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The New York Transatlantic

Confronting Italy’s colonial ‘adventure’ in Ethiopia

Confronting Italy’s colonial ‘adventure’ in Ethiopia

By Kyle Walker on February 13, 2016

[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/84273170″]

The most startling moment in “If Only I Were That Warrior”—and there are many startling moments—might be when Giuseppe, an Italian agronomist and military history enthusiast, offers a short catalogue of “Italian” habits adopted by Ethiopians in the years since the Fascist occupation of Ethiopia. From Italians, the Ethiopians took their “love of food and coffee” and the “social bustle in the evenings,” Giuseppe tells us.

It’s strange that a history buff and specialist on tropical agriculture should be so obviously unaware of the terrible irony of this statement: Coffee originated in Ethiopia. Giuseppe’s slip, though it is the most surreal, is hardly the most horrifying example of contemporary deafness to history that surfaces in “If Only I Were That Warrior.”

Euro-optimism despite Euro-crises

Euro-optimism despite Euro-crises

By Kyle Walker on February 10, 2016

Anthony Teasdale, the director general of the European Parliamentary Research Service, gave a talk February 8 at Deutsches Haus NYU, replacing Klaus Welle, who had been scheduled to speak. Welle, secretary-general of the European Parliament, was called back to Brussels on short notice to for the build-up to negotiations over David Cameron’s proposed European reforms.

It’s fitting that Teasdale should step in at precisely this moment—when the apparent shortcomings of the European Union seem to widen the Channel every day—to offer an optimistic view. In his estimation, the European Union does not get nearly enough credit for the efficiency with which it completes its routine tasks and is therefore unfairly cast as a doomed polity.

“I am basically allergic to the defeatist or declinist assumptions and philosophy which we very often find in public discussion about the European Union,” he said. “I have been surprised and encouraged by the ability of the member states to work together. This is not a Panglossian view about how the EU operates, don’t get me wrong, but we should always bear in mind the underlying resilience that the system seems to have established.”