New Books in European Politics

If, as expected, he re-emerges as prime minister after the Dutch election on March 17, Mark Rutte is on track to become the Netherlands' longest-serving prime minister. By mid-2022, he will beat the record set by Ruud Lubbers in 1994 and, assuming everything goes according to plan, he will serve until at least 2025.Yet, despite being a veteran on the European stage, Rutte remains an enigma - even at home. As Petra De Koning discovered from conversations with the prime minister's old friends and associates for this political biography, Rutte has never been in a relationship, cooked a meal or even had a political strategy.In a European Union without the UK and soon to be without Angela Merkel, Rutte is emerging as the spokesman of the EU’s pragmatic, fiscally conservative, free trading, and Putin-sceptical wing. But who is he? How has he refashioned his liberal party and Dutch politics, and can he reshape Europe?Petra De Koning is political editor of NRC and the 2020 winner of the Anne Vondeling Prize for political reporting. Formerly a correspondent in Kosovo and Brussels, she returned to The Hague in 2013 to cover domestic politics. In Dutch, she is the author of The Butcher's Daughter (2000) about her experiences in Kosovo, and co-author with Cees Banning of Balkans on the North Sea (2005) about the Yugoslav war tribunal.*The author's own book recommendation is What's In An Apple? A a collection of six conversations between Amos Oz and Shira Hadad (Keter, 2018 - not yet published in English).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are not short of books and commentary on the rise of the nativist right in Europe and the US but not all these movements are alike. Among the most intriguing aspects of the insurgency has been the contrasting attitudes to the role of women and gay rights in the nationalist movements in Spain and Italy compared to those in Germany, France and the US.The Dutch led the way. This style of New Right politics first appeared nearly 20 years ago in the Netherlands in the form of Pim Fortuyn - an openly gay Marxist convert to conservatism who made the then novel case that freedoms only recently won from one Abrahamic religion now needed protection from another.In The Rise of the Dutch New Right (Routledge, 2020), Merijn Oudenampsen makes the case that they are less original than they look; that Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Thierry Baudet are “part of a larger and longer conservative wave” derived from British neoliberalism and American neoconservatism and that "the conservative interest in feminism and gay rights is largely a function of their opposition to Islam”. As the Netherlands goes to the polls on March 17, he considers what the future holds for the New Right.Merijn Oudenampsen is a sociologist and political scientist at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously published The Conservative Revolt (2018) and Socialism for Beginners (2019) in Dutch. This is his first book in English.*The author's own book recommendation is Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper(Zone Books, 2017).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emmanuel Macron “has shown a genuine ability to strategize politically, determinedly and clear-sightedly [in] occupying the space of the bourgeois bloc. This is a space that France’s political crisis has left open for many years but that no one before him had been able to identify and represent effectively”.So say Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini in The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France's Political Crisis (Verso Books, 2021).For three decades, the French centre-left has tried and failed to hang on to a working-class base with socialist platforms while, at the same time, appealing to the same demographic as its leadership: metropolitan, liberal and with an unbreakable core commitment to European intregration.In 2017, Macron abandoned this effort and went straight for the “bourgeois” core of 20-25% of the electorate with the aim of building out into the traditional right in time for the April 2022 election.Bruno Amable is a professor of economics at the University of Geneva and was previously a professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, an associate member of the Paris School of Economics, and research fellow with CEPREMAP.*The author's own book recommendation is Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l'économie numérique by Cédric Durand (Éditions Zones, 2020)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ranked sixth globally in the BAV Group’s 2020 “Best Countries” index and 11th in output per head, the Netherlands is renowned worldwide as a wealthy, stable, tolerant, and democratic success story.Yet, as American political scientist Robert Dahl told Dutch colleagues after the Netherlands’ complex social and political structure was explained to him: “Theoretically your country cannot exist”.As 13 million Dutch voters prepare to choose a new coalition government on March 17, Tom Louwerse discusses the new and essential fifth edition of Governance and Politics of the Netherlands (Red Globe Press, 2020) co-written with Rudy Andeweg and Galen Irwin.He explains the modern history that prompted Dahl’s remark, the post-1960s “amazing transformation” of the Netherlands from “religious and boring” to “progressive and permissive” nation, and the onset of a domestic culture war over the last two decades.Tom Louwerse is Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University, and formerly an Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin.*The author's own book recommendation is Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries by Arend Lijphart (Yale University Press, 1999)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erik S. Herron’s Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine (University of Michigan Press, 2020) zeroes in on the mechanisms that sustain corruption and minimize accountability: aspects that play a crucial role in the effectiveness of democratic processes. This investigation is based on rigorous analyses of data that shed light on the specificities of the accountability system in Ukraine. In Ukraine, corrupt practices seem to overwhelm political and societal life. Corruption is a ubiquitous topos that is extensively commented on by both politicians and scholars. Many connect the pervasiveness of corruption in post-Communist states with the Soviet legacy. While recognizing Soviet influences on the formation of corrupt practices in Ukraine, Herron offers to compartmentalize corruptions, which may facilitate the development of actions and activities that can help minimize corruption. While focusing on the Ukrainian case, this book also includes sections that highlight the experiences of other former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Baltic states, and Russia. Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine contributes to the study of the development of democratic practices in the states whose political history is closely connected with totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The meaning of being an immigrant has changed significantly in the 21st century. The internet, social media and networks, cost of travels, homeland products of food that one can find all over the world, working far from home – all bring new opportunities to the idea of living in one place, but still feel deep belonging with the homeland.Growing numbers of Israelis are living today in Europe. The book, Leaving Zion: The Israeli Diaspora in Europe (Pardes, 2019; in Hebrew), gives us a wide picture of their lives, challenges but also shows us a glimpse for a broader perspective around being an immigrant and having an hybrid identity.Some of these Israelis still work remotely in companies based in Israel, in Hebrew, visiting Israel once a month since it is cheap and takes only a few hours of travel. They speak Hebrew with their kids, meet with other Israelis who live in their European city, and use Israeli media. Many of their parents or grandparents left Europe after the Holocaust or a bit before, to create a homeland for the Jewish people in Zion. Now, their children and grandchildren are moving back to Europe and make there, their new homes. In his book, journalist David Stavrou brings us their stories, stories that invite other immigrants and scholars to rethink about the meaning of living in two homes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The autarkic European nation-state, if it ever existed, was the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless it is the myth of the self-sufficient nation-state that lies at the heart of much scholarship on post-WWII European integration,” writes Signe Rehling Larsen in The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2021).“Instead of interpreting the EU in line with previous projects of market creation through empire and federation, the story of the post-WWII project of European integration is often interpreted as a ‘conflict’ or ‘competition’ between the Union and the Member States as the dominant forces in a zero-sum game”.Without taking sides in Europe’s proxy culture war, Larsen’s ground-breaking new book of “political jurisprudence” dispenses with the state as a template for the EU. Rather, she examines the “federal union of states” in America before the Civil War, Germany’s 19th-century experiments with confederations, and the imperial experience to understand a union that is anything but sui generis.Signe Rehling Larsen is a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford and was previously a Max Weber Fellow in Law at the European University Institute in Florence.*The author's own book recommendations are Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present by Gary Gerstle (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Cars, Trains, Ships and Planes: A Visual Encyclopedia to Every Vehicle (DK Children, 2015).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even without the loss of the City of London from its jurisdiction, the EU has gone through a decade-long revolution in financial supervision and regulation since Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008.The directives and regulations introduced in the wake of the crisis took years to negotiate, implement and stress-test against political reality in the last five years. The second wave of the crisis, which exposed the “doom loop” between fiscally weak states and their pet banks, spawned the European Banking Union but left some crucial remedial work undone.In this update of their 2015 edition of European Banking and Financial Law (Routledge, 2020), Matthias Haentjens and Pierre de Gioia Carabellese provide a comprehensive description and analysis of this growing body of new law, its origins, and policy implications.Matthias Haentjens is professor of law, director of the Hazelhoff Centre for Financial Law at the University of Leiden, and a deputy judge in the district court of Amsterdam.*His book recommendations are Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman (1952 – translated by Robert Chandler – Harvill Secker, 2019) and Made at Home by Giorgio Locatelli (Fourth Estate, 2017).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin's regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition.To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a "counter-intelligensia." It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a specific focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Hungary's opposition parties form themselves into an unlikely pre-electoral coalition, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faces the first genuine challenge to his "illiberal" rule since 2010.This is the second of three interviews with authors of new books in English about Orbánism. In The Orbán Regime: Plebiscitary Leader Democracy in the Making (Routledge, 2020), András Körösényi uses Max Weber's Plebiscitary Leader Democracy model to explain how this charismatic nationalist-conservative has not only held on to power for so long but come to dominate the domestic political culture. “The Orbán regime has turned out to be a natural laboratory for studying PLD", say the authors.Körösényi is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Corvinus University in Budapest.*The author's own book recommendation is Men on Horseback: the Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution by David A. Bell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices