Europe

STEVE ANGLESEY brings you some of the recent stories you might have missed from the continent. A man who used a blow-dryer to thaw a frozen water pipe set his home in southwest Germany on fire, causing 300,000 euro (£262,000) worth of damage. Police in Kämpfelbach-Ersingen said they believed the dryer had been left unattended […]

Covid has damaged populists in power. But it has also assisted those in opposition, especially in Europe where the centre is struggling to protect its population, says NICK COHEN. To say the radical right is deceitful and malevolent is to state the obvious but miss the point. I do not mean to discourage you from fighting […]

News that you might have missed from around the continent, selected by STEVE ANGLESEY Bayern Munich’s superstar players spent a night on a grounded plane at Berlin’s Brandenburg airport because they were 30 seconds too late to take off. The German champions, headed for the Club World Cup in Doha, had arranged for their match […]

JANE MORRICE is a former deputy speaker of the Northern Ireland assembly and helped to implement the Good Friday Agreement. In a very personal essay, she explains how she sees her British, Northern Irish and European identity, in the wake of Brexit. A ‘European unionist’ is everything the name suggests. In the broadest sense, it […]

The EU has blundered catastrophically over vaccines and behaved badly. Let’s be good neighbours about it, says LIZ GERARD. Well, what do you know! Here at last, to celebrate the double anniversary of Brexit and the UK’s first case of coronavirus, is an example of something the government has got right. Something we have done better […]

CATHRIN SCHAER on how the continent sees its vaccine troubles. While Brexit fans were busy trying to shout “I told you so” across the Channel as loudly as possible, following the recent AstraZeneca stoush, Europeans were – as they so often are – more worried about their own backyards than being in a race with Britain. There […]

The EU has survived previous crises. But it is not guaranteed to get through the next one, says JOHN KAMPFNER. “All of us are responsible for the crisis, and all of us have a responsibility to resolve it.” “We cannot shoulder this alone in the long term. We need a European solution.” So said Donald […]

Denis MacShane on the late Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a man who helped modernise France and Europe, and relished an argument and a rivalry. “Your friend, Tony Blair, who does he think he is. He’s now calling for Albania to be let into Europe?” Valéry Giscard d’Estaing stretched out his long legs in the French embassy in […]

Lech Walesa helped create modern Poland. Thirty years after he came to power, MICK O’HARE reports on a complex character and his even more complex legacy When Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party was re-elected in October 2019 under prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki it was on a ticket of more of the same. More right-wing […]

Roy Jenkins – the man that helped Britain join the European Community. This week sees the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roy Jenkins, one of the outstanding British statesmen of the post-war period. He was one of the greatest reforming home secretaries in history, arguably the most successful chancellor of the exchequer since the […]

Globalisation might now be a dirty word for many, while U2 sometimes seem as disliked by an equal number. But, says IAN WALKER, at their finest the band capture a sense of optimism about the connected world. Commercially, U2 are as successful as any band could be. Over the last decade, they made more money […]

In a deeply personal essay, writer PETER GUMBEL explains how the waning of national identities, combined with Brexit, has led him to reassess his own sense of who he is. November 9 is a day heavy with significance for my family: on that date in 1938, my maternal grandfather was arrested in his German hometown […]

The city has been so scrutinised it is difficult to find much more new to say about it. But an enthralling new book has succeeded in this task, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. The early days of the coronavirus seem a long time ago now. Streets fell empty as we hunkered down, shops and businesses closed and […]

Nine writers from across the continent tell us what ‘Europe’ means to them… Ana Pessoa, Portuguese authorEurope is about multilingualism and multiculturalism. We might not speak the same language, we might not share the same cultural background. Perhaps we don’t laugh at the same jokes even and we live very different lives. But we share […]

Europeans have idealised their continent as a place of accomplishment and civilisation, of excellence and enlightenment. But, in a challenging essay, Surinamese-Dutch writer GLORIA WEKKER argues that there is another side to Europe, of exclusion and denial. One evening in the dead of winter 2015, close to zero degrees and with a cold wind searching […]

The Swiss held two important national referendums last Sunday. The first decisively reversed a previous one of 2014 which, by a wafer-thin majority, had sought to end freedom of movement of people with the EU, putting the country’s whole relationship with Europe in jeopardy. The lesson for Brexit Britain, a Swiss friend tells me, is […]

A year ago, monitoring the G7 protests in Biarritz, I was kettled for more than two hours by police under a baking sun. The following day, I was almost choked by tear gas in Bayonne. What I experienced in the southwest of France was part of a heavy-handed police and judicial response to peaceful protest […]

The European Commission has put tackling discrimination at the heart of its mission. That will mean tougher and more frequent clashes with some member states, says Piotr Godzisz. In her first state of the union address as president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen called out hatred and pledged to build “a union […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY comes up with the first half of his rundown of the top 20.

Images taken by a pioneering balloonist more than 100 years ago lay bare the impact of climate change on France’s biggest glacier, KIERAN BAXTER reports Like a one-man Google Earth, Swiss aviation pioneer Eduard Spelterini flew a gas-filled balloon from the French town of Chamonix to Switzerland on August 8, 1909 – a distance of […]

The future, says NATHAN PIERCE, belongs to the European cities that genuinely embrace collaboration Europe is brimming with vibrant cities, each with their own unique flavour. At one end of the scale, sprawling metropolises like London, Paris and Berlin are renowned as global centres of commerce and culture. On the flipside, at least half of […]

The Catalonian crisis has put Europe, as well as Spain, in jeopardy, says PAUL KNOTT. The EU has been getting itself back on track recently after a series of crises. That comeback could be derailed again by the dramatic events in Catalonia. The Spanish government’s attempt to block the referendum on Catalan independence by force […]

The Danish island of Fanø was bypassed by the conflicts of the 20th century, yet remains marked forever by them. JAMES RODGERS visits and finds a European backwater with a lesson for Brexiteers The lone white headstone stands out. Nearby, in the tiny cemetery, lie farmers and fishermen who worked the land, faced the North […]

ADRIAN BURNHAM visits the Norwegian city of Stavanger, home of one of the world’s greatest street art festivals, where even the surrounding fjords become a gallery I need to get my eyes tested. I thought I’d just seen Igor Ponosov’s work Too Far, Too Close (2017) at the brilliant Rise Up! Exhibition. I was chuckling […]

In recent decades, Germany has shied away from being too assertive in its foreign policy. But growing global uncertainties mean that – regardless of Sunday’s election result – that is changing. Policy expert EMILY MANSFIELD analyses exactly where the country (and by extension the EU) is heading German foreign policy is currently in a transitional […]

Angela Merkel may be on course for victory but her campaign for the German chancellorship is not the stately procession it might seem from afar. TONY PATERSON joins her on a decidedly bumpy election trail Earlier this year the twin political earthquakes of Brexit and Donald Trump prompted shaken Europeans to dub her the last […]

A refusal to confront its past leaves France facing an uncertain future, argues MARTIN EVANS All countries have difficult chapters from their past, which continue to cast a shadow on the present. For France, the Vichy period certainly fits into that category. But, as the country has lately been considering, its colonial past is every […]