Podcast: Governing the EU in an Age of Division

New book interview with Dalibor Roháč

You can listen to my interview with Dalibor Roháč for New Books in European Politics about his Governing the EU in an Age of Division (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022) on Apple or Spotify.

In the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Dalibor Roháč wrote: "Not so long ago, I was a proud member of the free-market Eurosceptic crowd. For years, I quite literally made my living criticising the EU’s populist overregulation, moral hazard, the damage created by the common European currency, EU structural funds or the Common Agricultural Policy ... However, over the past two years, I have also come to the conclusion that for all its problems, the EU is irreplaceable in a number of its roles, which advocates of free-enterprise ought to value".

The searing experiences of the past six years have reinforced this view but, at the same time, highlighted the union's shortcomings in handling debt, public health, and diplomatic and military crises. "An important distinction exists between the politics of rules at which the EU is quite adept and the politics driven by events – which requires improvisation, risk-taking and alertness to opportunities,” he writes in Governing the EU in an Age of Division.

The book contains recommendations to address these failings but not of the pull-it-down-and-start-again type. Instead, Roháč "embraces Europe as it exists, not as an abstraction or as a hypothetical end state, accepting it in its unwieldy, pluralistic complexity and taking limitations of top-down approaches to policymaking as given".

Dalibor Roháč is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels. He is a prolific contributor to journals and media - with columns in the New York Post and Politico - and co-hosts the Eastern Front podcast.

For my Writer's Writers reading list, he chose Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars by Azar Gat (Oxford University Press, 2022).