Jan-Werner Müller

The word ‘party’ – as in ‘political party’ – is in bad odour across the West, though for different reasons in different places. In the United States, everyone from the president down seems to lament the polarisation of politics and the rise of partisanship. But then hostility to parties is nothing new in American history; ‘if I could not go to heaven but with a party,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘I would not go there at all.’ Europeans tend to be less in thrall to the ideals of the one indivisible nation. They worry about the opposite problem: that the parties are all the same.

In the 1980s Hungary was known as the ‘merriest barracks in the socialist camp’. After the suppression of the 1956 uprising by the Red Army, János Kádár instituted what became known as ‘goulash communism’, characterised by a policy of ‘little freedoms’: Hungarians could travel abroad, trade privately and say what they liked, so long as...

Germany is Europe’s paymaster. Even Franco-German summits are now really ‘German-German summits’, Romano Prodi said recently. But is Germany also becoming Europe’s political master? Many Europeans seem to fear it, but it would be wrong to say that Germany has developed fantasies of continental domination or become more Eurosceptic – at least any more Eurosceptic...