David Marquand on European politics

David Marquand, a former British MP and a commentator on Europe, writes: “At the heart of the European project lay an unacknowledged but pervasive ambivalence about politics. In transcending the nation state, the founding fathers were also seeking to transcend—or rather to escape from—the messy, vulgar, clamorous irrationality of political life.”

Hans Kundnani on the German question

Hans Kundnani, editorial director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, recently argued in the Washington Quarterly that “Germany’s economy is too big for any of its neighbours, such as France, to challenge…but not big enough for Germany to exercise hegemony.” This, he concluded, is an economic statement of the “German question” that tormented Europe for 75 years after German unification in 1871.