MCC Brussels Podcast

In this MCC Brussels Deep Dive, John O’Brien is joined by Harvard historian James Hankins to discuss The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume.Hankins argues that Western civilisation is not simply a sequence of empires, revolutions and crimes. It is held together by a fragile inheritance: Greek debate, Roman law and order, Christian ideas of human dignity, mediaeval scholarship, Renaissance renewal and Enlightenment reform.At the heart of the conversation is a sharp question: can the West still learn from its own past?Hankins warns that “year zero” thinking has taught many people to see Western history only as racism, sexism, slavery and oppression. But a civilisation that rejects its memory does not become free. It becomes frantic, ignorant and easy to manipulate.From Athens and Rome to Christianity, scholasticism, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, this Deep Dive explores the ideas that made the West possible, and why they now need defending.

In this MCC Brussels Deep Dive, John O’Brien speaks to Dr Ashley Frawley, Visiting Research Fellow at MCC Brussels and author of the new report Manufacturing Fragility: How Brussels’s Therapeutic State Makes Citizens Weaker.
The EU has committed more than a billion euros to mental health programmes across schools, workplaces and wider society. But Frawley argues that many of these initiatives are built on weak evidence and may be doing the opposite of what they promise. Rather than making people more resilient, she says, they encourage citizens to scan themselves for symptoms, reinterpret ordinary distress as illness, and become more dependent on professional and institutional intervention.
The discussion examines the rise of “mental health awareness”, the blurring of the line between serious mental illness and normal human unhappiness, and the way schools are being turned from places of knowledge transmission into sites of emotional management.
Frawley also argues that Brussels’s mental health agenda is not simply about health. It is a wider form of governance, one that gives the state new authority over education, work, speech and the inner lives of citizens.
link to report: https://brussels.mcc.hu/publication/manufacturing-fragility-how-brusselss-therapeutic-state-makes-citizens-weaker

This summer, the MCC Brussels podcast is doing things a little differently. In a series of more focused conversations, we take a deeper look at some of the big questions shaping Europe.
In this episode, Jacob is joined by Frank Furedi, Executive Director of MCC Brussels and author of Why Borders Matter, to examine what the scenes in Ceuta reveal about Europe’s political relationship with borders.
First, the discussion turns to the invasion of Ceuta and Frank’s argument that it should not be dismissed as an exceptional event. Instead, it offers a dramatic glimpse of the slower migration crisis taking place across Europe every day.
Then Jacob and Frank discuss Sánchez’s migration amnesty, Brussels’ performative politics of border control and the growing pressure that populist parties are placing on governments that previously treated borders as an inconvenience.
Finally, the episode turns to Europe’s reliance on Morocco, Turkey and other third countries to control migration. Frank compares the EU’s strategy to Rome’s decision to outsource its own defence and asks whether Europe can retain its sovereignty while depending upon other states to protect its territory.

Brussels wants Europe to achieve “digital sovereignty”, reducing its dependence on American and Chinese technology. But what if the entire project is based on a dangerous misunderstanding of how technological power actually works?
In this MCC Brussels Deep Dive, John O’Brien speaks to Dr Norman Lewis, technology analyst and author of the new MCC Brussels report The Grand Delusion, about why the EU cannot regulate its way to technological power.
Lewis argues that no country, not even the United States or China, is truly sovereign across the modern technology stack. Yet Brussels continues to pursue sovereignty through regulation, subsidy programmes and grand industrial strategies, while making it harder for European innovators to compete and scale.
The alternative is not isolation, but indispensability. From the failure of France’s Minitel model to the extraordinary strategic power of ASML, Lewis explains why Europe should stop trying to control the entire digital ecosystem and start building technological capabilities the rest of the world cannot do without.
Can Europe still become a serious technological power, or is Brussels regulating the continent out of the race?
Rea the report here: https://brussels.mcc.hu/publication/the-grand-delusion-the-european-union-and-digital-sovereignty

Host Jacob Reynolds is joined by Richard Schenk and Daniel de Liever, editor at the Dutch news and commentary platform NieuwRechts.
First, the panel turns to the growing revolt against asylum centres in the Netherlands. After scandals surrounding the huge centralised cetnre in Ter Apel, smaller centres are now being imposed on unwilling municipalities. Daniel explains how pressure on Ter Apel became the justification for spreading asylum seekers across the country, why local election promises have proved powerless and why public frustration is becoming increasingly difficult to contain.
The second topic is the resignation of Jens Spahn, leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, after he and his husband used a surrogate in the United States. The panel discusses the charge of hypocrisy, Germany’s ban on surrogacy and the EU’s attempt to make cross-border parenthood arrangements binding across member states.
Finally, the episode turns to Donald Trump’s proposed UN declaration on freedom of speech. Is it a useful challenge to Europe’s speech controls, or another attempt to settle national political questions through international institutions? The discussion ranges from the Digital Services Act and the Democracy Shield to media regulation and the economic cost of Europe’s regulatory state.