Movement_81

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...

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...