Europe 1.0 was an economic project and a peace project. That was not wrong. It was just unfinished. A market was built and the hope was that politics would follow. It did not follow. Now people experience Brussels as regulation — but not as democracy. That is not a communication problem. That is a design flaw. “Independent journalism is an anchor in a world that is increasingly difficult to see through.” ...
At the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, an older gentleman sat quietly upright and ate his burrata. Shots. Panic. He stayed seated. Bad back, he said afterward. New tuxedo. Dirty floor. That is cool. It is also an image for something larger. “Thousands from the journalistic and political elite of the country have now experienced what countless other Americans have had to live through in their schools, offices, shopping centres, and churches.” ...
Europe does not have a leadership problem. It has a construction problem. Ursula von der Leyen is not the problem. The system that produced her is the problem. Appointed, not elected. Accountable to bodies that no one can name. A face without a mandate. This is not a communication problem. It is written into the treaties. Who to Call Henry Kissinger asked it fifty years ago: what number do I dial when I want to call Europe? ...
In France, resistance is not a disruptive factor. It is a civic duty. This attitude is not a whim, not a national cliché, not a matter of temperament — it is the result of a history that has consistently repeated itself over centuries. Whoever wants to understand why millions of French people take to the streets for weeks over a pension reform, while in Austria a letter to the editor is at best what gets written, must know this history. ...