European politics and society — Alpha.Sources

Trying to make sense of the senseless

Noah Smith, an American columnist and Substacker, and historian Niall Ferguson both made the mistake last week of attempting to rationalise the Trump administration’s fumbling attempts to get Ukrainian peace talks underway.

Niall Ferguson appears to be making a completely reasonable point—one echoed by numerous other observers last week—that it was a mistake for the U.S. to publicly acknowledge that Ukraine can never become a full member of NATO and that the country must cede territory to Russia as part of any peace deal, even if both positions are widely accepted on the Western and Ukrainian sides of the negotiations. This, of course, was before Mr. Trump went on one of his ill-advised social media rampages, effectively accusing Ukraine of starting the war and labeling its sitting president a dictator.

A Millennial's Manifesto

Millennials, according to the internet, are people born between 1981 and 1996. That's a bit of a gap, so it will be useful to narrow down the definition of our protagonist somewhat. This is a story about a relatively old Millennial, born in 1984. It is not at all inconceivable that this person will have a different perspective from a namesake born in the middle of the 1990s. This is a bias that we must accept such as it is. Even more specifically, this is a story about European millennial, born in Denmark, who has ended up in the United Kingdom. He is married to a Canadian woman of Guyanese, and ultimately Indian, descent, who is now a naturalised English citizen. The melting pot is real, and millennials are sizzling in its cauldron.

The fertility wars

The political flurry in the US over the virtues of parenthood and a high birth rate is part of a much larger cultural moment in which the debate on the significance of falling global fertility is pitting two increasingly militant and unyielding sides against each other. We have trade wars, culture wars, even actual wars; we can now add fertility wars to the list. When Elon Musk, a US entrepreneur and businessman, calls Ms. Harris an “extinctionist”, because she has linked the reluctance of young people to have children to “climate anxiety”, he means it, just as he means it when he concludes that “the natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!”

How to get handle on this? With difficulty, but in the end, hopefully with precision and clarity. First, I will briefly show that the fertility wars have been fought for a long time. I will then draw the contours of three separate positions in the fertility wars today—on the Conservative right, on the left, and a feminist perspective—before offering a suggestion on where this discourse goes next, and where it ultimately ends up, if we are sufficiently unlucky or un-attentive.

Things to think about #5

There’s been a lot of talk about the political center* in Europe in the past few weeks, in the wake of the French parliamentary elections and the landslide victory for Labour in the UK. Is it reinvigorated, complacent, or perhaps just lucky? I offer two thoughts on this.

Firstly, sometimes a long-in-the-tooth incumbent is sacrificed on the altar of change no matter how reasonable or uncontroversial he or she is. In the context the most recent elections in Europe, this applies mostly to France, where the people has a tendency to throw their leaders under the bus, for no other reason that they’ve been in power for a bit too long. But I think it applies to England too, to an extent. Rishi Sunak and his cabinet weren’t that bad, or more specifically, the Sunak government was a lot of less controversial and risk-seeking than its Tory predecessors. But in the end, the weight of dissatisfaction and disillusion with previous iterations of Conservative cabinets were too much to bear. The Tories received the drubbing they deserved, having put their faith in a toxic mix of volatility and incompetence under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The doomed political and economic project of Brexit looms large in this story too. Whatever Labour decides to do with this smelling carcass of a political legacy, it brought the destruction of the Conservative party, and the right in UK politics, as we know it. Perhaps for that reason, Starmer will be inclined to leave it smelling for a bit longer, to remind people of what they’ll get should they consider jumping back into the Tory fold.

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