EU Scream

A revolt against modern-day monopolization is brewing in Europe. Among the responses is creation of a New Competition School to challenge the European Commission's deference to corporate power under the influence of the so-called Chicago School. Led by economic libertarians like Milton Friedman and anti-government zealots like Robert Bork, the Chicago School prioritized notions of economic efficiency over enforcement of antitrust and competition law. The results have been catastrophic across a wide swathe of economies, says Nicholas Shaxson, one of the founders of the New Competition School and the author of a forthcoming book on monopoly, The Big Squeeze. 
The trends toward concentration of economic power are plainly obvious and the perceived injustice is a factor pushing voters to support increasingly extreme political movements, especially on the radical right. That's where the New Competition School seeks to be a counterweight, returning the EU to the principles of robust enforcement that sprang in part from the defeat of Hitler's Germany. The Nazi war machine, after all, had been underpinned by monopolization, and the lesson — about the incompatibility of democracy and unchained corporate power — was not lost on the authors of the Treaty of Rome. 
The founders of the European project included laws inspired by German ordo-liberalism and by the American trustbusting tradition that aimed to keep relations between big business and government in check. But by the turn of this century, American politics swung back sharply towards laissez-faire neoliberalism and Chicago School economics in the sphere of antitrust. The Bush administration dropped an antitrust case against Microsoft, which could have broken the company apart, and President George W. Bush personally complained when the EU blocked a $42-billion mega-merger between General Electric and Honeywell. 
The transatlantic bust-up over GE/Honeywell was a pivot point. The EU buckled, adopting Chicago School standards and creating the role of Chief Economist, in turn enabling a parallel industry of unregulated economic consultants to flourish in Europe. Since then, the rate of merger prohibitions has collapsed even as the monopolization of the economy, including by technology giants, has gathered pace under the noses of the very people meant to intervene. The general public "know that corporate power is a big, rising, and terrifying problem," says Nick. "But what is surprising is that there is one group of people who don't seem to know what corporate power is — and that is the regulators."
Support the show

How did far-right politics go mainstream so quickly? Pundits frequently cite distrust of elites, concerns about migration, and economic anxieties. But these factors alone don't adequately explain how illiberalism and identitarianism spread so rapidly and take hold so firmly. More plausibly, the far right's rise isn't really about people suddenly changing their minds. Rather the velocity of extremism down to people who already held these views, and who've lost their shame about saying so out loud once a skilled politician shows them it's safe to do it. That's the argument of a book called The Normalization of the Radical Right by political scientist Vicente Valentim. We're re-running that conversation now because far-right insurgents still are making significant gains. In Germany, Alice Weidel's AfD party has been polling at more than 40 percent; a win in Saxony Anhalt on September 6 would make the AfD the first far-right party to govern a German state since the end of the Second World War. In Italy, Roberto Vannacci's Futuro Nazionale has already polled ahead of Lega, the far right party he formerly was part of; Vannacci's is pushing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, herself a post-fascist politician, even further to the right ahead of national elections expected in Spring. In Spain, the Vox leader Santiago Abascal could be something of a kingmaker in a future rightwing national government; four Spanish regions are already governed by coalitions that include Vox, and national elections are due within the next year. Vicente also discusses the phenomenon of feminationalism in light of the earlier rise of Giorgia Meloni and of Marine Le Pen, who heads the French National Rally and is a candidate in presidential elections in Spring. These leaders cultivate what Vicente calls an aura of ambiguity to gain mainstream acceptance and to continue to connect with their more extreme bases.
Support the show

Make no mistake: the far right's push for remigration — the mass removal of non-European immigrants, and of certain minority citizens too — is both serious and strategic. Yes, the European mainstream is still resisting it, and anti-Nazis and pro-Europeans are mounting a determined pushback of their own. But the far right insists its strategy of dragging the conservative center steadily rightward is working: rightward on restricting NGOs, rightward on rolling back climate protections, and rightward, above all, on migration. Among recent wins it's crowing about is EU approval for a so-called Return Regulation, under which member states could end up paying countries in the Western Balkans and North Africa — not just to hold back migrants, but to accept migrants deported from the EU. The vote, on June 17, was accompanied by chants of "send them back" inside the European Parliament.
Remigration, of course, would go a giant step further: the deportations, expulsions, and de-naturalizations envisioned would involve millions of people, and would likely share disturbing logistical and ideological echoes with Nazi Germany. But those terrifying precedents haven't dimmed the far right's enthusiasm one bit. That was palpable on July 15, inside hearing room 1E2 at the European Parliament in Brussels, where some of the continent's most extreme identitarian figures gathered at the invitation of lawmakers from the chamber's three main far-right groups. Among the speakers: Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch commentator British authorities deem a threat to public order and have barred from freely traveling to the UK; she called for an even more coordinated, transnational push for remigration. And there was Dries Van Langenhove, a Flemish identitarian facing a permanent UK ban; he deployed the word "metapolitics" in an allusion to Antonio Gramsci, to insist that the long battle for dominance over public thought is winnable — and that the groundwork for full remigration is already being laid.
It's a rich irony that Gramsci, an Italian Marxist jailed by Mussolini, is taken so seriously on the far right. But after the horrors of Nazism, the movement knew it had to proceed patiently if it ever hoped to stage a comeback. Some in Europe — the French New Right chief among them — took Gramsci as their guide to changing the culture first, and operating through a radical vanguard. Those same tactics got absorbed by the American radical right, which helped carry Trump into the White House. The story of how Gramsci's thinking keeps flowing back and forth across the Atlantic is of particular interest to Philipp Adorf of the University of Bonn. Philipp has written on the radicalization of the U.S. Republican Party and is a leading analyst of the rise of Germany's AfD. We recorded this conversation last year, but it's just as relevant now with the AfD and the continent's leading identitarians trying to carry their campaign for remigration to Brussels — and into the heart of European policymaking.
Support the show

Straight talk on what's behind the news, recorded live at the Full Circle in Brussels. 
Estelle Nilsson-Julien, a reporter with Euronews, describes the killings of two very different young men, Quentin Deranque and Henry Nowak. The tragedies unleashed torrents of disinformation that put more lives at risk. Both are now held up as martyrs by the far-right. Estelle also profiles the travel influencer sanctioned by the EU but who still peddles Russian propaganda on Elon Musk's X social media platform.
Natasha Mellersh, a journalist with Deutsche Welle, digs into Europe's escalating push to deport migrants. Far-right legislators chanted "send them back" after approving the plans, which raise fresh questions about the EU's commitment to human rights. Natasha also describes how countries like France are criminalizing people who help migrants even as the Spanish government appears to be charting a different course, by giving migrants the right to remain. 
Simon Van Dorpe from Follow the Money describes how Dutch bank ING appeared to turn a blind eye to suspected money laundering by a former EU justice commissioner. Simon also describes why the push by EU conservatives to centralize power is raising concerns about cronyism and corruption. As for the New European Bauhaus — Ursula von der Leyen's pet project to make the built environment greener — Simon says it's fallen far short of expectations. 
Support the show

A handful of American technology companies provide the backbone for much of the world's digital activity, including in public services. But with the current US administration signaling a shift to autocratic government, dystopic scenarios abound about how this plays out. While warnings about an era of technofascism could be overdone, the hazards from US government proximity to Big Tech are no longer theoretical. In response Europe is doubling down on what it calls technological sovereignty, to reduce dependency on China, but more immediately on the US and its tech oligarchs. The EU's tech sovereignty push means more investment in chips and in data centers, incentives for European tech alternatives — and a renewed focus on open source software. In this episode, a major figure in the world of open source: Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal publishing system that powers websites around the world, including for Airbus and the European Union. Dries lays out why open source is vital for Europe's sovereignty goals. But he also pushes back against calls to "Buy European" when it comes to software. That, he says, misses the mark: what matters more for sovereignty is the ability to switch services relatively easily, in order to limit the damage from Big Tech making capricious or systematically adversarial changes. Making software more resilient is one thing. But an even more important vulnerability for Europe is increasingly in the cloud. For now the European Commission plans to let US giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continue to handle some sensitive European data. That is partly the result of fierce US lobbying. But there are practical reasons too. Migrating so much European data would be costly and, as Dries explains, Europe is nowhere near ready to deploy viable industrial-grade open source alternatives for the cloud — nor for AI. Getting there, he says, is likely to take ten years of hard-nosed regulation and home-grown innovation. But a decade is an eternity in tech, and that may give the US the opportunity to strengthen what is already a very strong hand. A prospect that will, for some, make those dystopias seem not so far-fetched after all. 
This episode was made in partnership with the European Open Source Academy. You can read Dries's blog here. 
Support the show