Jan-Werner Müller

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...

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.

‘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...

They do not​ all look the same. But group them together and they clearly form a political family: Orbán, Erdoğan, Kaczyński, Trump, Modi, perhaps Netanyahu, Bolsonaro for sure. It would be a mistake to homogenise what are, after all, fundamentally different national trajectories: the causes of the rise of right-wing populism are not identical in every case. But there is a trend...

Like many participants in discussions about the future of the EU, Verhofstadt fails to make some basic distinctions between power, competences and sovereignty. The UK ceded many competences to Brussels, but it never gave up sovereignty; otherwise the Brexit referendum and the bitter outcome of leaving the club wouldn’t have been legally possible. Brexit will indeed return some legal competences to London, but it will mean less power for the UK in the world, as the clout of Theresa May’s ‘global Britain’ (an extreme example of fantasy politics) will be much less than what the UK in conjunction with 27 other countries could have achieved in trade, security and many other areas.