June 27, 2024
AnalysisBattery Supremacy
Hungary's role in Europe's EV industry
In the Summer of 2022, Viktor Orbán sparked international outrage by lamenting that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle were “no longer nations.” Amid the uproar, a dramatic pronouncement in the same speech largely escaped notice: Orbán declared his ambitions…
Carbon Budget versus Fiscal Budget
What’s at stake in the fiscal rules debate?
Negotiations at the Summit for a Global Finance Pact in Paris last week took place between fifty heads of state. They revolved around how poor countries might develop and decarbonize, within the confines of the existing financial system. A common…
April 5, 2023
AnalysisThe Eurochip
The quest for the European microchip from the 1980s to the present
The headline “World trade war looms over microchip accord” might recall current commercial disputes around semiconductor supplies. In fact, it appeared in an issue of Nature in February 1987, when the US had signed bilateral agreements with Japan to promote…
February 22, 2023
AnalysisCrisis Response
European Central Bank policy in 2008 and 2020
At the dawn of the newly implemented Eurozone, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi and Daniel Gros argued that three broad issues might present problems for Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Bini Smaghi, then Director for International Affairs at the Italian Treasury,…
February 18, 2023
ReviewsThe Sanctions Age
On Agathe Demarais’s “Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests”
Charles De Gaulle declared in 1961, “A great state which does not possess [nuclear weapons]… does not command its own destiny.” France became the world’s fourth nuclear power in 1960 following the Gerboise Bleue nuclear test. Yet the command of…