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It's debating season again at Uncommon Decency. This week we are chatting about Zelensky's rock star world tour, unpacking the Greek center-right's triumph and weighing the Conservatives' (low) chances for a similar performance in the UK. Join us for our second Decency Deep Dive! As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

“Soon there will only be five kings left: the king of spades, of clubs, of hearts, of diamonds, and the king of England”. King Farouk of Egypt was off in his prediction, but the permanency of the British monarchy has recently come under heightened scrutiny. The threat of independence from Britain’s constituent kingdoms, accelerated by Brexit, means that this could well be the Last King of Britain we see. Across the seas, Commonwealth members are expected to hold referenda on removing the British monarch as their head of state, something that many had only retained out of respect for the longevity of Elizabeth II. This is the challenge the latest person to sit on the Stone of Scone faces. Charles III has waited a long time to be King, but his reign could mark the end of one of Britain's most enduring institutions. The monarchy is but one of many constitutional institutions, and this week we also looked at the history of Parliament and its struggles with the Crown over the centuries, as well as the constitutional legacies of seminal figures in British history such as Oliver Cromwell. To explore this vast topic, we sat down with Sir Peter Riddell, a former journalist with the Financial Times and Times of London, and an Honorary Professor of History at University College London, where he works with the school’s Constitution Unit. We also covered recent constitutional crises stemming from the premiership of Boris Johnson and whether these exposed or validated the role of a monarch. Finally, our patreons will be able to hear an extended conversation on various constitutional reforms that have been floated in recent years, including by the commission led by Gordon Brown. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

In the mid-1990s, the mayor of Istanbul was quoted saying: “democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off”. That mayor is now president and his critics fear he believes Turkey has reached its democratic destination. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power, his consolidation of it, and his ability to shape world events makes him one of the 21st century’s extraordinary leaders. But he is currently at risk of losing his re-election battle as rampant inflation and the mishandling of rescue efforts following an earthquake and its aftershocks wrecked the south of the country. Now we’re faced with the question of whether one of the longest-serving autocrats in Europe’s neighborhood could lose in the forthcoming election. This week we recorded the first of a two part episode on Turkey. This edition covers Erdogan’s rise to power, his ideology, the clash between Kemalists and Islamists and finally (for our Patreons only) a discussion of what could happen when Turks vote this week. Our guests for this deep dive into Turkey and its mercurial president are Birol Baskan, a professor at Georgetown University and non-resident scholar at The Middle East Institute. Professor Baskan has published a number of books including The Nation or the Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy (2021). We also welcomed back Ryan Gingeras, a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is the author of six books, and his most recent work The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire (2023) is available to purchase now and linked in the show notes. The views he expresses here are not those of the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

It's debate season on Uncommon Decency. This week we evaluated President Macron's visit to China, and the premiership of Giorgia Meloni. As well as what stood out to us from the first part of this year. Enjoy! As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

“If only mine were the last drop of Spanish blood to be spilled in civil strife. God willing, may the Spanish people at peace, so replete with extraordinary virtue, at last find homeland, bread and justice”. Who among today’s Spaniards could possibly disown this quote? The man who uttered in November 1936 shortly before being shot by firing squad, in whose tombstone the epitaph is inscribed, is José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The current left-wing government of Spain has different plans for his bodily remains. As part of its so-called law of democratic memory, approved last summer, Primo de Rivera will be disinterred this week from his tomb at what used to be called the Valley of the Fallen—renamed Valle de Cuelgamuros by the same bill—incinerated, and his ashes will be relocated to the San Isidro monastery in Madrid. So what does the government of Pedro Sánchez fault Primo de Rivera for? Although he ended his life on the aforecited conciliatory note—and even though he lived through only six months of the civil war from prison before being executed by the Second Republic, which viewed him as a threat—Primo de Rivera remains a standard-bearer of 20th century Spanish fascism, someone historians see as having laid the idealogical groundwork for Franco, who went on to rule for 40 years upon winning the Civil War. He is the latest target of a sweeping effort, unfolding since the previous socialist government in the late 2000s, to settle the scores of these tumultuous decades of Spain’s history. These bills do various things. They rename streets and monuments. By setting up DNA banks, they enable families to trace, find and give a proper burial to Republican victims of Francoist repression buried in mass graves. And lastly, they reframe the way History is taught, depicting the Second Republic (1931-1939) as the unimpeachable defender of freedom and democracy against Franco’s fascist villains. This week, we will navigate this treacherous topic by inquiring about Franco’s exact place in Spain’s public consciousness, exploring the demographics of this issue, and questioning whether Spain’s history can be so neatly framed as a black-or-white story of good versus evil. We are joined by two distinguished hispanists. On one side of the line, Michael Reid, a longtime regular at The Economist and the author most recently of Spain: The Trials and Tribulations of a Modern European Country (2023), with Yale University Press. On the other side of the line we have with us Nigel Townson, a professor of History at Complutense University in Madrid. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

“I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace”. We begin with this quote from Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (1942) for two reasons. First, because it is a wonderful book that beautifully describes this powerful sense of loss—do give it a read. But more importantly, because in this episode we will challenge the idea that the Empire of the Habsburgs vanished “without trace”. In fact, its legacy remains incredibly alive in Central Europe specifically, and across Europe more generally. Some might see in the European Union (EU) an offspring of the buried liberal empire. So today we will explore what we owe to the Habsburgs and weave that parallel between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the EU. Joining us in this time capsule of an episode, we have Caroline de Gruyter, a German journalist of all things Brussels, and author of “Monde d’hier, monde de demain” which covers exactly today’s topic—go give it a read if you want to dig in further. On the other side of the line we have former Talking Politics podcast star and Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, Helen Thompson. She recently published “Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century”, a top-rated account on the three crises rocking western democracies in the 2020s. As usual, the full conversation will be available only to our Patreon subscribers. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"Is it a revolt? No sire, it's a revolution". While this famous exchange is attributed to Louis the XVIth and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, odds are that French President Macron has had similar conversations with his aides in the past few weeks. In an attempt to balance the books of France's pensions regime, Macron’s party—Renaissance—filed a bill to increase the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. Without a formal majority in Parliament, he needed the support of the center right, but given the overwhelming opposition to the bill across the electorate, Macron decided to use a constitutional trump card to force through the bill without a vote. This triggered a no confidence vote which was only 9 votes short of toppling Macron's PM, Élisabeth Borne, and her government. In the meantime, millions have taken to the streets or went on strike to oppose the bill. While these have been largely peaceful, some have turned violent, with brutal street fights breaking out between police officers and antifa groups. This week, we try to take stock of this chaos with Nicholas Vinocur from POLITICO and Cole Strangler, a Paris-based freelancer. Bear in mind we won’t be releasing an episode next week, and expect us to be back the week after that. Enjoy your Easter break! As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

While the geographic center of the EU is apparently in a small Bavarian field, its political center is harder to pin down. Historically, it was probably somewhere between France and Germany, but with the war in Ukraine, this center has seemingly moved East. Warsaw was not too long ago under considerable pressure from Brussels over rule-of-law skirmishes. Now, Poland and Lithuania are reaping the political benefits of their unambiguous support to Ukraine and their long-established hawkish stance on Russia. In a sign of this evolution Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki last weekend was not afraid to lambast Germany for being “co-responsible for the mess on the energy market” and urged Berlin to step up its support for Kiev. We wanted to map this shift in European politics and stress-test whether this pivot is noise or substance. We are joined by Jana Puglierin, the head of European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and a returnee to the show. On the other side of the line, we are joined by Timothy Garton Ash, a historian of contemporary Europe who just published Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (2023), a part-memoir based on his decades of experience traveling across Europe. This week our Patreons will get to listen to Timothy and Jana mapping out the nuances of Central and Eastern European politics, between Poland and Hungary, or Romania and Bulgaria. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

On episode five of this show, the late Gyórgy Schópflin, then retired and in the twilight of his life, made a lucid observation about what, at bottom, set his native Hungary apart from his adoptive Great Britain. “Hungary has no post-colonial guilt”, intoned the retired academic and former Member of the European Parliament (MEP). Schöpflin meant this as a partial explanation—if not a justification—of the nationalist politics practiced by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the subject of our episode that day. Not having colonized other territories, Orbán's dealings with other world leaders were, in Schópflin’s view, a function of Hungary having fallen under the dominion of foreign powers throughout recent history, be it Austria or the Soviet Union. What did Schópflin mean about the UK, however? Simply put, that conversely things like the British public's toleration of high levels of immigration from former colonies or its support for high levels of development aid towards them are also, in their own way, a function of Britain’s past as the ruler of a vast empire. In his latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2022), Oxford University ethicist Nigel Biggar hopes to inform a reassessment of Britain’s colonial guilt, placing on a single moral ledger the calamities and abuses worthy of guilt and condemnation along with the achievements worthy of praise and celebration. The Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, Biggar is joined in this latest episode by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a historian of Spanish colonialism and the William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Together, our two guests challenge one another to comparatively assess the historical and moral record of the Spanish and British empires. Enjoy! As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That is the peroration from possibly the greatest speech ever written, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The final words have been a rallying call for the voices of liberty and democracy not just in the US but across the world. However, those voices have been met with a growing chorus pushing back on the ideals of democratic governance. The debate over whether we are in a democratic recession has become a mainstay of modern political discourse, and world leaders are increasingly casting the world in manichean terms of democracies vs. autocracies. That is the context in which our guest this week, Martin Wolf, wrote his latest book. The Chief Economics Commentator for the Financial Times and one of the preeminent thought leaders in the West on economics and politics, Wolf is the author of a number of books, with his latest one, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023), covering all the most pertinent issues shaping the globe today. What is ailing democracy? What reforms are needed? What is the relationship between capitalism and democracy? These were just some of the questions that we covered during this episode. There is also a policy discussion for our Patreons including the merits of Starship Trooper’s citizenship policy, and a discussion on changing voting laws away from one person one vote, not to ranked choice voting, but something far more interesting. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

Since mid-December, a corruption scandal has been unfolding in Brussels that could soon begin rock the European Union's (EU) very foundations. Eva Kaili, a 44-year-old Member of the European Parliament (MEP), was detained by Belgian authorities along with three other suspects—including fellow MEP Marc Tarabella and Kaili’s partner, an assistant to another MEP—for allegedly accepting large bribes from foreign government officials in exchange for whitewashing the image of those governments in Brussels. Qatar was frontline in the scandal, but so was Morocco, and more recently, even Mauritania. As this episode goes to press, no less than 1.5 million EUR in cash have been seized, much of which was lying around the house of Kaili’s father, who is also ensnared. With the World Cup then about to take place in Qatar and amid widespread allegations of unsafe working conditions for migrant workers hired to build the facilities, Kaili and her fellow suspects had their work cut out for them. Now—the scandal’s implications cannot be overstated. While the EU has long labored under critiques of its democratic legitimacy, the moral legitimacy of its leaders has largely gone unquestioned. That all changes now. To discuss the repercussions of this scandal, we have with us Frank Furedi, executive director of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Brussels and Thomas Fazi, a columnist at UnHerd and Compact. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

“Exactly a year ago, I broadcast a message that contained the two things that remain most important now: that Russia had launched a full-scale war against us, and that we are strong. We are ready for anything. We will defeat anyone. Because we are Ukraine. We will never rest until the Russian murderers face the punishment they deserve. The punishment of the international tribunal. The judgement of God. Of our warriors. The verdict is clear. Nine years ago, the neighbor turned into our aggressor. A year ago, the aggressor turned executioner, looter and terrorist. We have no doubt that they will be held accountable. We have no doubt that we will win”. That was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week. To take stock of how profoundly this one-year war is changing our continent, we have decided, on this bonus episode, to reflect upon three unique angles of it: (1) the shifting tectonics of public opinion, (2) the enduring resilience of the transatlantic relationship and (3) the message the invasion sends to other authoritarian would-be aggressors like China. Enjoy the episode! As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". These words by American statesman Benjamin Franklin are often paraphrased into “those who sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither”. Franklin was talking about taxes, but don’t worry—that’s not what we’re going to cover today. We’re diving back into the world of espionage. This episode originally would have been combined with the one on Russia's security services, but we finally decided to keep them separate because we had so many interesting things to discuss with Dan Lomas. Dan is a senior lecturer in intelligence and security studies at Brunel University. This week, we asked him to comment on the role of intelligence agencies in democratic societies. We talked about the war on terror and how it affected the public's view of the security services, as well as the debate over Huawei and other forms of Chinese espionage. For those of you listening in February, we had a brief discussion about the infamous Chinese spy balloon and what it says about the country’s security posture. For our Patreon subscribers, you will be able to hear Dan discuss the effects of surveillance capitalism on the security services and how the collection of personal data by companies is reshaping intelligence work. Naturally, any conversation on Western spies must include a debate over who is the best James Bond—subscribe to hear Dan’s answer! As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

«With your democratic laws we will colonize you, and with our koranic laws we will dominate you». This rather bellicose warning for Europeans came from a 2002 speech by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, one of the key intellectual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). It’s a great insight on what the MB is—a strictly religious and conservative reaction to modernity that was launched in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan El-Banna. It’s also an insight into its modus operandi. The MB works in the shadows and builds its strength slowly through a complex maze of sister organisations to push its narrative and its pawns. Two decades after that speech, a series of controversies around EU institutions funding MB-adjacent organisations have highlighted the MB’s influence in Europe. We tried to stay light on acronyms but we mention FEMYSO a few times: that’s the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisation, which is one of these glossy organisations that get a lot of visibility in Brussels but that have strong ties with the MB’s web of organisations. To cover this issue we have invited Florence Bergeaud Blackler, an anthropologist at the French CNRS who has been working on these issues for a while and just released in French «Le Frérisme et ses réseaux, l’enquête» (The Brotherhood and its networks, an investigation). On the other side of the line we have Tommaso Virgili, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the WZB Social Center in Berlin where he works on modernization movements within Islam in response to the challenge of fundamentalism. He co-authored in 2021 a report for the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) on the MB in Europe entitled «Network of Networks, the MB in Europe». Before we move on, we're very happy to announce that we have partnered up with What’s Up EU, the best newsletter out there to follow all the policy and political development in EU politics. Take for example all the conversation we had on this podcast on trade. What’s Up EU will walk you through the inner workings of policymaking and all the horse-trading that goes behind it. It’s trusted by hundreds of journalists, policymakers, diplomats all across the world and if you need—or want—to follow what happens in Brussels, then subscribing to What’s Up EU is the best thing you can do, the link to subscribe is in the description. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"The Soviet State Security Service is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries”. Those were the words of Allen Dulles, the long-time head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but they may just as well describe the security services of today's Russia. Welcome back to a new season of Uncommon Decency where this week, we are starting with a conversation about the Chekhist state that Russian President Vladimir Putin has created. Joining us for this episode was Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who has been covering the security services and terrorism issues since 1999. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), and he has written a number of books on the Russian state including his most recent work, The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin (2022). This episode covered a lot of ground and referenced a lot of groups so let's start by outlining some of the abbreviations and names you’ll hear: KGV, SVR, FSB, GRU, Wagner Group. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

It’s that time of the year again—a time to look back on the year lapsed and make resolutions for the coming one. At episode 75, Uncommon Decency readies to enter its third calendar year—we launched in October 2020—with a potent mix of hope and derision. For the first time this year, we are greeting 2023 with a very special series of Uncommonly Decent awards and gifts. Who claims our “Brutus” award for betrayal of the year—Rishi Sunak, Giuseppe Conte or the Pakistani military? Who’s our “Gorbachev” spectacular collapse of the year—Liz Truss, BoJo, Putin or the European Parliament? Who pulled the “De Gaulle” political comeback of the year—Leo Varadkar, Bibi Netanyahu, Anwar Ibrahim or Lula? Who wins the “how-do-you-still-have-a-job” award—Berlusconi, de Kirchner or Sergei Shoigu? To hear us bestow these funnily-titled awards, listen to this special bonus episode marking the new year—and make sure to tell us how you’d have voted by reaching out through the usual channels? As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

It was the opening shot of what the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) editorial board fears may become a protracted climate trade war between the European Union (EU) and the United States. In a notorious departure from standard EU lip service to free trade, late last week French President Emmanuel Macron urged fellow European leaders anew to match the Biden administration’s round of green subsidies pork-barrelled into the Inflation Reduction Act. Unhelpfully acronymized as IRA, that legislative package was signed into law in August. As part of it, the US Treasury will be offering tax breaks and other market-rigging subsidies to companies manufacturing electric vehicles in the US, which Macron fears will unfairly disadvantage their European competitors. Macron claims there should be greater joint efforts to accelerate the green transition. In this latest episode with The Economist’s Charlemagne columnist, Stanley Pignal, and POLITICO’s Barbara Moens, we inquire whether the EU was really as committed to free trade as its liberal cheerleaders claim in the first place, and whether this latest round of rhetorical animus may spark a real trade war between transatlantic allies. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"Within our mandate, the European Central Bank (ECB) is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, and believe me, it will be enough." By uttering those three words, Mario Draghi saved the Eurozone from collapsing, thereby ushering Europe’s monetary policy into the 21st century. European fiscal policy, meanwhile, has not quite caught up. To this day, it still sticks with the treaty-enshrined limits to member-states' debt and deficit--the European Stability Mechanism (ESM)--albeit with varying degrees of fidelity. These days, the European Commission is proposing a new economic governance framework that would give member states greater flexibility on their spending plans and the Commission a larger role in the continent’s policy. This week we spoke to Rebecca Christie—a fellow at Bruegel—to discuss the Commission's proposal and the broader sweep of European economic policy. Rebecca is the author of an intellectual history of the ESM and a columnist for BreakingViews. This conversation got quite wonky quickly, as we rattled through arguments on capital markets unions, deficit targeting, bond spreads, tackling inflation, and Alexander Hamilton. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

"I think this administration—and President Biden personally—is very much attached to Europe, but when you look at the situation today, there is indeed a de-synchronization.” In an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, French President Emmanuel Macron highlighted the growing tension in the transatlantic relationship as the United States and Europe rift apart in a number of areas such as economics and energy. The EU has raised concerns that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a major package of legislation signed into law by President Biden earlier this year, will severely damage European industry through its use of subsidies and tax credits to promote manufacturing in the US. The dispute was at the core of discussions between the US and France during President Macron’s state visit to the US last week. Another area of disconnect relates to the differing approaches the EU and the US take towards China. While the US views China as a threat, European countries have a more dovish approach, favoring cooperation to competition. This was underscored by the recent visits of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Council President Charles Michel to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the former of whom recently declared in an essay for Foreign Affairs that the world is facing a "Zeitenwende"—the end of an era. Both visits were criticized by China hawks given their proximity to the party congress where President Xi was enshrined for another five years, becoming its most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. This week in a bonus episode, Jorge, Francois, and Julian discussed the fractious state of US-EU trade relations, as well as the diverging approaches to China. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.

On May 7, 1999, five bombs rained down from U.S. jets on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, as part of NATO’s air campaign to halt the deadly assault by the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Nearly a quarter of a century later, China is transforming the site of its bombed former embassy into an expansive cultural center, set to be one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Once opened, the center will serve not only as a potent symbol of China’s growing presence in the Werstern Balkans, but also of the potential kinship between the two regions, not least owing to the shared socialist past that Chinese diplomats often emphasize to advance those relations. In the long-run, some experts deem China’s growing economic clout in Europe, primarily through the Western Balkans, a more consequential trend than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine itself. To unpack just how deep China’s influence on the region runs, we are joined this week by Damir Marusic of the Atlantic Council and Valbona Zeneli of the Marshall Center. As always, please rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions either on Twitter at @UnDecencyPod or by e-mail at undecencypod@gmail.com. And please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.