Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides of the US-Iran rivalry. For the US, Mosaddeq is a constant reminder that the dictatorial reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after 1953 came into being with a US intervention to overthrow the constitutionally elected Mosaddeq. The US would provide strong support for the Shah in the coming decades. Mosaddeq is someone who challenged Western powers to defend Iranian national interests. This alone should, a priori, afford him a place of honor in the Islamic Republic established by Ruhollah Khomeini after his return from exile in 1979. However, Mosaddeq’s nationalism was grounded on democratic secularist convictions that are at odds with the ideology of the Islamic Republic, which in recent years has shut down its already limited avenues of democratic participation within the system.

In their book “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954”, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew revisit Mosaddeq’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the ensuing tensions with the US and the UK, and the Western powers’ final decision to remove Mosaddeq. As the title of the book already suggests, the oil dispute was the obvious point of contention but the early 1950s events in Iran would not have unfolded as they did absent the weight of much larger conflicts.

Among them was the desire of many Third World nations to manage their natural resources. In the age of decolonization, newly independent countries found themselves in a paradoxical situation. For the first time, they enjoyed political sovereignty but were tied to their former metropoles by long-term contracts to exploit their natural resources. Iran was never formally colonized. Still, the original oil concession Britain obtained in 1901, with very disadvantageous terms for the Persian state, had much to do with Persia’s internal weakness at the time. This fragility had been exacerbated by imperial competition between Russia and Britain for influence over Persia.

The oil dispute in Iran in the early 1950s took place against the background of an increasingly intense Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In a time of strong ideological polarization, there was little place for a leader such as Mohammad Mosaddeq, who followed a policy he called “negative equilibrium” as he did not want to align Iran with either of the two blocs.

Mosaddeq became prime minister in 1951 after the Majles (the Iranian parliament) decided not to ratify the so-called Supplemental Agreement negotiated by the Iranian government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The British company, founded in 1909, had been exploiting Iran’s oil for four decades. The Supplemental Agreement fell short of what most Iranians demanded. The Majles appointed Mosaddeq as prime minister after his proposal to nationalize the Iranian oil industry was unanimously approved by the parliament.

When nationalization was implemented, British leaders became convinced that Mosaddeq would have to go for the oil dispute to be settled in terms favorable to London. In October 1951, after Iranian troops took over the Abadan oil refinery in southern Iran, the last AIOC personnel departed the country. Mossadegh had Iran’s oil infrastructure in his hands but faced the major challenge of keeping the oil industry running without foreign technicians. Finding export markets for the oil products was even more complicated as Britain imposed an oil boycott and sanctions on Iran.

Diverging from the British position at this point, Washington “sought a solution that would restart the oil industry and preserve Iran from communist control while not endangering U.S. interests in the region”, write Painter and Brew.[1] At the same time, the Shah did not dare make a move against Mosaddeq since both his political figure and the cause of nationalization were widely popular in Iran. US officials acted as mediators between Mosaddeq on the one hand, and the AIOC and Britain on the other. There was no common ground to be found, however. Mosaddeq argued that Iranian oil belonged to the country after nationalization. Consequently, he wanted international companies to buy Iranian oil at a price higher than that offered to other developing countries where Western companies controlled the oil industry.

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Click here to buy.

Mosaddeq was open to international companies returning to Iran to help operate the oil infrastructure as long as it was under Iranian control. British diplomats in Tehran sought to destabilize the Mosaddeq government and have it replaced with a new one that would be more amenable to British interests. The crisis escalated in October 1952, when Mosaddeq ordered the British embassy to close and its citizens to leave the country.

By the end of 1952, the US presented to Mosaddeq the so-called ‘package proposal’, which would have recognized Iran’s ownership of the oil industry but still envisaged Iran selling most of its oil to a consortium of international oil companies. The thorniest issue was compensation payments to the AIOC for Iran’s oil nationalization. As the authors note, the US and the UK insisted that “payment could not be limited to physical assets but also had to cover lost future profits.”[2] Mosaddeq rejected the ‘package proposal’. The reason was not that the Iranian prime minister failed to understand the specifics of the oil trade, as it has often been suggested. Rather, Painter and Brew argue, Mosaddeq understood very well the risks of being trapped in continuous compensation payments to AIOC if it agreed to the terms of the deal. Iran would have been in nominal control of its oil industry but, in truth, once again dependent on the British company’s compensation wishes.

Painter and Brew situate the US decision to consider the forceful removal of Mosaddeq around April 1953. With the British forced out of the country, the US operatives in Iran stepped in to mobilize the Iranian clerical and political groups that opposed Mosaddeq as well as the military. Bribes were a common means to achieve the desired result. Although there was no love lost between the Shah and Mosaddeq, the monarch had to be talked into the coup by his Western backers as he feared a failed move against Mosaddeq could backfire. The Shah finally signed two firmans (royal decrees): one dismissing Mosaddeq and the other one appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister. While street mobilizations headed by bribed local gang leaders took place in Tehran, significant sectors of the army carried out an operation against Mosaddeq on August 16, 1953.

The prime minister had been alerted of the impending coup and loyalist troops defended his residence and the army headquarters. After the failed coup attempt and the Shah’s departure from Iran, the Tudeh Party took to the streets and used the opportunity to call for a republic. The US ambassador to Iran convinced Mosaddeq to order the police and the army to repress the Tudeh protests. As Painter and Brew remark, “ironically, Mosaddeq’s decision to crack down on the Tudeh, which illustrated his anti-communism and his desire for U.S. support, helped seal his fate.”[3] On August 19, 1953, with the streets empty of Tudeh demonstrators, the army moved once again to overthrow Mosaddeq, who was not prepared for a second coup attempt. Soldiers took the ministerial offices and Radio Tehran, while Mosaddeq was finally captured. The former prime minister was later sentenced to three years of prison and would die under house arrest in 1967.

Although the Shah returned from his short exile and General Zahedi was installed as prime minister, the removal of Mosaddeq did not immediately solve the oil dispute. Nationalization was a popular cause in Iran, and Mosaddeq’s forced departure from the scene did not change this. Negotiations dragged on until late 1954 when the Iranian government agreed to pay limited compensations and retain a largely symbolic control of its oil industry. The US sweetened the deal with a military and economic aid package of $120 million.

“The Struggle for Iran” partly draws on documents about the US role in the coup first released in 2017 and is particularly strong in covering the economic dimension of the conflict. Painter and Brew’s work helps debunk some of the most common myths about the coup. Although anti-communism and opposition to nationalization were strongly connected, the authors explain Washington viewed nationalization as the biggest threat. Successful nationalization in Iran could have resulted in other Third World nations following the same path.

Painter and Brew also note that it is unfair to portray Mosaddeq as an irrational and stubborn leader who was unwilling to compromise. Orientalist tropes were rife in contemporary assessments of Mosaddeq by British and American leaders. Mosaddeq was described as “incapable of rational thought”, “dominated by emotions and prejudices,” or a “reckless fanatic”, among many other condescending and offensive remarks.

Painter and Brew argue that the British were never interested in finding a negotiated solution to the conflict and “used talks as a stalling tactic to buy time”[4] for Iran to experience the negative economic impact of Britain’s oil boycott and allow covert actions against Mosaddeq to run their course. In “The Struggle for Iran”, Painter and Brew importantly reflect how the tragedy of the coup was not only that the US and Britain removed a constitutional leader in a foreign country, but also that the intervention “halted the progress Iran had been making toward representative government. Autocracy was the outcome.”[5]

[1] David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954,” (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023), p. 64.

[2] Ibid., p. 129.

[3] Ibid., p. 170.

[4] Ibid., p. 208.

[5] Ibid, p. 212.

The court was unanimous in determining that neither Colorado – which had banned Trump from the ballot – nor any other US state is qualified to decide on the eligibility of a presidential candidate. Furthermore, a majority opinion coming from the five conservative judges – three of them nominated by Trump himself – determined that only the US Congress can disqualify an individual from running for office on the grounds of insurrection.

This majority opinion, the three progressive judges in the minority warned, risked closing the door to any possible future US Supreme Court decision to ban an insurrectionist from becoming President. An indictment against Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is still possible but the Supreme Court would probably not act on it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, media attention is focused on a judicial proceeding taking place in Münster, a city in the West of the country. At the core of the dispute, we find the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany or AfD) and the “Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz” (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), a domestic intelligence agency that has no clear counterpart in other European countries.

The agency’s role is to police anti-constitutional extremism. The BfV, however, has often been unable or unwilling to fulfill this vital task. From 2012 to 2018, when the president of the agency was Hans-Georg Maaßen, the AfD – founded in 2013 – grew more powerful and more radical. Maaßen recently founded a right-wing party called “Werteunion” (Values Union) that is willing to reach agreements with the AfD and embraces part of its agenda.

In 2021, the BfV determined that the AfD merited the category of “suspected case of far-right extremism.” The far-right party appealed against the decision and the case has dragged on until now. The hearing in Münster is the second and last appeal. The AfD is likely to lose the appeal, but that would not imply its illegalization. A win for the BfV would bring further rights to investigate and surveil the activities of the party.

Both Trump and the AfD have been following the same legal strategy when forced to appear before the courts: delay, delay, and, if possible, delay even further. CNN reporter Stephen Collinson notes that Trump “appears to want to also forestall jury verdicts until after the general election – likely because polls have suggested some voters would be less keen to vote for him if he is a convicted felon.”

Meanwhile, the AfD wants to prevent for as long as possible a final decision on whether the BfV was right in qualifying the AfD as a “suspected case of far-right extremism.” This could negatively affect its electoral performance. There are elections to the European Parliament in June and regional elections in the three Eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September. In the European elections, the AfD is polling second with around 20% of the vote, whereas in the three Eastern states, the radical right is polling first with over 30% of the vote.

After the September elections in three of the five eastern states, broad coalitions, or at least tacit alliances from the left to the center-right will be needed to avoid that the far-right reaches its highest level of power in Germany since the end of the Second World War. In this sense, it is very worrying that the leader of the center-right CDU, Friederich Merz, continues to equate the left-wing party “Die Linke” with the AfD, announcing it will reach agreements with neither of these forces. Unless the pre-election polls are wrong by a huge margin, the CDU will soon be forced to pick a side.

By delaying the legal process in Münster, the AfD does not only seek to preserve the pretense that it is just as legitimate as any other German party – if not more, according to their discourse. The far-right party also seeks to prevent the BfV from taking the next step and qualify the whole AfD as “proven right-wing extremist”. The regional AfD groups in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt are already classified in this category.

DW News Video: “Why is Germany’s far-right AfD party so successful? | DW News”

The AfD has close ties with openly neo-Nazi groups and some of its leaders, especially in eastern Germany, have adopted a language very often reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Björn Höcke, the regional leader of the AfD in Thuringia and powerbroker within the national leadership of the party, has used multiple times the expression “Everything for Germany”, the motto of the SA, a paramilitary Nazi group that was key in Hitler’s power takeover in 1933.

Höcke has said that Africans have a biological reproduction strategy different from Europeans or, about Adolf Hitler, that “there is no black and white in history.” The AfD often employs terms such as “Volkstod” (death of the German nation), as well as “Stimmvieh” (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties.

The AfD has often fantasized about the possibilities of “remigration”, a common term among far-right European groups. The concept refers to the deportation of people with a migration background and has been popularized by Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi. The Austrian ideologist is banned from entering the US because he accepted money from – and probably met – Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist. In 2019, Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in his attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. On March 19 it became known that Sellner had been banned from entering Germany.

The concept of “remigration” is not a new one, and Höcke and other members of the most radical current within the AfD have been toying with the idea for years. However, many Germans became aware of how specific the concept of “remigration” has become in recent times when it was revealed that Sellner had presented his racist theses in a secret meeting in Potsdam organized by two businessmen. The meeting was attended by high-ranking AfD cadres – among them Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Sachsen-Anhalt – and some low-ranking members of the center-right CDU, who were later forced to resign. According to research by the independent investigative platform Correctiv, Sellner proposed that a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens.

The Correctiv revelations triggered a wave of massive demonstrations in Germany against the far-right. They also renewed the discussion on whether a process should be started to ban the AfD. A call for a party ban can be issued by the German government, the parliament, or the Bundesrat, an institution where the different German states are represented. The final decision would always be in the hands of the German Constitutional Court. The process could take years and there would be no guarantee of success. The openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was deemed too politically irrelevant to be banned when the Constitutional Court decided on the matter in 2017.

There is no consensus between the different German parties on whether an attempt to ban the AfD is the path to follow. The differences of opinion are also found within the parties. Whereas a parliamentarian for the center-right CDU was one of the early proponents of banning the AfD, the leader of the party Frederich Merz is against this. The neoliberal FDP is generally against the ban. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz have not taken a clear position, as views diverge on the issue. Within the Greens, banning the AfD would probably find wider acceptance. Every case is different, but the governing coalition in the northwestern state of Bremen, where the Social Democrats lead a government with the Greens and the left-wing “Die Linke”, has asked for an AfD ban.

German society appears to be equally divided on the appropriateness of initiating a process to illegalize the AfD. According to a poll from February 2024, 51 percent of the population was against starting such a process and 37 percent was in favor. The percentages change significantly when citizens are asked whether the AfD should continue to receive public funding as the other parties do. 41 percent are in favor while 48 percent want public funds not to reach the AfD.

On February 23, I attended a counterdemonstration against Martin Sellner, the neo-Nazi who has been pushing for “remigration”, when he visited the city of Chemnitz, in the state of Saxony. The protest was organized by “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, a group that has been mobilizing against the far-right for fourteen years in a city that represents a radical right stronghold.

Before the march against Sellner, I discussed with two activists of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement their views on whether a procedure should be started to ban the AfD. They told me this had been a major issue of discussion within their group in recent times. Although more members of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement are in favor of an AfD ban than against it, there is no clear majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a ban, the activists I interviewed remarked, is the significant consequences this would have for the AfD’s financial situation, which could be forced to reduce its activities. At the same time, they fear that AfD followers could become more violent if a ban was implemented. They did not discard that something similar to the assault on the Capitol in Washington could take place in Germany if the AfD was banned. The open question for the members of “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, as for many others, is: If you ban the AfD, what about the situation afterward? A poll from February 2024 shows that only 43 percent of those who plan to vote for the AfD would be willing to consider voting for another party in the coming years.

It is certainly urgent to discuss whether Trump should be able to run again for president, or whether the AfD should be banned by the Constitutional Court. But the key issue is that broad sectors of both German and US society – a far stronger one in the latter case – have radicalized themselves to the extent that they are ready to use the instruments of democracy to undermine its foundations. This does not mean that every Trump or AfD voter is anti-democratic, and part of these voters can still be convinced to move to less extremist positions. But a considerable percentage of them, and maybe even the majority, have crossed the point of no return.

Democracy is not only destroyed through authoritarian power grabs or military coups but also through free and fair elections. While Germany has known this for a long time due to its historical trajectory, this does not necessarily imply that it is better prepared than other countries. The poor performance of the BfV in protecting the Constitution is proof of this.

While democratic systems offer many opportunities that right-wing radicals can exploit, they are not defenseless and have mechanisms to combat radicalism. If all democratic forces in Germany take the right-wing threat seriously – and here the center-right CDU needs to play a responsible role – and focus on what unites them, the AfD can still be kept away from the main centers of power in the country. It might be too late for the US, where Biden has recovered some ground in the polls in recent months but lags behind Trump in the states that will probably decide the November election. Germany, meanwhile, still has a strong anti-AfD majority but should not be too complacent.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an improvement, the US embassy stepped in and calmed restless audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. “We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our special relationship,” posted the US embassy in London in January 2024. The embassy noted that “the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”

There was never a risk of a diplomatic conflict, of course, because two countries that agree to jointly strike Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen continuously for almost two months are not likely to create a tempest in a teapot. The long-running dynamics in the US-UK relationship that help explain their joint strikes in Yemen, not frivolous discussions on tea, are part of Tom Stevenson’s latest book, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony”, a collection of articles published by the author over the years for the London Review of Books (LRB).

Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, discusses Yemen in the book concerning the US-UK support for the bombing operations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have carried out in Yemen for seven years. Stevenson obviously could not have had the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis in mind when his book went to press at some point in mid-2023. Still, his assertion that, within the British establishment, “nostalgia for global influence has produced a compulsive Atlanticism and a reflexive resort to military actions that the UK is near incapable of actually performing”[1], could also serve as a clever analysis of the most recent events.

Facing its decline as a global power, “the dominant trend of late twentieth-century Britain was not resurgence as an independent power but a new surrogacy” to the US.[2] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed “end of history”, following Washington’s lead seemed more self-evident than ever. This was the case even if it implied invading Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire:British Illusions and American Hegemony. Click here.

Tony Blair was perfectly content to become George Bush’s junior partner. He was not alone among European leaders in embracing America’s turbocharged bellicosity after the 9/11 attacks. In Spain, for instance, Prime Minister José María Aznar from the center-right Popular Party was only too happy to meet Bush and Blair in the Portuguese Azores archipelago four days before the invasion to support the US-UK alliance. The Spanish press referred to Bush, Blair, and Aznar as “El Trío de las Azores” (The Azores Trio) and Spain sent 2,600 soldiers to Iraq between August 2003 and May 2004. Eleven of them would die there.

The Spanish participation in the Iraq War ended after the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who had campaigned on the promise to withdraw the troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in the national elections of March 14, 2004. The Iraq War was key in Zapatero’s victory. It will soon be exactly two decades since March 11, 2004, when Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks in commuter trains that killed 193 people.

Aznar’s government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the attacks despite knowing early on that everything pointed at al-Qaeda. The terrorist group had attacked Spain due to its involvement in the Iraq War. When the truth was eventually revealed right before election day, Zapatero’s Socialist party won a surprise victory. In an interview three years ago, Aznar continued to defend that his decision to join the conflict in Iraq “represented Spain’s most important role in many decades.”

In the early 2000s, the UK was not the only country with a vanished empire overplaying its relevance at the international level by seeking to stay close to the US. Whereas Spain soon shifted course, the UK has tied its future even closer to the US after Brexit, notes Stevenson. One of the examples the author provides is the trend in British weapons acquisitions. During the last twenty years, the UK has almost uninterruptedly procured more than 50% of its weapons imports from the US. However, this has recently only intensified. The data offered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that in the period from 2020 to 2022, the last year for which data is available, weapons imports from the US represented 95% of British total expenditure on weapons produced abroad.

One of Stevenson’s main arguments regarding the US-UK relationship is that London has often been conducting a foreign and defense policy that makes little sense in terms of promoting British national interests. For instance, Stevenson points to Britain’s commitment to deploy patrol vessels and a frigate in the Indo-Pacific area with the vague objective of “projecting power.” This is the kind of investment London has often committed to despite it more likely benefiting the US than the UK, if at all.

In this sense, the case of the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis is exceptional. If we accept, for the sake of the argument, that US-UK attacks against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen are the most effective way to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, then it would be the UK that would profit more from this. The economic interests of the US are hardly directly affected by the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, whereas the Suez Channel is a key trade artery for cargo either coming from or going to Europe.

Some exceptions notwithstanding, there is a clear general dynamic of British subordination to Washington. As Stevenson argues, this can also be observed in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that comprises the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Whereas the US National Security Agency (NSA) automatically receives the feed from intelligence stations in other countries, the NSA “sometimes withholds what it knows.”[3]

Stevenson discusses the changing character of war from the perspective of the US and the UK. The author is deeply knowledgeable of varied topics such as the overuse of economic sanctions by Western countries, the details of nuclear competition, or the militarization of space, with satellites and space missions becoming increasingly important.

But Stevenson often pushes too far the book’s generally convincing main argument, that Britain has become subservient to American power. For instance, he writes that “one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all itself.”[4] “Someone Else’s Empire” also tends to overplay the influence of Washington, and by implication London, in the Middle East. Writing about the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Stevenson argues that “since the West installed the monarchs, and its behavior is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as colonial.”[5]

It is difficult to see how a colonial power would not have replaced Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman following his implication in the murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Bin Salman’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi was a huge embarrassment for his Western supporters. Neither would a colonial power have allowed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose a blockade on Qatar, a Western ally, between 2017 and 2021.

Stevenson is sometimes hyperbolic about US power. Still, it is true that, for all talk of American decline, “the shadow of American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.”[6] The UK has been enveloped by this shadow while also contributing to making it larger. From Iraq to Yemen and, once the controversy around Britain’s national drink has been happily resolved, over a cup of tea.

[1] Tom Stevenson, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony” (London: Verso, 2023), p. 4.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3] Ibid., p. 55.

[4] Ibid., p. 234.

[5] Ibid., p. 160.

[6] Ibid., p. 232.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A decade of revolt.” From Tunis to New York, Madrid, Hong Kong, Tehran, or Khartoum, the past decade was marked by protests, demonstrations, and uprisings. If the notion that history is an almost continuous march towards the progress of human kind (a popular view among Western intellectuals in the 1990s such as Francis Fukuyama) still had some currency, the last decade should have put this idea to rest.

That is because, in hindsight, it is difficult to be optimistic about the results of this decade of revolt. This is a feeling shared by many and examined in the book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” The author, Vincent Bevins, is a US journalist who was highly praised for his previous book, “The Jakarta Method”, which discusses the US support for human rights abuses during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism.

The question at the core of Bevins’ second book, “If We Burn”, is a very straightforward one: “How is it possible that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for?”[1] With the temporal focus set on the 2010s, but having a global geographical scope, Bevins conducted around 200 interviews in twelve different countries with activists, politicians, and other people with key insights on this decade of mass protests.

“If We Burn” discusses many different cases of protests during the last decade, but special attention is paid to Egypt, Hong Kong, Chile, and, above all, Brazil. This is no coincidence because, from 2010 to 2016, Bevins worked as a foreign correspondent based in São Paulo for the Los Angeles Times. The chapters on Brazil are a pleasure to read, but the strong focus on the country is somewhat disproportionate when considering that the book is presented as a work of global history. An alternative approach would have been to focus on a smaller number of cases, perhaps narrowing it down to a few Global South countries.

Bevins appears a bit uncomfortable when moving away from the countries he knows best. For instance, when he refers to the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, Bevins writes that after coming to power in 2003, Turkey’s ruling party AKP embraced “more conservative Muslims and small business owners (as long as they were ethnic Turks).”[2] This is actually not the case, as the AKP has historically outperformed the main opposition party CHP – which has a much stronger Turkish nationalist discourse – in the Kurdish areas of Turkey.

Notwithstanding this inaccuracy, and the fact that the geographical scope of the book often works against the final result, there is much to be praised in “If We Burn.” A key success of the book is that Bevins strikes the perfect balance between critically examining what protests achieved in terms of tangible results and remaining deeply respectful of the protesters and their sacrifices. Tunisian President Kais Saied might have entrenched himself in power after 2021 and established a dictatorship similar to the one headed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, brought down by mass demonstrations in 2011. But this does not take anything away from the personal stories of people like Jawaher Channa, a university student who joined the protests against Ben Ali in December 2010. Jawaher explains to Bevins how she was tortured for her political activity in a Tunisian police station before the regime collapsed.

Bevins’ reporting allows us to see how relatively unknown people shaped and were shaped by this decade of protests. Take the example of Mayara Vivian, who was a teenager when in 2005 she joined the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) that demanded free transportation in Brazil. In 2013, Fernando Haddad, the mayor of São Paulo from the center-left Workers’ Party, announced a rise in the price of public urban transportation. Mayara and her colleagues at MPL mobilized the streets against Haddad’s decision, forcing the mayor to cancel the price increase. Mayara and other members of the MPL were even granted a meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, also from the Workers’ Party, who was trying to understand the growing discontentment with her government.

Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Click here.

The likes of Mayara would soon be replaced in the streets by right and far-right-wing groups. These protesters, in conjunction with sympathetic judges like Sergio Moro and media conglomerates like Grupo Globo, pushed for Rousseff’s impeachment on flimsy charges. Rousseff was ousted in 2016. Two years later,  Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate, was defeated in the presidential election by far-right and Brazilian dictatorship apologist Jair Bolsonaro. Mayara, then living in Santiago de Chile, wept while lamenting the election loss of the man she had opposed in the streets, explains Bevins.

Mayara soon joined the protests against the conservative Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who was forced to accept the election of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. After two referendums, Chile still does not have a new constitution. What is has, though, is Gabriel Boric as president, someone who became famous in the student protests of the early 2010s. Boric represents like no other the difficult relationship between activism and institutional politics, which is often manifested in the tensions between protesters who want to use their leverage to gain political concessions and those who prefer to keep pushing for maximalist objectives. A congressman since 2014, Boric was seen as a traitor by many protestors when he agreed to a constitutional referendum as a way to resolve the conflict with the Piñera government in 2019. After he was elected president of Chile in 2022, many of those who perceived Boric as too compromising in 2019 saw his decision in a more positive light, observes Bevins.

A key topic covered in “If We Burn” is the importance of traditional and social media in defining the protests of the last decade. Their relevance was accentuated by the fact that these were mostly de-centralized protest movements with no clear spokespersons. The protesters who had the opportunity to present their views to the traditional media were not necessarily those who put their bodies on the line when it mattered or were more representative of the whole movement. Instead, those who were interviewed were usually the more Western-media friendly. Writing about the protests in Egypt that led to the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Bevins graphically explains that despite how bravely street youth had fought against the police, Western journalists “were not likely to grab a teenager who lived on the street, addicted to drugs.”[3] Equally relevant was managing the narrative in social media platforms. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, open fights emerged over who controlled the movement’s social media accounts.

“If We Burn” does not provide any conclusive answer on why so many protest movements failed to achieve their objectives during the 2010s, and this only makes the book better. Anyone claiming to have a perfect explanation for such a complex puzzle should be approached with caution. Still, Bevins presents reflections that help us make sense of what he calls ‘the mass protest decade.’ One of them is that horizontally structured, leaderless mass protests are “fundamentally illegible.”[4] As Bevins sees it, “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”, with the ensuing danger that the protesters’ goals will be misrepresented. [5]

Strongly connected to this idea is the fact that successful protests will lead to a momentary political vacuum. Influenced by the experience of Brazil, where reactionary forces took the streets against Rousseff using some of the protest repertoire of the MPL movement advocating for free public transportation, Bevins notes that “unclaimed political power exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on anyone who might want it.”[6] Therefore, he argues, a protest movement that believes in creating a better society needs to be ready to enter the political vacuum that will emerge if successful.

In the absence of a plan, someone else will step in, most likely with a very different agenda but equally relying on the power of street mobilizations. The greatest merit of Bevins’ latest book is that it leaves a deep imprint on the reader and will serve as a prompt for many fruitful discussions. We cannot know which kind of retrospective articles will be published by the end of 2029. Still, it is reasonable to assume that protests in the 2020s are likely to play at least as important a role as they did in the previous decade.

[1] Vincent Bevins, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., pp. 108-109.

[3] Ibid., p. 68.

[4] Ibid., p. 276.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 263.

Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The war in Ukraine is being fought at two different levels. The first one is the military confrontation, where developments are measured in numbers of casualties, kill ratios, and square kilometers changing hands from one belligerent to the other. The second level of the conflict is economic, and here the key aspects are GDP growth, the value of foreign assets seized or companies under sanctions, and the prices of gas and oil. Needless to say, both levels are deeply interconnected. However, for the purpose of this review, it might be useful to look at them separately at first.

The military situation in Ukraine can be best described as one of stalemate when looking at the conflict maps. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, admitted as much on November 2023, when he said that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” During 2023, the frontline barely moved and, on the few occasions it did, the changes came at the cost of enormous human losses. The battle of Bakhmut, which continues around the city after Bakhmut itself was taken by Russian troops following almost seven months of fighting, is paradigmatic of these dynamics.

If the war is slightly tilting in any direction, the current situation would suggest it is in Russia’s favor. Some analysts point out that, while the conflict maps show stability, Ukraine might be slowly exhausting its limited supplies of soldiers, weapons, and ammunition. The recent struggles in both Washington and Brussels to approve supplies for the Ukrainian armed forces lend further credibility to this thesis.

On the economic front of the war, which has pitted Russia against Ukraine and its Western supporters, it is similarly difficult to reach any definitive conclusion on who is coming out on top. What is clear is that neither the West nor Russia achieved their maximalist goals in the economic struggle. Russia did not financially collapse in the face of incremental Western sanctions and Europe had less trouble than expected to surmount last winter’s energy crisis despite Moscow’s resort to cutting gas supplies.

This economic dimension of the war, which in recently published books has received less attention than the military and political dynamics of the conflict, sits at the core of “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West”, authored by political risk analyst and consultant Maximilian Hess. Hess does not look for winners or losers in the current economic war but provides a broad context to understand what is at stake on the economic front. Hess devotes half of his book to the prelude of the current military and economic war, covering the period that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the establishment of two Russia-supported separatist republics in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West. London: Hurst, 2023. Click Here.

After the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in the context of the Euromaidan protests in 2014, his successor Petro Poroshenko took a more pro-European course. Changes in geopolitical orientation notwithstanding, corruption continued to be rife. As Hess notes, “the revolution and subsequent conflict recast the networks of Ukraine’s politicians and oligarchs” but “failed to break the system that enabled them to rotate in and out of business and politics.”[1] Meanwhile, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for its expansionist behavior but Western European countries limited their extent. In 2017, the Trump administration would also tone down US sanctions.

Germany, with its heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for industries and households, was the main European proponent of retaining economic ties with Russia after the annexation of Crimea. Hess is very critical of Germany’s political leaders during that period. He argues that Berlin pursued economic interdependence but failed to realize “Putin did not oversee a democracy or have to answer to economic pressures from his own business community” after Putin disciplined unruly oligarchs.[2] With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that Europe’s energy dependency on Russia was an enormous mistake.

Even so, countries like Germany were probably not betting so much on the liberal ideal of trade driving cooperation in the political realm but rather on the high loss of revenue Russia would suffer if it stopped selling gas to Europe. After all, the Soviet Union had been a reliable provider of gas to West Germany during the Cold War. Back in 2019, German economist Michael Wohlgemuth argued that Moscow was more dependent on its gas exports to Germany than Germany was on Russian deliveries. This certainly did not stop Putin from attacking Ukraine, but the numbers supported Wohlgemuth’s analysis. In 2021, Russia exported 203 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas via pipeline. Among these exports, almost 146 billion cubic meters (bcm) were going to EU customers and around half of this volume, to Germany.

Hess explains that, although the sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the annexation of Crimea had very limited effects, the Kremlin’s reaction to them “asserted firmer control over Russia’s economy and increasingly sought to undermine the West’s influence both at home and abroad.”[3] As part of these efforts to increase its global geoeconomic power, Russia looked to Latin America (especially Venezuela), Africa and Asia.

But the most important partnership was arguably the one established with Saudi Arabia, the only oil exporter bigger than Russia. Riyadh and Moscow had engaged in an oil price war during the oil glut at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, by 2022 Putin had secured an alliance with the Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman to reduce oil production and ensure higher and more stable oil prices. Thus, Putin felt that Russia’s energy flank “was secure ahead of the all-out economic war that would ensue when its forces attacked”, explains Hess.[4] Russia’s total gas exports fell around 50 percent in 2022, and a further 25 percent in 2023. Although gas prices in 2022 reached historical heights and helped Russia offset the effects of the loss in export volume, in 2023 the prices returned to levels similar to those in 2019 or 2020. It has been oil, not gas, that has sustained Russia throughout the war.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has often been selling its oil at a discount price. The reasons behind this are the limited number of countries willing to buy Russian oil and the oil price cap imposed by the G-7 and the European Union. The oil price cap prohibits G-7 or EU-based finance companies from providing services to Russian oil companies selling their oil above $60 a barrel. Still, China and India, the latter moving in 2022 from barely buying Russian oil to being the second largest importer after Beijing, have kept Russia’s oil exports afloat.   

Hess identifies some key weaknesses in Russia’s position in the economic war against the West. Moscow underestimated the willingness of the EU to stop buying Russian oil and introduce major reductions in its gas imports. Also important, Russia has suffered greatly from the power of the dollar, which allows US sanctions to have a much greater impact than the US share of the global economy would allow. Too often missing in Hess’ “Economic War”, however, is the fact that the West’s economic war against Russia is not supposed to be an end in itself but a means to achieve political results, which so far have been lacking.

A political success would arguably mean either a significant weakening of Russia’s war effort or forcing Moscow to negotiate an end to the war on favorable terms for Ukraine. In one example among many, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced in December 2022, when the oil price cap on Russia was introduced, that “the decision will hit Russia’s revenues even harder and reduce its ability to wage war in Ukraine.”

Hess fails to engage with literature that adopts a critical approach towards the effectiveness of sanctions. To understand why sanctions on Russia have had only modest effects on the country’s war capabilities, it useful to search elsewhere. Nicholas Mulder, the author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War”, explained in an op-ed that “both the deterrent and the compellent effect of US sanctions have fallen dramatically amid rampant overuse.” Writing about the current sanctions against Russia, Mulder has noted that “the lure of cheap raw materials from Russia is spurring sanctions avoidance on a previously unseen scale.”

The use of economic sanctions in modern times, from post-revolutionary Cuba to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has consistently impoverished civilian populations but has a poor record in forcing policy changes. Sanctions, as seen in the case of Iran, have also incentivized circumvention tools that are certainly suboptimal but keep sanctioned regimes going, especially when the state has a reliable coercive apparatus to deal with protests over decreasing living standards. Sanctioned states also tend to cooperate with each other. Iran, with a long experience in dealing with sanctions, has provided drones and drone components to Russia for its use against Ukraine.

Hess concludes his book by noting that “Russia cannot win the economic war with the tools at its disposal. The West, however, could still lose it.”[5] The important question, nonetheless, is whether Russia needs to win the economic war to achieve military successes in Ukraine, or, at least, to prevent Ukraine from recovering territory. Everything seems to indicate that not losing the economic war is more than enough for Russia to fulfill limited military objectives and could even be sufficient to make major advances if external material support for Ukraine decreases. Soon before the EU passed the 12^th package of sanctions against Russia in December 2023, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published a report on the effects of the oil price cap on Russia. The report noted that “the impact of the price cap has been limited due to inadequate monitoring and enforcement.” It added that “the sanctions have not reduced the Kremlin’s resolve for war.”

Hess’ “Economic War” offers the lay reader an accessible but detailed account of the economic war between Russia and the West. The book is particularly valuable for its long-time approach, which allows Hess to carefully explore connections between the post-2014 and post-2022 contexts. “Economic War”, however, would have benefited from a stronger focus on the close relation between the economic war and the political/military war and a more skeptical approach to the power of sanctions to alter state behavior.

[1] Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 20.

[2] Ibid., p. 62.

[3] Ibid., p. 2.

[4] Ibid., p. 127.

[5] Ibid., p. 201.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – What does it mean to be European? This is a complex but legitimate question. Still, one is unlikely to find an answer to the conundrum in the numerous billboards paid for by the EU Commission in Munich and many other European cities under the motto “You are Europe”.

There are four different models of EU-funded billboards. They all put focus on three different concepts, which give us a total of twelve ideas: freedom, peace, energy independence, democracy, diversity, climate protection, stability, respect, green transition, unity, security, and renewable energy. In every model of the billboard, there is a different single individual in the picture alongside a reference to renewable energies, with an electric car, solar panels, and a windmill appearing.

Billboard at Giselastrasse Subway Station. Munich, November 21, 2023.

By examining the billboards, we understand that the message the EU tries to convey is that the EU is a value-based community. The promotional site of this new campaign calls Europeans to “stand up for our values, to protect your and your family’s future, the climate and the planet.” But one does not need to do more than search online “EU billboard” to see how fragile these values can be. Because the billboards that are catching the headlines in Europe are not the ones promoted by the EU Commission but those found in one particular EU country, Hungary, and paid by Fidesz, the political party of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

These billboards depict President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen alongside Alex Soros, the son of the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, under the slogan “Let’s not dance to their tunes”. This is not a first for Orban’s party, as they had already been responsible for similar billboards in 2019 featuring von der Leyen’s predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros.

In the recently published book “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project”, Hans Kundnani, an associate fellow at Chatham House, examines from a critical perspective how the EU has come to define itself and its values. The EU is often understood as a project united by the rejection of nationalism, which led to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This discourse can be found in, for instance, the address to the European Parliament in November 2018 by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel said that “nationalism and egoism must never have a chance to flourish again in Europe. Tolerance and solidarity are our future.” Kundnani begs to differ and presents a more complex picture of the EU, writing that “we should think of the EU as an expression of regionalism, which we should in turn think of as being analogous to nationalism—something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale.”[1]

Internal borders and nationalistic competition between EU countries might have lost importance, but the borders and adversarial relations between Europe and the rest of the world remain there and have even hardened. It is difficult to disagree with Kundnani when we see how, despite their internal differences on the topic, EU countries are currently discussing how to further cooperate to establish harsher EU policies towards migrants and asylum seekers.

Kundnani’s key idea, namely that the EU represents a form of regional nationalism, helps understand the current rise of the European far-right from a different perspective. Increasingly, “the far right in Europe does not simply speak on behalf of the nation against Europe, but also on behalf of Europe”, notes Kundnani. Contrary to what many would think, the far-right can also be pro-European in its own specific way.

Hans Kundnani Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project. Hurst, 2023. Click here.

On December 3, European far-right parties held an international meeting in Florence, Italy, to co-ordinate in advance of the European elections to be held in June 2024. During the meeting, Reuters reports, “Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, won applause speaking in Italian and saying that Europe cannot become a “5-star hostel for Africa”, and linking mass immigration to violence and crime.”[2]

Instead of hiding his Italian family background, which would have made sense from a French ultra-nationalist perspective, Bardella used his Italian language skills to appeal to his audience in Florence and demonize the non-European as violent and criminal. Inner European borders lose part of their importance when the main frame of reference is civilizational. And this is increasingly the case. European far-right parties share a belief in racist doctrines such as the ‘Replacement Theory’, which posits that white people around the world are being replaced by nonwhite people.

Kundnani argues that the regional nationalism we currently find in the EU is largely the result of its history. At the time the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), two of the six founding members – Belgium and France – still had colonies. This is what Kundnani calls the EU’s “original sin”.[3]

More important than that, however, is probably the way the EEC and its successor organizations, the European Community and the European Union, failed to come to terms during the following decades with this legacy of European colonialism and violence. Consequently, “the emerging official narrative of the EU was based on the internal lessons of European history, i.e. what Europeans had done to each other, but not the external lessons, i.e. what Europeans had done to rest of world—in particular colonialism.”[4]

There was an important sense, however, in which European regionalism could promote civic values. Kundnani mentions how many who described themselves as pro-Europeans saw “the social market economy and the welfare state as a more humane alternative to a more brutal American form of capitalism.”[5] Such an understanding of being European, which Kundnani names ‘civic regionalism’, reached its high-water mark in the decades following the Second World War. It became increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of the neo-liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s and the austerity measures imposed by the EU after 2008 during the Eurozone crisis.

This neo-liberal turn, and the increasing role of the EU in setting economic policies with little democratic oversight, argues Kundnani, was partly responsible for the rise in Euroscepticism. If the Eurozone crisis split the EU in terms of the better-off North versus the struggling South, the sudden increase in the arrivals of migrants and asylum seekers to Europe in 2015 led to important divergences between a more welcoming West and a closed-doors East. This double split, according to Kundnani, undermined the EU’s self-confidence. During the last years, the civic regionalism of the social market economy and the welfare state has receded even further in favor of a more exclusionary understanding of what it means to be European.

In this context, “centrists began to adopt far-right tropes and integrate them into the EU itself”.[6] Examples of this dynamic are abundant. After becoming President of the European Commission, the center-right politician Ursula von der Leyen announced the creation of a Commission Vice-Presidency for protecting ‘the European way of life’, which would include responsibility for topics such as migration. Von der Leyen, facing outrage, substituted the word ‘protecting’ for ‘promoting’, but little else changed. Meanwhile, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, from the Socialist Spanish Party, pronounced a speech in 2022 where he defined Europe as a garden and added that “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”.

There are two significant weaknesses in “Eurowhiteness”. The first one is related to the very title of the book. Kundnani explains that “Eurowhiteness” is an “ethnic/cultural version of European identity”[7] but does not develop the concept extensively enough to justify why the term has such prominence in the title. The second shortcoming is the lack of a proper concluding chapter in the book. The last chapter deals with Brexit instead of pointing out some key ideas on the way forward if we want an EU that strengthens civic regionalism.

Catherine de Vries, the dean of international affairs at Bocconi University, has recently published an op-ed for the Financial Times that quotes Kundnani’s work and offers some significant reflections regarding the problems identified in “Eurowhiteness”. Reflecting on the recent electoral victory in the Netherlands of the far-right Party for Freedom (VVP) led by Geert Wilders, de Vries explains that we would be mistaken if we seek to understand the success of the European far-right only through its anti-migration rhetoric.

De Vries notes that “research has shown that cuts to public services play an important role in explaining the rise of the far right”. “Concerns about reduced access to public services”, she adds, “leads people to question the extent to which their government cares about people like them. Waning public services may also fuel immigration concerns out of fear of more congestion and overcrowding.”[8]

Kundnani’s book represents a major contribution to a better understanding of how nationalism, far from fading away with the emergence of a European Union that now covers most of Western and Central Europe, has adopted a new shape in the form of exclusivist European nationalism. “Eurowhiteness” is not without its faults, but it offers an intellectually stimulating and policy-relevant departing point to any discussion about the future of Europe.

[1] Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 3.

[2] Armellini, Alvise. “Far Right Parties Eye Gains in next Year’s EU Parliament Elections.” Reuters, December 3, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-parties-eye-gains-next-years-eu-parliament-elections-2023-12-03/.

[3] Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, p. 75.

[4] Ibid., p. 94.

[5] Ibid., p. 84.

[6] Ibid., p. 126.

[7] Ibid., p. 6.

[8] De Vries, Catherine. “Migration Crackdowns Won’t Help Europe’s Moderate Right.” Financial Times, December 4, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/6b3e2ee0-189e-47f4-95df-375d79dd6266.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment;  Feature) – The book starts with a heist that represented “an astonishing covert achievement that decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy.”[1] At least, this is what Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, both journalists at The Jerusalem Post, claim in “Target Tehran”, their recently published book on Israel’s shadow war with Iran. As in so many other passages of “Target Tehran”, the authors show here a weakness for hyperbolic statements.

The “astonishing covert achievement” they refer to is Mossad’s operation to steal documents related to Iran’s nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran in January 2018. It was certainly astonishing that Israel managed to access some of Iran’s most sensitive information. However, there was nothing truly surprising in the documents obtained during the heist. And yet, they were presented as such by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his well-rehearsed (fifteen times, according to the authors) televised speech in April 2018.

Netanyahu accused Iran of having lied and continuing to lie about its nuclear program after the conclusion in July 2015 of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the JCPOA. On the first point, everyone involved in the negotiation of the JCPOA knew perfectly well that Iran had been carrying out a covert nuclear program. This is why a nuclear agreement was needed in the first place. On the second point, Netanyahu did not present any convincing argument to contradict the IAEA’s assessments that Iran was complying with the JCPOA at that time.

As for the fact that the document heist “decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy,” this is even more of an over-statement. The normalization process between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, which culminated in the Abraham Accords in September 2020 and had the external support of Saudi Arabia, had been in the making for years, as the authors themselves explain. And yes, Netanyahu’s speech might have affected U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, but the Israeli prime minister was pushing at an open door as Trump had been referring to the JCPOA already on the campaign trail as “the worst deal ever.”

Target Tehran: By Ilan Evyatar, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonathan Davis

Far more interesting than the details of how Israel convinced a U.S. President that needed little convincing to abandon the JCPOA are Israeli long-running efforts to first prevent the nuclear agreement and second, to complicate a return to it after Joseph Biden succeeded Trump. The main narrative thread in “Target Tehran” is Israel’s ingenuity in countering Iran through targeted assassinations, cyberwarfare, and diplomacy with the Arab world. But a more critical approach to the book allows us to read it as the story of how Israel consistently undermined U.S. diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions with Iran.

While negotiations on the nuclear file were ongoing between 2013 and 2015, Israel continued to carry out sabotage efforts against the Iranian nuclear program, former Mossad director Tamir Pardo told the authors. This covert action was simply the secret side of Netanyahu’s very open campaign against the JCPOA, which brought him to criticize Obama’s Iran policy in an address to a Republican-dominated Congress in March 2015.

There are more recent examples of similar dynamics. In May 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had accessed internal IAEA documents and used them to thwart the international agency’s fact-finding efforts. Again, the documents were from the period prior to the signing of the JCPOA, but Israel’s intentions were clear. The Israeli government leaked this information to the WSJ, first obtained in the 2018 heist, during an intense phase of diplomatic efforts to revive the JCPOA.

In “Target Tehran”, we get to know the backstory of this leak. Naftali Bennett, who was Israel’s prime minister at the time, told the authors that “he picked that particular moment to release the intelligence about Iran’s hack of the IAEA because he thought it could push the U.S. away from the nuclear negotiations.”[2] With friends like these, who needs enemies?

One of the biggest weaknesses of “Target Tehran” is that, while it extensively describes how Iran has been fighting back against Israel in the context of the shadow war between both countries, it never really seeks to understand Iranian behavior. For instance, if we are puzzled by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against the production of nuclear weapons, we only need to read the explanation that Harold Rhode, a former American intelligence analyst, gave to the authors in an interview.

Rhode, most probably without an ounce of self-reflection on how he essentializes a whole culture, told the authors that the Persian culture has “perfected the art of deception” and that the Iranians “attach little meaning to words.” The targeted assassination in May 2022 of Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, a colonel in the Revolutionary Guard who had reportedly planned attacks against Israeli targets, is impersonally described by the authors as “a strike at the head of the octopus.”

Compare this with the bizarre description of former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who was “a prickly pear, tough on the outside like the thorny shell of the fruit and soft on the inside like its sweet flesh.”[3] Any claim to a minimum of objectivity is left behind when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi are introduced to us as “socially liberal autocrats,”[4] a concept you will not find in any political science textbook for good reason. More accurate is the description of John Bolton as an “ultra-hard-liner” and the former national security adviser seems to be content with it if we are to judge from his positive review of “Target Tehran” for the WSJ.

Bolton is just one of the key figures Bob and Evyatar had the opportunity to interview in the course of their journalistic careers and research for the book, alongside many others such as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and a succession of former Mossad directors. The authors’ access to these high-profile figures, however, seems to have come at the cost of avoiding uncomfortable but imperative questions. For example, how is it possible that, despite Israel’s undeniable success in killing key Iranian nuclear scientists and disrupting Iran’s nuclear program through cyber weapons and sabotage, Tehran is currently further than ever in its uranium enrichment path?

Under Netanyahu, but also during his brief period out of power, Iran has been the focus of Israel’s covert action. In April 2023, Netanyahu said Iran was “responsible for 95% of the security threats” against Israel. It is true that Tehran supports Hamas both rhetorically and materially. Nevertheless, to present Hamas as an Iranian puppet, as a WSJ report tried to do in the aftermath of Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people, can only be the result of willful ignorance. Although one cannot flatly deny that Iran had some knowledge of Hamas’ plans, both Israeli and U.S. officials have expressed they have no proof that Iran was directly involved in the terrorist attack.

Palestinian armed groups have long had their own agendas, which are mainly the product of the specific situation in Israel/Palestine, and the PLO was fighting Israel long before Khomeini took power in Tehran. The main challenges to Israel’s security have long derived from its occupation of the West Bank and enforced isolation of the Gaza Strip after Hamas militarily took over the territory in 2007. The more than 15,000 Gazans that have been killed in the course of Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip after October 7 will not bring Israel any closer to safety and, considering the risk of regional escalation, the opposite appears more likely. For all its military superiority over the Palestinians and Washington’s support for the country, it is difficult to see how Israel can enjoy real peace as long as it remains an occupying power.

[1] Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), p. 14.

[2] Ibid., p. 230.

[3] Ibid., p. 35.

[4] Ibid., p. 112.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – After the death of British monarch Elizabeth II in September 2022, then president of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta ordered 4 days of national mourning. The president’s decision was not well-received among many sectors of the Kenyan population. Elizabeth II was already queen during the Mau Mau Uprising, a rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s that was suffocated at the cost of 11,503 official deaths but up to three hundred thousand dead and missing according to historian Caroline Elkins in her book “Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.”

Last October, Elizabeth’s son and current monarch Charles III visited Kenya. While in the Eastern African country, King Charles offered no direct apology or reparations. The closest he came to condemning British colonialism in Kenya was saying that “there were abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans” during their fight for independence.

The territory we now know as Kenya moved to British hands after the creation of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. By the point the Imperial British East Africa Company was created, the company represented nothing but a short chapter in Britain’s centuries-long history of combining private capital and royal prerogatives to expand its imperial designs around the world. This is a history whose origins and development are covered in depth by Philip J. Stern in his recently published book “Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism.”

Stern, an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, explains that British corporations, whose origins lay between the end of the 16^th century and the beginning of the 17^th century, represented the foundations of British colonialism. The corporation emerged as a particular legal entity funded by the joint stock of its members who, upon being granted the power by a royal charter, were allowed to engage in “overseas trade, exploration, predation, and settlement,” writes Stern.[1]

The men behind these corporations were a mixture of entrepreneurs, explorers, and dispossessors of natives, although not necessarily in this order. Whereas many of those who pushed the corporations further never left Britain and their contributions were merely financial, others came to settle and live in lands stolen from the native populations. The corporations first set their sights not far away from home, in Ireland, but they were soon securing royal charters to depart for Russia, Western Africa, or Northern America.

Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism. Harvard University Press, 2023. Click here.

Some of these charters still help understand the political geography of the United States. In 1632, for instance, King Charles I granted a charter to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. The new colony established by Cecil Calvert was named Maryland after the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria of France. In the US State of Maryland, Baltimore is the most populous city.

British corporations expanded their reach around the world through a process that was neither linear nor free of complications. Instead, it was a complex dynamic dominated by competition against the companies and imperial projects of other European countries and between British corporations themselves. The royal court became an arena for different corporations to challenge each other’s rights over certain economic activities and geographical areas. As Stern explains, this was somehow inevitable because overseas charters given to corporations “were not terribly well-written ones. They were remarkably ambiguous, aspirational, and open to interpretation.”[2]

New corporations were constantly founded while others disappeared, sometimes to re-emerge under a different name and supported by a new royal charter. The political uncertainty of 17^th-century England, with its Civil War and the Glorious Revolution in 1688, led to unease among those invested in the corporations. Nevertheless, the process of further intermeshing between British corporations and imperialism continued unabated.

There is probably no greater exponent of this sometimes-uneasy alliance than the East India Company (EIC), to which Stern dedicated a book in 2011 aptly titled “The Company State.” Because the EIC became indeed the perfect hybrid between the commercial and the political. The Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke famously described the EIC as “a state in the disguise of a merchant.”

When the British first arrived in India in the early 17^th century, the Mughal emperor Jahangir presided over one of the largest empires in human history. By 1815, the EIC had assembled an army of a quarter of a million men and claimed hegemony in the Indian subcontinent. The company’s trajectory was not without its setbacks, however. In 1772, the EIC had incurred enormous debts, and the directors of the company asked the British government for a £1.4 million loan, an extraordinary sum at the time. The government obliged as the EIC was so closely intertwined with the British domestic economy that it had become “too big to fail”, explains Stern.[3]

In Empire, Incorporated, Stern always remains in the realm of history. However, the enormous economic power of the EIC at that time, together with the company’s practice of bribing British parliamentarians to secure a favorable political environment, can only bring to mind the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and its strong connection to the governmental deregulation of financial markets. The EIC survived its biggest crisis thanks to the government’s bailout but, in exchange, the British parliament enforced “a new principle of government oversight” on the EIC.[4] The company would finally be nationalized after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the EIC.

Around the time India was put under the direct rule of the Crown, corporate imperialism, which had previously already shown its adaptive capabilities, underwent a process of formalization. With the passing of new legislation by the British parliament, “incorporation had now become a bureaucratic process not a political one.”[5] It was this new/old corporate imperialism that would fuel the expansion of the British Empire in Africa and Australasia and put Britain, at the end of the First World War, in control of around a quarter of the world’s population and territory.

It would take another world war for the formal dismantlement of the empire to begin. Stern describes how “there was no single corporate reaction to the impending end of empire.”[6] Many corporations lobbied against de-colonization. Others waited until the emergence of politically independent countries to engage in the recolonization of the newly nationalized companies seeking capital and commercial partners. And, in a good number of cases, “formerly colonial corporations still endured in some shape or form.”[7]

Unilever, the modern British multinational behind many household brands, built its Western Africa business after the acquisition of the United Africa Company, which in turn was founded in 1929 as a result of the merger between different companies, among them the Royal Niger Company, which played a fundamental role in imposing Britain’s rule over what is today Nigeria.

“Empire, Incorporated” is the result of painstaking research by a historian who impressively explores how Britain’s empire and its corporations became almost undistinguishable. And yet, as Stern himself explains in the introduction, there are no clear historical turning points in the book. The history of the British Empire, for all the suffering it caused, was not the result of any grand design, and there is more messiness than order in it. This is obviously not Stern’s fault, but it helps explain why the book is not an easy read and might be more appealing to historians than to the general reader.

The book could also have benefited from a more comparative perspective, for instance in regard to the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. We are left to wonder how unique the British alliance of corporation and empire was as compared to other European imperial projects. If we are to focus on one key insight of the book that advances our general understanding of the British Empire, this is that the British Empire as we know it was “an incorporated empire, built in no small part by absorbing and assimilating those corporations and other forms of non-state enterprise that often laid the foundations of the colonial enterprise.”[8]

[1] Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2023), p. 7.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, p. 177.

[4] Ibid, p. 183.

[5] Ibid, p. 256.

[6] Ibid, p. 315.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, p. 10.