Europe

In December 2019, I arrived in Berlin by train. I was just married and on honeymoon. The most precious item in my luggage was my Interrail ticket. My husband and I hoped to visit as much of the Continent as we could in three weeks. We did not know that soon such a trip would be impossible, thanks to the infamous virus from China. We were keen to see what remained of the Berlin Wall. One of the longest still standing parts is on Niederkirchnerstrasse, next to the site of the former headquarters of the SS and the Gestapo, now home to the Topography of Terror, an indoor and outdoor museum dedicated to the Nazi era.

It’s been a beast of a year, hasn’t it? Yesterday morning my father-in-law died of COVID in Pristina, and it’s only when it comes right home to you that you’re reminded how real and immediate the threat from that spiteful little virus is.The reason I’m writing about this personal loss is that I worry that the whole COVID situation has been politicized, even while the vaccine is finally coming into play.As lots of people have already observed, it’s turned into a left-right issue, with many liberals wanting to close things down and many conservatives wanting to allow the economy to function relatively normally, on the basis that lost livelihoods matter as well as lost lives.Fair enough.

It has become a received wisdom in recent months that the US has failed where the EU had succeeded. On June 22, for example, CNN viewers were shown a graph of COVID cases in the US, which had seemed to flatten at around 25,000 cases a day, compared with those in the EU which had fallen away from an April peak to fewer than 5,000 cases a day. ‘Look at the EU,’ viewers were told. ‘That’s where we should be.’ Roll on four months, however, and it is looking a little different. While cases in the US fell away, then returned in what is beginning to look like a bit of a third wave, Europe has been consumed in a rapidly-growing second wave.

Middlesbrough, United Kingdom Gareth Southgate, the unctuous, horse-faced manager of the England soccer team, insisted that his players take the knee before their game against Denmark in the Nations League last month. They were at it before the match against Iceland, too, and the Icelanders joined in, bless them, despite the fact that there is only one black person in all of Iceland and he probably ended up there by mistake. It was important, Southgate ventured, to show support for Black Lives Matter. And so down they all went, as Portland burned and the looters, bullies, thugs and professional agitators ran amok across the US.

An obscure Mediterranean flashpoint may soon come to a crisis; that would be the minuscule and remote Greek island of Kastellorizo (or Megisti; Meis in Turkish). Like many other Greek islands, it lies much closer to the Turkish than the Greek mainland (1 mile vs. 357 miles). Unlike other small Greek islands, its location between Rhodes and Cyprus bestows outsized military and economic importance on it.Were Kastellorizo, with a population of under 500, to enjoy the full rights bestowed on it by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Greece can claim a 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that leaves Turkey with a cramped EEZ along its shores; take away Kastellorizo and the Turkish EEZ more than doubles in size.

Juan Carlos, ex-King of Spain, behaved foolishly in relation to money and sex, and so his decision to leave Spain is sad, but justified. That seems to be the view of most moderate people outside Spain who are not ill-disposed to the monarchy. But is it right? Certainly Juan Carlos’s foolishness was real, but his imposed exile (it is not really voluntary) to the Dominican Republic is not a punishment for a crime: there has never been any legal process. It is a partisan political act which is bad for the unity of Spain. Juan Carlos’s exile was forced on the current King, his son Felipe VI, by a weak prime minister, the Socialist Pedro Sanchez.

As with any cell phone contract, the devil is in the small print – and that perhaps is the case with the UK government’s announcement today on Huawei. On the face it is, Tuesday’s ban is very good news. Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giants whose detractors claim is a front for the Chinese Communist party’s desire to dominate UK and global advanced telecoms, needs to be out of the UK’s 5G network by later this decade — 2027 — while no new Huawei kit will be sold into the 5G network after the end of this year. However, the small print is critical and there is a catch — or two. BT and other major vendors can still put Huawei kit bought this year into the network until 2026.

It’s that time again when newspapers tell us that America’s standing in the world has substantially declined under Donald Trump. It’s no coincidence that we’re always told this when a Republican resides in the White House. You must wonder why it is that 'the world' (i.e., elite European leaders and media) oscillates in its view of American leadership directly in tune with America’s presidential election outcomes. Since 1980, the message has boiled down to this: Republican presidents are narrow-minded and dimwitted warmongers (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) or isolationist (Trump), whereas Democratic presidents are nuanced and deep-thinking internationalists (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

Has the great Swedish mea culpa finally arrived? Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, is quoted by the Financial Times saying that his country ‘should have imposed more restrictions to avoid having such a high death toll’. His 'admission', continues the FT, 'is striking as for months he has criticized other countries’ lockdowns'. The Guardian goes just as hard on the story. 'Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes,' screams Bloomberg. But turn to Wednesday's Swedish press and there’s something strange: they seem to have missed the scoop entirely. All the stranger, seeing that Tegnell's remarks were made to Swedish radio. So was something lost — or, rather, added — in translation?

There have been an enormous number of positive attributes on display during the lockdown in Britain. Family members keeping an eye on each other. Neighbors looking after each other more. But there have been ugly attributes about as well. None uglier than the sort of tell-tale attitude that makes you realize how the secret police could always rely on a certain portion of the populace in any country. Everyone has their own anecdotes. A friend who lives in the countryside told me that someone she knew said to her, ‘Are you aware that this is your second walk of the day?’ That sort of thing. The people who have reported on others who they think are doing something they shouldn’t.

Over the coming weeks, a battle between Washington and Beijing over the inclusion of Taiwan as an observer at the World Health Organization will rage, reflecting the struggle between the People’s Republic of China and the United States over control over international institutions. Yet it also reveals the reality of the new cold war between the two countries, and the shift in focus of attention to ground-level tactics at the expense of grand strategies. Long forgotten in the shadow of China’s rise and the intensification of both contact and competition between the PRC and the United States has been the island nation of Taiwan.

My friend ‘D’ is an instantly recognizable type in the Middle East: the middleman. He’s always chasing the next deal, always about to make millions. One scheme was to build a London Eye in a flyblown town in the Levant. Another was to buy a ‘Trump sex tape’ for $10 million. His latest scheme is to get the British government to buy coronavirus test kits from Turkey. This could be the big score: for biotech companies, testing is a new goldrush. And though there’s a touch of Del Boy about my friend, he’s right about the need for test kits. In fact, to get out of the crisis caused by the coronavirus, we might have to test on an immense, unprecedented, almost unimaginable scale.

Professors of medicine do not usually look as if they have emerged from the pages of Asterix, or alternatively as if they were the drummer of a 1960s rock band just emerged from drug rehabilitation for the 17th time: but that is how Prof Didier Raoult, recently elevated to the rank of the most famous infectious disease doctor in the world, looks. If you type 'Didier' in your search engine, up comes Raoult, before even the soccer player, 'Drogba'. When infectious disease doctors are more famous than footballers, you know that an epidemic is serious.  Raoult says that he adopted his appearance to irritate his colleagues, which is another specialization of his, one at which he is undoubtedly very good.

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

Political realignments occur when large groups of voters desert one party for one or more other parties, shattering old coalitions and forming new ones. In America and northern Europe, working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, native and white — have been leaving established left-of-center parties. On their way out, they have met college-educated metropolitan professionals and managers migrating the other way. Center-left parties have exchanged the industrial workers who were once their core constituency for a new upscale clientele. The emerging center-left is supported by the college-credentialed middle classes, native minorities and immigrant diasporas.

COVID-19 has a horrid ability to turn fiction into fact. Deserted modern cities are usually the realm of post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. Now, many of us live in them. The world's greatest streets are dramatically empty; suspended suddenly in a dream-like quiet. It's eerie and also very beautiful. We usually often don't notice how remarkable our cities are the commotion. We are distracted by the crowds, the commotion and the congestion. Now it is hard for urbanites to notice anything else. The Spectator has looked around the world, and asked various writers in various places to describe where they live in lockdown.

The growth of COVID cases in Britain is now slowing according to Professor Neil Ferguson, who is emerging as the de facto chief strategist of the government response to the crisis. No government data has been issued to confirm this trend but Ferguson has access to other real-time data through SAGE, the medical emergency committee. His words are worth following carefully. He told BBC Radio 4's Today program this morning: 'In the UK we can see some early signs of slowing in some indicators. Less so deaths, because deaths are lagged by a long time from when measures come in force. But if we look at the numbers of new hospital admissions, that does appear to be slowing down a little bit now.