Western Europe
Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orban and the Subversion of Hungary By Zsuzsanna Szelenyi. Hurst, 2022, 352 pp.
Hungary’s trajectory in the past decade under President Viktor Orban illustrates how rightwing populist nationalism can erode liberal democracy from within. Szelenyi describes that slide with balance, detail, and compelling authority, for she began her political career in the 1980s as a leading member of Orban’s own Fidesz Party—which at the time offered a liberal democratic alternative to communism in Hungary. By the early 2010s, however, Szelenyi had turned against Orban. The Hungarian president is following what she terms a “twenty-first century autocratic playbook” aimed at centralizing and maintaining political power. He has packed the supreme court, rewritten the constitution, given government officials more discretion, nationalized substantial portions of the economy, and eroded human rights, fair elections, and checks and balances. Rampant corruption favors Orban’s cronies, and Fidesz controls, directly or indirectly, nearly 80 percent of the national media. Orban justifies his power grab through criticisms of “the deep state,” praises “illiberalism” and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and deploys virulently anti-EU, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay rhetoric. Missing from Szelenyi’s analysis is a convincing description of how and why this extreme-right mix of electoral manipulation, media control, and economic inducements has been so uniquely effective in Hungary. But for readers seeking a balanced analysis of Hungary’s recent political evolution, this is the one.
Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes By Tariq Ali. Verso, 2022, 448 pp.
Ali is a legendary figure on the British left: born in Lahore, Pakistan, he rose to prominence in the United Kingdom of the 1960s, which he spent preaching Marxism and hanging out with John Lennon and Mick Jagger. Since then, he has published around 50 books, mostly radical critiques of the conservative establishment. In this one, he shows that Winston Churchill’s brave resistance as British prime minister in World War II was an exception.The rest of Churchill’s half century in public life involved advocating reactionary and often foolhardy policies. He militantly
defended the British Empire, which led him to massacre national liberation fighters in places as disparate as India, Ireland, and Kenya. He justified such atrocities by explicitly espousing white supremacism. He admired the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and coddled the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. He bombed German civilians and advocated a nuclear first strike, not just against Japan in World War II but against the Soviet Union in peacetime. He ignored pleas from his own government to address humanitarian crises, such as the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. He abhorred social democratic values, resisted the social welfare state, and used the army to repress striking workers. All this is well known, yet Ali’s examination remains an important corrective to the hagiographic praise that Churchill receives to this day.
Cyprus: An Ancient People, a Troubled History, and One Last Chance for Peace By Lawrence Stevenson and Glynnis Stevenson. Sutherland House, 2022, 280 pp.
Cyprus is home to a frozen conflict.The country’s civil war flared hot and then cooled for a half century, leaving the island divided into one half that sits inside the EU and another that remains under increasing Turkish influence. United Nations peacekeepers have now been there for almost 60 years. The authors of this book—two Canadians, one having logged two tours as a UN peacekeeper in Cyprus, and the other, his daughter, a professional historian—bring unique experience and extensive interview data to the issue. Rather than taking sides, they evenhandedly explain how this conflict unfolded, and why the United Kingdom, the United States, the EU, and the UN have not been able resolve it.They propose a confederal solution, whereby Cyprus unifies under a decentralized government, with absolute guarantees of minority rights. To break the current logjam, they argue, the UN must threaten to leave in six months and then impose a choice on Greek Cypriots between confederal unity or independence for Northern Cyprus. Risky, perhaps, but if such a decentralized arrangement works for Canada, why not Cyprus?
Scotland: The Global History, 1603 to the Present By Murray Pittock. Yale University Press, 2022, 512 pp.
To understand why so many in Scotland support independence today, one must understand the nation’s history. In this book, a distinguished Scottish historian offers a vivid, if perhaps overly detailed, account of the remarkable successes Scots have enjoyed through the centuries in science, literature, art, business, and soldiering. He attributes this record of achievement mostly to Scotland’s superb education system. Yet to use their knowledge, most of its well-trained graduates had to emigrate from their economically stagnant homeland. Two hundred years ago, Scots composed a quarter of Britons and a fifth of Americans, and they could be found in substantial numbers elsewhere. Today, however, the country has declined demographically and been surpassed by other countries in educational excellence. Scots remain attached to their past: the romantic history, vivid
landscape, and distinctive regional traditions.The book’s conclusion expresses the hope that this attachment will be enough to make independence viable and attractive, yet it offers few concrete reasons to believe it will be.
EU Industrial Policy in the Multipolar Economy Edited by Jean-Christophe Defraigne, Jan Wouters, Edoardo Traversa, and Dimitri Zurstrassen. Edward Elgar, 2022, 446 pp.
In today’s global economy, high-tech rivalries, the transition to a green economy, and security concerns have encouraged more and more countries to expand government intervention in industry. Although many observers focus on the United States and China, the EU is economically comparable in size to both countries. In an increasingly multipolar world, the policies Europeans adopt may be decisive for the future of the global economy. Most analysts are pessimistic, given that the member states of the EU have failed to create the effective, centralized institutions they would need to manage such a policy at a continental scale. But these authors point to a silver lining. Centralized subsidy policies no longer really work, except where governments buy the output—as happens in the areas of transport, energy, and military arms production. Instead, key European interventions take the shape of the imposition of antitrust policy, regulatory standards, coordinated trade policy, and supply chain management—and here the EU wields much geo-economic power. It remains to be seen whether Europe’s regulatory clout can help it become an independent global competitor, a junior partner in a transatlantic alliance, or the object of manipulation by China and the United States. This book’s survey is a good starting point to understanding Europe’s current efforts to secure a place in the future global economy.
The Lost Future: And How to Reclaim It By Jan Zielonka. Yale University Press, 2023, 288 pp.
This book argues that the world faces unprecedentedly rapid and complex change that existing political institutions are too slow and too weak to manage effectively. Politics simply protects parochial and backward-looking interest groups and opinions. Zielonka tries to transcend this familiar trope through an engaging, if sometimes meandering, reflection on “space and time,” written in the style of business journalism and peppered with political cartoons. In it, he summarizes several generations of scholarly thinking about the difficult task of governing swift social and technological change. Yet the book ends with no more than a few pages of what he wryly terms “half-hearted” proposals for the future, which amount to something very much like the international system that has existed since 1945: nation-states would remain the primary actors, linked by international networks of governance rather than strict hierarchies. If such familiar forms of politics can and should be made more enlightened, cosmopolitan, and farsighted—and are to prevail over the vested interests the author rightly condemns—another book must explain how.