France

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union” startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]As I write this, I am sitting outside a weinhaus in Kaub, a half-timbered town on the wooded slopes of the middle Rhine. If you don’t know the place, I recommend a visit: the scenery is lovely, the hiking is fine, and the Riesling is great (they have to handpick the grapes, like peasants in a Brueghel painting, because the river-ine vineyards are too steep for machines). But there is another reason to make the agreeable journey to Kaub: it’s a brilliant place to contemplate the mysteries of nationalism and national

The FTSE100 index stands precisely where it did in the first week of December 1999. Whichever way you look at it, shareholders — including pension funds — have had a rotten run on the economic rollercoaster of the past 15 years. So it’s reasonable to keep asking whether the rise in executive pay over that same period is justified: a report from the High Pay Centre says remuneration of the average FTSE100 chief executive is now at a multiple of 130 times (corrected from the report’s original figure of 143 times) that of the average worker in the same companies. In 1998 that multiple was 47, indicating that top pay

For the last five years, politicians of all shades have been banging on about how we should adopt this or that aspect of German economic policy. George Osborne argued in 2011: ‘We want to learn the lessons of the successful Mittelstand model, which has operated in Germany for many decades.’ Only a few weeks ago, Vince Cable argued: ‘Britain has not been as good as competitors like Germany in turning ideas into wealth creation.’ The German economy seems to be widely admired, despite lagging behind Britain’s for nearly a generation. It is true that Germany had a better post-crash period than the UK, but its financial sector was smaller and many of

There was a time when having almost two hundred of your citizens blown out of the sky was a big deal for a western democracy. But when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine last month, killing 193 Dutch citizens and a couple of dozen other Europeans, the response was conspicuous public mourning, some mild objections, a soupçon more sanctions, but otherwise nothing. Everyone knew which government might have handed powerful surface-to-air missiles to eastern Ukraine’s rebels. But nobody seemed willing or able to do anything much about it. There was also a time when whole swaths of the map being overrun by Islamic groups who make al-Qa’eda

Is Israel drifting away from the West? That was Hugo Rifkind’s claim in his column in the magazine last week. Hugo wrote: ‘Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s? Then they shot Yitzhak Rabin, and Oslo didn’t happen, and

In a one-horse town called Hestrud, on the Franco-Belgian border, there’s a monument which encapsulates Europe’s enduring fascination with Napoleon. The story carved upon this plinth is more like poetry than reportage. As Napoleon passed through here, on his way to Waterloo, he struck up a conversation with a bold little boy called Cyprien Joseph Charlet. ‘You think victory will always follow you, but it always disappears,’ this audacious lad told him, apparently. ‘If I were you, I’d stay at home. Tomorrow your star will surely dim.’ Well, that’s the story, anyway. Fact or fiction, or a bit of both? In a way, it hardly matters. Napoleon recorded this incident

Still going on, is it, the World Cup? There have been some fine games and some poor games with surprisingly thrilling conclusions. Ronaldo, with possibly the worst haircut I have seen on a human being ever, provided a wonderful chipped cross for Portugal to equalise against the USA; neither team, one suspects will trouble the big boys and I doubt the Portuguese will get out of the group. Good! Russia may also fail to do so and have been exactly as boring as Russia always are when it comes to the final stages of a World Cup. Belgium, meanwhile, look rather less menacing than all the experts suggested they would