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INSIGHTS

Notes and essays

Short pieces on European institutions, culture, sport and the slow work of democratic maintenance.

FEATURED

OSLO · JUNE 2025

A small country lives by the scale of its imagination

What small states can still do in a multilateral order under strain.

Small states have always traded weight for precision: choosing the file, holding the pen, and staying in the room after the larger delegations have moved on. That discipline is now scarcer than it should be. The multilateral order is under strain not because small states have lost influence, but because too many have stopped doing the patient work that made their influence possible.

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ARCHIVE

  • STRASBOURG · MAY 2025

    Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life

    Culture is not a soft policy area. It is where legitimacy is rehearsed.

    Cultural policy is treated as a residual budget line until the moment a society needs a shared account of itself, at which point it is discovered to have been infrastructure all along. The institutions that survive are those that understood this before the crisis arrived.

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  • LAUSANNE · MARCH 2025

    Sport has the power to change the world

    Integrity in sport is governance work, not communications work.

    Every integrity failure in sport has a governance signature: an unaccountable board, a compliance function without budget, or an appeals process designed to exhaust the complainant. Communications cannot fix what governance has broken.

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  • BRUSSELS · JANUARY 2025

    The quiet cost of postponed decisions

    Institutional drift is rarely a decision. It is the absence of one, repeated.

    Postponement is the most expensive instrument in multilateral practice, because it is priced as free at the moment it is used. The cost arrives later, as drift, as cynicism, as a reputation for decisions that are never quite taken.

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  • OSLO · NOVEMBER 2024

    Citizens' assemblies after the novelty

    Deliberation only counts once someone is obliged to answer it.

    An assembly without a duty to respond is a consultation with better staging. Deliberation only counts once someone is obliged to answer it, and once the public can see whether the answer addresses what was said.

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  • STRASBOURG · SEPTEMBER 2024

    Conventions are only as strong as their monitoring

    Ratification is the beginning of the obligation, not its discharge.

    Monitoring bodies work best when their findings are dull, predictable and impossible to ignore. Their authority comes not from drama but from repetition: the same standards, applied consistently, over time.

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