Jan-Werner Müller: How Europe could face its own shutdown - Just as the Tea Party has paralysed Congress, an alliance of populist anti-EU parties could force Europe into gridlock

As an illuminating study by Marley Morris has shown, anti-Europeans do little real work in the legislature, preferring to grandstand in plenary sessions – Ukip is a champion of this approach. Many of these parties – concentrated in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group, a kind of International of nationalists – offer no coherent policy platform. Marine Le Pen's Front National (leading in French polls for the May 2014 European elections) and Geert Wilders' anti-immigration and anti-Islam party in The Netherlands are attempting to forge a pan-European anti-EU alliance. They might campaign more effectively together, but are also likely to make things even more chaotic: some populist parties will want nothing to do with the racism associated with them. On one level this incoherence is a good thing, as is the fact that even within the far right, alliances have regularly broken down.

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.