Hans Kundnani
@hanskundnani
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OSF Ideas Workshop Fellow, visiting professor in practice at @LSEEI, previously at @ChathamHouse, Germanist, dot joiner, writer, (N/W) Londoner.
Joined March 2008
Extraordinary how for months Germany has been having this fraught debate about sending Leopard II to Ukraine and then the UK decides to send Challenger II with almost no debate at all.
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One of the most jarring aspects of Germany’s memory culture is that you can compare Putin to Hitler and Russia to Nazi Germany all you want (e.g. Anne Applebaum), but comparing Israel to Nazi Germany in any way (e.g. Mascha Gessen) is seen as outrageous and unacceptable. 1/4.
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The German political establishment’s position seems to be not so much that what is happening in Palestine is not apartheid and genocide but that it cannot be. It focuses on the effect of the claims - which “delegitimate” and “demonise” Israel - rather than their truth.
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German foreign policy think tankers seem to have almost nothing to say about the ICC's announcement today, even as they continue to tweet about Russia and Ukraine, i.e. exactly as I argued in this piece published in April.
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The idea that “the centre held” only really works if you ignore, or don’t care about, the way that the centre right has taken on much of the far right’s agenda, especially on identity, immigration and Islam.
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Every time I see horrifying images like this from Gaza and now Lebanon, my instinct is to share them. But it seems pointless - supporters of Israel seem to think that, whatever it does, it is Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran that are responsible for it.
While the world looks at Iran and Lebanon, Israeli strikes hit a school and orphanage where displaced people were sheltering. Warning, there are distressing images.
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Perhaps not surprising but still shocking that Fareed Zakaria does not mention the Haitian Revolution once in his 400-page book on revolutions from 1600 to the present.
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What I think this shows is that what is seen as a problem is not the “relativisation” of the Holocaust or the questioning of its “singularity” as is often claimed. Rather, it is what you are comparing it to - and who you are explicitly or implicitly comparing the Nazis to. 2/4.
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Do Germans who think of themselves as progressive and are trying to police criticism of Israel, including by people who are themselves Jewish, just not realise how aligned they are with the American and Israeli right? Or do they not care?.
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What seems to me to have happened in the 20 years since then is that, when it comes to Israel, the idea of singularity is enforced increasingly aggressively, but when it comes to Russia, the exonerating relativisation of Nazism has become quite normal again. 4/4.
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I have been pretty critical of Borrell. But at least he had something to say about Gaza. Kallas, on the other hand, just seems to see it as a distraction from the only issue she cares about, i.e. Russia.
This is my first Foreign Affairs Council, .and I am very much looking forward to it. We have three major topics on today’s agenda: Syria, Ukraine and Georgia. My doorstep ↓
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If Russia is surprised at how tough and united we have been in response to the invasion, as many people claim, that is not a success but a failure. It means deterrence didn’t work because we failed to convince Russia that we would be that tough and united.
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3 reasons why I think the concept of "populism" is unhelpful and has confused us rather than clarifying developments in European politics in the last decade, as discussed in this podcast yesterday. 1/5.
🚨 New Ep! . "Europe’s Civilisational Turn?". @TomMcTague and @HelenHet20 sit down with @hanskundnani discuss the domestic politics of European countries and the reshaping of Europe's collective future. Listen below👇🎧.
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What is ironic about this is that the idea of the “singularity” of the Holocaust came out of the Historikerstreit in the 1980s, which began when Habermas criticized the way that Nolte relativized the Holocaust by comparing Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. 3/4.
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Very good @washingtonpost column by @ishaantharoor on the emerging far-right EU - especially the flawed idea that countries with fascist pasts like Germany, Italy and Spain had some kind of “immunity” to the far right.
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Europe is not in “mortal danger”. It is just in relative decline. But apparently its sense of entitlement makes that feel apocalyptic.
In a major new interview with The Economist, five years after he told us about the “brain death” of NATO, Emmanuel Macron explains why he thinks Europe is in mortal danger, and what it can do about this. In @TheEconomist .
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So bizarre - but also revealing - to see Germany turn against Greta Thunberg during the last year because she expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians.
Dass Greta #Thunberg bei pro-palästinensischen Demos in Berlin mit demonstriert, sei „furchtbar und schlimm“ und sollte jeden dazu anregen, seine frühere Meinung zu Thunberg zu überdenken, sagt .@Cem_Oezdemir. #maischberger @DasErst
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More on the civilisational turn in the European project.
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There now seems to be a reverse "Kissinger question" - European officials are asking themselves who to call to speak to the United States.
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It’s funny that a lot of the same people who thought social media was creating echo chambers that are bad for democracy are now leaving this app because it’s not enough of an echo chamber for them and instead joining a different app which is more of an echo chamber.
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It’s amazing to me how, in the last two years, the German political establishment has suddenly and completely abandoned the idea of peace, which until then was so central to its sense of what Germany stood for as a country.
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Great op-ed by @broderly on what is really happening in Italy. A lot of people seem to want to believe that Meloni and other far-right parties are becoming more moderate. If they are, it is in a very selective way (e.g. moderating their Euroscepticism).
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The silence of the European Blob about the Pylos migrant boat tragedy is deafening. It’s almost two weeks since it happened and most European foreign policy analysts, even those who were very vocal about Ukrainian refugees, have had nothing to say about it.
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Extraordinary to hear a supposedly serious historian use historical analogies in such a direct and unqualified way. He seems to be either completely unaware of the previous use of "1938" in foreign policy debates or is aware of it and just doesn't care.
Worth listening to Timothy Snyder in Tallinn 🇪🇪 yesterday: We are in 1938 now. If Czechs had resisted Nazi Germany at the time, there would have been no WWII. If Ukraine gives up or we give up 🇺🇦 we will move to 1939. Ukraine helps us to extend 1938.
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Much more than the United States or even the UK, Germany has always claimed to stand for international law. But during the last year, it has become very clear that Germany’s commitment to Israel is stronger than its commitment to international law. 1/2.
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Munich Security Conference in one sentence, every year, over and over again.
"One thing is crystal clear: We Europeans have to do much more for our security, now and in the future.". — 🇩🇪 @Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz at #MSC2024.
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Whatever you think about Scholz’s approach to the question of sending Leopard 2 to Ukraine, I suspect he is closer to the German public on this than the Berlin Blob is.
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Here’s the piece I wrote in August about the possibility of a far-right EU. The point is not that the rise of the far right in places like Netherlands will lead to the end of the EU. It’s that it will take it further in the direction it is already going.
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In my recent @DissentMag essay I said that the Springer media corporation’s stance on Israel had effectively become the position of the entire German political establishment. The German education minister’s comments to Bild yesterday illustrate my point.
Das Statement der Lehrenden in Berlin erschüttert. Statt sich klar gegen Israel- und Judenhass zu stellen, werden Uni-Besetzer zu Opfern gemacht und Gewalt verharmlost. Weder #Antisemitismus noch Gewalt dürfen toleriert werden.
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The Israeli government explicitly trying to turn its war on Gaza into a global clash of civilisations. We shouldn’t fall for it.
OPINION: This is the West’s war too.
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Wow, even by his standards this is extraordinary. The conquistadors as inspiration/role model for the EU!.
“Like the conquistadors, we must invent a new world,” @JosepBorrellF said to Latin American officials. European colonisation exterminated 90% of the South American population—perhaps history’s largest genocide—and replaced the dead with African slaves.
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There seem to be a lot of people who have suddenly become anti-imperialists during the last year - but only care about Russian imperialism.
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My attempt to make sense of how Germany’s Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, has regressed.
New online: @hanskundnani on the regression of Germany's Holocaust memory culture.
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In 1933 Hermann Heller coined the term "authoritarian liberalism" to capture the way that German governments had sought to bypass parliament and impose austerity by decree. It feels like a pretty good description of what Macron is now doing in France.
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One of my impressions from all the discussions I had about my book #Eurowhiteness in the second half of last year was how reluctant (continental) Europeans are to discuss race and how they often seek to change the subject. I encountered 3 distinct versions of this denialism: 1/5.
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Current events are really revealing how a lot of people think some lives (Israelis, Ukrainians) are more valuable than others (Palestinians, Africans).
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When the German Greens supported the NATO military campaign against Serbia in 1999, it was a big deal for a party that had come out of the peace movement in the 1970s. Quite extraordinary how, 25 years later, they are the most belligerent party in Germany.
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I always find it puzzling that so many foreign policy analysts, especially in Europe, pore over the details of strategy documents, and take them at face value, as if they represented the essence of a country’s foreign policy. In reality, they are largely PR.
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Great comments here by @CasMudde on how, although Giorgia Meloni "has lived her whole life in a truly fascist subculture", people deny she is on the far right because she supports Ukraine, which has now become the proxy for being liberal democratic."
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@RugeBoris I understand that. I’m just saying we haven’t had a big public debate in the UK like you have in Germany. It wasn’t even meant as a criticism! I’m just struck by the contrast.
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“As a Jewish Israeli who is a left-wing activist, I feel unsafe and unwelcome in Berlin.”.
Standing ovation in Berlin as Yuval Abraham speaks of Germany’s “shameful” abuse of the term antisemitism and its own historical responsibility
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So much for von der Leyen's claim that clear support for democracy and the rule of law was one of her preconditions for cooperating with ECR (i.e. far-right) parties.
Ursula von der Leyen has buried an official European Union report criticizing Italy for eroding media freedoms as she seeks Giorgia Meloni's vote.
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This is such a rich interview with @samuelmoyn on Cold War liberalism (great questions as well as answers). Read it and then listen to his Carlyle lectures, which I think are even more relevant now than when he delivered them in Oxford last year.
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It’s not just that Biden’s position on Gaza has alienated specific groups like Arab-Americans. It’s that all the arguments that Democrats made in 2016 and 2020 about why people needed to vote for them to save the liberal international order etc. no longer have any credibility.
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Cologne University cancels two planned lectures by Nancy Fraser because of her support for Palestine, which it says questions Israel’s right to exist and “relativises” the 7 October attacks by Hamas.
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2. It is not a neutral, analytical term – rather, it is used by the centre right and “radical” centrists to imply that there is a clear line between the centre right and the far right (and thus obscures the convergence between the two in Europe during the last decade). 3/5.
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I see a lot of people praising the smoothness of the transition from Merkel to Scholz. But it’s hardly surprising since he was was vice-chancellor in Merkel government! The problem with German democracy is the opposite of that in the US - not polarization but coziness.
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The madness of this war: Ukraine is using up so much ammunition that NATO countries, including the United States, can’t collectively produce enough to meet their needs - and now we need to give them cluster munitions to fill the gap.
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31 Empfehlungen und kein einziges Buch, das irgendetwas mit Israel/Palästina zu tun hat, als ob in Gaza in 2024 nichts passiert wäre.
⏳🎁🎄 „Welches Buch zur internationalen Politik war in diesem Jahr das wichtigste für Sie und warum?“ Auch 2024 haben wir diese Frage an Persönlichkeiten aus Politik, Wissenschaft und Journalismus gestellt. Alle Empfehlungen gibt es hier: 📚👇 1/3.
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Leggeri - who resigned as director of @Frontex after revelations about illegal pushbacks of asylum seekers - joins Le Pen. A perfect illustration of the arguments I have been making about the fluid relationship between the European far right and the EU.
Elections européennes : Fabrice Leggeri, ex-directeur de Frontex, rejoint la liste du Rassemblement national
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What a great little book on democracy and liberalism and the relationship between them (“by no means one of continuity or identity”) - highly recommended, especially for those who use the terms democracy and liberalism as if they were synonyms. @VersoBooks
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The more I think about it, the more I think that what happened in the European elections was the worst possible outcome. The centre right did just well enough to think that its strategy of getting even tougher on immigration worked - and so it is likely to double down on it.
“The European centre right will now likely double down on this strategy of attempting to defeat the hard right by becoming the hard right, albeit in ‘pro-European’ form.”. 🖊️ @hanskundnani
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Every day I seem to hear about yet another case of someone being persecuted (threatened, fired, uninvited, etc.) in Germany for expressing or having expressed sympathy with, or support for, the Palestinian people.
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The obsession with the idea of "populism" makes it seem as if, if you drop this style or “thin” ideology, far-right ideas are no longer a problem – which, again, is in the interest of the centre right, so it can cooperate with the far right or just copy these ideas. 5/5.
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A very good example of how, for much of the European centre right, the problem with the far right is not that they are far right but that they are pro-Russian. As soon as they stop being pro-Russian, the centre right no longer has a problem with them.
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Frontex and the Greek Coast Guard watched the Adriana, with 750 people crammed on board, for 13 hours - and let them die.
"Didn't I tell you we were going to die? Didn't I tell you we were already dead?". The complete story of hundreds of preventable deaths in the Mediterranean. Major @nytimes team effort across countries & teams.
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It seems to me that the basic neoconservative position, i.e. that there can be no peaceful coexistence with authoritarian states, is now closer to being the conventional wisdom than ever before.
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@daniel_dsj2110 Reminds me of the scene in American Fiction where Lisa tells Monk that his book changed her life because her table was wobbly and his book was the perfect size to fix it.
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Very good piece by @jonhenley on the rise of the far right across Europe. The part that I think is slightly missing, though, is around how this is changing the EU itself. It is no longer the bulwark against the far right that we imagined it was.
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Today Baerbock calls the release of hostages a “breakthrough”. But yesterday she - a Green German foreign minister! - opposed the ceasefire.
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We tried military deterrence (but made it clear weren’t prepared to put boots on the ground) and economic deterrence (but made it clear we weren’t prepared to cut off Russian energy). Putin just called our bluff.
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A lot of people seem to be reaching very premature conclusions based on the second round of the French election today. The big question, surely, is whether it increases or decreases Le Pen’s chances of winning the presidential election in 2027 - and that is far from clear.
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This excellent review of Serhii Plokhy's book The Russo-Ukrainian War by @mkimmage in @ForeignAffairs raises important questions about Ukranian nationalism - and its compatibility with the EU's post-nationalism - that few people seem to want to discuss.
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It seems to me that, during the last decade since the euro crisis began in 2010, there has been a troubling transformation of the EU. I have tried to describe this transformation in four essays I have written over the years since then. 1/7.
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1. It obscures the heterogeneity among all the figures, movements and parties (and, in the case of Brexit, a decision!) that are categorised as "populist" and implies they are all the same. In particular, it implies that the far left and the far right are the same. 2/5.
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3. It misses the point – the problem with the far right is not its style or “thin” ideology (i.e. talking about a pure people vs a corrupt elite etc.), or at least that is not the main problem with it. Rather, the problem is its “thick” ideology, i.e. its actual ideas. 4/5.
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Hervorragender Artikel darüber, wie Deutschland in den letzten acht Montaten sein Image zerstört hat – und die meisten Experten für deutsche Außenpolitik schweigen darüber immer noch. @IPGJournal.
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Has anyone written about the metaphor of “turning” in German history? It’s obviously relevant now with the so-called Zeitenwende, but there is also the Wende of 1989 and A.J.P. Taylor’s idea that Germany “failed to turn” in 1848. Why do people keep talking about Germany turning?.
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Excellent @NewYorker interview with Stephen Kotkin, who is very clear headed, especially on our lack of clarity about what “victory” means in the war in Ukraine.
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A brilliant essay on my book #Eurowhiteness by Mike Wilkinson of @LSELaw for @jacobin. I think this is the most challenging and perceptive review of the book so far.
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Brilliant (and funny) by @JyShapiro on how things work in Washington: think tankers pretend to have influence on policy and policymakers pretend to be influenced by them.
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It has tried to square the circle by denying that Israel was violating international law. But now that the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the choice between Israel and international law is even clearer. 2/2.
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My sense, fwiw, is that no one in Europe wants Germany to “lead” anymore, they just want it to follow (i.e. stop getting in the way). That’s the big change, e.g. in Poland since Sikorski’s famous speech in 2011.
NEW on the IPQ website:. Who wants to be led by Germany?. The coalition parties in Berlin have no doubt: The country is destined to lead, certainly in Europe. Sadly, they have no comprehension of what that involves, argues @DrStefanieBabst .
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This is my impression too - that support for Ukraine and opposition to Russia has become our new central moral reference point. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore if you’re on the far right, as long as you’re pro-Ukrainian/anti-Russian.
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Whether because they share Borrell’s views, they are too scared to speak out, or they just don’t care, very few European foreign policy think tankers have publicly criticised Borrell for this speech. @Shahinvallee, quoted in this article, is one of the few exceptions.
The top EU diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, called Europe "a garden" and the world "a jungle," leading to charges of neocolonialism and racism as the EU tries to drum up support in the developing world.
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It seems to me that the crucial question on SWIFT is not whether Russia is excluded from it or not, but whether it actually stops energy transactions. If we go ahead but only after finding a workaround for energy transactions - where we seem to be heading - it’s pretty pointless.
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European NATO countries seem to me to have conflated their own security with the liberation of Ukraine to such an extent that they are now completely unable to think clearly and realistically about how to deal with a second Trump presidency.
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Someone needs to write a piece on the role of the Nazi past in the German debate on the war in Ukraine.
Zur Kritik an der Karikatur, die in der Feiertagsausgabe der SZ erschienen ist: Diese Karikatur ist die zeichnerische Umsetzung der Fernsehbilder vom Montag: (1/2)
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The innocence with which people in Europe and the United States are now talking about the "West" - as if it were a simple and totally unproblematic concept whose meaning is obvious - is quite extraordinary.
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Wonderful despatch from the Munich Security Conference - “a place where Europeans judge Americans according to how far they deviate from John McCain” - by Tom Meaney.
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So between 2014 and 2022 Frontex, the EU border agency, was run by a Le Pen supporter. Makes sense.
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In the past, the default German position in any conflict was to say there was no military solution to it. Now, Germany opposes ceasefires in both Gaza and Ukraine and says war must continue until the enemy has been defeated.
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What makes Germany’s unconditional support for Israel so striking is that, in general, Germany loves using tough conditionality, including against EU member states and eurozone countries.
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It seems to me that those dismissing Putin’s proposal to end the war in Ukraine would have more credibility if they were able to say what a more reasonable peace deal with Russia might look like. Many of them think that the only way to end the war is regime change in Russia.
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Charles Michel’s op-ed the other day is typical of the new conventional wisdom among “pro-Europeans” that the EU must “prepare for war". But in calling for the EU to change, they idealise its history as a “peace project”. 1/12
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As someone who has studied German foreign policy for over a decade and written two books on it, I don’t care about whether it is changing right now. What I care about is (a) the fate of the Ukrainian people and (b) whether and how this conflict might escalate.
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Catching up on some of the analyses of the "Zeitenwende". Most of them are so binary and simplistic - Berlin used to think x and now thinks y. The reality is that it's much more complicated - both in terms of what Germans thought before and what they think now.
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I am so sick of people throwing around the term “colonialism” in the context of Russia and Ukraine without having thought for five minutes about what it means and what differentiates it from imperialism in general.
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Post-colonial studies seems to play the same role in the German version of the culture wars that critical race theory plays in the American version.
Die Kampagne gegen die Wissenschaft geht weiter. Zwei Autor*innen des Netzwerks W verbreiten Stammtischthesen über postkoloniale Theorie und frönen ihren Feindbildern. Wissenschaft ist das nicht, und Debatte versteht @faznet ja auch eher einseitig.
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I'm surprised at how many people still seem to think the German Greens are a radical left-wing party.
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I have generally been sceptical about the EU’s aspiration to be “geopolitical”. But in this moment, to paraphrase Sikorski, I am as worried about EU recklessness as I am about EU inertia and technocracy.
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It seems to me that “pro-Europeans” are tying themselves in knots to respond to the Polish constitutional tribunal ruling two weeks ago - or rather to respond to the response to it. (1/8).
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This paper by @redhistorian on the relationship between Brexit and empire is absolutely fantastic - one of the best articles I have read about Brexit.
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Excellent piece by @ShivshankaMenon challenging both Eurocentric assumptions about the significance of the war in Ukraine and Anglo-American hopes that it will unite the “free world” against authoritarian states.
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I very much agree with Wolfgang Münchau's point here about "the poverty of pro-European discourse". We need to expand the definition of what it means to be "pro-European" beyond uncritical support for the actually existing EU.
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