Aksinya Staar

Every club on earth is judged by one measure: who wants to get in. Of all the large political entities that exist in the world today like the United States, China, India, the great regional blocs and federations and empires old and new, only one has a queue outside its door. Only one generates, in country after country, a genuine popular longing to belong. That entity is the European Union – a body routinely described as bureaucratic, technocratic, democratic-deficit-ridden, perpetually in...

There is a puzzle at the heart of modern civilisation that almost no one speaks about. Think of the ideas that most violently shaped the 20th century – and continue, with undiminished force, to shape the 21st. The unconscious mind and its dark, unruly sovereignty over human behaviour. The radical subjectivity of economic value, the impossibility of central planning, the spontaneous emergence of market order from millions of uncoordinated individual choices. The totalitarian logic of racial...

When Prime Minister Modi and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the India-EU Free Trade Agreement on January 27, 2026, Indian business leaders celebrated expanded market access, reduced tariffs, and the "first mover advantage" into European markets. The commentary focused, predictably, on sectors poised to benefit — textiles from Tamil Nadu, pharmaceuticals from Gujarat, IT services from Bangalore, leather goods from Uttar Pradesh. All true, all important. And all...