This is chapter 3 of 5 of our series “Why we need the ‘ Europeans of the Planet’, published each Friday”. Chapter 2: “ Prosperity Amid Depletion — the paradox” was published last Friday. How do societies respond when confronted with threats that may unfold over decades rather than days? The answer is less encouraging […]
One of the great ironies of human history is that the period in which humanity has exerted the greatest pressure on the natural world has also been the period in which human well-being has improved most dramatically. When Thomas Hobbes [5] published Leviathan in 1651, life for most people was indeed precarious. Disease, famine, violence, […]
This is chapter 1 of 5 of our series “Why we need the ‘Europeans of the Planet’, published each Friday. Humanity’s demand on the biosphere currently exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate many of the resources and ecological services upon which modern civilisation depends. According to the methodology of the Global Footprint Network, humanity is […]
Conscience, Expression, and the Secular State Figure 1. The inner forum may be absolute; the outer manifestation cannot be. I. Introduction: The Liberal Promise and Its Tension For John Stuart Mill, freedom of opinion was not an ornament of liberal society but one of its enabling conditions. In On Liberty, he formulated the principle with […]
On 13 April 2026, Beatrice Achterberg, an editor at the conservative publication NZZ Deutschland, titled her newsletter Der andere Blick am Morgen with the remark: “He moderates where he should decide, and lets things happen where he ought to lead – Merz is reminiscent of Angela Merkel.” Yes, we are being unfair to Friedrich Merz. Yet […]
A Political Thought Experiment for April 1st Taking advantage of the ambiguity that this date offers for all manner of news items, jokes and provocations, I would like to set out here a bold but logically compelling utopia. Hence this essay embraces a daring hypothesis, yet treats it with full seriousness: could Switzerland’s long experience […]
I frequently and arbitrarily come across posts like this one on LinkedIn … Jonny Resman, having a long and winding title / designation, claimed that “in a leaked draft of the U.S. National Security Strategy, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland were potential countries for U.S. coercion and influence, to make them leave the EU. The […]
Why Europe must complete its political formation in order to gain a voice as a respected power on the world stage, preserve its Enlightenment heritage, and possibly re-establish itself as a multinational federal state. As indicated in my recent Blog post “The Awakening of the Mosaic – An Inaugural Address” on 2026-02-06 besides the remnants […]
Last night I had a dream. I dreamed that I was listening to the inaugural address of the President of the United States of Europe to the European peoples sometime around 2029/2030. I woke up enthused and tried to piece together the fragments of my memory and fill in the rhetorical gaps. This is the […]
“My motto is cheerful pessimism. Since I can think politically, Germany has been going downhill. But on this long road down, there are still a number of beautiful days.” Jan Fleischhauer, former editor of Der Spiegel, is occasionally quoted as uttering this rather sobering statement. My reflexive inclination is to dismiss this melancholic resignation […]
