Europe Archive

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss President Donald Trump’s week at the United Nations, including his speech to the General Assembly and the Security Council session he chaired. For the Report, Cara Tabachnick talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about how Belgium and other European countries are dealing with citizens returning from fighting with ISIS in Syria. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your […]

Under the cover of darkness, eight cargo trucks from Russia rumbled down a dirt road just inside the Ukrainian border. A breeze cooled the early August night, drifting over the Russian countryside into this swath of coal-mining country in Donetsk, before being caught in the swells of the Black Sea. It was clear. A perfect night for a drone from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which has been monitoring a shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine for the past four years, to record video of the convoys of KamAZ-4310s, the green army trucks once called the “workhorse of […]

PARIS—French President Emmanuel Macron is probably glad to be in New York this week. His meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump—always a risky affair given Trump’s unpredictable bent—surprisingly went off without a hitch. And his address to the United Nations General Assembly offered him another high-profile opportunity to burnish his global image as the defender of the multilateral order. But the real appeal of the trip for Macron is that it took him out of France, where a series of self-inflicted wounds have dented his approval ratings. After winning the presidential election in April 2017 with a lopsided 66 percent […]

BRUSSELS—One morning in November 2015, Ahmed Khaddine, then 25, was in his apartment in central Brussels, typing away on his computer at his desk, when the front door flew open. Before he really knew what was happening, two policemen burst in, grabbed him, pushed his face down onto the wooden floor and handcuffed him before taking him to the police station. For Ahmed, a son of Moroccan immigrants who was born and raised in Brussels, the arrest had been a long time coming. Many years earlier, during his final years of high school, he had begun attending a local mosque […]

AMSTERDAM—If you think the annual rundown of a government’s policy plans has to be a droll, soporific affair, perhaps you should look at the Netherlands. Its version of the State of the Union is a carnival of color, pageantry and whimsy, cleverly concealing the arcane necessity of a national budget, and the delicate state of negotiations over politically charged policy choices. Tuesday was Prinsjesdag in the Netherlands—the Princes’ Day, also known as Budget Day. It happens every year on the third Tuesday in September, when the Dutch monarch, now King Willem-Alexander, formally opens the new parliamentary year, reading a speech […]

More than two years after narrowly approving a referendum to leave the European Union, the British are discovering that asserting national sovereignty is less straightforward than the proponents of Brexit promised. Leaders of the “Leave” campaign in 2016 painted the issue in black and white. Britain had subordinated its sovereignty to Brussels, not least its authority to control its own borders. A fully independent Britain would regain those rights, while also negotiating a favorable, bespoke trade agreement with the EU’s remaining 27 members. With only seven months left before the deadline to leave the EU, it is clear that this […]

Last week, Denmark reached an agreement with the government of Greenland, which is an autonomous Danish territory, to fund improvements to airports on the island. The project aroused controversy when a Chinese company expressed interest and was pre-qualified to participate, a concerning development for Danish and American officials. While Denmark’s $559 million deal decreases the chances of Chinese involvement, it came at a steep political price, as it led the pro-independence Naleraq party to break away from Greenland’s ruling coalition, depriving it of its majority in Greenland’s Parliament. In an email interview, Ulrik Pram Gad, a professor of Arctic politics […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of a new series on immigration and integration policy around the world. The German Cabinet is set to meet later this month to discuss a draft proposal that would loosen immigration requirements for skilled workers from outside the European Union. The plan in its current form would reportedly abandon a requirement that companies give preference to German citizens before considering foreigners for vacancies, and would also provide qualified foreigners with opportunities to come to Germany to look for jobs. While the proposal enjoys fairly broad support within the governing coalition and its constituencies, it […]

As the nationalist, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats claimed their best result yet in Sweden’s parliamentary elections last Sunday, the nation’s newspapers went bold with their headlines. “Chaos,” read the front pages, in all caps, of the two largest tabloids. Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper, called the outcome “a political earthquake.” But the subject of their worry was not the rise of the Sweden Democrats, the latest party to surf Europe’s anti-establishment populist wave. Instead, it was the utter fragmentation of the country’s political landscape. That few focused their attention on the far-right party’s performance—it gained seats but still came in third […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the Palestinians, against the backdrop of the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords. For the Report, A.J. Naddaff talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about how Kosovo has become the latest battleground in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s war with the Gulenist movement. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The […]

ROME—When Italy’s most powerful politician, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, signed up last week to join Steve Bannon’s effort to help populists on the continent win more seats in the European Parliament next year, he unwittingly underscored one of the inherent contradictions in Europe’s far-right populist movement. Much like other resurgent nationalists, Salvini, who is also Italy’s deputy prime minister, has steadily grown in power by fulminating against immigration and against the European Union. But now, by joining forces with Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s ousted chief strategist, anti-EU activists are showing that they may not object to European unity as […]

Yesterday’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks passed by with relatively muted commemorations. This is understandable given the passage of time, and how we commemorate increasingly distant events. But if the immediate consequences of 9/11 have faded, the less visible aftereffects of that day’s trauma persist. At times, these aftereffects, no less pernicious for being hidden, spring into full view—most recently on Sunday, when Swedish voters made the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party the third-largest in parliament. It would be relatively easy to trace the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, of which the Swedish electoral results are but the latest example, […]

A little more than two years since a bare majority of British voters opted to leave the European Union, and just over six months before it happens, negotiators are still trying to determine what the post-Brexit relationship will look like. As of March 29, 2019, the United Kingdom will no longer be part of the EU and, while the parties have agreed on a 21-month transition period, time is running out. The U.K. needs to find a way to maintain free trade in goods and services with what is by far its largest trading partner, in order to avoid large […]

In the largest Russian military exercise since the height of the Cold War, Moscow this week is deploying 300,000 troops, 900 tanks and 1,000 aircraft in central and eastern Russia. The military demonstration, called “Vostok 2018,” or East Exercise 2018, is expected to last from Sept. 11 to 15. This year, for the first time ever, Chinese military forces will participate, sending 3,200 troops and 30 aircraft over the border into eastern Russia. Similar Cold War-era drills only included states that were part of the Soviet sphere. The Vostok exercise highlights two important, seemingly contradictory things about the relationship between […]

LIPJAN, Kosovo—On a Thursday morning in March, Yasemin Karabina and her husband, Yusuf Karabina, both Turkish nationals, awoke at the usual time and headed to work in this town 10 miles south of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Yasemin taught Turkish to high school students at Mehmet Akif College, while Yusuf served as deputy director of the Gulistan Educational Institution, which is in the same building. The couple, who have been married for more than 20 years, were in the habit of driving to and from work together. Their teenage son, a student at Mehmet Akif College, rode along in the back […]

French and British fishing vessels clashed at sea last month, marking an escalation in an ongoing dispute over scallop stocks in the English Channel. French fishermen are prohibited from dredging the shellfish during the summer months in order to prevent overfishing, while their British competitors fish year-round, leading the French to accuse the British of depleting stocks. Negotiators from the two countries failed to finalize a resolution to the impasse last week. According to Johan Bergenas, senior director for public policy at Vulcan, this skirmish is only part of a growing global conflict over increasingly scarce fish stocks and fishery […]

On Aug. 12, leaders of the five Caspian Sea littoral states—Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan—gathered in the Kazakh port city of Aktau to sign the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea. The agreement ended decades of uncertainty over the Caspian Sea’s status, clarifying the boundaries between each party’s territorial waters. And while the agreement left open the key question of ownership over the rich oil and gas deposits lying under the Caspian’s seabed, it provides a framework for these five countries to work out arrangements for joint exploration and drilling, as well as long-stalled pipeline projects. […]