The party’s no-confidence motion to oust PM Pedro Sánchez amounts to little more than a gimmick. — In his recent scholarly book Losing to Win (2020), University of Nevada political scientist Jeremy Gelman probes the causes of an unsettling phenomenon in American politics — the recession of lawmaking. Gelman argues that as partisan polarization has intensified nationwide, and as cable TV and Netflix shows have dramatized the…

Spain’s upcoming turn at holding the EU Council… —

A new book places the quest to keep Algeria French squarely at the center of European integration. — The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community. By Megan Brown. Harvard University Press; 345 pages; $29.99. When West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told his counterpart across the Rhine Guy Mollet, in the wake of the 1957 Franco-English embarrassment at Suez, that “Europe will be your revenge”, he…

Fauda so fairly attempts to depict the Palestinian question that it can’t be pinned down on a spectrum. — In review: Fauda (Netflix), Season 4 (2023), by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff. When a cultural product exploring a given conflict draws contradicting reviews from each of the conflict’s sides, could that contradiction simply be proof that the conflict in question is beyond repair? With season four released to roaring…

Fresh off forming Israel’s most right-wing government ever, Bibi Netanyahu appears in his recently published memoir as the Jewish people’s shrewdest leader since King Solomon. — Bibi: My Story. By Benjamin Netanyahu. Threshold Editions; 724 pages; $29.99. Midway through the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Judges chronicles Israel’s struggle to attain God-worthy self-rule by outgrowing the perennial temptation of apostasy — an allegory that eerily echoes with the modern Jewish state. The Bible’s seventh book, Judges…

A new book explores the English philosopher’s American afterlife. — America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life. By Claire Rydell Arcenas. The University of Chicago Press; 265 pages; $29.99. You can hardly fault John Locke (1632–1704) for never setting foot on US soil, even as Britain’s American colonies grew into intellectual and religious polestars in the English philosopher’s lifetime…

If they wish to be governing forces like… —

What would it take for Spain to reassess the scale at which it welcomes immigrants from Muslim-majority countries? — What would it take for Spain — or any society, for that matter — to reassess the scale at which it welcomes immigrants from Muslim-majority countries? Not that such a reassessment would necessarily make a practical difference, since most such immigrants (primarily from neighboring Morocco in Spain’s case) file asylum…

If the open-air killing of a priest by an Islamist doesn’t prompt a reckoning, it’s hard to see what will. — On Wednesday in Spain’s southernmost most outpost of Algeciras — a mere 30-minute boat ride from Morocco across the Mediterranean’s narrowest strip of water — 25-year-old Moroccan national Yassine Kaljaa left the squalid apartment he had been illegally squatting since first arriving to the city in 2019 headed towards the…