Tag: ukraine
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Procedural Sovereignty and the Grammar of European Agency: Meloni and Merz in Rome between Competitiveness, Security, and Institutional Seriousness
The Rome joint press conference featuring Giorgia Meloni and Friedrich Merz, staged as the public terminus of bilateral government consultations, offers a compact but unusually legible specimen of contemporary European executive reasoning: it is an event in which competitiveness, security, and sovereignty are treated less as separate policy domains than as mutually conditioning registers of…
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Calulus, Guarantees, and the Remainder of Freedom: A Davos Ukrainian Breakfast as an Event of Alliance Reasoning
The recorded discussion staged as a “Ukrainian Breakfast” at Ukraine House on the margins of the World Economic Forum at Davos offers a compact laboratory for examining how contemporary Euro-Atlantic public reasoning tries to hold together heterogeneous registers: humanitarian witnessing, alliance management, legal-financial constraint, technocratic reconstruction, and strategic coercion. Its governing ambition, as the sequence…
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Instruments of Order Under Pressure: Alexander Stubb’s Values-Based Realism and the Re-Specification of Europe at Davos 2026
The recorded session stages Finnish President Alexander Stubb at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a a compact, highly mediated instance of public geopolitical reasoning in which a head of state and a policy-intellectual moderator attempt to render “order” thinkable under conditions of accelerated volatility. The central problem-space is articulated as a transition…
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Procedures of Autonomy: NATO Integration, European Capability, and the Public Grammar of Defense at Davos 2026
The recorded session titled “Can Europe Defend Itself?” stages a concentrated test of what “defense” means when it is spoken in the same breath as alliance law, industrial capacity, fiscal mobilization, health sovereignty, and the management of intra-alliance conflict. Its governing ambition is practical—assessing Europe’s ability to sustain security under conditions of strategic uncertainty—yet its…
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Ending Europe’s Groundhog Day: Zelenskyy at Davos and the Critique of Actionless Order
The event can be read as an attempt to convert a familiar diplomatic lament into a diagnostically organized indictment of European agency. The speech treats political paralysis as a repeatable form of life, and then tests that claim by moving across disparate crises—Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, frozen assets, sanctions, tribunals, maritime oil flows—so that “Europe” appears…
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Cleareyed Partnership in an Age of Force: Friedrich Merz at Davos on Power, Trust, and European Competitiveness
What appears under the title “Special Address by Friedrich Merz, Federal Chancellor of Germany | WEF Annual Meeting 2026” is an event that stages, in compressed form, a particular European self-description under conditions of accelerated geopolitical drift: a self-description that tries to hold together, within a single rhetorical economy, the language of rules and partnerships…
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Welt und Zeit—The End of a War, 21:00—24. February 2025
In the wake of my previous contemplations and explorations in In the Wake of Thought, where the stirring question of thought’s perpetual unfolding demanded ever deeper considerations of human agency and temporal unfolding, it becomes necessary now to gather the threads of ontology, history, and politics in a new tapestry titled Welt und Zeit (World…
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I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv
I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko is a sprawling, unflinchingly intimate immersion into a conflict that most would prefer to keep at arm’s length. It is the book that punctures the neat categories of “us and them,” “invader and invaded,” and “hero and villain,” forcing readers…
Simon Gros 