Green European Journal

As Turkey prepares to host the world’s largest climate summit in Antalya, its official rhetoric masks a long-running policy of expanding fossil fuel exploration and accelerating nuclear projects under foreign dependency. In this context, COP31 is bound to become yet another greenwashing spectacle. Still, Turkey’s grassroots movement continue to resist the government’s authoritarian push for more extraction, fighting instead for energy democracy and ecological justice.

The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) will be held from 9 to 20 November in the Turkish city of Antalya. Touted as the “implementation COP”, the hope is that it will provide a platform for forging global consensus on realistic emission cuts and fossil fuel phaseout.

This edition of the world’s largest climate summit will be held against a backdrop of intense geopolitical rivalry and tension. China, the world’s foremost producer of green energy, has signalled its intent to use the conference to push back against Western tariffs on its clean technology, including solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric cars. Meanwhile, the US under Trump 2.0 has cast its lot with fossil fuels, while the EU faces energy insecurity due to oil and gas supply chain disruptions, and slashes green policies in the name of competitiveness despite growing climate impacts.

Turkey itself is heading to this COP as a country that imports two-thirds of its primary energy – nearly all of it fossil fuels. Still, a centrepiece of the summit is Ankara’s “35 by 35” proposal, a global target for electricity to ‌meet 35 per cent of the world’s energy demand by 2035 (compared to today’s approximately 20 per cent). This comes even as, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has made no secret of its ambitions to become a major fossil fuel transit hub between the Middle East and Europe. And while Ankara has struck deals with China covering mining, critical minerals, renewables, and nuclear power, it has also intensified oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, putting it at loggerheads with Greece and the EU.

For the Turkish government, COP31 is an opportunity to divert attention from a prolonged macroeconomic crisis. Climate diplomacy serves Erdoğan not as a genuine ecological commitment but as a pragmatic instrument of governance, designed to attract foreign capital and secure international legitimacy in a domestic context where social opposition has already been silenced.

Greenwashing continues

Just as Egypt (COP27), the UAE (COP28) and Azerbaijan (COP29) used their host status to pursue energy deals worth billions, and Brazil (COP30) pressed ahead with oil licensing and auctions in the run-up to its summit, Turkey is approaching COP31 with a dual strategy: it is leveraging the global electrification narrative to mask deep-seated policy contradictions and position itself as a hub for clean technology.

On the one hand, the Turkish government has negotiated with China on battery investments, urging Western donors to shift defence spending toward climate finance, and staging high-profile domestic events including the state-sponsored “NextGenCOP30.5” youth summit on Yassi Island (renamed Democracy and Freedom Island in commemoration of the 1960 coup). On the other hand, rather than outlining a coal phaseout strategy, Ankara has said it would raise national emissions through 2035, signed new international natural gas agreements, and regularly issues emergency expropriation decrees for domestic oil and gas exploration activities. In other words, COP31 will be another act of greenwashing by a government that is actively increasing carbon emissions and promoting fossil fuels.

This contradiction became most evident on 10 October, when a presidential decree authorised urgent land expropriations across Antalya and the Mediterranean coast to accelerate oil and gas exploration led by the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO). Indeed, this institutional greenwashing was already embedded in Turkey’s official climate commitments for the 2053 net-zero goal, as the state’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) promised a 41 per cent reduction by 2030, which in fact implies an additional 11 per cent increase beyond the roughly 30 per cent emission level that would occur without mitigation measures. After the launch of Turkey’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) in August, this policy environment became even more complex, as the system risks legitimising continued industrial pollution through tradable allowances instead of enforcing real emissions limits.

In fact, with Turkey’s emissions expected to rise by 16 per cent by 2035, absolute reduction targets have been deferred to an unspecified future date. This trend is also confirmed by 2026 data from the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. According to these data, Turkey rose two places in the global emitter ranking, now accounting for 1.13 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and standing as the world’s 14th-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Ultimately, behind Ankara’s climate diplomacy lies a familiar calculus of regime survival. Just as growth in the construction and energy sectors was leveraged to maintain political hegemony in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the government now regards ESG funds, green loans, and the revenues expected from COP31-related economic activity as vital liquidity to manage macroeconomic tensions before the 2028 presidential election. These pressures stem from inflation, which peaked at 85 per cent in late 2022 before stabilising at around 30 percent, as well as the roughly 80 percent depreciation of the Turkish lira.

Murky renewables

Beyond political rhetoric, an analysis of the Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation’s national power grid data reveals that these contradictions have roots in the energy system itself. At first glance, while fossil fuels constitute 38 per cent of total installed capacity – with imported natural gas alone making up 19 per cent – the remaining 62 per cent is officially labelled as renewable energy. However, 40 per cent of this renewable share comes from hydroelectric projects that disrupt river flows, exacerbate regional water stress, and face persistent local opposition, while solar and wind account for only 21 per cent and 15 per cent of installed capacity, respectively.

But that is not the full picture. According to Ember Climate data, actual production levels reveal the structural limitations of Turkey’s renewable energy production more clearly. For instance, solar energy accounted for only 6 per cent in January 2026; in June, one of the peak summer months, solar contributed just 16.5 per cent of total generation, while wind contributed 13.5 per cent. In contrast, countries with broadly comparable solar resources, such as Portugal and Italy, regularly derive around 20 to 30 per cent of their monthly electricity generation from solar during peak months. Italy’s renewable energy output can exceed 40 per cent of total electricity demand during high-generation summer periods, while Germany, despite having only a third of Turkey’s solar potential, generates more than 20 per cent of its summer electricity from solar through more effective use of its infrastructure.

Addressing these structural shortfalls requires a drastic acceleration: as officially declared in its 2053 net-zero targets, Turkey must urgently develop a concrete roadmap to deploy 120 GW of solar and wind energy by 2035. This has not been done so far, and current solar generation capacity remains limited due to institutional barriers. Moreover, the lack of mechanisms within the current legal framework to encourage households or local communities to feed the electricity they generate back into the grid has left small-scale projects mired in licensing procedures, bureaucratic delays, and inadequate grid capacity.

Complicating these problems is the fact that while small-scale initiatives are systematically obstructed, land allocations and financial support flow directly to large corporations and foreign capital. For example, despite having 185 GW of solar energy potential and 300 sunny days per year, Turkey has instead signed an intergovernmental agreement with Saudi Arabia, akin to the Akkuyu nuclear deal with Russia, for energy production on its own territory. In domestic discourse, the government portrays such projects as cost‑free investments that will leave Turkey with new facilities. Yet these agreements in fact oblige Turkey to purchase the energy from the producing state, turning these ventures into a source of economic loss in the long run, even if they appear beneficial in the short term before elections. What is more, when renewable energy projects are pursued through centralised state‑backed deals, they also trigger dispossession, which in turn fuels social opposition.

The nuclear gamble

The critical reliance on foreign sources embedded in Turkey’s energy policy is most evident in its long-standing nuclear ambitions, officially framed as a 20-GW capacity target under the 2053 net-zero strategy. Beyond the 4.8-GW Akkuyu plant currently under construction, revised plans include a 5.6-GW facility in Thrace, a 4.8-GW plant on the Black Sea coast in Sinop, and a 4.8 GW allocation for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

As the Akkuyu project illustrates, this ambitious roadmap faces serious limits: 16 years after the intergovernmental agreement with Russia to complete the plant was signed, not a single reactor has entered commercial operation. That is more than double the global average construction timeframe of seven to eight years. As the world’s first nuclear power plant built under the “Build-Own-Operate” (BOO) model, Akkuyu does not reduce dependence on Russian energy, as Turkish officials initially claimed. On the contrary, by granting a foreign state ownership over sovereign national territory, it deepens Turkey’s strategic dependence on Russia. Moreover, while officials often claim Akkuyu NPP will meet 10 per cent of national electricity demand, long-term energy projections suggest that its contribution will be lower. With electricity consumption projected to approach 500 TWh by 2035, Akkuyu’s expected annual generation of 35 TWh would cover only about 7 to 8 percent of demand.

This structural mismatch is compounded by severe ecological risks: Akkuyu relies on cooling water from the Mediterranean Sea, which is warming 20 per cent faster than the global average, heightening the risk of climate-driven operational disruptions. Yet, instead of adapting ecological safeguards to these climate realities, the government has granted regulatory exemptions. Crucially, the discharge water temperature from the Akkuyu plant has been exempted from the 35°-Celsius thermal limit set by the national Water Pollution Control Regulation.

The project’s waste management framework exposes another structural inequality in the allocation of risk. Although official statements suggest that spent fuel will be managed domestically, existing regulations and international practice indicate that fuel from the VVER‑1200 reactors, which are also used at Akkuyu, will instead be shipped to Russia for reprocessing. Under Russian federal law, foreign radioactive waste cannot be permanently stored on Russian territory. Consequently, once plutonium and uranium are extracted, the remaining high-level waste must be returned to Turkey. As a result, while Russia extracts usable materials for strategic and industrial purposes, Turkey is left with the burden of managing high-level radioactive waste that will remain hazardous for up to a million years.

This waste will force Ankara to confront the question of long-term disposal, and there is even a possibility that the management of long-lived isotopes may ultimately compel Turkey to build a deep geological repository; a multi-billion-euro infrastructure project akin to Finland’s Onkalo facility, which is designed to isolate waste for 100,000 years. Under centralised and authoritarian governance, however, even the siting of a radioactive waste management facility follows a rigid top-down approach. Indeed, in 2022, Turkey’s Ministry of Energy was reportedly considering Polatlı, an agrarian region near the capital Ankara with relatively lower seismic activity, as a potential site for a radioactive waste facility, without consulting local populations or securing community consent.

In addition to environmental and strategic risks, the Akkuyu project fails to integrate with Turkey’s labour market and technical infrastructure. While official sources reported that construction employment once approached 30,000, Russia’s economic bottlenecks due to the ongoing war in Ukraine have already reduced this figure to 10,000; it will decline even further upon operational launch, requiring only about 4,000 long-term workers. Because the specific terms of the BOO agreement with Turkey explicitly exclude technology transfer, local engineers and workers will be confined largely to mid-level technical support roles, reinforcing structural dependence on foreign expertise. This institutional gap is tied to a longer historical legacy: during the restructuring that followed the 1980 military coup, the ranks of experienced scientists in Turkey’s public nuclear research sector were severely diminished.

Resistance and repression

Between 2018 and 2025, Turkey issued 22,855 mining licenses and received 13,342 initial applications, systematically converting agricultural land and ecologically sensitive zones into industrial sites. This expansion of extractive concessions and large-scale energy projects unfolded alongside escalating administrative and legal pressures on civil society and local environmental movements. By narrowing the channels of public participation in environmental decision-making and repressing opposition in the public sphere, the central government has systematically suppressed local resistance to secure compliance with large state-backed initiatives.

In recent years, a common thread among COP host countries has been not only high carbon emissions but also authoritarian forms of governance that refuse dialogue with social opposition and systematically rely on administrative coercion. In Turkey, grassroots activism against ecologically destructive projects has faced severe repression, particularly since the 2016 state of emergency, proclaimed after an attempted coup. Environmental activism is not merely a debate among urban intellectuals; as state-backed mining and energy projects steadily expand into rural areas, it has evolved into a direct struggle by local communities to defend their land, water, and livelihoods. As Human Rights Watch has documented in the lead‑up to COP31, the state increasingly employs criminal investigations, arbitrary detentions, and administrative fines to suppress this local resistance.

For instance, in Mugla’s Akbelen Forest, where local villagers have mobilised against coal mine expansion since 2019, state authorities have deployed law enforcement to safeguard corporate extraction. Security forces have repeatedly dispersed nonviolent protesters with tear gas, water cannons, and pepper spray. Turkish activists and residents also face arbitrary detentions, administrative fines, and continuous identity checks around their protest encampments; a police strategy of spatial surveillance designed to intimidate the community and erode ongoing resistance.

Similar dynamics unfolded in the Black Sea region during the 2026 protests against gold mining on the Perşembe Plateau. Situated across the Korgan and Aybastı districts of Ordu city, this high-altitude plateau sustains pastoral livelihoods and livestock farming. Although the area holds legally protected pasture status, the Ministry of Environment granted a mining permit in 2024 without public consultation. Residents only became aware of the project after preliminary site operations directly contaminated their drinking and irrigation water supplies. In June 2026, a court-appointed expert report validated these concerns, warning that gold extraction through cyanide leaching posed a lasting threat to the region’s groundwater reserves. Yet, despite these judicial findings and ongoing legal challenges, security forces repeatedly suppressed peaceful local demonstrations with pepper spray, tear gas, and arbitrary detentions.

Meanwhile, In Rize province’s İkizdere Valley, state intervention assumed an explicitly coercive form when a limestone quarry was opened to supply raw materials for a state-backed logistics port. The quarry directly threatened local tea cultivation, old-growth forests, and essential water sources. To bypass community opposition, the government issued urgent expropriation decrees and imposed district-wide movement restrictions under the pretext of maintaining public order. Despite heavy security blockades and administrative fines, residents, spearheaded by rural women, sustained road blockades, direct physical interventions to protect trees, and legal petitions against the project.

Autocratic greenwashing vs. energy democracy

These cases demonstrate that Turkish state institutions and security forces have acted in tandem to guarantee corporate access to natural resources. By bypassing community consultations, disregarding judicial and scientific assessments, and criminalising nonviolent protest, the central government systematically shuts down public participation. Under the guise of regional development and energy security, state authority dispossesses local populations of their land, water, and livelihoods.

In countries where domestic opposition is suppressed, international climate conferences provide host governments with an opportunity to project a progressive image and secure foreign capital in a politically sanitised environment. For foreign investors and state delegations, this authoritarian arrangement ensures predictability and shields large‑scale energy and infrastructure deals from public scrutiny.

At the same time, grassroots initiative networks such as the People’s Climate Summit (PCS) – formed as a collective platform for excluded civil society to articulate a common voice against COP31, encompassing the local struggles discussed above in Akbelen, Persembe, and Ikizdere – are building solidarity across environmental, labour, and human rights movements. By confronting extractivist projects and demanding community‑led energy democracy, these alliances articulate the most vital alternative vision of a just transition: they embody alternative imaginaries of ecological justice and democratic transition.

The share of renewables in Europe’s energy production is growing slowly but surely. Yet as Europe races to build its green energy economy, the workers doing the building are too often facing weaker unions, unsafe conditions, and employers who resist collective bargaining. Without them on board, the transition can’t achieve the social consent it depends on for its success. What would it take to make green jobs good jobs?

Europe is, slowly, moving along the transition to green energy. In 2025, just over 9 per cent of the EU’s electricity came from coal and in the first three months of 2026, close to half came from renewable sources.

For a continent that has repeatedly come face to face with the economic, security, and environmental risks of relying on fossil fuels, this transition is both urgent and crucial. However, the question of whether it is a “just transition” is still open, particularly when it comes to the rights of the workers who are being affected as Europe’s economy shifts towards renewables.

Determining who falls into that group is not straightforward, as the green transition cuts across numerous sectors. “If you look at the standard statistical classification of activities, you don’t have brown or black sectors and green sectors separately,” says Bela Galgóczi, senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI). Brown and black sectors commonly refer to carbon-intensive, polluting industries. While some workplaces – such as an oil refinery – might sit squarely in that category, chemical production and vehicle manufacturing are too complex to be put in a particular category, he notes.

However, the work done so far – often using imperfect data – tends to show that brown and black sectors have slightly higher wages and union density, greater coverage from collective bargaining agreements, and lower use of agency workers than green sectors. This is in part because these sectors have existed and workers have been organising for a century. “I would never suggest that for the wind sector we will need 100 years, or even 10 or 20. But there is a little bit of a build-up time for structures and representation and settlements,” Galgóczi says.

The work done so far tends to show that brown and black sectors have slightly higher wages and union density, greater coverage from collective bargaining agreements, and lower use of agency workers.

Unscrupulous employers

The multinational companies active in Europe’s green transition have tended to respond differently in each jurisdiction to protest action by their workers. For instance, in 2023, workers in Germany concluded a 123-day strike, the last of a series of industrial actions, against their employer, the Danish renewables giant Vestas. The strike was in protest against the company’s refusal to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with the workers’ union – something that was and is standard practice in Denmark itself. The workers ultimately succeeded and established a collective bargaining agreement. Meanwhile, workers at electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary conceded defeat in August of this year following a three-year strike aimed at establishing a collective bargaining agreement.

Another pattern that has emerged in the behaviour of major players in the green industry, according to Galgóczi, are attempts to erode the pay, terms, and conditions of workers as part of company restructuring. In 2022, the state-owned French energy company EDF was forced to abandon a restructure named “Projet Hercule” that would have moved their renewables business into a new company, which was opposed by unions on the grounds that it would privatise a public service, and criticised by the European Commission over EU competition rules.

In the UK, North Sea oil still provides a significant number of well-paid and unionised jobs. But since production peaked in 1999, many have believed the future to lie in offshore wind. However, the workers’ ability to participate in that future is not guaranteed. “Nobody ever speaks to renewable workers, and I think there’s a massive missing piece of the jigsaw,” says Connor Watt, worker organiser at Platform, an NGO working on the just transition. Watt and his colleagues have been talking to workers across oil, gas, and renewables, particularly those who have moved over from fossil fuels – usually in search of long-term job stability – about their experiences.

Many of these workers find that renewables projects are often more poorly managed and workplace accidents are more frequent, in part because safety practices have not been transferred from the oil and gas sector nor developed specifically for renewables. Watt points out that safety processes and union engagement were transformed in the North Sea oil and gas industry following the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, where 167 workers died following a catastrophic explosion on an oil rig.

Watt feels the situation in renewables means a disaster is only a matter of time, particularly once workers are in international waters – a mere 12 miles from the British shore. “If you’re just on a vessel at sea and it’s not under a UK flag and you might just be waiting for weather or for a shout from somebody, there isn’t any legislation which protects the vessel that you’re on, and that’s a common thing,” he notes. In international waters, companies can exploit casualised migrant labour and pay less than minimum wage. “We’ve developed this massive [offshore wind] industry, second in the world. However, there are just these oversights in the regulations and legislation, so that’s worrying,” Watt adds.

The missing link with workers

The problem has its roots in the tendency in European countries, including the UK, to prioritise greener industries even at the cost of workers’ rights, terms, and conditions – a bargain that could undermine the transition itself.

“A lot of people who want renewable energy to be built, want it to be built quickly because of the urgency of the climate crisis, and so relatively few questions are asked about how it’s built and the conditions under which that happens,” says William Westgard-Cruice, a human geographer at the Clark University Graduate School of Geography.

He points to the construction of solar farms in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, where in a number of cases workers’ rights have been violated and where migrants have been hired to work under harsh circumstances. “There’s a lot of focus on local communities and their concerns, and relatively little focus on the workers who are actually building and operating these power plants,” Westgard-Cruice adds.

One of the reasons why there is localised opposition to renewables projects, he believes, is that communities where they are built are not offered clear and defined benefits in the form of good and decent jobs. Moreover, he says that political parties from across the spectrum are failing to engage with these issues sufficiently, if at all.

There’s a lot of focus on local communities and their concerns, and relatively little focus on the workers who are actually building and operating these power plants.

Westgard-Cruice believes that politicians can make an effective intervention by incorporating stronger labour protections into the auctions for offshore wind projects. At present, he explains, European countries are including measures around environmental sustainability and skills into these contracts, but they could go much further and mandate collective bargaining. There were, he adds, unsuccessful efforts on a European level by some MEPs to add protections into the Net-Zero Industry Act, but worker protection didn’t appear to be a “dealbreaker” for either the Greens or the Social Democrats – and certainly not for the European Commission.

Westgard-Cruice believes that unions, social and climate movements, as well as green, social-democratic and left parties must push for better working conditions and standards to be a much greater political priority and to use the power of the state to raise them in the renewables sector. “This is the only way that there’s going to be social consent for the development of renewable energy in rural areas that feel like they’re being turned into sacrifice zones,” he emphasises. “These political debates could have a very different character if people all knew someone who’s working in offshore wind, and who’s saying, ‘Oh, the conditions are great in here. I’m so glad that I left my old job in the fossil fuel industry to be able to go to this.’”

The way forward

IndustriAll is a global trade union federation representing around 800 unions and 50 million workers worldwide. As a union focused on manufacturing, it sees a lot of potential for the green transition to generate new manufacturing jobs further down the supply chain.

Both IndustriAll and the ETUI are pushing for a just transition framework directive, says Corinna Zierold, head of just transition at IndustriAll Europe. This is because their experience of negotiating at the sector level has not been successful. For example, in 2022, IndustriAll started to negotiate a just transition agreement for gas workers at Eurogas, a European association representing the gas industry. However, after two years of talks aimed at reaching a voluntary agreement, Eurogas said it would not sign it.

That said, there are also positive examples, according to Zierold. For instance, Poland has established projects to retrain coal miners to work in wind power, which the country is aiming to expand to provide around a quarter of its energy. The UK and Scottish governments are also establishing projects to fund retraining of offshore oil and gas workers (however, this was before the announcement that the UK would grant permission for more gas production in the North Sea.).

IndustriAll’s member unions are also facing pressure from employers, backed by right-wing governments. In Hungary, battery manufacturing plants stepped up hiring of migrant labour, with the support and facilitation of the government of far-right former prime minister Viktor Orbán. At the same time, workers were facing increased health and safety risks from exposure to toxic substances. Unions have continued to push for change since a new government came into power earlier this year.

There are also structural issues at work in the new green energy economy. “The net zero sectors are basically small businesses, and maybe some of them do manufacturing… I would put that under the general bundle of the installation economy,” says Dr Nicholas Beuret, a lecturer in management and ecological sustainability at the University of Essex. According to Beuret, many green jobs are in assembling and installing rather than producing the components that go into key infrastructure like heat pumps or smart metres, so the full value of the green transition does not trickle down to workers.

“There’s often a fraught relationship with working conditions, and not only are they [small installation businesses] at risk of going under themselves, and there’s lots of competition, and then they’re fighting larger businesses, but there’s also quite a lot of underhanded economic behaviour that undermines the very conditions of green transition in itself,” he laments. This includes, for example, installation companies fitting faulty insulation and defrauding green energy schemes.

The economic geopolitics of green energies is another factor, with European renewables manufacturing contending with China, which supplies 95 per cent of the solar panels used in Europe and manufactures 39 per cent of wind turbines installed outside the country. In the long term, this could relegate Europe to largely being a continent where solar panels, wind turbines, and other green technologies are assembled, while economic giants in China capture the value created through manufacturing.

Beuret also highlights the heavier dependence on government grants and support, which is a “really politicised revenue scheme”.  As he sees it, the larger problem is how policymakers are approaching the transition. “They’re not interested in running public companies or public investment or public research,” he says. “They want to incentivise businesses to do it, and the problem is the businesses they’re trying to incentivise all have a lot of money to lose in fossil fuels.”

As the backlash to green policies gathers across Europe, supporters of the transition to a green economy need to understand better how to bring workers on board – both in old industries that are in the process of transition and the new ones that are meant to provide better, greener jobs.

After Europe’s summer heatwaves, climate salience is at its highest in years, yet it’s clear the past frameworks used to mobilise majorities are crumbling amid an ongoing cost of living crisis and energy insecurity. To penetrate politically, climate communications must fit within the material realities of voters’ lives. In other words, the key to mobilising climate action is to demonstrate that the green transition can make European countries more secure and people’s lives cheaper.

The salience of climate change has been on a downward trajectory post-2019. That year is remembered by many as the moment climate politics broke containment: Ursula von der Leyen’s newly elected European Commission mandated Net Zero by 2050 after mass mobilisations in the streets demanding climate action and a strong performance by Green parties in that year’s European elections.

The years that followed could not have been more different. Pandemic lockdowns broke the wave of climate protests, and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis forced climate down the political agenda. There, the issue languished, rarely emphasised by mainstream parties except occasionally by far-right agitators attempting to stir up “greenlash”. 

Even before the cost of living crisis, climate struggled to get more than 10 per cent of European electorates ranking it among their top issues. While polling shows that people hold ambient concern for the climate crisis, it remained a second-order issue. The movement has thus existed in political purgatory: marked by high awareness and intense polarisation, yet devoid of broader electoral momentum.

The recent summer of extreme weather may have broken that impasse. New research we conducted in August at Mandate Research, a strategy consulting firm for political campaigns, shows a definite spike in voters’ climate concern during this summer’s heatwaves. Among the countries we polled,1 this effect was particularly visible in Hungary and across Southern Europe, where Spain and France in particular were hit by devastating wildfires. In Hungary, 91 per cent of voters report being worried about climate change, followed closely by Italy (81 per cent), France (80 per cent), and Spain (68 per cent).

This worry translated directly into issue salience. In Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and the UK, roughly a fifth of voters now rank the environment and climate change among their top two issues. In Hungary, salience catapulted from a spring baseline of 3 per cent to a staggering 25 per cent, making it the second most important issue in the country in August. Hungarian citizens have had a particularly shocking confrontation with energy precarity this summer. The most severe drought in over a century partially dried up the Danube, causing a temporary shutdown of the nuclear facility supplying nearly half the country’s power.

Salience numbers are famously difficult to budge. The belief that climate politics had hit a saturation point, with returns diminishing as voters grew accustomed to extreme weather rather than increasing with the severity of the climate crisis, had convinced many mainstream parties that the issue was a vote loser. However, double-digit salience increases in the span of a few months demonstrate that European voters are not yet numb to peril.

This momentum is unlikely to fully evaporate in the colder months. With El Niño intensifying towards historic peaks and European gas storage levels concerningly low ahead of the winter season, the climate conversation is poised to shift from record heatwaves to heating bills and the threat of more extreme weather events.

The failure of old stories

Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

While rising salience presents an undeniable political opening, progressives must not misread the room. Affordability, immigration, housing, and healthcare still rank above climate in most of the countries we surveyed, and overall concern has met but not surpassed the 2019 peak.
More importantly, the world has changed significantly since then, and so have the ways people relate to the climate crisis. The failures of green policies, the rise of the far right (with its own narratives and solutions to the climate emergency) and the shifting geopolitical landscape all demand a different approach from progressives. Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

This risk is most visible with “Net Zero”, a 2050 target enshrined in both the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. When asked to rank environmental policy goals from highest to lowest priority, “achieving Net Zero emissions” ranked dead last across every single country surveyed. In Germany (-37), the UK (-42), France (-35), and the US (-40), Net Zero received deeply negative net priority ratings. Voters overwhelmingly prefer tangible, immediate objectives: building clean energy, protecting nature and wildlife, and reducing energy costs.

Furthermore, the public is deeply sceptical about the feasibility of Net Zero targets. Well over half of respondents believe it is unlikely their country will make meaningful progress towards the 2050 goal. The attempt to bundle various policy aims together and rebrand it as Net Zero has clearly failed to reach voters; repetition has led to abstraction and meaninglessness.

Even more troubling is the perceived distribution of economic costs. Almost half of Europeans surveyed believe that pro-environmental policies have left ordinary people in their country worse off, including 54 per cent in the Netherlands, 46 per cent in Spain, 45 per cent in Germany, 45 per cent in France, and 42 per cent in the UK.

This perception persists despite measurable, real-world improvements in air quality, public health indicators, and biodiversity conservation across Europe. Policies that treated emissions reductions as the target and affordability as an afterthought have clearly reached their limit, and they are even less likely to succeed amid a prolonged cost of living crisis.  Relentless far-right framing that depicts environmentalism as technocracy has also played its part in convincing people that green policy is synonymous with meaningless sacrifice and elite control.

Today, progressives have to contend with thin, transactional support for climate action. When asked if they would support renewable energy, people respond positively. However, when renewable investment is posited as requiring taxation or public service cuts, this support turns sharply negative across nearly all European countries.

Moralistic, future-focused arguments and lofty green targets celebrated in the Fridays for Future past have lost momentum. The timelines environmental policies require are inescapable, but so is the need to have people on board a green project. Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Reconfiguring climate politics

While affordability concerns overshadow melting ice caps, they also provide an opportunity for the climate movement to execute a strategic pivot. The convergence of climate extremes, geopolitical volatility, and rising utility bills creates a narrow window to reframe clean energy as a practical, necessary alternative to fossil fuels. Low riverbeds impact the cost of transportation, hot summers make it hard to cool power plants, and a warming atmosphere yields bad harvests and increases the price of everyday goods such as olive oil, coffee, and chocolate. Framed this way, the green transition is less a matter of global leadership and blue-sky thinking than a shield against further economic insecurity.

Voters do make the connection between renewable power and structural affordability. Clear majorities across Europe agree that transitioning to renewable energy will lower energy bills and reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets. In a similar vein, expanding renewable capacity is consistently ranked by voters as the single most effective action governments can take to lower energy costs.

This is reflected in message testing across Europe. Narratives focused on immediate material outcomes, such as capping household energy bills by taxing fossil fuel windfall profits, or protecting national energy security from foreign autocrats, consistently outperform abstract moral appeals.

Right-wing figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Kemi Badenoch in the UK have attempted to present themselves as pragmatic leaders defending working families against “arbitrary climate targets”. Support for nuclear energy as part of the solution is often featured in this kind of discourse – and it resonates among voters, ranking as the top climate priority in Sweden and Poland, and a close second in the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

During this summer’s heatwaves, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen also tried to pitch herself as a pragmatic leader by advocating a “grand plan” for air conditioning. While this will neither solve the climate crisis nor adapt our cities to the heat, it put her opponents on the defensive.

All this shows that progressives can no longer lay exclusive claim to the climate issue. The newfound salience of the climate crisis will only translate into votes if they offer solutions to people’s material concerns. In this context, conceding the language of pragmatism to the Right would be a strategic mistake.

Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Rebuilding majorities

Europeans have not abandoned the green transition. Across the continent, solid majorities recognise that drastic change is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and they believe that green investment can help make their lives easier.

However, voters are no longer responding to the argument as it has been framed and delivered over the past decade, and hoping that extreme weather will shock electorates back to reason is bad politics. Many Europeans are providing the movement an opening because of the energy and cost of living crisis and security concerns. The climate movement must take heed of this, and meet voters where they are.

Civil society and climate movements can continue to highlight immediate threats from extreme weather to maintain emotional urgency – after all, this type of messaging still proves the most effective in boosting the salience of the climate crisis. But political parties competing for government must ground their vision in tangible economic benefits. By dismantling the abstract vocabulary of Net Zero, confronting corporate profiteering, and presenting renewable energy as a tool for bill reduction and sovereign security, progressives can begin to rebuild a majority for climate action.

1. Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Hungary, Poland, and the US. ︎

Beyond rogue scenarios and hype, the AI boom is accelerating a deeper structural shift: the migration of the global economy to the cloud. So far, the EU has mostly tried to rein in Big Tech through regulation, but this reactive approach has fallen short. The recent push for tech sovereignty can only succeed if it starts with democratic choice and a shared vision for social and technological progress.

Alessio Giussani: Your book The Rulers is primarily about three companies: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. What sets them apart from other big corporations?

Cecilia Rikap: In the current debate, there’s a lot of noise about what’s going on with AI. Everybody, of course, has the right to talk about AI, particularly because decisions are made behind closed doors, and we lack a space to democratically discuss the ways forward. But instead of talking about the roots of corporate power and how it dictates technological change and profits from it, the conversation is often about two types of agents – and I’m playing with the word “agent” here.

One is the AI agent. People marvel at the things that AI can do, and instead of trying to understand who is developing this technology and for what purposes, they get caught up in this rhetoric that AI is either wonderful or horrible, but is extremely powerful either way. Others, who are more concerned with economic inequalities – as I also am – focus on another type of agent: the CEOs and the founders of these companies, particularly the ones who side with the far right, like Elon Musk or Alex Karp. I’m not saying that this approach is not relevant. But if we truly want to understand the roots of corporate power today, and therefore act upon it, dismantle it, and create alternatives, we cannot miss the forest for the tree.

These far-right characters shout very loudly and sometimes distract us from what’s really going on; this is what happens often with someone like Elon Musk. I’m not saying his companies don’t matter or that we shouldn’t study them, but in my research I don’t want to single out companies arbitrarily. Instead, I try to offer a more comprehensive view of corporate power. Therefore, I start by analysing the largest companies by market capitalisation, and then try to understand what explains their power.

I identify two groups: one is the group of big oil companies, and more broadly, companies that get their advantage by systematically extracting and monetising nature in different forms. The other group, which is the largest one and has been growing fast and overtaking some of the old giants, is made up of companies whose advantage comes from systematically capturing intangibles.

Corporate power has always been built, to some degree at least, on capturing and making sense of intangibles like information and knowledge, organising them, and putting them at the service of production processes. Think, for example, of the R&D laboratory of IBM, or the marketing department of Coca-Cola. These companies have been intellectual monopolies for decades, capturing intangibles like science and knowledge (in the case of IBM) or narratives and brand-building (Coca-Cola).

As intellectual monopolies, they mobilise their intangible assets to exercise economic power. Start-ups, for example, control intangibles, but usually they are not used for capturing economic value. An intellectual monopoly puts different forms of knowledge, narratives, and data at the service of expanding its control of the economy. This control can take the form of a chokepoint if it occurs on a specific market, or of a panopticon if it gives the ability to monitor all information created and exchanged within a network, enabling the leading corporation to plan, organise, and control beyond ownership.

Based on your analysis, a company like NVIDIA – which designs the most advanced AI chips and is the largest in the world by market capitalisation – does not qualify as a “ruler”. Why?

Nvidia has a clear chokepoint because it controls a specific market and is certainly an intellectual monopoly. But beyond that, it doesn’t have the capacity to control a broad part of the global economy. Its power is focused on semiconductor design, whereas other companies have a panopticon view, often because they sell directly across multiple markets. When you are at the supermarket, you think there are so many brands, but then you start turning the packaging, and you see Unilever everywhere. This gives a company like Unilever a panopticon: broad oversight across different parts of the economy. So all these companies mobilise intangibles to control portions of our lives, but these end up being contained, limited. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the only ones that combine multiple chokepoints and the largest panopticon of Western capitalism.

Many powerful actors are involved in producing an AI model. NVIDIA’s semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan at TSMC, which I also classify as an intellectual monopoly with a chokepoint. So I’m not saying a company like Nvidia or TSMC isn’t powerful. But even the semiconductors from Nvidia end up entering the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Everywhere we look, we see these three companies controlling the many pieces and actors that then, seen together, become the digital stack.

Take academic research on AI, for example. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google co-produce around 90 per cent of their research with thousands of organisations. This isn’t exclusive to them: Meta, Nvidia, and companies from other sectors do it too. But when it comes to AI, Google and Microsoft are those with the largest capacity to control universities and public research organisations developing frontier research on AI. Moreover, they control the largest number of other companies, including start-ups, with their venture capital money and through the cloud.

Nvidia is expanding its profits so much that it has leverage to expand beyond its chokepoint. It is now trying to get its own cloud by investing a lot of money – also in partnership with other leading companies – to basically offer its semiconductors as a service on independent data centres that are not those of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Of course, this makes total sense because Nvidia doesn’t want to depend on selling to other big players. To some extent, what NVIDIA is trying to do is build its own cloud, and for me, this shows how important the cloud is.

What exactly is the cloud? And why does it bring so much power to the companies that control it?

Let me start with an example everyone knows: Netflix. It looks like a simple streaming app where we can watch whatever we want. Behind Netflix, there are thousands of digital services, which means that you have millions of lines of code that do a lot of different things. Not even a company as large as Netflix writes every line of code that makes the platform exist for all of us. Why? Because there are a lot of services, a lot of ready-made pieces of software for solving specific and repetitive issues that can be purchased. Where do you buy that? In the past, organisations used to go to a software provider and ask for software for their needs. It was more tailor-made, but it was also more expensive. Now, they rent it in the cloud.

The cloud is like a supermarket for digital technologies. It’s not just infrastructure offered as a service – that is, the data centres where data is stored and processed. You can get whatever you want in the cloud: software, a model, data, a platform, infrastructure, and more. From each of these clouds – which are run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google – you have thousands of options that you can purchase as a service.

That also means you never truly get access to the code. You don’t download the service to your computer, but you can use it while you are connected to the cloud. And this is where the cloud starts being something different. It’s not just the supermarket of technologies. It is also the production sphere, the factory, the place where data is arranged and organised, the software is produced, the architecture of the platforms is designed. Everything happens inside the cloud, and when we consume the services, we’re also inside the cloud. It’s as if I were also cooking and eating my meal inside the supermarket where I bought the ingredients. The production, the exchange, the consumption: it all happens there.

This differs from the power these companies already had over individuals through social media. Organisations of every size and every type, from small firms to large companies like Netflix, Nestlé, or Coca-Cola, and even governments, migrate to the cloud. In fact, the entire global economy is migrating to the cloud, which means that companies that control it get the capacity to oversee, predict, and anticipate where the economy is going; a level of foresight that no single institution, government, or organisation had in the past.

The cloud and intellectual monopolies predate the explosion of AI hype with the public release of ChatGPT in 2022. What does AI fundamentally change in the cloud’s role and the power relations it generates?

The AI companies that we now associate with the AI boom or hype, like OpenAI and Anthropic – but also DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 – are tightly connected to the cloud giants in multiple ways, including venture capital money. Since the release of ChatGPT, these AI companies have required a growing amount of processing power, which has also driven the data centre boom. At the same time, we have organisations around the world that feel that they must adopt AI, that they cannot be left out. I call this AI FOMO. And what is the safest, and also the most seamless, way to adopt AI? Well, the cloud.

AI is like a Trojan horse, a marketing strategy for the cloud. It accelerates migration to the cloud. Through Amazon, Microsoft, or Google Cloud, you automatically integrate the AI models into all the rest of the digital services you use. And you might not trust Anthropic, but Microsoft? Microsoft has been there for many years, so these companies have built a reputation as trustworthy partners, especially for other leading firms. Some companies have contracts directly with OpenAI or with Anthropic, but more and more we see that organisations prefer to go to the supermarket, where today they might use Claude, tomorrow ChatGPT, and the day after tomorrow they may use China’s DeepSeek, because even DeepSeek is available as a service on the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Meanwhile, regulators and competition authorities focus on AI and whether the AI market will be competitive, or what to do to make it competitive. But AI exists within an ecosystem, and the ones that control the ecosystem beyond ownership are the cloud giants.

Controlling beyond ownership is also linked to planning and delivering innovation. How do you understand that concept?

We tend to think that innovation is a precondition for economic growth, and that growth, if we have the right policies, will lead to prosperity and a better life for everyone. Private companies are seen as the innovators, so governments are expected to cut red tape so we can achieve prosperity. Yet societies are not becoming more prosperous.

The classical understanding of innovation would define it as a new process or product put on the market. An invention might be the discovery of a new drug or treatment, but until it’s approved and sold on the market, it’s not an innovation. But this definition neglects that every innovation is produced collectively by many, and then monetised by the company that captures that co-created knowledge. Between 2012 and 2021, for example, Microsoft produced over 15,000 scientific publications. Almost all of them had at least one co-author who worked for another organisation, not Microsoft. During the same period, Microsoft was granted 35,000 patents. It shared ownership of just 1 per cent of those patents.

This goes to show that these corporations are not the only innovators. When companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others work with public universities and research institutes or invest in startups, they do so to get access to the knowledge that is being produced, to steer the trajectory of that knowledge, and then recombine all the pieces of that huge puzzle and monetise all the new recombinations. In a way, they are the big appropriators. So we shouldn’t cope with them under the promise that their innovations will contribute to a better life. In fact, they don’t, and these are not just “their” innovations, but the product of collective creative processes involving many others. These companies are indeed producing a lot of frontier research on AI, but never alone.

Besides, innovation today should be understood as knowledge in all its forms. This includes narratives and data, and how all this gets combined in the melting pot of creativity that the intellectual monopolies control beyond ownership. Corporations craft narratives about what we think AI is and how it should be regulated, and push us to use AI as a method of inventing, sidelining other means of producing and creating. I call this process epistemic totalitarianism.

Europe seems to have only awakened to the dangers of this system since Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 and his unholy alliance with tech bros. But who’s really in charge? Who’s driving whom?

During the Cold War, the Department of Defence set the trajectory and orientation of technological change. The Pentagon did this by investing strategically as well as coordinating and planning the big technological innovations of the Cold War period. After the Cold War, there was a sense of, “Why should we continue doing this the same way? We won.” Of course, it doesn’t mean that the Pentagon stopped investing in technology in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was no longer steering and planning technological development in the same way. Now, big tech companies have increasingly become the big planners of science and technology, particularly of AI. The AI that we have is the AI that they want. It’s an AI that can be resold again and again to countless actors, making it cheaper to produce and expanding their control over our societies.

Europe has been missing this story for decades. It thought that the world was operating as a common market, and that we should promote competition because everyone was on the same page. Of course, Europe knew that China wasn’t on that page and that China was planning. But what was harder to see was that leading corporations, in particular those from the US, were also planning and controlling beyond ownership.

The US government, once it realised around a decade ago that this was going on, decided to take action, and the already solid relationship between big tech and the Department of Defence has grown stronger and stronger since then. The most important change in this dynamic is that big tech – unlike previous military subcontractors – does not depend on government money. A key difference between a company like Palantir and a company like Microsoft is that Microsoft doesn’t depend on funding from the US government and its allies to be profitable, whereas Palantir does. This doesn’t mean Palantir will always obey the White House rule and bend the knee, but it is in its best interest to keep the government happy. For big tech companies, it’s not about getting money from the government; it’s about getting political help. They need the US government to stop places like Europe from regulating them.

What do they want exactly? They seem to be asking to pull the brake on AI development, while promising that AI could bring immense benefits to humanity and pushing on the accelerator.

There are two prevalent discourses in Silicon Valley, which correspond to two different ways of trying to control the state. One is that democracy, innovation, and freedom cannot go together. It posits that innovation and freedom should be prioritised over democracy. For those pushing this view, the state has failed and needs to be destroyed; technology by itself will bring a better world and deliver progress in every respect – to those who can pay for it, of course. These are the views of people like Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. But we also have the discourse of Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Microsoft and Google, who say almost every day that their technologies will deliver promised economic growth while helping governments manage public administration, schools, hospitals, and borders.

This second discourse is more subtle. I describe it as corporate diplomacy because it’s a more strategic way to convince governments – even progressive ones. And when it comes to regulations, of course, these companies will respond differently: they will pretend to be much more open to oversight, but the question is which type of regulation and who designs it. They say that the technology moves so fast that it’s impossible for government regulation to be updated as it should be, and so they push for self-regulation, or regulation done by a third-party actor that goes inside the company and works together with its employees, with the information that the company wants to share. And they agree on regulations that blame tech users but never (themselves as) producers.

So, even though it might seem like they’re saying something different, in the end, they are all pushing for a certain type of regulation that blinds governments and society more and creates a shield from external oversight.

Regulation has been the approach driving policymaking in Brussels for a long time. Now there has been a shift towards competitiveness and a new buzzword: tech sovereignty. You’ve been working with this concept well before it became so popular. What does it mean?

Tech sovereignty can mean three different things. It can mean techno-nationalism, which consists in giving all the contracts to European firms. However, European companies like Siemens or SAP are also intellectual monopolies. And they are private companies, so their interest is to make money, not to grant options, choices, and openness to our societies in terms of how technology is produced or for what purposes.

Another interpretation, prevalent today at the EU level, sees tech sovereignty as making things happen in Europe, and it is as problematic as the first, if not more. The European Commission’s Tech sovereignty package should be renamed the tech competitiveness package. It aims to achieve competitiveness and economic growth through or with the excuse of sovereignty. It’s good marketing to call it sovereignty, but it’s essentially about attracting more capital to Europe, growing GDP, and reducing the feeling that we are lagging behind vis-à-vis the US. As it is designed, the package allows a company like Microsoft to fulfil all the criteria [of Europeanness] if it stores data in European data centres, and if its subsidiaries selling its services are based in Europe. So, from a legal point of view, these companies will be European entities, even if they are part of the Microsoft multinational corporation.

Clearly, these two ways of thinking about sovereignty are very short-sighted. Sovereignty, when it comes to tech, should be connected to governance, democracy, and choice. It is about being able to decide which technologies we want, which ones we don’t want, and for what purposes. Who is going to develop them? To what extent are we going to develop them, given their ecological footprint? What data are we going to use? How will we recognise the collective work that goes into developing technology? How are we going to make sure the effects don’t harm workers?

Ultimately, sovereignty is about who decides. It’s about democratising the political power of who is deciding about the present and future of humanity, because these technologies are powerful and ubiquitous, and the technologies that we are getting today are decided behind closed doors by a few actors.

If you were a progressive politician, government, or policymaker who wants to work towards this more expansive notion of tech sovereignty, what kind of coalitions and constituencies would you try to involve in the process?

The “we” needs to include everyone who identifies that this is a problem and wants to build a vision of digital sovereignty that is about collectively co-creating and sharing knowledge.

I think we need to start by decoupling the public sector from these companies. We need to make sure the US government and the companies can’t switch off the states participating in building an alternative. We can start small, for example with education, which is a critical sector, because kids at school are receiving a Google Suite package and studying with generative AI. We’ve seen the effect it has even on adults: it reduces people’s capacity to think critically. We, as adults, have learned to maintain some balance, but kids often don’t have that capacity. Other critical sectors are healthcare and the public service media.

It’s hard, but it will not require all the money that the companies are investing because we are going to start smaller, from the capabilities that already exist. And Europe has a lot of those. A significant part of these companies’ advantage comes from research that was done and is still being done in Europe by European universities, European companies, and so on.

There’s a growing movement against data centres. Should they be part of the conversation? And can we really build a democratic and sovereign tech if we put a pause on them altogether?

Including the communities that are fighting against data centres is critical because if we are building a public alternative, we will need infrastructure. The question is, where are we going to build these data centres? To what extent do we need them?

There is the idea that hyperscale data centres are inevitable, but only because we’ve accepted the narrative from cloud giants and AI companies that what we need is the largest model with more parameters, even though that is less rigorous than the machine learning models developed to detect or do specific tasks. But of course, those models require more human effort and less energy. So, we also need to change the AI paradigm in this process.

Tech CEOs and politicians in the US mention China “catching up” day in and day out as the ultimate reason to push the accelerator and push back against meaningful regulation. Is that narrative justified by reality?

When you look at the level of investment in the digital infrastructure of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google compared to Alibaba, Tencent, or Huawei, you can clearly see that China is playing a different game. It is trying to expand the adoption of its models as much as possible, even if they are not at the frontier. If it had political interest in doing so, China could channel all its efforts into one big team producing the largest AI model you’ve ever seen, and it has the resources and people to do that. But that’s not the game that China is playing.

Nor is Beijing just playing the AI game. China has been focusing on so many industries; it’s trying to lead everywhere, while the US is focused on AI, and Europe is stuck in between because it’s not thinking about what Europeans’ problems are today. What’s the priority? What should we be focusing on?

I like to live in Europe. The quality of life here is way better than in the US, and we often forget this. We forget about all the things we still get in Europe that are much rarer in other parts of the world, and I think we need to embrace that much more. It’s the time to build digital commons. It’s the time to build global public goods. It’s time to solve critical problems instead of being blinded by the latest iteration of an AI model that clearly brings more problems than solutions. And again, I’m not saying we should solve all problems without technology, but we should first map the problems, who is being affected by them, and how, and then identify what type of solutions is needed. In some cases, it might be technology; in other cases, it might just be redistributing wealth and decision-making power. It’s ultimately about bold political choices, and I hope to see more of those coming from Europe.

The content of this interview has been edited and rearranged for length and clarity.

From California to France to the G20, “tax the billionaires” is shifting from slogan to concrete proposal. Beyond the revenue it would raise, it draws a sharp line between those who profit from crisis and everyone else. As the far right turns economic insecurity into a politics of scarcity and division, the billionaire enemy could become the foundation for a different political “we.” But only targeting a handful of people at the top risks leaving broader inequalities untouched.

This article is an 11-minute read. In the time it takes to finish reading it, the world’s most chronically online billionaire, Elon Musk, could add another 11 million dollars to his wealth – more than most people around the world will earn over their entire working lives – without having to do much of anything at all, other than, perhaps, angrily “tweet”.

And those millions add up fast. When SpaceX went public in June 2026, Musk became the first person Forbes had ever valued at more than one trillion – after his wealth had grown by more than 550 billion dollars over the previous year.

But Musk is not the only one. The US has Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; Europe has its own billionaire class, from Bernard Arnault and his family in France to Amancio Ortega in Spain; China has Zhong Shanshan; and India has Mukesh Ambani. The list goes on, as do the zeros. By 2025, billionaire wealth reached a record 18.3 trillion dollars, increasing by more than 16 per cent in that year alone.

Beyond the numbers, what does any of this mean for our societies? For decades, there has been a rather convenient economic story about what happens when wealth grows at the top: it generates investment, jobs, and growth whose benefits eventually spread to everyone else, or “trickle down”. Yet wealth has become increasingly concentrated: the richest 10 per cent now own around three quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half own just 2 per cent.

The result is not simply inequality. At a certain point, the extraordinary concentration of resources in the hands of a very small number of people also becomes a concentration of power. Billionaires own or control major companies, media, and digital infrastructure; they finance political campaigns; some enter politics themselves. Others do not need to hold office for access. It has become common to see Elon Musk alongside presidents and heads of government, Mark Zuckerberg sitting down with political leaders, and some of the world’s wealthiest people moving through spaces of political power to which very few people have access. Nobody elected them to those rooms. Their invitation is, in large part, their wealth.

That concentration of wealth and power becomes particularly difficult to ignore when set against what everyone else has been asked to absorb. Austerity after the financial crash was followed by a pandemic and then a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. Eurofound’s 2025 survey found that 61 per cent of respondents in low-income EU households were struggling to make ends meet. Yet between 2020 and 2022 alone, billionaire wealth increased more than it had over 23 years between 1987 and 2010.

This divergence between those at the top and everyone else matters politically. When governments talk again about what societies can afford and what must be sacrificed, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what “ordinary people” must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back.

What even is wealth?

Which brings us back to Musk’s 11 million dollars, which is not a salary. Musk does not receive a million-dollar pay cheque every sixty seconds. Much of his wealth comes from his ownership of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, whose increasing value allows his wealth to grow without anything resembling a conventional income. And that distinction matters enormously when it comes to taxation.

Work remains remarkably easy for states to see and tax. Billionaire wealth is a different creature. It can appreciate without being sold, sit inside companies and be reorganised through legal structures in ways that wages cannot. Someone can therefore become billions richer without reporting anything resembling those billions as taxable personal income.

Tt becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what ‘ordinary people’ must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back

The result is a peculiar political economy. Governments can tell an ordinary worker with extraordinary precision what she owes from her next euro of salary, while struggling to answer a seemingly simpler question about some of the richest people ever to have lived: what constitutes their fair share?

There is also a curious asymmetry in how we think about wealth. We are very accustomed to drawing poverty lines, minimum incomes, measures of deprivation. States have developed remarkably sophisticated ways of calculating exactly how little someone can have before they officially count as having too little. Far less attention has been devoted to drawing a line at the other end: can someone have too much?

That is beginning to change. For instance, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns has made the case for limitarianism – the idea that there should be an upper limit to how much wealth an individual can hold. Others, like University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have focused on designing a wealth tax for the ultra-rich.

The idea has travelled well beyond academia. In 2024, under Brazil’s G20 presidency, Zucman was commissioned to develop a proposal for a coordinated minimum tax on the world’s billionaires, based on the principle that they should contribute at least 2 per cent of their wealth each year. And in California, home to many Silicon Valley billionaires, voters will decide this November on Proposition 40, which would impose a one-off 5 per cent tax on billionaire wealth to help fund healthcare.

These proposals differ substantially in their design, scale, and ambition. But taken together, they point towards a simple idea gathering political momentum: tax the billionaires.

Taxing the untaxable?

How exactly to do that remains contested – and the usual objections are never far behind. Wealth, we are told, can move across borders; billionaires can change their tax residence; some assets are difficult to value; assets tied up in companies are not necessarily available as cash; and sufficiently determined billionaires can employ sufficiently determined accountants to find ways around whatever rules governments create.

These are not imaginary problems. Several European countries have abandoned recurrent net wealth taxes over the past few decades amid concerns over avoidance, valuation, and administrative complexity. IMF economists have also questioned whether annual net wealth taxes are always the most effective instrument, arguing that stronger taxation of capital gains and inheritance may sometimes work better.

But these are, ultimately, problems of design. Tax systems already value assets, trace ownership, and deal with people and companies operating across borders. International information-sharing has made hiding financial wealth offshore more difficult, while international coordination – the entire logic behind Zucman’s G20 proposal – is precisely an attempt to prevent the world’s wealthiest people from playing one tax system against another.

None of this makes taxing billionaire wealth easy. But “difficult to tax” and “should not be taxed” are two quite different arguments.

Zucman estimates that, in proportion to their income, France’s approximately 100 billionaires currently pay half as much tax as the average French person. Correcting that imbalance, which is not unique to France, would improve the fiscal situation of cash-strapped governments. It could mean more resources for healthcare, housing, education, and public transport, or help meet the enormous investment required for the green transition. California’s Proposition 40 makes that connection particularly tangible: take a relatively small (5 per cent) share of excessive private wealth and direct most of it towards healthcare.

There is also the redistributive effect of the tax itself. If wealth at the very top has been accumulating far faster than it has for everyone else, taking some of that wealth back into the public realm can narrow the distance between the top and the rest – particularly when it pays for services on which people with the least depend most. That alone would be a substantial argument for doing it. But it may not be the most politically consequential one.

The perfect enemy

There is one thing billionaire taxation does exceptionally well: everyone knows who it is not about.

That is because, unlike “the rich”, “billionaire” has a very clear boundary. Someone earning 100,000 euros a year, a homeowner sitting on an expensive property, a successful small-business owner or someone who inherited a few millions might all be considered rich – or not – depending on who is drawing the line. And even well-off people have a tendency to draw that line somewhere just above themselves.

There is a distinctly populist logic to that structure. Political scientist Cas Mudde famously defines populism as dividing society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. Few political demands draw that boundary as cleanly as “tax the billionaires”.

The billionaire line sits so far up the wealth distribution that almost nobody risks mistaking themselves for the target. Politically, that distance matters. “Tax the billionaires” singles out an extraordinarily small group while leaving almost everyone else standing on the other side. The “them” is remarkably easy to identify; the potential “us” is enormous.

California’s Proposition 40 makes that political divide unusually concrete: a little over 200 billionaires, according to the campaign, would be subject to the tax, while 90 per cent of the revenue would go towards healthcare. And it is precisely this ability to make distribution so immediately legible that gives the demand its wider political significance.

Across Europe, far-right parties have become adept at connecting experiences of insecurity – unaffordable housing, strained public services, stagnant wages, shrinking welfare provision – to immigration. The details vary between countries, but the underlying story is familiar: resources are scarce, ordinary people are losing out, and somebody else is getting what should have been theirs. Migrants, refugees, and welfare recipients become visible explanations for problems whose causes are considerably more complicated.

Part of the power of that politics is that it gives insecurity a direction. It tells people not only that something has gone wrong, but who is benefiting at their expense and, ultimately, who belongs on either side of “us” and “them”.

Progressive politics has often struggled to offer an equally legible account. For Greens, the problem can be particularly acute. Climate politics is easily caricatured by its opponents as a growing list of things ordinary people will have to surrender or pay more for: your car, your boiler, your flight, perhaps even your steak. However unfair the caricature, it pulls political attention towards what millions of people consume rather than towards who owns, accumulates, and exercises economic power.

“Tax the billionaires” points in a different direction.

Who are “we”?

There is nothing particularly new about politics trying to construct a “we” out of people who do not occupy exactly the same economic position. Political coalitions have repeatedly been built across existing class boundaries, and those boundaries have shifted as societies and economies have changed.

There are particularly striking precedents for organising those coalitions against concentrated economic power. During the New Deal years of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt – himself hailing from an affluent family – railed against what he called the “economic royalists”. Thus, he was placing concentrated private power on one side and a much broader democratic coalition on the other. Decades later, Occupy Wall Street found an even simpler formulation: “We are the 99%.”

Neither required everyone inside the “we” to be economically equal. And “tax the billionaires” doesn’t either. A renter on a relatively high salary, a nurse who owns her home, a factory worker, a precarious university lecturer, a delivery rider and a small-business owner may have very different economic interests and may not understand themselves as belonging to the same class. Yet they all have something rather obvious in common: none is remotely close to being a billionaire.

That makes for an unusually broad political coalition – one capable, at least in principle, of bringing together people who might otherwise have little reason to see their economic interests as shared. But bringing people onto the same side of a political dividing line is one thing; giving them a common politics is another.

Roosevelt’s attack on concentrated wealth was attached to a much broader political project. The New Deal did not simply ask wealthy Americans to contribute more to public coffers. It strengthened collective bargaining, regulated finance, expanded social protection and public investment, and challenged aspects of concentrated corporate power.

Occupy’s “99%”, meanwhile, proved extraordinarily successful at changing the language through which inequality was discussed. The “1%” escaped the occupations themselves and entered mainstream political vocabulary. But turning that enormous “99%” into a durable political organisation or a common programme proved much harder. The billionaire version stretches the boundaries of that “we” even further, placing people with vastly different levels of wealth and economic power on the same side of the line.

But in so doing, it can also obscure the inequalities and conflicts among everyone who is on the same side. What is income to a landlord is rent to a tenant; what increases returns to shareholders may come at the expense of wages; what preserves the value of a large inheritance also preserves inequalities between those who inherit and those who do not.

In other words, the slogan “tax the billionaires” risks serving as a diversion from tackling inequality more broadly.

Beyond the billionaires

And there is plenty beneath the billionaire line to look at. A billion euros of private wealth does not appear from nowhere. It grows within an economy in which companies and land have owners, profits are divided between workers and shareholders, wages reflect very different levels of bargaining power, housing can function as both a home and a financial asset, and wealth can be passed from one generation to the next. Long before the tax authorities arrive, decisions have already been made about who owns what, who receives what, and who has power over whom.

This is where a distinction emerges between redistributing wealth and changing how it is distributed in the first place. A billionaire tax largely does the former. Once enormous wealth has accumulated, the state takes a share of it and redirects those resources towards society. That can make the final distribution less unequal – particularly when the money funds public services and social protection on which people with lower incomes depend.

Changing how wealth is distributed in the first place means intervening earlier. It means looking at workers’ bargaining power and how profits are shared; at who owns companies, housing and land; at what is publicly or collectively owned and what remains privately controlled; and at how large amounts of wealth are inherited across generations.

None of this is an argument against billionaire taxation; after all, it can raise substantial revenue, redistribute resources, and slow accumulation at the very top. Nor do redistribution and changing the underlying distribution need to be mutually exclusive. But if the politics ends at the billionaire line, much of what created the inequality on either side of it remains beyond reach.

Perhaps this is where the real political potential of “tax the billionaires” lies. The billionaire may be the most visible expression of a much broader distribution of wealth and power.

And this matters at a moment when the far right has become remarkably successful at explaining insecurity through competition between locals and immigrants over scarce resources. Billionaire politics offers a very different account: away from who might be receiving too much, and towards who has accumulated so much, how they did so, and what that accumulation allows them to do.

For Greens and the wider left, that offers something more than a new source of tax revenue. It offers the possibility of contesting the politics of scarcity itself. And in doing so, it unsettles the premise on which so much of that politics rests: that there is simply not enough to go around, and that politics is therefore a matter of deciding who among the rest of us must make do with less. Before accepting that ordinary people must compete over what is available – who gets the house, the hospital bed, the welfare payment or the secure job – it asks us to look at where resources and power have actually gone, who owns them, who controls them, and how they became so concentrated in the first place. And why, in societies capable of producing such extraordinary private wealth, does the political conversation so often begin with what everyone else must learn to live without?

That does not make scarcity imaginary. Housing can genuinely be in short supply, public services can simply lack capacity, and governments face real choices about resources. But those shortages do not tell us, by themselves, how the resources a society does have should be distributed, who should contribute more, or whose claims should be placed in competition with who else’s. Those are political choices too.

But constructing a convincing “them” is still easier than building a meaningful “we”. If that “we” is to mean more than simply everyone who doesn’t own a billion euros, it eventually has to acquire political content: what should be more equally shared, what forms of power should be challenged, and what people should be able to expect from the society they belong to.

That is why “tax the billionaires” is perhaps most powerful as the point of departure. It can raise revenue and redistribute wealth at the very top. But it can also serve to open a much broader argument about who owns companies, housing, and land; how economic power is distributed between workers and owners; and how much of the wealth societies produce should remain privately controlled in the first place.

The risk is that the politics stops at the slogan. The opportunity is that it does not.

Britain’s new prime minister has said that Brexit was a mistake and that the country should have a much closer relationship with the European Union. But is this possible without the UK again becoming an EU member state? And with the far right on the rise on both sides of the Channel, is there enough political will to undo Brexit?

They were the words many Labour supporters had been longing to hear. 

“Brexit has done more harm than good,” Andy Burnham told the 2026 Labour party conference. Later this year, he would lay out to Britons “what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners. I will see if we can find consensus around one.”

Yes, a decade after Britain narrowly voted to leave the EU –  and whether that meant the single market and customs union too was entirely unclear in 2016 – Britain is coming back. Maybe. If we can agree on what we want, and if the EU lets us.

The French president Emmanuel Macron welcomed the move, but warned that if the UK rejoined it would have to compromise. “You cannot choose between the freedoms of the Union and you cannot decide to take what suits you and not the rest. So come back.”

Britain can, however, try to sign up to some aspects of the EU without actually rejoining. This approach has plenty of downsides, which is why Brexiteers rejected it after the referendum, but it represents the kind of compromise that might be able to persuade a majority of Britons.

No one seriously pretends that Brexit has not damaged Britain’s economy. The question is how much independence the country is prepared to sacrifice in order to revive the trade and benefits it lost.

The Labour government is already trying to negotiate a better relationship with the EU than Boris Johnson’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement offers, though progress has been ponderous. In exchange for “dynamic alignment” on plant and animal health regulations, carbon pricing and electricity, and limited freedom of movement for young people, the UK would get smoother access in these areas.

A partial return?

Rejoining the customs unionwould mean that the UK could no longer set its own tariffs on imports and would have to abandon the ones it has negotiated since 2020. Like Turkey, it would have to agree a bespoke arrangement with the EU. This would cut a lot of paperwork, especially in manufacturing. But whether it could boost growth much would depend on the scope of the deal. This, in turn, would depend on the degree of regulatory alignment and the EU’s demands.

Another alternative, known as the “Norway” or “Swiss” option, would return the UK to the single market, but means paying into the EU budget (Margaret Thatcher famously negotiated a rebate, which the UK would be unlikely to repeat) and accepting freedom of movement. 

Andy Burnham’s rhetoric on immigration has been confusing. In his conference speech, he said immigration control had been “weakened by Brexit”. He was probably talking about the fact that Brexit means the UK can no longer return people who arrive on small boats to France. This is correct, but glosses over the practical and diplomatic difficulties of doing so. Alternatively, Burnham may have been implying that losing access to EU workers, who can move about freely without the need for visas, had forced the UK to recruit people from Asia and Africa instead. This is also true. But the desire to have more control over immigration was a main reason for the Brexit vote.

Burnham would need to convince sceptics that, because Central European countries are richer than they were in the 2000s, freedom of movement would not lead to another wave of new arrivals from the EU. He could point to the fact that only Britain, Sweden, and Ireland chose not to impose restrictions on those workers, which is why so many came. And he is right to imply that Brexit has not “solved” tensions over immigration, even if it has given Britain more control over legal migration. It is now Britons’ top concern.

But the EU could decide – as Macron hinted – that if Britain wants to rejoin the single market, it will have to go the whole way and sign up to the EU again. Simon Usherwood, a professor of politics at the Open University, thinks the EU would probably block the Norway option. 

“Negotiations would involve a lot of UK asking for exemptions and EU pushing back, partly because classic cherry-picking line, and partly because of precedents for other European Economic Area [EEA] states,” he says. Meanwhile, Norway and Switzerland may oppose it because the EEA is “designed for small, less-politicised countries”.

On the other hand, since the UK would have to accept EU rules without having any say in making them, we would no longer be able to try to veto the bloc – as we did in 2011 – or elect pro-Brexit MEPs like Nigel Farage who sought to disrupt it from within. The EU might appreciate that.

“Full-fat” rejoin

This has the advantage of clarity. It would give Britain full voting rights and is the obvious riposte to the question: “What’s the point of just rejoining the single market, when it means signing up to EU rules and getting no say?” Polling suggests that a pledge to rejoin the EU would win back voters whom Burnham needs, especially in Scotland and Wales.

“Half-baked calls to enter a customs union or join the single market won’t bring the transformational economic heft to avoid further drift and decline, or the political payoff to prevent Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gaining power,” says Naomi Smith, the chief executive of the pro-rejoin pressure group Best for Britain. “The choice Burnham must face is whether to go big – or go nowhere at all.”

But Burnham also knows that pro-Brexit parties are currently polling at 45 percent of the vote. And public support for rejoin fluctuates depending on what people perceive it to involve. If it means joining the euro, support falls. It will be hard to convince the public that the pound is safe if membership depends on committing to the single currency.

Then comes the question of whether Brussels will have enough confidence in Britain to start a rejoin process. Since all the right-wing parties are opposed to it, the UK can hardly be relied upon in the medium to long term. The irony is that the EU has also changed since Britain left. Far-right, often Eurosceptical, parties are on the rise. The single market will probably endure, but would the Labour party want to rejoin a bloc where France, Germany and Spain might all have far-right leaders?

The thought of another referendum is also unwelcome. It is difficult to argue that since Britain held a referendum on whether to join (in 1975) and leave (in 2016), it could rejoin without holding another one. Few of us will relish the culture wars it would probably stoke. Arguably, the amount of time Westminster spent on Brexit left some serious domestic problems to fester.

Among some Britons, too, there is a degree of stubbornness allied with an element of the sunk cost fallacy: we made our bed, so we might as well lie in it.

Burnham’s speech was the first piece of good news pro-rejoiners had had for a decade. No wonder they are excited. But they are going to need an awful lot of stamina.

This article was first published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union. The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.

As the fever dream of this summer’s scorching heat slowly subsides, nightmares from Europe’s past are lingering in waking life in the form of warships, bombs, and catapult stones. Still, a shared understanding of history remains elusive despite physical evidence of all that befell the continent. And while some of the walls that separated us have crumbled, new divides are forming in front of our very eyes.

London’s unforgiving, sun-bleached summer of 2026 has a dystopian, hallucinatory quality. As I write this, the city has not seen proper rain in 45 days. We swelter, unused to high temperatures. Air-conditioning in private homes is rare. People are suffering from sleep deprivation. Underground trains and buses are like ovens. A hosepipe ban has turned English lawns into dusty deserts of parched yellow and trees are shedding leaves to survive. We watch in horror as wildfires devour vast areas of France and seemingly everywhere else further south. Reports suggest that almost half a million hectares of European land have been consumed by flames so far this year.

Email exchanges with friends across the European continent frequently start and end with the weather. A distinguished university professor in Timișoara, in Romania, reports living as if under house arrest, with temperatures rising into the 40s. “In the end we will probably have a repeat of the 1980s,” she writes, “when, albeit for different reasons, there were constant power and running water cuts”. Our conversations about climate are increasingly coloured by a fatalism which seems, in many ways, more difficult to argue against than climate denial.

Skeletons of the past

Meanwhile, the falling waters of the Danube, Europe’s great East-West thoroughfare, are peeling back layers of European history in a way which makes the physical vulnerability of our present difficult to separate from the traumas of our past. In Hungary, the riverbed has surrendered centuries-old catapult stones and a live wartime bomb, causing a temporary bridge closure in Budapest. Further downstream, the wreck of a cargo ship materialised in Croatia, and the ancient remains of a woolly mammoth surfaced in Bulgaria. Most striking of all, a fleet of World War II German warships emerged from the river’s former depths in Prahovo, Serbia. Skeletons of the European past have never seemed so close to the surface.

Elsewhere, history is yielding its secrets through deliberate excavations. Joint archaeological teams from Poland and Ukraine are searching for the mass graves of up to 100,000 Poles murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volyn Oblast during the last two years of the Second World War. This vast project is, in some ways, a belated example of the type examined by Katherine Verdery in her seminal book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (1999).

In some ways, the passage of time and the exigencies of economic survival have achieved more progress towards reconciliation than the activities of expensive and sometimes self-serving international bodies set up to forge it.

The people of Eastern Europe, Verdery argued, suffered “cosmic disorientation” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In order to re-anchor their sense of history, they turned to exhuming, moving, and reburying historical figures and national heroes, as well as counting victims of mass executions in an effort to reframe versions of the past they had lived with since the end of the Second World War. The materiality of dead bodies seemed to promise an “objective truth” in contrast to narratives coloured by communist ideology.

Ukraine may be spurred to cooperate with Poland by its desire to join the European Union, but “objective truth” requires more than a body count. Having witnessed perhaps the largest and certainly the most technologically advanced effort in human history, conducted on the territories of at least four of its successor states, and still ongoing, former Yugoslavia illustrates the limitations of such endeavours. Causes and effects of past events continue to be disputed to the extent that makes the idea of a shared, agreed version of history seem like a naïve dream. In some ways, the passage of time and the exigencies of economic survival, involving trade, shared infrastructure projects, or cross-border employment, have achieved more progress – however painfully slow – towards reconciliation than the activities of expensive and sometimes self-serving international bodies set up to forge it.

I am drawn to contested versions of history by the invitation to consider the current state of the East-West divide in Europe, and its transformations in the last 15 years. The evidence of this summer’s parched landscapes leads me to wonder if the North-South division is not already more critical. The seemingly unstoppable mass migration patterns are certainly speaking in its favour. Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2020 was largely driven by fears of uncontrolled immigration, yet when it comes to global movement, post-Brexit Britain and the rest of Europe continue to share the same problems. Desperate people walking and sailing into Europe from Sub-Saharan Africa or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan do not worry if their biometric passports are EES or ETA compliant.

Europe “as it used to be”

In an episode from the 2010 UK election campaign, broadcast live on British television, 65-year-old lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy challenged the then prime minister Gordon Brown by highlighting immigration issues. “But all these Eastern Europeans that are coming in, where are they flocking from?” she asked. Brown offered a predictably anodyne public response. Some moments later, being driven away and forgetting that his microphone was still on, he commented to his aide that the conversation was a disaster and that Duffy was “just a sort of bigoted woman”.

The comment derailed Brown’s campaign by its suggestion of political arrogance, yet the so-called “Bigotgate”, highly damaging at the time, seems almost quaint today. Even the language used to depict the threat of immigration belongs to a simpler world. Instead of “flocking”, with its suggestion of birds that can potentially fly away as easily as they arrived, we now hear threats of biblical deluge, conquest and population replacement. The most prejudiced Brexiteers sometimes hint at nostalgia for the Polish plumbers of yesteryear and even a degree of envy for those plumbers’ as yet unspoiled homeland.

It might seem paradoxical that Poland, historically one of Europe’s most significant exporters of labour, is also one of the most vocal opponents of southern migration. It is not without its support in western social media, where countries such as Poland, Hungary, or the Baltic republics are often mentioned not as “New Eastern Europe” but as Europe “as it used to be”, evoking postcard images tinged with the sepia tones of false memory. Such nostalgia is often a conservative fantasy, a coping mechanism for the West’s own identity crisis and its diminishing social cohesion.

In 2022, I published Iron Curtain, a novel set in the mid-1980s, the dog days of communism. Its story linked an unnamed Soviet satellite state with Britain in the grips of its yuppie revolution under its Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. I had lived through the era but the experience of recreating it on the page seemed at times as challenging as researching the French Revolution. In 1986, I arrived in London from socialist Yugoslavia, a country enjoying freedoms unimaginable further east and officially not behind the Iron Curtain. As a student I had criss-crossed Europe by train. Britain was less easily accessible. Airplane tickets were expensive and a single telephone call from London to my parents in Belgrade cost more than my current monthly mobile phone bill. We were so paralysed by the need to be succinct that our conversation often consisted of the same basic phrases, reassuring each other that everything was all right. Our steadiest link consisted of weekly letters: one means of communicating which has since become both more expensive and more unreliable.

What resurfaced with those memories, more than almost anything else, is a sense of the sheer physical distance between East and West, a void that is no longer there. My British students hop on an airplane to spend a weekend in Riga or Budapest with less forethought than, at their age, I gave to spending 48 hours in my grandparents’ village a hundred kilometres south of Belgrade. Could the distinction between East and West still be relevant, on either side of wherever that divide might lie now, when a whole generation of what would have been East Europeans has grown up benefiting from freedom of movement, buttressed by budget flights and a shared digital space?

Nostalgia is often a conservative fantasy, a coping mechanism for the West’s own identity crisis and its diminishing social cohesion.

Recycled concepts

Indeed, it sometimes seems that the East now has an advantage even beyond the conservative longing for an impossible return to safe, homogenous, and traditional societies. In The Historical Novel (1937), György Lukács described how an awareness of Europe was formed by the mass marches of the Napoleonic Wars, taking millions of people for the first time across their country’s border. Something similar happened at the beginning of this century, now in a benign context, when the borders of Western Europe opened to labourers from the East.

As reverse brain drain started to occur more recently, the West to East knowledge transfer brought with it an economic and digital boom in cities as far apart as Tallinn, Warsaw, and Cluj. It would appear that any notion of a simple binary opposition pitching a rich, democratic West against an impoverished East – unfree until 1989, then for many years lagging behind – has been replaced by a more complex, fluid set of ideas and values.

The concepts of East and West are still recycled, even if the West is no longer so sure of its progressive ideas; and the East is more ready to resist what it sees as western cultural impositions; and even if we are no longer so certain where exactly we are talking about when we talk about East and West. Again, it is in former Yugoslavia, once perceived as “the West in the East”, that the West continues to assert its superiority most confidently, even running Bosnia like an EU colony through its own appointed viceroy. The notion of “the Western Balkans”, now a common reference for those regional states still not in the EU, is part consolation prize, part insult. It is an oxymoronic designation devised by outsiders, and it makes no geographic sense other than to define a hole in Europe’s Balkan bagel.

Viewed from the West, this area is still routinely described in tones that are more redolent of Bismarck than of contemporary European debate. This is illustrated by a quote from a recent report published by the Robert Schuman Foundation: “In the Balkans, borders, regimes, dynasties, alliances and even the names of states are constantly changing … It is clear that today, Balkans or not, the region wants to be European. Yet will all these countries, having barely regained their sovereignty, easily accept Community rules which by definition imply limits to national sovereignty? Will the Community model suit them? After centuries of dependence, will they be able to tolerate a new form of federalism? And finally, can the European Union overcome the Balkan curse?”

There is profound irony in the fact that the report’s authors, the French centre-right politicians Jean Bizet and Fabrice Hugot, worry about the Balkan ability to accept limits to national sovereignty just at the moment when Western European nations are putting forward greater demands for sovereign border controls. To borrow their gothic turn of phrase, the curse may be European and not Balkan.

However, and whenever, the war in Ukraine ends, that new demarcation – between what Putin calls the ‘collective West’ and the shrunken, Russia-dominated East – seems likely to remain.

A new West?

Of course, it is impossible to discuss shifts in mutual perceptions between East and West while ignoring the fact that there is war in the East. I have argued elsewhere that the Iron Curtain was removed in 1989 only to divide Europe again in February 2022, this time several hundred miles further east from the Szczecin-Trieste line made famous by Churchill’s speech. However, and whenever, the war in Ukraine ends, that new demarcation – between what Putin calls the “collective West” and the shrunken, Russia-dominated East – seems likely to remain.

As we look at the parched earth of the South and the newly dug trenches of the East, yet another difference of perspective emerges from the geopolitical vice. It is the contrast between those countries in the European Union with direct memories of the Soviet Union and all too concrete fears of Russia, and those countries further West, with populations much more concerned with Israel and Palestine than they are with Ukraine. Their peoples are more influenced by the post-colonial priorities of the Global South than by fears of Moscow. To them, Gaza seems closer than Kyiv. It is easier, in light of such a divergent sense of existential threat, to pinpoint the “New East” than it is to locate the “New West”.

This article first appeared in New Eastern Europe. It is republished here with permission.