In late September, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann announced his candidacy for the French presidency. Reactions were mixed. Whilst the mainstream media in France and Germany largely applauded the move, representatives of independent and alternative media outlets mostly voiced criticism and derision regarding the candidacy of “Gluglu”, as he is known to some.

“The man who wants to save France from the radicals”, was the headline used by the once-respected and formerly left-liberal German weekly DIE ZEIT for its article on Glucksmann’s candidacy. Further down, it states: “Glucksmann is a left-winger… and a moderate left-winger at that”.

Time for some context: we live in times when the distortion of language is reaching ever more extreme heights. Here we see some wonderful examples of this once again. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a classic left-wing politician, is described as “radical” (he is, alongside Marine Le Pen, one of the radicals from whom Glucksmann is supposed to save France), whilst Glucksmann’s position is described as “moderate”. These words are not neutral: “radical” has a clearly negative connotation, whilst “moderate” implies something positive.

Just as was once the case with the German Greens, where one wing of the party was labelled “Fundis” (i.e., “the fundamentalists”) and the other “Realos” (i.e., “the realists”). In this context, it was deemed “fundamentalist” to advocate pacifist positions, as well as those critical of capitalism and the system, and to fight for more grassroots democracy. It is only in the case of environmentalist positions — some of which worked towards deindustrialisation — that this approach might perhaps be described as “fundamentalist”. By contrast, those who were prepared to work within the existing system and neither tackle economic and political malfeasance within the system nor oppose US wars of aggression and interventions were portrayed as “realistic” and thus “mature”, “level-headed” and “reasonable”. We can observe the same manipulation in the reporting on Glucksmann’s candidacy.

But who is Raphaël Glucksmann, and why can he be described as another “bluff” by the Empire? Glucksmann is a French politician, journalist and documentary filmmaker, who self-identifies as a “social democrat”. From 2008 to 2012, he advised the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. In 2018, he founded the pro-European, environmentalist party Place publique, of which he is now co-president.

He is also the son of André Glucksmann, a French “star philosopher” and one of the most staunch advocates of American military interventions, who, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, was one of the co-founders of the pro-American think tank Cercle de l’Oratoire, whose stated aim was to defend US foreign policy in the French public sphere.

His son, too, has so far found no US regime-change operation or colour revolution that he has not enthusiastically supported. Whether as an adviser to Saakashvili in Georgia (the neoliberal and authoritarian President of Georgia, who received massive support from the US and NGOs such as the Open Society Foundation and USAID), as a supporter of the Euromaidan movement or as a speechwriter for the Ukrainian politician Vitali Klitschko: Glucksmann has repeatedly found himself on the side of Western-backed regime-change activities.

Even as a Member of the European Parliament, he eagerly supported every US regime-change propaganda campaign. For instance, in a speech in the European Parliament, he spread unsubstantiated rumours that the Communist Party of China was harvesting “halal organs” from executed Muslim Uyghurs in order to sell them to wealthy clients in the Gulf regions — a rumour that even the “Uyghur Tribunal” in London, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) via the World Uyghur Congress, had already classified as unsubstantiated a year earlier (2021).

But even more interesting is Glucksmann’s role as a Member of the European Parliament: from 2020 to 2022, he chaired the European Parliament’s Special Committee on “Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation” (INGE), and subsequently chaired its successor committee, ING2, until 2023. Under his chairmanship, the committee became one of the parliamentary driving forces behind the call not only to combat so-called “foreign disinformation” publicly, but also to impose sanctions on its originators and disseminators. As early as January 2022, the European Parliament unambiguously titled its communication on the committee’s final recommendations: “EU should build a sanctions regime against disinformation”.

Two months later, the Parliament adopted the report. It called for sanctions against actors behind foreign influence operations and disinformation campaigns; in the case of organisations deemed to be disseminators of foreign state propaganda, the withdrawal of broadcasting licences should even be considered.

Glucksmann also led delegations to both the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, a point of contact between the EU and NATO. In Riga, his committee collaborated, amongst others, with representatives of the EEAS East StratCom Task Force and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Anyone wishing to gain an insight into his views and convictions in this regard can watch this informative interview with Glucksmann for the StratCom podcast from October 2022, in which he states that the Ukrainians are the true democrats and the true Europeans who are teaching Europeans the meaning of freedom, and that the heart and soul of Europe now lie in Kyiv.

So, if one sometimes wonders how the EU could have resorted to such extreme measures to restrict freedom of expression and freedom of the press — such as the draconian sanctions against the Berlin-based journalist Hüseyin Doğru or the Swiss political analyst Jacques Baud: Raphaël Glucksmann was one of the key figures who drove this development forward at EU level — a development that culminated in those regulations and decisions of the Council of the EU on the basis of which such sanctions can be imposed (see, for example, here).

Glucksmann is therefore neither a “left-winger” (in the traditional sense) nor a moderate. Nor is he the moderate way out of the dilemma facing the French, who are forced to choose between the two “radicals”, Le Pen and Mélenchon. He is — au contraire — a neoliberal, business-friendly, interventionist and authoritarian servant of the Western empire. Just like Emmanuel Macron before him, with whom he shares many similarities and a network. It is therefore no surprise that many of Macron’s allies and associates have already switched to Glucksmann’s camp, such as Sacha Houlié and Aurélien Rousseau (former Minister of Health under Macron, subsequently Glucksmann’s campaign director) or Marguerite Cazeneuve.

If my colleagues in the mainstream media were to dig a little deeper, they could easily have uncovered this. But that is probably not what they want at all. This is old neoliberal imperialist wine in new wineskins, labelled “left” or “right”, without these words actually meaning anything anymore. And anyone who openly criticises the excesses of the system they represent and fundamentally questions it is labelled “radical”.

Glucksmann is simply — like Macron and many others before him — yet another pretty face intended to sell an agenda of the powerful that is becoming increasingly unpopular amongst the population. His candidacy is clearly intended to split the votes of left-wing voters in France and take them away from the anti-imperialist and socialist candidate Mélenchon. Let’s see how many more rounds of this same game we have to endure before the majority of the population sees through it. In any case, Glucksmann must first win the joint social-democratic primary in October in order to enter the race as this camp’s joint candidate.

Incidentally, anyone looking for a bit of a laugh in these gloomy times might want to watch this amusing and insightful conversation (in French) between the independent French journalists Alexis Poulin, Yohan Pavec and Félix Marquardt about Glucksmann’s time in Georgia. Here, a former colleague and acquaintance of Glucksmann recounts his inglorious behaviour as an adviser to President Saakashvili and provides interesting insights into his character and career — like the time he busted the leg of the Georgian ambassador to France while jet-skiing drunk on the black sea or the time he allegedly pushed the female head of an NGO into Saakashvili’s hotel room and closed the door behind her, after having promised he wouldn’t leave her alone with him.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

As Politico recently reported, the first scenario involves excluding Saxony-Anhalt’s representatives from meetings on sensitive matters. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that the AfD candidate would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences”. Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed. Thus, as several ministers confirmed to Politico, one possibility would be to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers, but also organise separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues from which the representative from Saxony-Anhalt would be excluded. According to an emeritus professor of constitutional law, the idea is “perfectly conceivable”, though he conceded that it might be challenged by the federal courts.

A second scenario would involve raising a “wall” within shared information systems. The argument is that the AfD, given its alleged “closeness” to Russia, cannot be trusted with sensitive dossiers. The notion that the AfD would act as a pipeline of classified information to Moscow is rather ludicrous — if only because that would amount to political suicide. “We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” said a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.” Nonetheless, a Social Democrat politician told the magazine that the AfD should be kept away from all intelligence on right-wing extremism and espionage. In other words, an elected government would be deliberately kept in the dark about dossiers crucial to national security, rendering it effectively incapable of governing. Once again, it is claimed that this would be “legally possible”.

A third scenario, the most striking so far, would involve financially starving the AfD-led state. Saxony-Anhalt receives almost €3 billion a year from federal fiscal equalisation, equal to a fifth of its budget. The threat is to reduce or suspend those funds in order to “make life harder” for a potential AfD government, “or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable”. The finance minister of Baden-Württemberg points out that the system is anchored in the constitution, as though a single constitutional provision could disguise the political motive behind financially strangling a rebellious region.

A final scenario being contemplated is the so-called “nuclear option”: the Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat, the chamber representing the states, may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfil its legal obligations. In other words, Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law, a measure that has never been applied in the history of the Federal Republic, not once since 1949.

The picture that emerges is unmistakable: the same German establishment that is constantly lecturing other countries about democracy and the rule of law is demonstrating that democracy is tolerated only so long as it produces results deemed acceptable. When democratic processes produce an unwelcome government, or risk doing so, ways are sought to circumvent it, to hollow it out or to render it harmless — all in the name of “defending democracy”, of course.

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Icelanders were being asked to cede control over their fisheries, their agriculture, and their trade policy to Brussels, and—since no state acceding after Maastricht holds Denmark’s opt-out—agreeing in principle to adopt the euro. Sweden has demonstrated that this obligation can be deferred more or less indefinitely, but indefinite deferral at the sufferance of the institutions is not the same thing as a right of refusal.

In addition to a seat at the table—to be exact, six seats out of 720 in the European Parliament and one voice among twenty-eight in the Council—Iceland would have received (possibly) marginally cheaper imports and a little more tourism, all while becoming a net contributor to the EU budget.

But the deeper problem with the pro-EU argument is that it treats the bloc as though it were little more than a very large trade agreement—a body of technical standards governing the labelling of jam and size of fruits, to which membership would simply add a vote. But the European Union is much more than this: it is a political, institutional and ideological mega-machine, and its power over member states goes well beyond the percentage of directives transposed. As we saw in the wake of the financial crisis, countries that join effectively adopt an “economic constitution” that binds them to a ruthlessly enforced neoliberal framework that no democratic vote can override. This is particularly evident for eurozone countries.

[…]

Indeed, the island nation already made the argument against EU membership better than any article could. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, Iceland was hit harder than almost any country in Europe. Ninety percent of its banking system collapsed. Yet it recovered faster and better than virtually all of them. Why? Because it had something eurozone countries had surrendered: sovereignty. Iceland could let its currency adjust; it could let its banks fail rather than being forced by the European Central Bank to bail them out at the expense of its citizens; it could impose capital controls on its own authority and lift them on its own timetable—which it did, fully, only in 2017. It could also ask its own people what they wanted: in the Icesave referendums of 2010 and 2011, Icelanders refused to shoulder the private debts of failed bankers.

Compare that with the fates of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and my own country, Italy: countries that, trapped in the eurozone, were subjected to years of punishing austerity, mass unemployment, and social devastation, administered by unelected technocrats in Brussels and Frankfurt. Iceland weathered the storm because it was a much freer country. That was the lesson of 2008, and it remains truer than ever today.

[…]

Becoming an EU member would have been a bad idea twenty or thirty years ago, but it would be an even worse one now. Today, the bloc’s oligarchic machinery—the austerity, the technocracy, the contempt for democracy—has mutated into a full-blown war machine. The EU has launched a $927 million rearmament program, “ReArm Europe”, hastily rebranded “Readiness 2030”, on top of national commitments agreed at NATO’s Hague summit to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP. Manfred Weber, leader of the largest group in the European Parliament, speaks openly of $7 trillion in European military spending over the coming decade, and insists that this build-up must be locked in so that, in his own words, no future government can undo it.

How will all this be paid for? The Financial Times said the quiet part out loud: Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state. One might object that Iceland already belongs to NATO and cannot avoid this fate in any case. But Iceland has been in the alliance since 1949, and still has no standing army: seventy-seven years of membership, not one Icelandic soldier. NATO has few means of actually forcing a country to follow its diktats. Joining the EU is another matter. It means handing full control of your economy to what has effectively become the political arm of NATO—one that will use every tool at its disposal to bring member states into line with the EU-NATO strategy.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Subscribe now

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

At the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, the American president Donald Trump had unusually warm words for his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

The occupant of the White House expressed his support for Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian territory, stating that “it is an escalation, but it is also an escalation that could help bring about a conclusion” to the conflict.

The friendly meeting between the two presidents stood in stark contrast to the “Oval Office row” that had erupted between them at the beginning of 2025, when Trump had only recently begun his second term.

The openly pro-Ukrainian stance displayed by the American leader marks the failure of the diplomatic efforts launched with the meeting between Trump and the Russian president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025.

Those efforts, aimed at reaching a negotiated solution to the conflict, had met with firm opposition from Kyiv and the European countries, as well as from Republican and Democratic members of the US Congress.

Lavrov and the Minsk comparison

A few weeks ago, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he did not want “to even think that Alaska, just like the actions of the Europeans, was conceived to buy time in order to rearm the Kyiv regime. […] But in reality that is exactly how things went”.

In speaking of “the actions of the Europeans”, Lavrov was referring to the statements made by the former German chancellor Angela Merkel in a 2022 interview, according to which the Minsk agreements had been a stratagem to allow Ukraine to rearm.

Negotiated by France and Germany together with Ukraine and Russia in 2014 and then in 2015, the Minsk agreements were meant to ensure that the Donbas would remain under Ukrainian sovereignty while guaranteeing the region broad autonomy.

Merkel’s revelations suggested that the Minsk agreements were in fact a deliberate deception designed to induce Russia to accept a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful resolution of the conflict, buying Ukraine time to strengthen its armed forces.

This thesis was confirmed by the former French president François Hollande, who had negotiated the agreements alongside Merkel.

Interviewed by the Kyiv Independent, Hollande maintained that “yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point”.

He added: “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army is completely different from that of 2014. It is better trained and better equipped. It is to the credit of the Minsk agreements that they gave the Ukrainian army this opportunity”.

Petro Poroshenko himself, the Ukrainian president who had negotiated the agreements, told the Financial Times that Ukraine “had no armed forces at all” and that “the great diplomatic success” of the agreements was that “we kept Russia away from our borders — not from our borders, but away from a full-scale war”.

According to the biography of Putin written by the journalist Philip Short, Poroshenko said he had signed the Minsk agreements “because it was the only way to stop the fighting, but he knew they would never be implemented”.

Putin’s indecision?

Last June, then, Lavrov compared the consequences of the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin to what had happened with the Minsk agreements. In other words, according to Lavrov, Russia had once again been deceived.

In reality, the understanding reached at Anchorage was even weaker than the Minsk agreements. According to Russian sources, it envisaged that Trump would press Zelensky to withdraw from the Donbas, and in exchange Putin would accept a ceasefire.

In practice, Trump never persuaded Zelensky to withdraw, while at the same time he sought to push Putin to declare a ceasefire even before the Ukrainian withdrawal — something the Russian president never accepted.

From Moscow’s point of view, a mere ceasefire would have produced a frozen conflict that would not have resolved the root causes of the war, once again allowing Ukraine to rearm and resume hostilities at a later stage.

Despite this — according to the critics of the Kremlin’s official line, whose voices are multiplying in Moscow — Putin continued his dialogue with the White House even when it was by then evident that the latter was exerting no pressure whatsoever on the government in Kyiv.

Moreover, these critics argue, Putin kept the war effort in Ukraine within the confines of the so-called “Special Military Operation” without proceeding to an escalation, even when it was by then clear that the whole of Europe was mobilising in support of Kyiv and that Washington was continuing to back the Ukrainian army at the logistical and intelligence level.

Uninterrupted support for Ukraine

That the White House supports Ukraine at the intelligence level is confirmed by recent revelations in the Financial Times, according to which the United States has helped Ukrainian long-range drones evade Moscow’s air defences and strike deep into Russian territory, in particular with an unprecedented wave of attacks on oil refineries.

In the first six months of 2026, Russian refineries were reportedly struck at least 194 times — a staggering increase on the same period the previous year.

But as early as December of last year, the New York Times revealed that, although the partnership between Washington and Kyiv was officially strained owing to America’s supposed willingness to negotiate with Moscow, the CIA had continued to maintain its presence in Ukraine and had helped orchestrate a campaign of drone attacks against Russian oil infrastructure.

Trump is even said to have praised these attacks, claiming that they gave him bargaining power in negotiations with Russia.

Even when the Pentagon decided briefly to suspend intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025, the CIA continued to supply data to Kyiv, in particular on Russian operations on Ukrainian territory.

The CIA was also authorised to assist Ukrainian drone attacks against the so-called “shadow fleet” of Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

The fact that Washington was continuing to provide Ukraine with the intelligence needed to strike Russian energy infrastructure had already been confirmed by the Financial Times in October 2025 — that is, less than two months after the Anchorage meeting.

The data supplied by the US included route planning, altitude, timing and the details needed to evade Russian air defences, according to American sources cited by the newspaper.

Those sources maintain that Washington also helped determine the priority of the targets to be struck. The paper reports that Trump secretly backed Kyiv’s strategy of attacking Russia’s energy infrastructure “to make them [the Russians] feel the pain” and soften their negotiating position.

Coercive diplomacy

The United States, then, never became an impartial mediator in the conflict despite Trump’s declarations to that effect, having instead remained a co-belligerent party at Ukraine’s side.

From what has been set out above, it emerges that in the aftermath of the Anchorage meeting, the Trump administration decided to adopt a “coercive diplomacy” towards Moscow, not unlike that adopted with Iran, in order to push the Kremlin into accepting a ceasefire even in the absence of a Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas.

That strategy included support for the Ukrainian campaign of drone attacks on Russian territory, the imposition of sanctions (also decided in October 2025) on the two Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil, pressure on India to stop buying Russian oil and even the possibility of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.

The Russians, however, showed no sign of yielding to intimidation. Then, at the end of 2025, an event as mysterious as it was disturbing took place.

The attack on Putin’s residence

On December 29, the Russian foreign ministry denounced an overnight attack — which it described as “terrorist” — in which a swarm of long-range drones (91, to be precise, according to the statement) had targeted the Russian president’s residence on Lake Valdai, in the Novgorod region.

All the drones had been shot down by Russian air defence systems, the statement declared, adding however that such a reckless action would not go unanswered.

The morning after the attack, Putin personally called Trump to protest at what had happened.

Hours later, questioned by journalists about the episode, Trump replied: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it […]. President Putin told me. Early this morning he said he had been attacked. That’s not good. That’s not good... This is not the right time to be doing any of that… I was very angry about it”.

We have seen how Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory in fact take place with the direct support of American intelligence.

A New York Times article entitled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”, dating back to March 2025, revealed how the Pentagon and the CIA had been authorised as far back as president Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, to carry out strikes deep inside Russian territory.

A senior officer of a European intelligence service, interviewed by the paper, stated that the Americans “are now part of the ‘kill chain’” in Ukraine. The Russians are obviously aware of this.

At the time of the attack on the presidential residence on Lake Valdai, Moscow was convinced that US intelligence had taken part in the operation.

“I said straight away that it is impossible [to carry out this attack] without the support of [Western] intelligence services, first and foremost the CIA”, declared Aleksei Chepa, deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Duma, the Russian parliament.

A few days later, the CIA claimed that the attack had never taken place — or at least that the drones which had flown over Russia that night had not been headed for Lake Valdai.

Further irritated, the Russians cited the published photos and videos of the wreckage of the downed drones in support of their claim. On January 2, 2026, they summoned a US military attaché in Moscow for a formal meeting.

During the meeting, a senior Russian officer handed the American attaché what he identified as the navigation processor recovered from one of the downed drones, urging American specialists to decrypt its contents.

On January 5, after receiving briefings from the CIA, Trump said he did not believe that Ukraine or the CIA had attempted to kill Putin at his residence on Lake Valdai.

Yet it was precisely to this attack that Zelensky referred in a provocative open letter addressed to Putin at the beginning of June: “We often hear it said that you are comfortable in this war. Not, of course, when it comes to the security of your residence at Valdai or your parade in Moscow. Your own life is precious to you”.

An implacable adversary

Meanwhile, two days before Trump’s denial of January 5, American special forces had seized the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a raid on Caracas that had left around a hundred dead.

A few weeks later, on February 28, Israel would assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei — once again with the help of the CIA.

The Ukrainian attacks on the early-warning radars of Russia’s system for detecting potential nuclear threats, and on its fleet of strategic bombers (a key element of Moscow’s nuclear deterrence triad) — operations likewise conducted with the probable support of Western intelligence — constitute a further alarm bell for the Kremlin.

The recent failure of the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran confirms, in the eyes of non-Western leaderships, that for Washington the only negotiation worth pursuing is one that leads to the adversary’s surrender.

The decapitation operations carried out against the governing leaderships of Iran and Venezuela constitute a warning to Moscow and Beijing, one which seems to indicate that the United States accepts neither compromise nor arrangements for coexistence with its adversaries.

In Moscow, many are by now convinced that the Anchorage overture was yet another deception. The path of negotiation appears closed off. What remains to be decided is how to confront the growing attacks conducted by the West against Russia by Ukrainian hand.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

I recently heard an activist say the following in an Instagram video: “We will never get our pre-Covid society back”. That sentence has stayed with me ever since, because it made me realise that I do in fact — somewhere in my heart — still harbour an unspoken hope that there is a “way back”; that we can undo, can erase from the world, the harm (inflicted on people) and the deterioration (to democratic culture) that have occurred in the Covid years and in the years since. But there is no way back. Or, as the beautiful title of a 1940 novel by Thomas Wolfe put it: You Can’t Go Home Again. But how to deal with this situation with resilience and steadfastness?

First, to clarify: this is a different question from that of a possible political and legal reckoning with the Covid era, or of apologies and social reconciliation. We are still waiting for both, even if we may no longer be hoping for them.

First and foremost, it’s about coming to terms with what has been lost. And there I find myself longing for the pre-Covid era and, above all, unwilling to accept that this world is a thing of the past; that we cannot return to it, but now find ourselves in a completely different reality. I believe that this, psychologically speaking, is known as an adjustment disorder.

And I’m experiencing this not only in relation to the negative developments during and since the Covid era — in terms of the social climate, division, the shrinking freedom of expression, the lack of respect for fundamental rights and other aspects — but also in relation to many other issues. I find myself unwilling to accept what the European Union has become, some of the decisions made by the Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Court of Justice in Germany, what our leading politicians say and decide, what has become of once-beloved German media outlets such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung or DIE ZEIT, what has become of my image of Germany, of my idea (perhaps always mistaken) that we as a nation had learnt from our recent past.

It is hard to let go of these images, these memories. Perhaps it is down to age; perhaps to a sluggishness of the soul that is not made for the massively accelerated changes and developments of our modern world. Intellectually, all this is just about manageable (albeit with compromises). Emotionally, it sometimes seems almost impossible to cope with.

Of course, there is also something good in holding on to these memories of times, principles and rules, so that they can serve as a template and, by comparison, reveal just how much things have changed for the worse. Many younger people do not have such points of comparison at their disposal, and so they are all the more easily led astray. But this focus on the past and what has been lost — on how things “used to be” — does have something of a battle against windmills about it. It is nostalgia, a refusal to accept reality, and this often paralyses and wears one down.

On NachDenkSeiten, the independent German political news and commentary website that I work for, we write a great deal about topics, facts and arguments. But today I’d like to write about how we deal emotionally with the many changes and the massive deterioration in our political culture that we have witnessed in recent years.

My colleagues and I have lately received numerous letters from readers who write, in essence: “I really appreciate your journalism and your work, but sometimes I just can’t bring myself to read it all any more”. We, as editors and authors, sometimes feel the same way. It is depressing to document developments that seem to be heading in only one direction: everything is getting worse and worse. One is exhausted by the constant agitation, the constant annoyance, the constant outrage. And that is why nostalgia is so powerful, along with the desire for everything to simply go back to the way it used to be.

But acceptance comes before improvement. We won’t be able to go back; the only way is forward. But where do we find the strength to let go and carry on despite everything?

We must refuse to become as bitter as the times in which we live. For the political struggle takes place not only externally — through demonstrations, petitions, letters to the editor and articles — but also internally. If we become inwardly exhausted and give up, we have already lost.

A first and important step is to radically filter the news flow when we realise that the reports are driving us into a state of powerlessness and despondency. Then it is time for mental self-protection, for breaks, for nature, joy and beautiful things — for everything that restores our strength.

Another method of self-protection can be to depersonalise the “enemy”. In other words, not to hate the people who, from our point of view, are currently doing “evil” things, but rather to oppose what they are doing, the energy that takes hold of them at that moment, the propaganda to which they seem to succumb, the weakness to which they yield. If we start to hate the people on the “other side”, we have already lost the battle, because we are sinking to the same level as those we wish to fight. The way out of this is always empathy.

And we must focus our attention on the positive. After all, so much good is happening despite everything. The current times lay bare a great deal of human weakness and malice, but they also show us people who display incredible strength, resilience and integrity, who make great professional and personal sacrifices to stand up against injustice and war crimes, to rebel against their governments. Admiration for these people and support for them — even if it’s just a few words of encouragement and appreciation — can be valuable for them and for us.

One can also choose to focus on one’s private life from time to time — for a while — on one’s circle of friends, family and one’s own (hopefully pleasant) immediate surroundings. This is naturally difficult for someone who is politically engaged, but in these times it is nonetheless an effective survival strategy. Here in Germany, we find ourselves in the peculiar situation where, for politically critical and observant people, the suffering in the world and the very negative political developments in our own country coexist alongside a world that remains very secure and, in many ways, beautiful on a small scale — such as at the level of our own neighbourhoods, local authorities, villages and towns.

We live in an age in which the West’s global dominance is steadily waning, yet in its struggle against decline, all its most negative aspects are washed up to the surface and intensified once again (colonialism, exploitation, totalitarianism, wars, injustice, destruction, hypocrisy). And we are experiencing all of this from within the heart of the empire itself. And although many of us disagree with our governments and elites, we feel powerless and complicit, and are, of course, increasingly restricted and subjected to repression in our criticism and our expressions of dissent. This is a situation in which it is difficult to maintain one’s bearings. Looking out of the West’s echo chambers towards perspectives and analyses from the Global South and the BRICS states, and from resistance movements in the West can be a great help in resolving the recurring cognitive dissonance.

Another important decision is who we choose to direct our energy towards. For attention is energy. And whatever we focus our attention on gains energy and significance as a result. We live in a time when many familiar institutions are crumbling and delegitimising themselves, and elites are exposing their weakness and corruption. Amidst this destruction and self-destruction of familiar power structures, we can focus our energy more strongly on what is to come — on what we wish to strengthen and rebuild. This is uplifting, because we are engaging with things that are good in our eyes, and this strengthens the ideas, people and structures that we want to be part of a more positive future.

This is how we build resilience and steadfastness: by accepting the present without losing heart or giving up; by not allowing ourselves to become cynical — nor to lose ourselves in hatred. Instead, by showing compassion — towards ourselves and our opponents. And by preserving our softness in these hard times, allowing ourselves to mourn what has been lost, and then focussing our energy on continuing on our path amidst all the tottering and collapsing structures.

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Thomas Fazi

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On Thursday, the European Parliament “adopted” the extension of Chat Control 1.0. This is the temporary suspension of the EU’s ePrivacy rules that allows tech platforms to mass-scan citizens’ private communications, ostensibly to detect child sexual abuse material. “Adopted” is placed in quotation marks here because the word implies something that conspicuously failed to happen: a majority of MEPs voting in favour. In fact, 314 MEPs voted to reject the text, against 276 in favour. And yet it passed anyway.

This was made possible through a procedural sleight of hand worthy of Brussels at its most cynical. The file was rammed through under an “urgency procedure”: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola unilaterally reopened a dossier that MEPs had already rejected in March, and the Council conveniently bounced it back at the start of the summer recess, when securing attendance is hardest. Rejecting it a second time would have required not a simple majority but an absolute one: 360 votes. The law was therefore approved despite a majority of MEPs voting against it. The regulation will now remain in force until April 2028, buying time for negotiations on its even more ambitious successor, Chat Control 2.0.

As German MEP Fabio De Masi noted following the vote, Chat Control is a “legislative zombie” — a measure the European Parliament has rejected multiple times, revived again and again until the desired outcome emerges. This episode should give pause to those who insist that the EU’s democratic deficit could be cured by handing more power to the European Parliament. Here is that very institution’s president working with the Council to resurrect a file the Parliament itself had buried. If this is how the Parliament operates, empowering it further would only deepen this democratic deficit, lending a thicker veneer of legitimacy to what remains, at bottom, an executive-bureaucratic machine that treats votes as obstacles to be engineered around.

Defenders of the outcome point to a supposed silver lining: an amendment from the liberal Renew group excluding from the law’s scope communications to which end-to-end encryption “is, has been, or will be applied”, such as WhatsApp messages. Some MEPs have hailed this as a glimmer of hope, and it likely helped peel off enough votes to prevent outright rejection. But the amendment sits in flat contradiction with the entire logic of mass scanning, which is precisely why the Council, where the file is led by interior ministries with little appetite for privacy niceties, is widely expected to strike it out when the package lands on its desk in the coming three months. It’s a fig leaf, in other words, designed to be removed further down the line.

The re-elected Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) President Svenja Hahn called the vote “a disgrace”, warning that it “opens the door for mass surveillance of all private communication” and that “the surveillance of private chats pushed by EU states is a threat for our freedom and democracy”. Lyudmyla Kozlovska of the Open Dialogue Foundation placed it in a broader pattern of “a sweeping power justified by an urgent-sounding purpose, then quietly normalised” — first financial privacy, then travellers’ data, now messages. The real battle, she noted, comes in September over Chat Control 2.0.

And that is the point. Chat Control was never really about children. This scanning of private correspondence — something no one would tolerate if applied to paper letters — does little to catch actual predators, who operate on the dark net, while drowning police in false positives. By Swiss federal police estimates, some 80% of machine-flagged content is not even illegal. What it does build is permanent infrastructure for total surveillance, ripe for function creep and abuse, atop mandatory age verification that would end online anonymity for whistleblowers, journalists and dissidents alike. Former MEP Patrick Breyer put it best last year: “They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine”. That machine has now cleared another hurdle.

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

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What, then, is the package that the Commission is so keen to sign into law? It is a framework totalling almost €2 trillion, equivalent to around 1.26% of EU gross national income (GNI) over the seven-year period. The European Parliament, never shy about spending other people’s money, wants to push that to 1.38% of GNI. But neither institution really admits the structural tensions buried in the figures. The EU must service roughly €750 billion in bloc pandemic debt, the repayment of which is now being permanently integrated into the regular EU budget. The Commission’s own proposal earmarks €149.3 billion for repaying the so-called “NextGenerationEU Recovery” and “Resilience Facility” funds — a sum that amounts to nearly 10% of total MFF commitments.

This matters because of what it reveals about the true nature of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). What was sold to European publics as an exceptional, one-off response to the Covid crisis is now the fiscal template for the Union’s future. The pandemic fund set the precedent: the EU can borrow on capital markets, distribute grants to member states, and then embed the repayment into the general budget for decades to come — all without anything resembling a proper democratic mandate. This is arguably what the “unprecedented” EU fiscal response to the pandemic was always about: normalising common debt as a mechanism for tilting the institutional balance of power decisively in favour of the Commission, downgrading member states and locking in a structural shift in European integration. Indeed, the EU has since repeated the trick with a €90 billion package for Ukraine, again funded through joint debt backed by the common budget. The “historical exception” has quietly become the norm.

To repay its vast debts, the Commission has proposed a package of new levies on companies. But if the new taxes fall short, as is likely, the fallback is a compulsory levy on member states. The existing “Own Resources Decision” — another wonderful piece of EU lexicon — already empowers the Commission to call on national governments for additional GNI-based contributions to cover NGEU repayments, on top of regular programme spending. In other words, if the new revenue streams underperform, the bill lands automatically on national treasuries, decided not by sovereign parliaments, but by the remorseless logic of the EU’s debt repayment. At any rate, EU debt now functions as a de facto tax on member states, bypassing the normal channels of democratic budgetary control.

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

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In short, three key ministries in the new Peter Magyar government — energy, foreign affairs and finance — are now led by people who built their careers inside Western multinational corporations, all of them linked to two of the most powerful actors in the global economy, BlackRock and Vanguard, and in one case with strong ties to the US security state as well. This means that Western corporate interests in general, and American energy interests in particular, now have direct representation at the highest levels of the Hungarian state.

There is truth in the charge that Orbán’s government cultivated a domestic class of “oligarchs” and concentrated economic power in loyal hands. But Hungary’s domestic capitalist class pales next to what is poised to replace it. Whereas the corruption of local strongmen is visible, nameable, prosecutable in principle, the institutionalised influence of global capital is none of these things.

Companies like Shell (from which the new energy minister hails), along with the asset management funds that own them, have hijacked democratic decision-making across the Western world. They call it lobbying rather than corruption — but the distinction, in terms of outcomes for ordinary people, is largely cosmetic.

As former MP and Green Party co-founder (which he has since left) András Schiffer has asked, will the feudal power of domestically controlled capitalism simply be replaced by the more anonymous, more pervasive and far less accountable power of global big capital — with a liberal gloss applied over the transfer?

In light of the above, the trajectory of the Magyar government is not difficult to predict: energy diversification towards US LNG, financial opening towards Western institutions and corporate interests, and a foreign policy recalibrated towards Brussels and the Atlanticist establishment.

Read my deep dive into the new Hungarian power elite here.

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The risk of an all-out conflict between NATO and Russia is higher than it’s ever been — even at the height of the Cold War — given how deeply the two sides are now entangled in what is, in every operational sense, an increasingly direct military confrontation, even if the fiction of non-belligerence is still formally maintained. Unlike during the Cold War, when the superpowers maintained elaborate protocols designed to prevent direct confrontation, the lines today are blurred to the point of near-invisibility. A war that was supposed to be contained within Ukraine’s borders has steadily metastasised into something far more dangerous: a proxy conflict in which NATO’s role has become so operationally central that the distinction between proxy and principal has largely collapsed, and in which each week brings fresh evidence that the escalatory logic is running well ahead of any political capacity to control it.

The events of recent weeks have made this unmistakably clear.

Last week, a Ukrainian drone in the Donbas struck a college in Donbas, killing 21 people, most of them students.

This represents a very serious escalation in Ukraine’s intensifying drone offensive against Russia in recent months — including a growing number of deep-strike attacks carried out on Russian territory. Just a few weeks ago, at least three people were killed and several more injured in a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region.

Meanwhile, according to Reuters, by March Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s three main export terminals on its western coasts — Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, and Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic — had knocked out around 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity. According to a New York Times estimate, by early April Ukrainian strikes had also damaged or destroyed around 20% of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Just this month, Ukrainian drones have struck two dozen Russian oil refineries, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

Some of the more recently targeted sites were located as far as 1,500-1,700 km from the Ukrainian border, signalling a significant improvement in Ukraine’s long-range drone capabilities.

As John Mearsheimer noted in a recent interview with Glenn Diesen, Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian territory, including Moscow, represent a significant step up the escalation ladder. Though unimpressed by their immediate military effect, the trajectory concerns him deeply:

The amount of damage that those drones can do is not that great... it’s certainly not going to affect the outcome of the war in any meaningful way. That’s not going to happen. But I think the great danger moving forward here is that the Ukrainians working with the Europeans who remain determined to defeat Russia will increase the number of strikes and the kind of strikes on Russia.

Russia has already responded to the drone attack on the Donbas college with a massive assault on Kyiv, one of the largest since the start of the war, including the use of nuclear-capable Oreshnik missiles. And it has already threatened to launch a fresh wave of “systematic strikes” against the capital. The new strikes will target “decision-making centres and command posts”, alongside drone manufacturing facilities in the city, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Moscow has called for foreign nationals and diplomats to leave Kyiv “as soon as possible” and warned citizens to stay away from administrative and military buildings.

So far Moscow has refrained from targeting Ukrainian headquarters — a rather remarkable fact given that the Ukrainian armed forces have repeatedly targeted Russian headquarters, as Anatol Lieven noted. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian General Staff claimed that it had destroyed a major Russian command and control centre in Lugansk with British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. The effective use of these missiles — which Ukraine has been firing for the past two years — requires US targeting data.

Despite this, Moscow has not targeted Ukrainian headquarters in Kyiv precisely because of the likelihood that US and other NATO soldiers and intelligence officers would be killed, risking drastic escalation in response by the West. Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency and reopened diplomatic negotiations, the Russian government has also been restrained by a desire not to either anger or weaken him. However, last week US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the peace talks are at a standstill, and that “there are no such talks occurring at this time”.

This points not merely to a dangerous escalation in the war — but also to its potential expansion beyond Ukraine’s borders.

After all, though these attacks are formally being carried out by Ukraine, the reality is that Ukraine could never carry out these drone attacks on Russian territory without intelligence and satellite support from NATO — and from the US specifically. Despite Trump’s peace overtures, his administration has continued providing Ukraine with intelligence to carry out long-range drone attacks against Russian energy infrastructure, according to multiple US and Ukrainian officials. The intelligence helps Ukraine “shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, enabling Ukraine’s long-range, one-way attack drones to evade Russian air defenses”. One source described Ukraine’s drone force as the “instrument” the US is using to achieve the goal of undermining the Russian economy and pushing Putin toward a settlement. The CIA has also been involved in building up Ukraine’s drone programme.

The degree of US involvement goes further than mere intelligence-sharing. While one US official said Ukraine selects the target and the US provides information on its vulnerabilities, other officials said the US has actually been setting target priorities for the Ukrainian military — meaning the US is in effect choosing what to strike.

The US also provides satellite support — both in the form of real-time GPS guidance (particularly over Ukrainian and Russian-annexed Ukrainian territory via Elon Musk’s Starlink) and through the provision of geospatial data that allows drones to operate without a real-time GPS signal, such as in areas where the signal is jammed: pre-loaded terrain maps, route data, target coordinates and air-defence evasion profiles, all of which depend on American satellite reconnaissance and intelligence.

This means that Ukraine’s deep-strike operations against Russia are functionally a US-NATO operation wearing Ukrainian colours. But NATO isn’t just providing the intelligence and satellite support for these attacks — and of course the money for the drones. Increasingly, it is providing the drones themselves as well.

Even though the overwhelming majority of drones used by Ukrainian forces are produced inside Ukraine itself, a newer and strategically significant development is the deliberate expansion of drone manufacturing into European countries, partly to reduce vulnerability to Russian strikes on Ukrainian facilities. Zelensky announced plans to open ten joint enterprises for drone production in Europe in 2026.

The country at the centre of this development is Germany. The Merz government is deepening its military cooperation with Kyiv, becoming increasingly a co-belligerent in the conflict with Russia. With American disengagement, Germany has long been Ukraine’s primary financial backer. But in mid-April, for the first time the German government entered into a strategic partnership with the defence sector of a country at war. The agreement paves the way for the co-production of weapons systems, drones with a range of up to 1,500 km and long-range missiles, together with Kyiv. One of the most visible examples is Quantum Frontline Industries in Germany — a joint venture between Quantum Systems and Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics — where the first drone rolled off the production line less than two months after the partnership was announced.

With a stroke of the pen, the German government has swept away the entire domestic debate of recent years over supplying German weapons to Ukraine for strikes on targets inside Russian territory. As former German MP Sevim Dagdelen has written, with the integration of Berlin’s and Kyiv’s defence industries we are witnessing the emergence of a German-Ukrainian military-industrial complex under Berlin’s hegemony. Indeed, it is likely that German-made long-range drones were used in the recent attacks on Moscow and the Moscow region.

Other European countries are involved as well. Since the end of 2024, Finnish group Summa Defence has set up several joint ventures with Ukrainian firms to produce drones in Finland. British firm Prevail Partners and Ukraine’s Skyeton joined forces in July 2025 to produce the Raybird surveillance drone in the UK. Skyeton has also opened a Raybird production line in Slovakia and is negotiating additional European partnerships, while Ukrainian drone consortiums are building assembly and component plants in Finland and Denmark.

This means that European nations — first and foremost Germany — are becoming ever more directly involved in the conflict. This seriously increases the risk of Russian retaliatory strikes on European territory. Indeed, in mid-April, the Russian Defence Ministry published the names and addresses of European companies — including several Italian firms — involved in the production of Ukrainian drones, stating that “the European public should both clearly understand the true reasons of threats to their security and know the addresses and locations of ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘joint’ enterprises producing UAVs and components for Ukraine on the territory of their countries”.

To make matters worse, there is growing evidence that Ukrainian drones are passing through the airspace of Baltic NATO countries to attack Russian targets — such as the drones that hit the Russian oil terminals in Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea. Just this month, Ukrainian drones have triggered repeated airspace alerts over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, prompting NATO fighter jet scrambles on multiple occasions, with at least one Ukrainian drone being shot down by a NATO jet over Estonia on May 19. Just days before, another Ukrainian drone struck an empty oil storage facility in Latvia. The political fallout has been significant, causing the collapse of the Latvian government over its handling of the crisis.

Russia has accused the Baltic states and NATO of actively allowing Ukrainian drones to use their airspace for strikes on Russia, framing it as NATO aggression. Presidential adviser Nikolai Patrushev stressed that this constitutes direct NATO country participation in attacks on Russian territory. For their part, Ukraine and the Baltic countries have rejected claims of deliberate collusion, accusing Russia of using electronic warfare and jamming to redirect Ukrainian drones into Baltic airspace — though this does not explain why Russia has proven unable to prevent drone attacks on sensitive and civilian targets, including in Moscow. European Commission President von der Leyen went as far as saying that “Russia and Belarus bear direct responsibility” for the Ukrainian drone incursions.

What is clear is that tensions in the Baltic are higher than they have ever been. The risk of a conflict between NATO and Moscow breaking out there is heightened further by the recent announcement of the creation of a joint naval force, dubbed the Northern Navies Initiative, comprising the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands. This force appears to have the explicit aim of containing Russia between the Arctic and the Baltic, potentially by obstructing Moscow’s commercial traffic — and in particular its so-called “shadow fleet”. Provocations such as the boarding of Russian vessels, or even a naval blockade, would constitute an obvious casus belli. To this must be added the militarisation of Finland, which recently joined NATO, and the espionage and aerial surveillance operations being conducted from its territory against Moscow — factors that are transforming the Scandinavian country into a new strategic threat in Russia’s eyes.

It is not an exaggeration to say that we are one incident — real or engineered — away from the situation rapidly escalating into a direct NATO-Russia war. This is particularly concerning given the fact that Western provocations are emboldening the hardliners in Moscow.

Among the more radical approaches, that of Sergey Karaganov stands out — a long-standing political scientist, formerly an adviser to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and currently among Putin’s advisers. Since the beginning of the conflict, Karaganov has advocated the possible use of nuclear weapons in Europe. His argument is that European elites are entirely discredited and lack the legitimacy to remain in power. But above all, they are incapable of reaching a compromise with Russia. They must be stopped by force of arms to prevent the conflict from spreading across Europe — first and foremost by striking strategic and highly symbolic military targets on European territory with conventional weapons.

According to Karaganov, if this were not sufficient to “persuade” European elites to come to terms with Russia, it would be necessary to resort to a “demonstrative” nuclear strike, or even one aimed at eliminating the European elites themselves. Such ideas, largely marginal at the outset of the conflict, are progressively gaining ground in both Russian military and political circles. In parallel, pressure on Putin for a change of strategy is mounting.

Mearsheimer takes seriously the argument advanced by Karaganov — that Russia should strike European targets with conventional weapons, escalating to nuclear if necessary — noting that what was once a minority view has gained wide acceptance inside Russia:

He argues now and I take him at his word because he is an honest person that the overwhelming majority of people that he talks to agree with him. The Russians in a sense are fed up.

On the nuclear dimension, Mearsheimer explains why the mere prospect of nuclear use gives Karaganov’s strategy its coercive logic:

Once you begin to go up the escalation ladder, everybody understands that at some point up there... somewhere up that ladder is nuclear use. On one of the rungs is the use of nuclear weapons... the mere threat of nuclear weapons will have huge deterrent value.

He also makes a striking historical comparison regarding Western red-line violations:

It’s truly amazing that the United States and Britain aided Ukraine when it invaded the Russian homeland in the summer of 2024. This is the Kursk offensive... the idea that we would help an ally invade the Soviet Union, that would never happen... or that we would help an ally attack one leg of the strategic nuclear triad. This is just unthinkable. It was just so dangerous.

His conclusion on the Russian strategic dilemma is the following:

If you’re playing Russia’s hand... you’re going to have to put your foot down, as my mother used to say. And you’re going to have to send a very clear signal that this is just unacceptable.

The risk of war is not some distant abstraction — it is dangerously, imminently real. The mechanisms of escalation that have brought us to this point are well understood: each step up the ladder, taken with the confident assumption that the other side will back down, makes the next step more likely and the space for de-escalation narrower. Western leaders have convinced themselves, through a combination of wishful thinking and institutional inertia, that Russia will continue to absorb provocations without responding in kind. But every week that passes without a diplomatic off-ramp brings us closer to the moment when that assumption is tested to destruction.

What makes the current situation uniquely perilous is not just the military escalation but the complete collapse of the political imagination that might arrest it. There are no Cold War realists, no back-channel, no serious European leader with the standing and the will to propose a negotiated settlement. There is only the momentum of the war machine, now distributed across a dozen countries and thousands of companies, producing weapons in Finnish factories, German joint ventures and British workshops — all of them feeding a conflict that, in the absence of urgent political intervention, has no logical terminus short of catastrophe.

The responsibility lies, ultimately, with European citizens. Our governments are not acting in our name or in our interests. It falls to us — before the next incident, the next miscalculation, the next drone that crosses into the wrong airspace — to demand that they step back from the brink.

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This is the English version of an interview that appeared in the May-June edition of the German magazine Hintergrund.

1. The Illusion of Multipolarity and “Engineered Chaos”

It is widely observed that a multipolar order is emerging, yet you have described US foreign policy — particularly under Trump — not as aimless, but as “engineered chaos”. How does Washington successfully use this strategy to obstruct a stable new international order, and who are the primary victims: the declared adversaries like China or the European “partners”?

Yes, I believe that Washington’s strategy is not aimless, but is rather the deliberate engineering of permanent chaos and disorder. Unable to defeat its rivals head-on, the US seeks to prevent any stable alternative order from consolidating. The logic is straightforward: a multipolar world requires, by definition, some degree of international order and predictability. By systematically dismantling that order — discarding treaties, weaponising sanctions, launching illegal wars, destabilising peripheral states — Washington ensures that no stable, coherent alternative international system can take root.

Both China and Europe are targets of this globalised proxy-war strategy, which targets the weaker links of the rival system, though they face it very differently. China is the US’s principal long-term adversary whose rise must be slowed at all costs, but China is also large, nuclear-armed and too economically integrated into the global system to attack directly. Europe is far more vulnerable, and in many ways a more immediately useful target. Keeping Europe destabilised, dependent and tied to Washington through NATO and energy prevents the emergence of the one geopolitical bloc that, if it ever achieved genuine autonomy, could decisively tip the global balance: a Eurasian economic space fully integrated within a new multipolar or polycentric global framework.

Europe is therefore a primary victim of this strategy, arguably more so than China. The war in Ukraine, the sabotage of Nord Stream, the forced switch to expensive American LNG in place of Russian pipeline gas, the war on Iran and its devastating energy consequences for the continent: none of these are accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a strategy designed to keep Europe weak, divided and subordinate.

2. Energy as a Geopolitical Lever and the Ukrainian Factor

You argue that Washington has deliberately replaced European reliance on Russian gas with a dependence on USA liquefied natural gas (LNG). Given the massive tensions in March 2026 over blocked pipelines in Ukraine (e.g., Druzhba), has energy infrastructure become a tool for the US to exert pressure via Kyiv on “disobedient” EU states like Hungary or Slovakia?

That energy infrastructure has become a tool of geopolitical pressure is no longer a hypothesis, it is documented fact. The US National Security Strategy explicitly frames “American energy dominance” as a strategic priority, and the Trump administration has made no secret of using LNG exports as leverage to extract political and economic concessions from European governments.

The Druzhba situation, however, requires more careful reading. The attacks on Hungarian and Slovak energy infrastructure are most plausibly the work of the EU-NATO establishment, which includes liberal-Atlanticist factions within the US state apparatus but should not be simply equated with the White House. The timing is particularly telling: these moves were clearly aimed at destabilising the Orbán government ahead of the Hungarian elections. Given that Orbán is one of Trump’s closest European allies, it would be strange to lay this at the White House’s door. What we are seeing is the permanent transatlantic state — the Brussels-NATO apparatus — pursuing its own institutional interest in eliminating a disruptive element, even at the cost of working against a sitting US president’s ally.

The broader point stands regardless: energy has become the primary lever through which both Washington and the Brussels apparatus discipline member states that pursue independent policies. Hungary and Slovakia are being punished not for violating EU rules but for refusing to subordinate their national interests to the Atlanticist consensus.

3. The Brussels “Silent Coup” and Strategic Self-Destruction

In one of your reports for MCC Brussels, you speak of a “silent coup” by the EU Commission. Why does the Brussels bureaucracy engage in an economically self-destructive game that serves Washington’s interests, and to what extent is the current crisis being used to seize powers that rightfully belong to sovereign nation-states?

Washington has long supported European integration on the reasonable calculation that one supranational government is easier to manage than dozens of national ones. The EU has therefore always functioned partly as an instrument of US influence. But reducing it to that alone would miss something important. The EU’s deeper function is the transfer of power from democratic nation-states to elite oligarchic interests — financial, corporate and bureaucratic — whose power grows precisely when governance is moved to institutions insulated from popular accountability. The Brussels apparatus serves a transnational superclass, and the American connection is one dimension of that, not the whole story.

What has changed under von der Leyen is the pace and brazenness of centralisation. The Iran war has provided a fresh opportunity. The Commission has used the crisis to assert control over foreign policy domains that formally belong to the High Representative, which is supposed to reflect the position of member states, establishing parallel structures, including an intelligence cell under direct Commission supervision and a new Directorate-General for the Middle East. The pattern is consistent: each new crisis becomes a pretext for another transfer of sovereignty upward, away from member states and away from institutions with at least some democratic anchor towards the structurally undemocratic supranational institutions of the EU.

4. Hungary’s “Strategic Autonomy” and Technological Bridges

While the EU demands an almost complete decoupling from the East, Budapest [under the previous government] maintained projects like the Paks II nuclear plant. Can such technological and energy-related cooperations serve as essential anchor points for a multipolar integration of Europe, and why was Hungary seemingly the only EU country taking the concept of “strategic autonomy” seriously?

Hungary’s insistence on completing Paks II, maintaining energy ties with Russia and preserving trade relations with China reflected a coherent understanding of what strategic autonomy actually requires in practice, as opposed to the rhetorical version Brussels peddles. Projects like Paks II matter not only for their energy output but as long-term anchors: they create technical and economic ties that are far harder to sever than political alignments, and they signalled to partners that Budapest intended to remain a serious interlocutor whatever institutional pressure it faces.

As for why Hungary stood largely alone, part of the answer is Orbán himself, a genuinely exceptional statesman by the dismal standards of contemporary European politics, one who has proven willing to absorb sustained financial and institutional punishment in defence of what he sees as Hungary’s national interests. But there is also a structural explanation. Until the 1990s, Central and Eastern European countries were largely shielded from the cultural and ideological colonisation that decades of US soft power, media dominance and Atlanticist institution-building imposed on Western Europe. The result is a more robust and unselfconscious sense of national identity. These societies were never fully “reprogrammed”, and Hungary under Orbán has been the country most willing to act on that historical difference.

5. The Weaponisation of “European Solidarity”

When Hungary temporarily halted diesel deliveries to Ukraine in response to pipeline blockades, it was condemned in Brussels as “unsolidary”. Is the term “European solidarity” today merely an ideological weapon used to suppress national interests and stigmatise any diplomatic path — such as the one favoured by the Global South (BRICS)?

The selective application of “European solidarity” tells you everything you need to know about what the concept actually means in practice. EU member states Hungary and Slovakia, whose populations are suffering measurable economic harm from pipeline disruptions carried out by Ukraine, are lectured about their obligations to the bloc. Meanwhile, Ukraine, which is not even a member state, is treated as though it commands unconditional loyalty from every European government. When Hungary suspended diesel deliveries in direct response to attacks on its own infrastructure, it was condemned. When Ukraine attacks the infrastructure of EU members, Brussels finds nothing to say.

The concept has in effect become an ideological enforcement tool, a way of delegitimising any government that deviates from the Atlanticist consensus rather than a genuine principle of mutual support. Countries that pursue diplomatic engagement with Russia, China or the Global South are framed as threats to European unity. Solidarity, in this usage, means alignment with EU-NATO and liberal-Atlanticist strategic priorities, and those who question that alignment are cast as enemies of Europe rather than defenders of European interests.

6. Germany: The Loyal Vassal and its Deindustrialisation

Germany follows the line from Washington most faithfully, yet it suffers the most from deindustrialisation. Why does the German political elite — in stark contrast to the previous leadership in Budapest — offer no significant resistance to the systematic weakening of its own economic foundation?

Germany’s incapacity to resist its own economic degradation makes sense once you appreciate how thoroughly the country was reoriented after 1945. The post-war Atlanticist reprogramming went far deeper in Germany than anywhere else in Western Europe, reshaping not only political institutions but universities, media, think tanks and the formation of several successive generations of professionals whose entire worldview was built within transatlantic frameworks. The Atlanticist power bloc in Germany is hegemonic in a way that has no real parallel in other countries, and any politician who strays from the Washington consensus faces immediate pathologisation, usually framed as a dangerous echo of the country’s worst historical chapters.

Nonetheless, despite this, up to a certain point, Germany was able to conduct a semi-autonomous policy. Under Schröder (and partly under Merkel), Germany managed to carve out a degree of strategic semi-autonomy vis-à-vis Russia, of which Nord Stream was the most tangible expression. That experiment proved threatening enough to provoke a sustained effort to re-establish full control: the gradual marginalisation of politicians willing to defend German economic interests, and the careful cultivation of those who would not. Friedrich Merz is the outcome of that selection process, a leader who combines assertive language with total strategic subordination and who presides over the managed decline of German industry without seriously contesting it.

7. Vulnerabilities of the BRICS and the Risk of Collapse

You have warned against “excessive confidence” in the success of multipolarity. What is the greatest structural or political vulnerability within the BRICS alliance that the US might exploit to cause the emergence of this new world order to collapse?

Yes, I think there is a good deal of complacency in pro-multipolarity circles, a tendency to treat the transition to a new international order as essentially inevitable and the US as capable of slowing it only marginally. I take a less deterministic view. As said already, a new international order requires, by definition, some degree of order and stability. By engineering permanent destabilisation, the US can create serious structural problems for the BRICS project without needing to win any direct confrontation.

The vulnerability the US is best placed to exploit is the strategic incoherence of the Global Majority’s collective response. Russia is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with NATO. Meanwhile, China continues to avoid direct conflict at virtually any cost, and Iran has largely been left to rely on its own military means to respond to the US-Israeli aggression (albeit with indirect support from China and Russia). The BRICS has no unified security doctrine, no shared deterrent framework and its members continue appealing to UN mechanisms and a rules-based order whose fictional character the situation in Gaza has made impossible to deny. Continued reliance on frameworks that demonstrably do not function risks signalling to the Western bloc that escalation carries no serious cost.

For all its waning power, the Western imperial bloc remains remarkably united. Developing a comparable strategic coherence among the countries of the Global Majority is probably the single most important task facing those who want to see the multipolar transition succeed.

8. The Middle East Conflict and the Iran Crisis

How does the current war involving the US, Israel and the “decapitated” Iranian leadership fit into this broader struggle for global dominance? Is this an attempt to reassert unipolar control over a key region of the multipolar world?

The war on Iran follows the same logic I described earlier: rather than direct confrontation with great powers, the US targets the weaker nodes of the rival system. Iran fits this role precisely. It supplies roughly 13 to 15 percent of China’s oil imports, forms a key part of the emerging Russia-China-Iran strategic axis, and has long represented the main obstacle to uncontested Western military primacy in the most energy-rich region on earth. Removing it simultaneously advances US energy dominance objectives and serves Israeli regional interests, and those two agendas have now fully converged around a single operation.

What makes the current war qualitatively different from earlier episodes of US-Iranian confrontation is the recklessness with which it has been launched. Previous administrations understood, at least partially, why attacking Iran directly would be catastrophic, which is why they held back despite decades of Israeli pressure. That institutional caution is now gone. Europe is already absorbing the consequences: a severe energy shock, the risk of massive refugee flows and mounting demands for direct military involvement. Two devastating wars now run simultaneously on the continent’s doorsteps, one to the east that Washington stoked, and one to the south that Washington is actively waging. The first pushed Europe deeper into vassalage. The second carries the real risk of pushing it toward economic and social collapse.

9. The Future of European Sovereignty

As we look toward the remainder of 2026, do you see a path for a “sovereigntist” turn within Europe, or has the structural dependence on Washington and the Brussels bureaucracy already reached a point of no return for most EU member states?

Two structural problems make a genuine sovereigntist turn in Europe very difficult to foresee in the near term. The first is the absence of any major party willing to confront the EU as an institution rather than simply complain about it, which is actually a retreat from where the debate stood a decade ago. The second, and in some ways more fundamental, problem is that virtually no right-populist or sovereigntist party has grappled seriously with Europe’s structural subordination to the United States, of which the EU is partly an instrument. Attacking Brussels while embracing Washington is not a coherent sovereigntism. Indeed, it avoids the very question on which everything else turns: who ultimately controls Europe’s foreign policy, energy supply and military posture.

We are thus facing a paradox. The objective conditions for a break with the Atlanticist order are more favourable than they have been in decades. US power is visibly declining, the Trump administration is generating fractures with European publics that no previous administration has managed and the EU’s institutional legitimacy is in deep crisis. Yet the political forces best positioned to exploit this opening are instead either asleep, co-opted or lacking the geopolitical literacy to understand what is happening. The one piece of genuine good news is that awareness of the need for a radical break is spreading among ordinary Europeans. On this question, it is the so-called anti-establishment parties that have fallen furthest behind their own voters.

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Tucker Carlson’s interview with Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel has been making waves on social media. And rightly so: it’s an incredibly important testimony, from someone who used to be very close to Zelensky, which confirms much of what war critics like myself have been saying for years — about the missed opportunities for peace and how these were sabotaged by Western intervention; the totalitarian and hyper-repressive nature of the Zelensky regime and its commitment to permanent war, even at the cost of Ukraine’s extinction; the mind-boggling corruption surrounding Western aid to the country, and much more. Many of my readers are likely to have seen the interview already. But for those too lazy to do so — or who, like me, can only absorb information in written form — I’ve decided to summarise the interview’s main points. You’re welcome.

Who is Iuliia Mendel?

Mendel was born in 1986 in the Ukrainian city of Henichesk, in the Kherson Oblast, in what was then still the Soviet Union. As she explains in her 2022 book Each of Us Is President, her intellectual formation was influenced substantially by Western ideas and culture, “attending dozens of courses and programs in Europe and the United States”. She then worked as a freelance journalist in Ukraine for several years, also writing for several Western outlets, including the New York Times, Politico Europe, the Atlantic Council, Vice, Spiegel Online and Forbes.

In May 2019, shortly before becoming Zelensky’s press secretary, she co-authored an important piece in the New York Times piece on the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal. For those who don’t the story, while Joe Biden was Vice President under the Obama administration, and leading US “anti-corruption” efforts in Ukraine, his son Hunter sat on the board of Burisma Holdings — a Ukrainian energy company owned by oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who was himself under multiple criminal investigations for tax evasion, money laundering and abuse of office. Hunter was paid up to $50,000 per month despite having no experience in Ukraine and having recently been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. In December 2015, Biden publicly threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees unless Ukraine fired prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had active investigations into Burisma and Zlochevsky. Shokin was subsequently removed. The article led the Biden administration to to cut off interviews with the Times.

Anyway, in June 2019, right after Zelensky’s election, Mendel started working as his press officer. As she explains in the interview, she was hired through an open application process from 4,000 candidates, worked directly with Zelensky for two years and describes herself as genuinely loyal to him initially. She worked with him until July 2021. She supported him when Russia launched its invasion in 2022, and was grateful he stayed in the country. But since then, her views about the Ukrainian president have shifted radically. She emphasises she has no personal vendetta but believes Zelensky is “one of the biggest obstacles towards peace today”.

Zelensky’s personality and leadership style

She describes a man utterly unlike his public image. He is “emotionally uncontrollable”, frequently hysterical, treats people as disposable and lacks genuine empathy. His extraordinary acting ability generated enormous Western support in 2022, but she insists “his acting doesn’t have any substance”. Two phrases he reportedly repeated constantly reveal his worldview: “Ukraine is not ready for democracy” and “dictatorship is an order”.

The communications operation was chaotic. Zelensky and his then-chief of staff Andriy Yermak — removed by Zelensky in 2025 following a corruption investigation — constantly contradicted each other, changed strategies and moods without warning, and created an atmosphere of perpetual frantic activity that produced nothing. She describes them both as “malignant and paranoid narcissists”, with Yermak the more paranoid of the two. Zelensky had the visions; Yermak found ways to implement them — almost never through legitimate policy.

When ratings began dropping and her team argued there were simply no positive results to communicate, Zelensky rejected the premise entirely: “It doesn’t matter what’s happening. The most important thing — we need 1,000 talking heads, and if 1,000 talking heads tell positive things, then positive things are happening”. When a colleague pushed back with a specific example of broken promises to displaced families from Donbas, he reportedly slammed the table and said: “I need Goebbels propaganda. I need thousands of talking heads of Goebbels propaganda”.

Zelensky’s pre-war record and relationship with Russia

She describes Zelensky’s background as deeply intertwined with Russia. He built his career and his first significant wealth performing for Russian audiences and media. When Russia annexed Crimea and war broke out in Donbas in 2014, he was in Russia completing a film — a fact he later publicly acknowledged. More damningly, she claims he owned properties in Crimea and was vacationing there under Russian control in May 2014, enjoying time with friends from his production company 95th Quartile, apparently indifferent to the annexation. A person who worked for him at the time, helping renovate the property, is cited as her source.

He ran for president in 2019 explicitly as a peace candidate, promising to “stand on his knees in front of Putin” to stop the war, defending the right of Ukrainians to speak Russian and advocating friendship with Russia. She says this is why people voted for him — nobody wanted war.

The NATO question

She was present at a December 2019 meeting in Paris where Zelensky had a private conversation with Putin and, according to her, personally promised Putin that Ukraine would never join NATO, on the grounds that Ukraine was not economically or institutionally ready and there was no domestic consensus for it. She stresses this was not a political or personal position unique to any Western leader — it was simply the reality.

The pivot came later when Zelensky, watching his domestic ratings fall, gave a TV interview in which he spontaneously asked why Ukraine wasn’t in NATO. The nationalist audience applauded and he followed the applause. From there he escalated the rhetoric continuously, presenting NATO membership as a non-negotiable condition for peace, knowing — she insists — that it was impossible. She describes his October 2024 “victory plan”, which listed NATO membership as the central demand, as “ridiculous” and a deliberate strategy: by attaching conditions he knows cannot be met, he creates a permanent justification for continuing the war and maintaining his heroic image. He even offered to step down if Ukraine was admitted to NATO, “knowing that Ukraine is not going to be taken to NATO. So it’s very easy to promise something under the condition of impossible things”.

Peace negotiations and missed opportunities

Mendel identifies at least two concrete moments when the war could have ended:

Istanbul, April 2022: she spoke with people who represented Ukraine at those negotiations and was told the two sides had agreed on virtually everything. Zelensky himself had privately consented to territorial concessions — something he now publicly insists is unthinkable. Then Boris Johnson arrived. He promised Zelensky weapons, influence, fame and a place in history as the man who defeated Russia. Zelensky chose the war. She notes that just days before Johnson’s visit, Zelensky was on camera saying he would continue negotiations. “It is said that this is Putin’s lies but this this story was told by Ukrainians”, she adds.

Late 2022: a second opportunity for peace was foreclosed when the Biden administration, as per a New York Times account that Mendel says confirmed her own information, decided to back Zelensky’s plan to continue fighting despite all evidence that Ukraine could not win.

She has tracked around seven attempts to end the war through various mediators and countries, in which Zelensky made promises to each and lied to all of them. His positions shift constantly — on ceasefire, on territory, on NATO, on elections — creating the appearance of engagement while ensuring that nothing is ever resolved. As an example she cites the contradiction between his June 2024 peace summit and the simultaneous planning of the Kursk incursion into Russian territory.

Corruption

She makes several specific allegations:

• A friend of hers was shortlisted for Minister of Social Policy and was told during the interview process that candidates would need to propose money-laundering schemes to be financed through the ministry — the body responsible for pensioners’ payments.

• A minister she declines to name was offered a bag of cash by Zelensky and Yermak — $5,000 a month in unofficial salary — because an official salary of that amount had caused a scandal.

• Another minister told her that close associates of Zelensky were demanding illegal percentage cuts from government programs, and when informed they were taking “too much,” Zelensky smiled and said “good job, guys” — and was not joking.

• The current energy ministry scandal: the former Minister of Energy helped launder around $100 million through offshore companies connected to Russian mafia figures. The minister himself got $12 million for his role in the deal. Mendel notes that this is roughly 10% — the standard fixer’s cut — raising the question of where the other 90% went.

• The dismantling of the independent supervisory board at Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state oil and gas company, and its replacement with loyalists, enabling what she describes as a scheme to turn it into a corruption vehicle modelled on Gazprom.

• On the IMF deal: Zelensky pushed through two difficult reforms to unlock a $5.5 billion package, demonstrating he was capable of doing it. Within days of receiving the first $2.1 billion tranche, he fired the head of the National Bank for political reasons, telling IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva the replacement would be “independent, but he will be coming from us”. Georgieva, who is Bulgarian and would speak to Zelensky in Russian, said that she stopped speaking Russian to him after that.

Demographics and the human cost of the war

Ukraine’s last census was in 2000-2001. Pre-war, government officials estimated 34-37 million people actually living in the country. With 10+ million refugees abroad and significant population in Russian-occupied territory, she estimates around 25 million remain — of whom 11 million are pensioners living on $75-200 per month. That leaves perhaps 10 million working-age people to sustain a country at war. She describes a recent case of a retired film director dying of cold and hunger at home with no one to help him, and wonders how many similar deaths will never be counted.

She describes soldiers sent to the front in inadequate winter uniforms, losing fingers and limbs to frostbite, while ordinary Ukrainian women cook food and crowdfund equipment for them. She frames this against the backdrop of hundreds of billions in Western aid, the destination of which she says needs to be tracked.

Her conclusion is stark: “I believe we are on the verge of extinction”. Ukraine cannot sustain a war of attrition against a country of 140 million that has not even borrowed to finance the conflict, while Ukraine carries debt at 100% of GDP.

Repression and political control

She describes a system of comprehensive political control:

• A member of parliament who publicly called for peace negotiations was jailed within three days on treason charges, despite security service insiders confirming he had had no contact with Russia since 2021.

• Cases of treason have multiplied many times over during the war.

• Critics are publicly smeared as Kremlin agents — a label she says will now be applied to her.

• Bloggers who questioned the war were summoned by the security service and threatened with treason charges; at least one had to flee the country.

• Zelensky uses the front line as a punishment, including for political critics. She was told by insiders that he explicitly ordered action against critical bloggers in late 2023.

• Zelensky sanctions his own citizens — an unconstitutional measure — freezing accounts and shutting businesses of opponents.

• Former president Poroshenko is sanctioned and unable to access his own money.

• A pervasive culture of cancellation targets artists, writers, churches and historical figures on the grounds of any connection, however tenuous, to Russia.

She describes Ukraine as feeling like the USSR — and says a government official told her the Netflix series How to Become a Tyrant described exactly what was happening in the country, even before Russia’s invasion.

Suspected drug use

Mendel is careful to say she never personally witnessed Zelensky taking drugs. However, she says multiple people over many years — including doctors, people who knew him for 20-25 years and people who spent time with him in clubs — have described cocaine use. During her time working for him, she noticed a consistent pattern: before interviews, after she had briefed him, he would disappear into the bathroom for 15 minutes and emerge “a completely different person — energised, full of action, ready to say everything”. She also met, inside the presidential office, a man she later learned was described as his supplier. She also references a scandal during his 2019 campaign when he challenged his opponent to drug testing, went to a clinic owned by a friend and the results were dated differently from when the samples were given.

Yermak

As noted above, Andriy Yermak was Zelensky chief of staff from 2020 to 2025 — when he was removed by Zelensky himself following a corruption investigation Mendel traces Yermak’s background from a 1990s strip club where he worked as a lawyer and met future pro-Russian politicians, through work at a luxury goods store that smuggled branded merchandise, into film production (including films about smuggling) and eventual proximity to organised crime at a local level. She says a first employee described him as someone with enormous ambitions and no talent for them. She describes the Zelensky-Yermak dynamic as a symbiosis of two paranoid malignant narcissists — Zelensky providing chaotic vision, Yermak providing the tools to implement it — operating not around policy but around personal ambition and self-preservation.

Her situation and motivation

Mendel cannot return to Ukraine after this interview. She stayed in the country through most of the war, was shelled when Russians withdrew from her area and had a husband who served at the front. She left in early 2025. She says she is speaking now because Zelensky is at a weak point and she believes people within his own power vertical who want peace may not act against her as they once would have. She is writing a book about the real Zelensky. Her message, repeated throughout, is simple: the only way to support Ukraine today is to push for a peace deal, because the country is being destroyed and its people are not Zelensky’s priority — his survival in power is.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

On April 8, the day after a ceasefire with Iran (which was supposed to include Lebanon) came into effect, Beirut was hit by an extremely violent Israeli bombardment.

Within minutes, entire residential buildings had been reduced to rubble — smoking heaps of concrete and twisted metal. Dozens of Israeli aircraft dropped bombs and missiles on around a hundred targets in the capital and other parts of the small neighbouring country.

The initial toll announced by Lebanon’s Ministry of Health was devastating: more than 350 dead and over 1,200 wounded. In the capital, the strikes hit residential neighbourhoods and some of the most crowded commercial streets.

“Eternal Darkness” is the emblematic name Israel gave the operation, as if signalling an intent to bring about the total annihilation of its neighbour.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had unleashed a campaign of unprecedented violence against the Gaza Strip — supported by a massive flow of US weapons — pulverising residential areas and civilian infrastructure.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces have adopted the same tactics: massive air bombardments and sweeping, arbitrary evacuation orders that have forced hundreds of thousands of people into displacement.

Civilian infrastructure, villages, and border towns have been razed to the ground to make way for “buffer zones” occupied by Israeli forces. Hospitals, medical personnel, rescue workers and journalists have been targeted — all in an atmosphere of substantial international indifference and apathy.

A Ceasefire Never Respected

The fragile ceasefire reached with Hezbollah at the end of 2024 was violated repeatedly by Israel, which struck various parts of Lebanon on multiple occasions, killing at least 370 people.

In the meantime, the American administration had been pressing the Lebanese government to proceed with Hezbollah’s disarmament, while Israel continued to bomb the country. This only served to heighten tensions within Lebanon.

Although it did not respond to Israeli violations, Hezbollah carried out a gradual rearmament.

Only after the Israeli assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28 did Tehran’s allied group respond with a rocket launch against Israel — one that the BBC itself described as “largely symbolic”.

This gave Tel Aviv the pretext to launch the large-scale operation described above, which since early March has caused more than 2,500 deaths and nearly 8,000 injuries.

At the start of the campaign, senior Israeli officials declared that Lebanon would receive the same treatment as Gaza.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, for his part, stated that Beirut’s southern suburbs would soon resemble Khan Younis — the city in southern Gaza utterly razed to the ground by more than two years of bombardment.

Verbal Violence and War Crimes

Similar scorched-earth tactics were adopted by the United States and Israel in their war of aggression against Iran, accompanied by official statements of equally stark violence.

At a Pentagon press conference on March 4, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that the campaign against Iran had never been “meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”.

He added that the United States would be raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and that the war was being waged “devastatingly, decisively, and without mercy”.

A few days earlier, presiding over his first Pentagon worship service since the start of the war, Hegseth had prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.

For his part, President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to blow up Iran’s power plants, bridges and desalination facilities, to “decimate“ its infrastructure and to send Iran “back to the Stone Age”.

These threats culminated in the April 7 ultimatum, when he warned that “an entire civilization will die tonight, never to be revived”, if Iran did not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Such violence is not merely rhetorical — it finds full expression in the military campaign waged against Iran.

The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) has recently submitted to the International Criminal Court and other international bodies the evidence it has gathered on possible war crimes committed by the US and Israel since the start of the bombardments on February 28.

The IRCS estimates that the Israeli-American strikes destroyed more than 132,000 civilian structures, including residential homes, hospitals, schools, universities, research institutes and bridges.

On the first day of the conflict, the United States bombed the elementary school of Minab, in southern Iran. It was hit twice, forty minutes apart, maximising the number of victims — 155 children and 26 teachers.

The violence of the Israeli-American campaign was such that even the British Telegraph described Tehran as “an apocalypse of burning hospitals and children buried under rubble”.

The provisional toll stands at at least 3,375 dead and over 26,000 wounded. It is worth noting that Iran’s retaliatory action in the Gulf, though it caused considerable damage to military and energy infrastructure, resulted in only a few dozen deaths.

The Israeli campaign against Lebanon (which caused more than 2,500 deaths) was, proportionally, even more ferocious than the Israeli-American campaign in Iran.

More Permissive Rules of Engagement

It is equally important to stress that the overwhelming violence of these military operations cannot be attributed exclusively to the current governments in the United States and Israel — it must be understood in the context of a broader transformation in the military culture of the two countries.

Naz Modirzadeh, a professor at Harvard Law School and founder of the university’s program on international law and armed conflict, described it as reflective of a “deeper transformations within the US military and its legal apparatus”.

As I wrote in an article about a year ago:

In recent years, the Department of Defense has become increasingly focused on how the US might fight a large-scale conflict against an adversary capable of matching the American military in technology and force. In such a scenario — referred to in technical jargon as a “large-scale combat operation” (LSCO) — an extremely violent military confrontation would unfold across multiple domains (air, land, sea), air superiority would not be guaranteed, casualties would run into the hundreds of thousands and entire cities would be razed to the ground.

“In short”, Modirzadeh argues, the US military has begun “preparing for an all-out war with China”. With a conflagration of such magnitude in mind, military legal experts are reinterpreting the laws of war.

In 2021, an article in Military Review, authored by two senior US Army legal experts, argued that the US would need to fight on the basis of far more permissive rules if it hoped to win a large-scale war. Further articles in the same vein followed.

Geoffrey Corn, a professor of law at Texas Tech University and former senior legal adviser to the US armed forces on the laws of war, assessing Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, argued that “the systems and processes that the IDF implemented are very similar to what we would implement in a similar battle space”.

Corn had made these statements to the American magazine The New Yorker.

The same report states that the idea “that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is in line with the US military’s understanding of its own legal obligations, has become the general consensus among American military lawyers and their allies in the academy in recent years”.

The “Dahiya Doctrine”

The military tactics adopted by Israel in Gaza in turn derive from the war fought by the Israeli army against Hezbollah in 2006.

It was then that the Israeli armed forces elaborated what became known as the “Dahiya doctrine”, named after the southern suburb of Beirut — generally considered Hezbollah’s “stronghold” but simultaneously home to thousands of Shia civilians who have no necessary connection to the organisation.

The doctrine, conceived by General Gadi Eisenkot, then head of the IDF’s Northern Command, entails the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure as a method of collective punishment, designed to turn the local population against the military entity controlling that territory.

Eisenkot subsequently declared: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”.

Israel is once again applying this tactic in Lebanon where, despite the new ceasefire, it continues to level villages and civilian infrastructure — often through outright controlled demolitions.

It is estimated that since early March, Israeli forces have destroyed or damaged more than 62,000 residential units across the country. The objective is to create a permanent buffer zone that definitively prevents residents from returning.

In late March, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz declared that the 600,000 Lebanese living south of the Litani River — situated roughly 30 kilometres from the border with Israel — would never be allowed to return, and that their homes would be destroyed.

Permanent State of War

From a strategic standpoint, Israel has embraced what some have called the doctrine of “permanent security” and others that of “preventive war”, in opposition to the theory of containment previously adopted by the Jewish state.

Whatever one chooses to call it, this approach envisages no negotiated resolution to conflicts, only a military solution pursued through the massive use of force. In practice, this doctrine translates into a permanent war encompassing not only Gaza and the West Bank, but also Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran — what many in Israel have termed the “war on seven fronts”.

This campaign involves a total disregard for international law, rules out any political compromise and aims exclusively at the elimination of the adversary — through the decapitation of its political and military leadership or annihilation via overwhelming military superiority.

But the conflict with Iran, which rapidly spiralled into a regional war, has exposed all the limitations of this theory.

The resort to targeted killings, and to exorbitant levels of violence and destruction, has failed to bring about the collapse of the Islamic Republic in Iran or of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Even Hamas remains in power in the devastated Gaza Strip.

For its part, Israel has been ground down by over two years of uninterrupted conflict. Its army is worn out by casualties of men and materiel, by the constant mobilisation of reservists and by the need to fight on multiple fronts.

The United States has squandered enormous quantities of armaments and strained the logistical capabilities of its navy and air force, only to find itself ultimately compelled to evacuate its bases in the Arabian Peninsula.

Washington has lost control of the Persian Gulf and must now contend with the global crisis triggered by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Both the US and Israel find themselves in an unprecedented strategic, political, and moral paralysis. The temptation to resort to ever greater levels of ferocity and violence as a way out of the impasse — if heeded — is destined to drag them both deeper into an abyss into which they risk pulling the region and the world.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Subscribe now

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green

What follows is the English translation of the introduction I wrote for the book.

Since the early 2010s — that is, since the so-called euro crisis and the economic and social upheavals that followed — an extensive critical literature on the European Union, and in particular on monetary union, has emerged, especially in Italy, to which I can claim to have made my modest contribution. Yet almost all of this analysis has focused on the institutional characteristics and the economic, political and social implications of the European integration process (and of monetary unification in particular): on the way in which the progressive transfer of ever-larger shares of sovereignty — up to and including monetary sovereignty, the cornerstone of state independence — from the national to the supranational level, combined with the adherence to a structurally technocratic and anti-democratic political-institutional order and a radically neoliberal European economic constitution, has negatively affected economic and social development, democratic health and class equilibria in member states, with particularly significant effects in the Italian case.

This body of analysis has, in other words, privileged the hard power dimension of European integration: the ensemble of legal, economic and institutional constraints formally codified in the treaties, in the fiscal rules, in the macroeconomic surveillance mechanisms and in the architecture of the euro, and more broadly the economic and social policies promoted by European institutions. In recent years, attention has increasingly turned to the reckless warmongering policies promoted by Brussels. In short, the critical literature has so far focused, understandably, on the substantive content of European policies and architecture: on the most visible, concrete — and most overtly coercive — aspects of the European external constraint.

Little or no attention has been paid, however, to the soft power dimension of European integration: that is, to the ensemble of cultural, communicative, educational and symbolic instruments through which the European order is legitimised, internalised and “naturalised” in the public debate and in the collective imagination. And yet this is a terrain where a less visible but equally decisive contest is being waged. No regime or political-institutional order, after all, can sustain itself solely through coercive instruments or technical-administrative mechanisms, and the European Union is no exception: like any other political regime, it too requires symbolic frameworks and narratives capable of conferring meaning, justification and legitimacy upon its exercise of power.

From this perspective, the EU has progressively supplemented, over the years, its traditional instruments of functional integration (single market, common currency, technical regulation) with an elaborate discursive apparatus aimed at symbolically legitimising its own project: at constructing a European “common sense” that presents the current configuration of the Union not as a historically determined and politically contestable arrangement, but as the inevitable horizon of political and economic modernity. In essence, while hard power operates through explicit rules and constraints, soft power works through the manufacturing of consent, the definition of interpretive frameworks and the selection of paradigms deemed scientifically and morally legitimate.

Yet if it is true that the Union has progressively intensified its symbolic and narrative production, it is equally true that — especially in recent years — this effort has not translated into open engagement with European public opinion. What we have witnessed is not a genuine deliberative politicisation of the European project, grounded in transparent and equal dialogue with civil society, but rather a more indirect, structurally asymmetric and ultimately authoritarian mode of consent-building.

Rather than openly submitting its strategic choices and institutional architecture to challenge, the EU has tended to channel its narratives through instruments of diffuse legitimation, often largely invisible to the broader public. This has occurred primarily through the systematic use of funding programmes directed at NGOs, think tanks, media outlets, local authorities, academic networks and cultural institutions. Formally, such funding is public and traceable; in substance, however, it remains opaque in the collective perception, since the public is rarely aware of the financial link between certain ostensibly “independent” positions and European funding.

What takes shape is a mode of influence that does not take the classical form of direct propaganda — declaredly institutional and easily identifiable — but rather that of a networked dissemination of interpretive frameworks, “values” and political priorities through formally autonomous actors. European narratives are not merely communicated from the top down; they are “grafted” into the social fabric through a multiplicity of intermediaries operating in the fields of education, information, culture and civic activism.

In this respect, the EU is not exceptional within the contemporary landscape. The forms of legitimation and political influence in the twenty-first century have evolved well beyond the twentieth-century model of propaganda conveyed exclusively through mainstream media or state apparatuses. Increasingly, a “whole-of-society” approach is adopted, in which the production and circulation of particular narrative frames involves multiple levels simultaneously: public institutions, organised civil society, universities, digital platforms, cultural influencers, territorial bodies and transnational networks.

In this model, political communication becomes intertwined with governance and the distribution of resources. Funding becomes an instrument for structurally orienting public debate: not necessarily through censorship or the repression of dissent — which does nevertheless occur — but through the selective promotion of particular themes, perspectives and sensibilities. The boundary between support for civil society and indirect co-optation tends to blur, often to the point of vanishing altogether.

The result is a discursive ecosystem in which the European agenda frequently appears as the spontaneous product of a plurality of actors, when in reality it is sustained — and sometimes made possible — by a financial and institutional infrastructure that favours its reproduction. This contributes to reducing the visibility of real political conflict: consensus is not constructed through an explicit confrontation between alternatives, but through the progressive normalisation of a particular normative and strategic horizon.

In greater detail, the text critically examines the evolution of the European Union’s budget and its growing deployment not merely as an economic or cohesion instrument, but as a political and cultural tool aimed at promoting Brussels’s policy agenda. In recent years, European programmes and funds have been progressively oriented towards the diffusion of so-called “European values” — and very often towards the promotion of the EU and the integrationist project as such — through the direct funding of NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, media outlets and educational projects, with the effect of blurring the boundary between support for civil society, institutional communication and outright political propaganda.

The text shows how budgetary instruments such as the CERV programme, Erasmus+, and other funding lines are used to reinforce narratives favourable to European integration, while simultaneously marginalising critical or Eurosceptic positions. The result is that many formally independent organisations end up functioning as transmission belts for the European Commission’s priorities, transforming civil society from a space of mediation between citizens and institutions into a vehicle for legitimising Brussels’s policies. What emerges is a veritable EU-NGO-media-academia propaganda complex: a self-referential ecosystem in which funding, cultural production and advocacy mutually reinforce one another. This is, in certain respects, the hidden face of external constraint: if hard power narrows the space of decisions, soft power tends to narrow the space of imaginable alternatives.

A central element of the book’s argument concerns the democratic risk inherent in such practices: the way in which the use of public funds to selectively support particular political visions distorts the pluralism of public debate and may constitute — especially in countries governed by Eurosceptic forces — a form of “foreign interference” in the internal affairs of member states.

In sum, the text argues that the progressive politicisation of the European budget has transformed instruments formally aimed at promoting cooperation, rights and civic participation into levers of ideological influence and consolidation of the integrationist project, raising crucial questions about democratic legitimacy, transparency and the very role of European institutions in the public sphere.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Subscribe now

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green

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This is the third and final part of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.

In part one, I examined the theoretical and historical foundations of the EU’s legitimacy problem and showed how the peace narrative — the EU’s original legitimising frame — was never founded on genuine popular mobilisation but on elite-managed integration deliberately insulated from democratic politics, and how it has now been definitively exhausted by the war in Ukraine. In part two, I traced the EU’s successive attempts to legitimise deepening integration through economic and normative narratives — from the shift to market-based justifications in the 1980s, through the sacralisation of the euro and the rise of “Social Europe” as a rhetorical fig leaf, to the emergence of a “Europe of values” in the early 2000s.

In this third and final part, I trace the accelerating decomposition of EU legitimacy from the eurozone crisis through the polycrisis era and the war in Ukraine. I show how the “Europe of values” narrative — revived in the aftermath of the financial crisis as a moral counterweight to the social devastation wrought by austerity — in fact deepened rather than resolved the legitimacy deficit, by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity and moral standing. I further examine how, in the polycrisis era, emergency governance and value-based legitimation fused into a single architecture of permanent exception, with instruments like the CERV programme operationalising “European values” as tools of narrative consolidation and proxy propaganda. And finally I argue that the war in Ukraine has accomplished the definitive and irreversible exposure of the values discourse as a selective political instrument: the same Union that framed its response to Russia’s invasion as a civilisational struggle has maintained silence or active complicity in the face of genocide in Gaza, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that “European values” were never universal principles but directional instruments of Western geopolitical interest.

6. The Late 2000s-Late 2010s: The End of Implicit Consent and the Values Revival

The eurozone crisis that followed the global financial crisis marked the definitive exhaustion of the permissive consensus that had long underpinned European integration. Adjustment programmes, fiscal surveillance mechanisms and structural reforms imposed direct and uneven social costs on broad segments of the population, particularly in southern Europe. Integration ceased to be a distant or largely technocratic process and became an everyday experience of constraint, discipline and loss of policy autonomy.

This was not merely a crisis of economic outcomes but of political authority. The widespread and accurate perception that key decisions were taken without democratic input and often in direct contradiction to popular preferences fundamentally undermined the normative foundations of the EU project. National parliaments were marginalised, technocratic governments were installed and social rights were subordinated to fiscal targets. The eurozone crisis thus constituted a watershed moment: the point at which European integration began to be experienced less as cooperation among states and more as a system of rule.

The euro thus functioned simultaneously as sacred object and disciplinary instrument. Its preservation justified the suspension of democratic norms, including the marginalisation of parliaments, the imposition of technocratic governments and the subordination of social rights to fiscal targets. Emergency became the dominant grammar of governance. Debtor countries were cast as irresponsible, profligate or insufficiently disciplined, while creditor countries were associated with virtue, prudence and credibility. Economic imbalance was recoded as moral failure.

The Revival of the “Europe of Values” Narrative

Confronted with mounting contestation in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, EU institutions revived and significantly intensified the “Europe of values” narrative. Democracy, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and pluralism were increasingly foregrounded as defining features of European identity. This renewed emphasis served a dual function. Internally, it was presented as a moral counterweight to the social dislocation and political alienation produced by crisis management. Externally, it reaffirmed the EU’s self-image as a normative power committed to upholding universal principles in an unstable world.

Yet this revival also had a distinctly disciplinary dimension. Values were no longer invoked merely as aspirational ideals but increasingly mobilised to draw boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate political positions. Dissent from EU policies risked being reframed as opposition to European values themselves. In 2018, the European Council adopted a recommendation on common values, inclusive education and the European dimension of teaching, which called for educational strategies designed to ensure that young people “understand the importance of and adhere to” the values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. The promotion of values was explicitly linked to combating populism, xenophobia, divisive nationalism and the spread of “fake news”, thereby framing political dissent and alternative interpretations of democracy as threats to be managed through pedagogical and normative intervention.

This approach, however, further exposed structural contradictions. While European values were selectively mobilised to criticise “illiberal” developments in certain member states, they remained conspicuously absent from debates about the governance of the monetary union itself, where social rights, democratic participation and political choice were subordinated to fiscal discipline and technocratic imperatives. The asymmetry between proclaimed values and practised governance undermined the credibility of the narrative. Rather than resolving the EU’s legitimacy crisis, the intensified mobilisation of values further highlighted the gap between moral discourse and political reality, reinforcing perceptions of double standards and deepening existing conflicts.

Heritage, Culture and Memory: The Endless Quest for Moral Legitimation

Alongside the revival of values discourse, EU institutions intensified efforts to construct a shared European memory and identity as sources of legitimation. Whereas early integration had been oriented primarily towards the future, the erosion of faith in economic growth and the exhaustion of forward-looking narratives prompted a gradual shift towards the past. European institutions began to act as “memory entrepreneurs”, seeking to construct a common European memory as a substitute for the weakening mobilising power of functional and economic integration. This approach increasingly emphasised a negative identity: Europe as a space defined by the rejection of past horrors — war, totalitarianism, genocide — and by a commitment to never repeat them.

A telling illustration of the persistent belief among EU elites that legitimacy deficits could be addressed through narrative engineering was the A New Narrative for Europe project, implemented by the European Commission between 2013 and 2014. The initiative epitomised the conviction that culture, memory and values could be mobilised to compensate for the absence of a shared demos. Yet this ambition immediately ran into a structural impasse. While EU leaders acknowledged that passive acquiescence could no longer be assumed, they proved unable to specify what substantive values or historical references could plausibly serve as the foundation of a renewed political narrative. Values capable of sustaining authority cannot simply be manufactured on demand.

The mobilisation of civil society and academic institutions as vectors of values promotion must also be understood as a response to the EU’s weakened legitimacy. The transformation of the Erasmus programme is particularly illustrative. Originally conceived as a modest student exchange scheme, Erasmus+ was progressively expanded into an instrument for the active promotion of EU values, policy priorities and political alignment. The Jean Monnet Programme, incorporated into Erasmus+ and significantly expanded, evolved into a dense network of professorial chairs, modules and centres of excellence functioning as the EU’s academic outreach arm (for a detailed analysis of the Jean Monnet Programme see here). Faced with governments that openly contested the EU’s normative authority, EU institutions increasingly relied on indirect governance mechanisms to bypass national political arenas and shape societal norms from above. This strategy can be understood as a form of “propaganda by proxy”: rather than directly mobilising institutional communication, the Commission relies on ostensibly independent civil society actors to disseminate pro-EU narratives, shape public debate and marginalise dissenting perspectives.

The Backlash Against Value-Based Legitimation

The highly polarised political context of the early-to-late 2010s exposed the structural limits of value-based narratives as instruments of legitimation. Rather than unifying Europeans around a shared moral horizon, the “Europe of rights” and “Europe of values” increasingly became sites of division and contestation. Far from generating a sense of common belonging, these narratives accentuated national differences, cultural anxieties and competing interpretations of universalism.

In this context, rights discourse operated simultaneously as a resource and as a weapon in struggles over sovereignty and identity. Progressive actors mobilised human rights language to defend migrants, minorities and supranational authority, while populist actors reframed the same discourse as evidence of elite moralism, cultural relativism and democratic overreach. This dynamic was particularly visible in the politicisation of LGBTIQ+ rights, which came to be presented as emblematic of European modernity and emancipation, while generating strong antagonism in more conservative societies where the association of the EU with sexual liberalisation was perceived as a form of cultural imperialism.

The backlash against value-based legitimation was also expressed through the populist reappropriation of “Christian Europe”. Whereas postwar Christian democrats had conceived Christianity as a transnational moral horizon compatible with supranational integration, contemporary conservative actors increasingly framed it as a cultural marker of national identity. Christianity was stripped of its universalist theological content and reinterpreted in secular and cultural terms. This shift exemplifies a broader process of counter-sacralisation: as EU institutions elevated abstract values to justify authority, populist actors sacralised alternative referents — nation, culture, religion — to challenge supranational legitimacy.

These tensions came sharply into focus during debates in the European Parliament on developments in Hungary. EU institutions framed Hungary’s constitutional choices as threats to the secular, liberal values of the Union, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán responded by explicitly reclaiming the language of European values, insisting that his government’s reforms were grounded in them. The controversy thus revealed two competing conceptions of nationhood and legitimacy: one grounded in procedural rule-following and expert authority, the other in tradition, collective memory and popular sovereignty. The paradox of the EU’s position was striking: while the EU frequently celebrated diversity, tolerance for divergent moral orientations across national contexts appeared sharply limited.

In this sense, the backlash against the EU’s value-based legitimation revealed the limits of moralised authority. Rather than closing the legitimacy gap, the elevation of values intensified conflict by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity, history and the sources of authority. The result was not the emergence of a shared European moral community, but a polarised landscape in which competing sacralisations confronted one another — supranational values versus national traditions — each claiming exclusive legitimacy.

7. Polycrisis Europe: Permanent Emergency and the Sacralisation of Post-Democratic Governance

From 2020 onwards, European integration entered what has widely been described as an era of polycrisis. The COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to global supply chains, energy crises and escalating geopolitical tensions followed one another in rapid succession, producing a condition of permanent instability. Rather than constituting discrete shocks, these crises overlapped and reinforced each other, consolidating emergency as a normal mode of governance.

In this context, the narrative grammar forged during the eurozone crisis was generalised and intensified. Exceptional measures were again justified as necessary, temporary and value-driven. Yet the exception proved durable. Emergency ceased to be an episodic deviation from normal politics and became its organising principle. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the most explicit manifestation of the state of exception as a form of sacralisation: the imperative to “protect life” functioned as an absolute value, limiting the space for democratic contestation. In the EU context, the pandemic reinforced sacralised beliefs about the necessity of supranational coordination, technocratic expertise and regulatory uniformity.

A defining feature of the polycrisis era is the convergence between securitisation and supranationalisation. Socio-economic issues — public health, supply chains, energy — are increasingly framed as security matters, justifying both extraordinary measures and the transfer of authority to the European level. The EU is consecrated as the default solution to crisis management. Emergency thus reinforces integration not through consent, but through necessity. The sacralisation of Europe becomes less about inspiring collective identification and more about establishing non-negotiable limits to political action.

“Europe of Values” Redux: The CERV Programme

The polycrisis era has been marked by an intensified reliance on the “Europe of values” narrative. Concepts such as resilience, solidarity, democracy and fundamental rights are increasingly presented as defining features of European identity and as guiding principles of crisis management. Rather than counterbalancing emergency governance, however, this renewed normative emphasis has become deeply entangled with it. Values no longer operate primarily as limits on power, but as justificatory resources within a broader architecture of exception.

This shift is visible in the growing institutional centrality of values discourse. The assignment of the portfolio “Values and Transparency” to a Vice-President of the European Commission during the 2019-2024 term symbolised the elevation of values from rhetorical reference to an organising principle of EU governance. At the same time, “European values” have acquired a self-performative role in judicial and regulatory politics, functioning as axiomatic reference points that narrow the scope of legitimate contestation.

A key institutional expression of this development is the increasing use of budgetary instruments to promote compliance with EU-defined values. While mechanisms such as rule-of-law conditionality have attracted public attention, a less scrutinised but equally significant trend concerns the proactive deployment of values-oriented funding programmes. Chief among these is the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme, launched in 2021 (see my paper on this here). Through CERV and similar instruments, the European Commission channels substantial public funding to civil society organisations, NGOs, think tanks, municipalities and academic institutions tasked with promoting “EU values” and fostering identification with the European project. Since its inception, thousands of organisations have received support under the programme, with funding concentrated among large transnational advocacy networks active in areas such as anti-discrimination, gender equality, racial justice and minority rights.

At first glance, many of the programme’s objectives appear unobjectionable. Combating discrimination, opposing racism and protecting individuals from violence and exclusion are goals that command broad support. Yet the political significance of these initiatives lies not simply in their stated aims, but in how they blur the line between protecting individuals from harm and promoting — often enforcing — specific cultural norms and ideological frameworks. The promotion of equality and dignity increasingly extends beyond the prevention of discrimination into the active reshaping of language, institutional practices and social norms in ways that frequently collide with prevailing cultural understandings within member states.

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This is part two (link to part one) of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.

In part one, I examined the theoretical and historical foundations of the EU’s legitimacy problem and showed how the peace narrative — the EU’s original legitimising frame — was never founded on genuine popular mobilisation but on elite-managed integration deliberately insulated from democratic politics, and how it has now been definitively exhausted by the war in Ukraine. In this second part, I will trace the EU’s successive attempts to legitimise deepening integration through economic and normative narratives — from the shift to market-based justifications in the 1980s, through the sacralisation of the euro and the rise of “Social Europe” as a rhetorical fig leaf, to the emergence of a “Europe of values” in the early 2000s.

In the third and final part, I trace the accelerating decomposition of EU legitimacy from the eurozone crisis through the polycrisis era and the war in Ukraine. I show how the “Europe of values” narrative — revived in the aftermath of the financial crisis as a moral counterweight to the social devastation wrought by austerity — in fact deepened rather than resolved the legitimacy deficit, by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity and moral standing. I further examine how, in the polycrisis era, emergency governance and value-based legitimation fused into a single architecture of permanent exception, with instruments like the CERV programme operationalising “European values” as tools of narrative consolidation and proxy propaganda. And finally I argue that the war in Ukraine has accomplished the definitive and irreversible exposure of the values discourse as a selective political instrument: the same Union that framed its response to Russia’s invasion as a civilisational struggle has maintained silence or active complicity in the face of genocide in Gaza, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that “European values” were never universal principles but directional instruments of Western geopolitical interest.

3. Market Europe and Global Europe: The Rise of Economic Legitimation

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the peace narrative had lost much of its mobilising force. European integration entered a new phase, increasingly legitimised through economic narratives centred on markets, competitiveness and globalisation. The completion of the internal market, the removal of barriers to capital and labour mobility, and the promise of efficiency gains became central justifications for deeper integration. This shift must be understood in the context of the crisis of the postwar Keynesian compromise. The economic turbulence of the 1970s — stagflation, declining profitability and intensified global competition — undermined the material foundations of social-democratic governance. In this context, European integration was progressively rearticulated as a solution to the perceived limits of national economic management.

Crucially, however, many of the constraints that were later invoked to justify further integration were not external or inevitable, but were themselves the product of earlier integration choices. The European Monetary System (EMS), established in 1979, introduced rigid exchange-rate constraints that sharply limited national monetary autonomy while exposing weaker economies to speculative pressures. Rather than revealing the intrinsic failure of sovereignty, these dynamics reflected the contradictions of an incomplete and asymmetric monetary regime that constrained states without providing compensatory democratic or fiscal mechanisms. Yet these pressures were consistently reinterpreted through a supranationalist lens: if supranational integration wasn’t delivering the expected results it was because there wasn’t enough of it. Under Jacques Delors’s leadership, supranationalism increasingly assumed an ideological character: national sovereignty was redefined as anachronistic, while supranational institutions were portrayed as guarantors of stability, efficiency and openness.

This ideological shift was reinforced by political developments on the left, particularly following the failure of François Mitterrand’s initial redistributive programme in the early 1980s. Confronted with currency pressures exacerbated by the EMS, the French government abandoned its domestic socialist agenda and embraced European integration as a constraint-based strategy. From this moment onwards, European integration was increasingly presented as the only realistic path for progressive politics. Supranational constraints — many of them self-imposed — were reinterpreted as protective shields against market forces rather than as instruments of depoliticisation and elite-oligarchic power. In this way, supranationalism ceased to be a means and became an end in itself, sustained by a narrative in which the problems produced by integration were continuously invoked to justify its further deepening.

4. The 1990s, Maastricht and the Sacralisation of the Euro

The Maastricht Treaty formalised a shift from market-building integration to functional integration, embedding monetary union, fiscal discipline and institutional constraints at the core of the European project. Monetary policy would be delegated to an independent central bank, fiscal policy constrained by convergence criteria and economic coordination framed as a matter of technical necessity. Integration was no longer justified primarily by peace or prosperity, but by credibility, stability and confidence.

At the same time, the 1990s saw the emergence of “Social Europe” as a legitimising counter-narrative. Social Europe functioned as a progressive alternative to Market Europe, promising that integration could be reconciled with social protection, labour rights and cohesion. It allowed centre-left parties and trade unions to support Maastricht while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to social justice. Yet Social Europe remained structurally subordinate to Market Europe. Social policies were weakly institutionalised, largely dependent on national implementation and systematically overridden by economic imperatives. The asymmetry between hard economic constraints and soft social coordination was not accidental but constitutive of the integration model.

The creation of the euro represents the most far-reaching and politically consequential step in the history of European integration. More than any previous integration step, the euro institutionalised depoliticisation. From the outset, the euro was not merely justified as an economic tool, but framed as an irreversible political achievement. By framing the euro as both necessary and irreversible, political elites pre-emptively delegitimised opposition and insulated the project from democratic contestation.

Italy: A Laboratory of Anticipatory Sacralisation

Italy provides a paradigmatic case of the early sacralisation of the euro. There, long before its material effects could be fully measured, the euro had already assumed a symbolic and political function far more ambitious: it became a substitute for politics itself. In the crisis-ridden Italy of the 1990s, the euro was elevated from an economic instrument to a theologico-political device, a secular faith meant to discipline society, absolve elites of responsibility and promise redemption through sacrifice.

Italian political elites mobilised the euro through the idea of the vincolo esterno, the external constraint. By binding the country to irreversible European rules, political leaders claimed they could finally impose reforms that Italy was allegedly incapable of choosing for itself. Decisions would no longer be political; they would be technical. Responsibility would no longer lie with elected governments; it would be outsourced to treaties, markets and supranational institutions.

The debate around the euro rapidly took on characteristics that are unmistakably religious. The euro became undiscussable — criticism was answered not with counterarguments, but with moral disqualification. Italy’s economic problems were reframed in terms of guilt: public debt was no longer treated as a historical and political outcome, but as a moral failing; austerity became penance and suffering became purification. A millenarian promise surrounded the currency: prosperity was always said to be just around the corner — once reforms were completed, once rules were fully internalised. This structure mirrors classic political theology: a doctrine placed above politics, immune to falsification and sustained by faith rather than evidence. Italy was not an exception but a precursor: a laboratory in which the logic of euro sacralisation was tested and refined.

Beyond Italy, with the formal introduction of the euro, sacralisation intensified and generalised across the Union. Monetary stability, price discipline and fiscal orthodoxy were elevated to quasi-moral principles. The euro thus functioned as a powerful boundary object. Membership signified inclusion within a community of discipline, credibility and virtue; exclusion or deviation carried moral stigma. This moralisation of economic governance reinforced existing power asymmetries, particularly between core and peripheral economies, while simultaneously obscuring their political origins.

5. The Early 2000s: The Rise of the “Europe of Rights” and “Europe of Values”

At the turn of the millennium, European integration entered what many political leaders and institutional actors interpreted as a constitutional moment. With the launch of the euro imminent or already underway and the prospect of eastern enlargement raising fundamental questions about cohesion and identity, the European Union faced an increasingly visible legitimacy problem. Economic integration had deepened substantially, yet political identification and democratic attachment lagged far behind. In this context, EU institutions and supportive elites began turning to normative narratives centred on rights, values and constitutionalism as a means of compensating for the growing democratic deficit.

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