Jan-Werner Müller

Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton. Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces is out now.

United Europe?

Jan-Werner Müller, 3 November 2022

Euro-cheerleaders liked to contrast the American way of promoting democracy – invade countries and make big profits for US companies – with the European one: make membership irresistible for neighbouring states, then peacefully transform polities from within (while making big profits for Western European companies). This sort of gloating stopped a while ago.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the EU’s centre of gravity has shifted from Paris and Berlin to the east, Warsaw and Budapest have no common vision beyond domestic illiberalism; other than that, they share a ruthless determination to veto EU actions such as establishing a minimum corporate tax. They might wish for a much looser – dare one say more British – EU, but lack the clout to force other states to join a Peripherieuropa.

Germany Inc.: Europe’s Monsters

Jan-Werner Müller, 26 May 2022

In 1990 the heavy metal band Scorpions released ‘Wind of Change’, a song celebrating the end of the Cold War: ‘The future’s in the air/Can feel it everywhere.’ It also contained the hopeful lines: ‘Let your balalaika sing/What my guitar wants to say.’ It turns out, though, that they had it the wrong way round: it is Putin who calls the tune to which...

While Brussels was prepared to allow a single autocracy to exist as an exception within the realm, it turned out that Viktor Orbán’s approach had set a precedent. Poland’s ruling populists promised to create ‘Budapest in Warsaw’; in Slovenia, Janez Janša followed Orbán’s far-right playbook. Measures that might have been taken against one rogue member state were off the table as soon as a second, copycat populist government was willing to veto them.

Prussian Disneyland

Jan-Werner Müller, 9 September 2021

The reconstructed palace, with Franco Stella’s razionalismo façade.

Thirty years ago, the Bundestag voted to move from sleepy Bonn to newly unified Berlin. There was a lot of anxiety at the time that the change might signal the emergence of a more nationalist Germany, but even the most apprehensive couldn’t have imagined that the centre of the new-old capital, the...

Defenders of Berlin’s new palace claim that as home to the Humboldt Forum – a collection of objects from Africa and Asia – it demonstrates Germany’s eagerness to engage in a ‘dialogue of cultures’. This is disingenuous. The building’s façade, sponsored partly by German business and testament to a stifling, philistine cultural climate, is its real message – a coda to the Merkel era.

Short Cuts: Blame Brussels

Jan-Werner Müller, 22 April 2021

The EU took on a task that should have brought it popularity, but for which it was ill-prepared; in the end, it performed, to quote the German finance minister, in a ‘shitty way’. As with the common currency and the refugee crisis, the union acquired features of a state – but in an incomplete and ultimately incoherent way. The Euro couldn’t function without a common fiscal policy; the shared border has lacked a unified asylum policy. And, as so often, the commission overpromised: ‘l’Europe qui protège’ ended up protecting free trade at least as much as the lives of citizens.

One way to politicise the pandemic would seem to be to make a contrast between competence and incompetence. But that’s misleading: politics is always about choices and priorities (who will live and who might die). The premier of Saxony claimed recently that government policies haven’t been unjust; rather, ‘the virus is unjust.’ But no politician simply follows the science; what’s significant is one’s underlying theory of justice – and whether one avows it.

Le Roi-machine: Beyond Elections

Jan-Werner Müller, 19 March 2020

‘Our regimes are democratic,’ Pierre Rosanvallon states in the opening sentence of Good Government, ‘but we are not governed democratically.’ There has in recent decades been a shift, he argues, away from a model of democracy focused on representative assemblies towards one in which executives are dominant. More and more countries are adopting the presidential style of...

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