the Fridays for Future crowd didn’t show up in the 2024 election, and we’re now living with the consequences.

Elections have consequences. And the impression that Gen Z is now ‘over it’ when it comes to climate change and is now voting for the far right in ever-increasing numbers, is in particular making politicians think climate change is now a losing issue with little political benefit in pursuing.

Or was it Trump?

The reasons why Europe is right now tearing up its climate change efforts are myriad. The EPP says they have been given a mandate to do so by the citizens in the 2024 election. European businesses are facing legitimate competitiveness concerns as they’re getting their asses handed to them by Chinese and American companies (though the degree to which this is due to EU regulation or the ETS is highly debatable). But it is also impossible to ignore the context of repeated European surrender to the Trump administration which is aggressively lobbying against EU climate policy (along with EU tech policy). The EPP and von der Leyen will insist this pressure has nothing to do with why they’re tearing up EU climate laws. That is hard to believe.

As part of her surrender deal with President Trump signed a year ago, President von der Leyen committed to Europe buying $750 billion worth of US liquified natural gas (LNG). If that promise is kept, it will be impossible to meet the EU’s target of reducing emissions by 55% by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. Investments are being diverted from renewables into building new gas infrastructure for the incoming American fossil fuel, which needs regassification facilities at ports and new pipelines. Meanwhile, von der Leyen is preparing to shred the EU’s methane law at at the US federal government’s request, even as Democratic lawmakers and US state governments are begging her not to.

At minimum, it is clear that EU climate policy is not important enough to von der Leyen and her EPP to defend it from US attacks. But they are going even further, jumping at the chance to obey US orders to gut climate laws. Whether they are doing so out of honest convicting that climate laws are hurting European competitiveness or cynical pandering to big business, this now seems like an unstoppable train. And with the EPP’s war on NGOs in Brussels having hallowed out civil society in this town over the past year, there isn’t much momentum to push back.

Future generations will look back at this moment as a pivotal turning point, the point at which Europe gave up on the idea that climate change can be resisted. We will be living with the consequences of that for decades to come.

There’s a word Brussels loves right now: sovereignty. Digital sovereignty, energy sovereignty, defence sovereignty. And yet there’s one form of sovereignty few in Brussels seem willing to name, let alone pursue. It’s the ability of Europeans to think their own thoughts, rather than unconsciously borrowing the mental furniture of a country across the Atlantic.

The Slovenian author Gorazd Hladnik has defined this concept as “cognitive sovereignty” – the ability for a people to set their own narratives rather than accepting the narratives of others. “Europe's deepest vulnerability is not military or economic – it is cognitive,” he writes in his Libertas Europa paper on the subject. “Europe is progressively losing the capacity to define reality according to its own experience, traditions and interests. This is cognitive dependence: the gradual adoption of externally generated narratives and values without independent evaluation.”

“This condition is hard to recognise because democracy formally continues. Elections happen, media report, universities teach. Yet the cognitive environment within which democratic judgement forms is increasingly shaped outside Europe.”

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Last week I gave the keynote speech at the European Economic and Social Committee conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The EESC is the consultative body that, since 1958, has been representing employers and workers in advising EU lawmakers on legislation (it sits alongside the Committee of the Regions, which represents states and municipalities).

In my speech I laid out the reasons why Europe is not currently free and sovereign and the things that need to be done to get us there. I listed the three foreign powers on which Europe’s dependence poses a problem: Russia, China and America. For this continent’s Atlanticist establishment, just putting those three together is controversial enough. But I went further, arguing that though it is the one that our leaders never want to talk about, Europe’s dependence on America is by far most entrenched and the most dangerous. It was this aspect that the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã led with in their coverage of the speech last week.

I thought my readers might want to watch the full speech here on my Substack. It’s also an opportunity to write about an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed while doing these speeches and readings to promote my book The Owned Continent (and more recently the French edition Le Continent Captif) over the past seven months.

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Yesterday I wrote about the three big developments that took place on the same day for the French, British and German far right – all three of whom are currently polling first in their respective countries. I wrote that for all three, it was hard to tell if these were setbacks or rocket fuel for them. For Le Pen and the AfD, the jury’s still out. But for Nigel Farage, 48 hours after his dramatic press conference on Tuesday it is already clear that his gambit is failing.

As a recap, the father of Brexit is currently being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over whether he broke House of Commons rules by failing to declare a £5 million donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. After taking the money he reportedly lobbied the governor of the Bank of England to relax rules on cryptocurrency.

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7 July 2026 may go down in the history books as a turning point for the far right in Europe, but which way things are turning is hard to tell at this stage. Yesterday saw major developments for the far right in Europe’s three biggest countries – France, Britain and Germany. And that’s significant, because the far right is polling in first place in all three.

Let’s start with France. First we got the unexpected news that from a French appeals court that they are upholding Le Pen’s conviction for embezzlement but they are striking down the ban on her running for president next year. This means that she will be under house arrest next year during the election, and it prompted an obvious question: will she run for president wearing an ankle bracelet? She told French news channel LCI a week ago that this would “not be possible” because a presidential candidate needs to move freely. She could not imagine having to ask a magistrate’s permission each time she wants to hold a rally or give an interview. So the assumption was, if her conviction were upheld, her young protégé Jordan Bardella would be the candidate.

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But then last night, in an interview on France’s main broadcaster TF1, she announced, “I am the candidate for the presidential election.” Bardella will be running alongside her but as candidate for prime minister, she said. “We offer the French a duo, president and prime minister, and this duo is solid and has very strong convictions. We are a winning ticket.”

This US-style concept of a presidential “ticket” does not exist in France. But Le Pen is going to make it a thing. She will try for a fourth time to become president of France.

Talking to people here in Brussels ahead of the verdict, it was hard to tell which outcome people wanted. On one hand, out of two bad options for the EU, some people I’ve talked to felt that Bardella would be the lesser of the two evils should the far right take the presidency. He has less historical animosity toward the EU, is from a younger generation, and is perceived as being more business-friendly than his mentor. Plenty of people I’ve talked to also saw him as more “beatable” than Le Pen, given his inexperience, youth and questions lingering over his personal life. On the other hand, he doesn’t come with the same baggage as Le Pen, who still carries the surname of her notorious father even if she distanced herself from him long before his death last year.

“I honestly don’t have a preference, both candidacies come with risks,” one centrist in the EU bubble told me last week. He likened the situation to Democrats who wanted Trump to be the Republicans’ candidate in 2016 because they thought he could never win with the baggage he came with. “We should be careful what we wish for.”

Both Le Pen and Bardella are polling in first place ahead of next year’s election, meaning it’s likely that either one will win the first round. But polls then show that either one would face the same difficulty winning in the run-off second round that Le Pen has faced in the last two elections against President Macron. But Bardella has been polling slightly higher than Le Pen.

How is it going to work having a candidate campaigning while wearing an ankle bracelet? We’re about to find out. Experts say that, at minimum, house arrest means she would need to stay every night in her own home. Since people are allowed to go to work, she can argue that campaigning is her work. But she would not to be able to stay overnight in other French cities before or after campaign appearances, for example. Will she wear her ankle bracelet as a badge of honour? Will she downplay it? There are many questions.

Nigel’s ‘vanity election’

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage made the dramatic announcement that he is resigning as a member of Parliament in order to trigger a by-election in which he will run as a candidate. Why is he doing such a nonsensical thing? He is trying to overcome a financial scandal by demonstrating that he has popular support. Much like prime ministers call snap elections while under siege in an appeal to the public to bail them out with a popular mandate, Farage hopes that like Andy Burnham, he can be propelled toward the office of prime minister with a landslide by-election victory. “This will be a people versus the establishment by-election,” he said in a press conference. “It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.”

There’s just one problem: the other parties have already said they’re not going to play along with his game. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens and rival far right party Restore Britain have all said they will not field candidates. Farage will be running against himself, all alone.

The father of Brexit is currently being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over whether he broke House of Commons rules by failing to declare a £5 million donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. He has given several contradictory accounts of why he didn’t declare it, sometimes saying it’s because it was a gift to use any way he likes, sometimes saying it was given to him before he was an MP to pay for his personal security, sometimes saying that the whole thing is fake news. At his press conference yesterday, he defended the right of politicians to receive support from wealthy patrons. “We absolutely need successful people from all walks of life – but particularly from business and industry,” he said.

“There is no easy way to describe what Nigel Farage has just done, because to even try requires that you surrender your commitment to elementary logic. It is impossible to even express it in a single sentence, because at the end the sentence will negate itself.

Let’s give it a go. The Reform leader is going to run a ‘people vs the establishment’ campaign over his right to receive undisclosed gifts from a man who calls him daddy and writes books called ‘How to Launder Money’,” wrote Ian Dunt on Substack yesterday. “No, that sounds mad. Let’s try again. The Reform leader has triggered a vote in his constituency on the principle of whether there should be scrutiny of his finances. No that’s fucking crazy, that can’t be right. The Reform leader is going to sidestep a highly damaging news story by elevating it to the most important narrative in politics for the next six weeks. No, that doesn’t work either. It can’t done. You cannot make it make sense.”

Farage’s rivals were also not kind in their descriptions of yesterday’s spectacle. Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch told Politico: “What I saw was a man who is cracking under the pressure. He went on telly, having a hissy fit, because for the first time he is finally having to face some scrutiny after a very long honeymoon, and he cannot handle it.” Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “If this by-election does go ahead now, we are calling on all parties to stand aside and refuse to give oxygen to Farage’s vanity project.”

AfD’s group disbanded?

And finally, the third development – concerning Germany. Ever since the far-right Alternative for Germany party came second in 2024’s European Parliament election in Germany, there have been questions about their political home. The party’s lead candidate Maximilian Krah had a very public falling out with Le Pen and therefor was barred from entering the far-right Patriots for Europe group she formed with Viktor Orban and Geert Wilders. Relations between Le Pen and party leader Alice Weidel haven’t been much better. So the AfD had to form their own group, Europe of Sovereign Nations, with a ragtag selection of individual MEPs from small parties in other countries. To form a political group, you need at least 23 MEPs from seven different member states.

Political groups receive EU taxpayer money for their administration, and that is the origin of Le Pen’s legal troubles. Money that was meant to go toward European activity instead went to domestic French politics.

ESN has 15 AfD MEPs from Germany, together with one or two MEPs each from eight other countries, from very obscure parties. This is, in short, not so much a European group as it is AfD’s vehicle in Brussels. That has made the group very vulnerable to collapse, which has happened in the past to previous far-right groups that were dominated by just one party (such as Farage’s EFDD group in 2014, which I wrote about here for European Voice at the time). It only takes one or two MEPs leaving to trigger such a group’s collapse. The speculation has been that when ESN inevitably disbanded, Weidel and Le Pen would put their differences aside and AfD would be welcomed into the PfE, making it the second-largest group in the Parliament.

But MEPs have decided, inexplicably, to accelerate that process by voting yesterday to trigger a process to disband ESN due to the behaviour of their MEPs. The vote, with 414 in favour vs 224 against in a secret ballot, tasks the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations (APPF) to investigate ESN’s compliance with EU values. Specifically, MEPs cite as evidence AfD members expressing Nazi sympathies, the MEP from the Dutch party Forum for Democracy calling for “remigration” in order to preserve a “white” Europe, racist banners installed by Czechia’s SPD party, and an action by Bulgaria’s Revival to stop the broadcast of a film featuring scenes of homosexuality. Most heavily, the motion is relying on a German court’s ruling last year that found AfD’s policy programme to be “contrary to human dignity and freedom of religion”.

But what motivated the vote to happen at this exact moment was the far-right chants of “send them back” following the vote last month passing an EPP-designed law toughening asylum rules and giving the green light to third-country return hubs - scenes that have shocked Brussels.

“There is strong evidence that the AfD’s European party, the ESN, is in breach of the EU’s core values,” said German Green MEP Daniel Freund, who initiated the motion, yesterday. “Racism, homophobia and antisemitism have no place in Europe and anyone who peddles hate speech must not be allowed to receive a single cent of EU money.”

Here’s the problem though: it wasn’t just ESN MEPs who were chanting and celebrating in the European Parliament following the asylum vote. It was also PfE MEPs, and I’m told some from Meloni’s ECR also joined in (though less fervently). All of the accusations being levied at ESN could also be levied against PfE and ECR. So why is ESN being targeted and not them? Is it because PfE has sitting prime ministers in the European Council, and perhaps the next president of France? Is the Parliament ready to move against a group that includes the prime ministers of Italy and Belgium? Is the reason that ESN is being targeted simply because there is no governing party in their membership?

The EPP’s support for this motion reeks of hypocrisy. Let’s get real here: all of the transgressions listed against the ESN have been expressed by Donald Trump’s Republican Party in the United States - for example the “remigration” rhetoric. How can the EPP vote to disband a European party expressing these sentiments that are supposedly “not in line with EU values” while at the same time saying the Trump regime is a “great ally” of Europe? It’s completely inconsistent.

I know people are understandably upset about the distressing scenes we saw in the parliament last month. But I’m not sure that going after a political group that was probably about to collapse anyway is the smartest response. All it’s going to do is give the ESN, PfE and ECR further fodder to say the EU is persecuting them for their beliefs. These groups are receiving EU taxpayer money because 23% of European voters voted for parties in these three far-right groups in the 2024 election. If you include the EPP, voters in that election gave the European Parliament a right-wing majority (these four right-of-center groups together have 52% of EP seats).

The problem is not with the funding. The problem is with the voters. And that isn’t going to be solved by depriving funding from the elected representatives people voted for because we don’t like what they’re saying.

Taken together, it’s really hard to know right now whether these three developments yesterday were good news or bad news for the European far right. We may look back and say this was the moment that all three were able to ride the momentum of a persecution narrative all the way to their nations’ highest offices. Or it could be the beginning of their unravelling – losing control of events just when they were at the peak of their popularity.

Given that early elections remain a distinct possibility in Germany and Britain, we are looking at the very real possibility of Europe’s three largest countries all being under the control of the far right by the end of next year. Given how unpredictable things are at the moment, it’s also a very real possibility that all these movements will have lost steam by then. But in order for that to happen, we need to give Europeans an alternative to believe in. And right now, our centrist leaders are completely failing to do that.

I’ve been in Ireland the past days on the press trip for the start of Ireland’s presidency of the EU Council - the upper chamber of the union’s legislature representing national governments with a rotating chairmanship. It’s always a delight to be in Ireland. I make no secret of the fact that this is my favourite EU country, and not just because of my ancestry. Nevertheless, the article is going to dish out some harsh truths about the emerald isle that some will not like to hear.

We’ve had briefings with Irish ministers and business leaders, as well as a joint press conference with Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen held after she convened a college meeting in Cork.

During all these briefings, it became clear that there are two awkward subjects that Ireland’s politicians are having to grapple with as their presidency starts. One is their military neutrality in the face of Russia’s war on Ukraine (I’ll write more about that below). The other is the degree to which American big tech companies (and pharma as well) have disproportionate power in this country. Sweetheart tax deals attracted them to base their European headquarters here and that’s given them quite a lot of power in Dublin, since they account for such a large portion of the country’s economy.

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He was escaping wretched poverty and starvation as a result of the potato famine, which had hit his town of Skibbereen outside Cork particularly hard. He sailed to America in search of a better life - and more than anything, in search of hope. He might have been bemused to know that 146 years later, his great great great grandson would make the same journey in reverse. Not for economic necessity as was the case for him, but also in search of hope.

In this video shot in Cobh port, I talk about how when I emigrated from the United States to Europe at the end of 2006, people in both the US and EU couldn’t quite grasp the concept. The US doesn’t have a tradition of emigration, only immigration. We’re taught from a young age, in both Europe and America, that the US is the place where dreams come true. Why would anyone leave? Having grown up in American society, I wasn’t all that surprised that people in the US didn’t quite get the idea that I was leaving and did not have the intention of coming back. But what really took me aback was that Europeans also didn’t get it. Time after time, I encountered confusion at the idea that I would leave the US and not want to go back.

So on this 4th of July, I reminisced about this time period, back before the Trump era when Europeans found it strange that an American would want to leave America. It’s a topic that’s been coming up a lot during the readings and interviews for the French edition of my book, Le Continent Captif. I’ve stressed this idea of being an emigrant rather than an “expat”. But I’ve also stressed how different this experience is for an American vs any other immigrant, because we can never really escape our home country. It follows us wherever we go.

I hope you enjoy the video, and happy 4th of July for those who celebrate.