Mar 29, 2023
While the geographic center of the EU is apparently in a small Bavarian field, its political center is harder to pin down. Historically, it was probably somewhere between France and Germany, but with the war in Ukraine, this center has seemingly moved East. Warsaw was not too long ago under considerable pressure from Brussels over rule-of-law skirmishes. Now, Poland and Lithuania are reaping the political benefits of their unambiguous support to Ukraine and their long-established hawkish stance on Russia. In a sign of this evolution Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki last weekend was not afraid to lambast Germany for being “co-responsible for the mess on the energy market” and urged Berlin to step up its support for Kiev. We wanted to map this shift in European politics and stress-test whether this pivot is noise or substance. We are joined by Jana Puglierin, the head of European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and a returnee to the show. On the other side of the line, we are joined by Timothy Garton Ash, a historian of contemporary Europe who just published Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (2023), a part-memoir based on his decades of experience traveling across Europe. This week our Patreons will get to listen to Timothy and Jana mapping out the nuances of Central and Eastern European politics, between Poland and Hungary, or Romania and Bulgaria.
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