Caroline de Gruyter
Caroline de Gruyter is a Europe correspondent and columnist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC. Since 1999, she has published works about European politics, won several prizes and was twice nominated for the European Press Prize. She is also a columnist for Foreign Policy, De Standaard and EUobserver as well as a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. She has written five books on the topics of democracy, globalisation and shifting interpretations of sovereignty. Her bestseller Beter wordt het niet; een reis door de Europese Unie en het Habsburgse Rijk (It Won’t Get any Better) (2021) was translated into English, French, German, Swedish and Hungarian.
She was posted to Brussels twice and spent more than twenty years covering Europe. Her previous books include Swiss Lives: the New Political Reality in Europe (2015) and A Cursed Paradise: Why Politicians Must Finally Take Europe Seriously (2016). De Gruyter currently lives in Oslo but wrote this book, her fifth, in Vienna, the former capital of the Habsburg Empire.
More Caroline de Gruyter
It Won’t Get Any Better
For the European Union, recent years perhaps have felt like the beginning of the end, what with nationalism rising across the board, geopolitical dynamics shifting throughout the world, ugly deals with border nations, Brexit and financial troubles. Europeans love to complain the EU has too little power, or too much, that it’s too slow, too weak, too divided. And yet European Affairs correspondent Caroline de Gruyter recognizes striking parallels with the Habsburg Empire, which saw itself similarly tasked with unifying many different, wary and critical states, and nevertheless lasted six centuries: ‘the zeitgeist is different, but the nature of the political games is not.’ What can the EU learn from the Habsburgs?
Sunday’s Children: Europeans, War and Peace
Essential and highly relevant reading about the prospect of war, peace in Europe and lessons from the past, as told by one of the continent’s leading correspondents