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How to Be a Populist Republican Conservative

What is the real alternative to liberalism? There is a general agreement that we now live in a ‘post-liberal’ era, but there is very little clarity or agreement about what replaces liberalism or what liberalism is evolving into. At most it seems that some core elements of liberalism are surviving into the new era anyway, so it still debatable whether we are indeed superseding liberalism (or indeed if we should) or simply helping it survive in a new guise. In recent years three alternatives have appeared as possible rivals to liberalism as a general ideological principle of our societies (albeit with more specific programmatic recommendations remaining still very vague). The first is populism, which emerged in 2016 because of Brexit and Trump as the new major topic of discussion. Populism is generally seen as antithetical to almost all of liberalism’s prescriptions: it opposes independent and counter-majoritarian institutions, it favours political meddling in the field of the economy, i...
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Sovereignty, Confessionalism and the Moral Foundations of Political Rule

In her important book “Before the West”, Ayse Zarakol discusses the phenomenon of confessionalism and its relationship with political centralized sovereignty. The relationship may at first appear paradoxical since historically the establishment of this kind of sovereignty (NB: there are conceivably other decentralized forms of sovereignty, but IR is mostly concerned with transitions into the centralized type) was marked precisely by the submission of religious authorities to secular power. This makes sense since for most of human history the main check on absolute political power came from independent religious authority, from which law making (or at least interpreting) flowed. Zarakol’s success is to show that this process actually took place in the Eurasian ‘East’ throughout the 13th-15th centuries following the Mongol conquest, well before the actual ‘revolution of sovereignty’ in 16th century Europe. Yet Zarakol also highlights that the relationship between political and religious ...
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Europe so white? The EU must address its legacies of racism, but fixating on its ‘whiteness’ is not the way

Is the EU too white? A recent high-profile report by the think-tank ECFR seems to think so. It argues that EU elites have a ‘blind spot’ of how the union’s self-professed multi-national character fails to accommodate and reflect the increasing diversity of European societies.  According to some commentators, the EU is degenerating into a so-called ‘civilizational’ entity, whose opposition to nationalism inside Europe plays out as racial hostility against non-Europeans. Its tacit embrace of racial uniformity, or ‘Euro-whiteness’, is not accidental. It continues a long tradition of conscious European superiority against non-white races.  It is hard to deny that Europe must cope with difficult legacies of racial injustice, colonial exploitation and integration of non-European immigrants. But while all this is true for European countries individually, applying the concept of ‘whiteness’ to the EU and the ideal of European unity as a whole is wrong and unfair. First, using ‘whitene...
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Western liberal democracy now works like an elective monarchy

One of the biggest historical misconceptions about the institution of the monarchy is that it was created to ensure hereditary succession in political office. However, at least in the European world, monarchy’s initial logic was not about handing over power to a single family. It was primarily about the need to personalize authority for reasons of both effectiveness and accountability. Heredity was inherent not in the monarchy but in the body that initially appointed or elected kings – the class of warriors, nobles, or landowners who were everywhere and always obsessively preoccupied with the passing down of their privileges to their descendants.  Until the beginning of modernity, when kings concentrated political power and tried to escape control of the nobles, monarchy was a peculiarly democratic institution, in the sense that the king was always considered accountable to an elite that at least formally, and in some cases very literally, had placed him on the throne. Even after t...
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The EU must choose between protectionism and industrial policy

The recent European mini-tour of Chinese leader Xi Jinping exposed the internal contradictions of the EU’s economic strategy. While in Paris Xi was treated to a litany of complaints about unfair competition from Chinese exports, in Hungary and Serbia he saw Chinese investments being welcomed with open arms. Despite talk of pursuing economic ‘sovereignty’ and ‘strategic autonomy’ in the EU’s economic relations with other powers, Xi’s visit showed just how little Europeans still agree on the meaning of these terms.   Generally speaking, ideas in the EU about a more muscular and strategically minded economic policy in recent years run along two tracks: the deployment of protectionist measures against competitive exports from rivals like China in new strategic economic sectors like electric vehicles and green tech; and the use of public subsidies at the EU level to create so-called ‘European champions’ to compete with mega-corporations from the US and China in these areas.   Prote...
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