Background: international economic history and chemistry. Currently promoting human rights. Political economy newsletter: https://xitter.cf/t.co/JVqDNCF1IU
Roma, Lazio
Joined September 2014
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I write The Continental Brief to understand Europe beyond daily headlines. My lenses are political economy, climate transition and power.
I connects long-term structures with today’s political choices to understand the stakes of our democratic future:
shehuandi.substack.com
In 1898 a Polish banker calculated how the First World War would become a nightmare in the trenches.
Statesmen read him and Europe marched in anyway.
1/2
Now Europe it's rearming again: €800bn, 5% of GDP and conscription is back. The threat is real, especially with the NATO umbrella dissolving.
But arming builds a constituency that outlives the threat. New essay 👇
open.substack.com/pub/shehua…
The public anger gets aimed at a handful of criminals, instead of at the rules that allow selling a protected coast in the first place.
Anti-corruptiom prosecutors freeze some money, name a few villains and the billion-euro resort on the protected lagoon keeps moving.
3/4
So when a government promises to "get tough on corruption," ask: who benefits from keeping the story about individuals, never about the system?
I wrote the whole thing, seemingly about Albania, in truth about a battle we're all having.
4/4
open.substack.com/pub/shehua…
Is the EU in decline?
Two men. Same job, same age, same company: Amazon.
One earns more. He's also the one more likely to die young. He's the American.
A thread on the most misread number in politics 🧵
1/
The decline story points at the welfare state and calls it the obstacle, as if the road to Silicon Valley ran through the American graveyard.
8/
Measure the wrong thing and you'll fix the wrong thing.
Europe isn't falling behind America. On the measure that matters most, America is falling behind Europe.
Full essay 👇
open.substack.com/pub/shehua…
1/ THE PERFORMACE OF CONTROL
An Italian guard at the Gjadër migrant camp in Albania, asked if he gets bored guarding empty cells
"There's nothing to do. But we have to stay, because we were asked to."
The EU just made this camp the model for its strictest-ever migration law.
2/
The pilot the law is built on: 111 people processed in nine months. €72,461 per bed. Staff paid per migrant, sent home for lack of migrants.
It failed at the stated goal but it succeeded at the real one: the performance of control.
3/ Europe adopted the model in the same season it watched ICE's death toll grow in America.
It did so with the far right's votes, and the liberals centre called the process "inclusive".
Full story: shehuandi.substack.com/p/the…