Danube Institute Podcast

We all know what we mean by the Western Canon. Or do we? The Canon comes from nowhere and everywhere. A smelted down best-of-the best of the things our culture has truly loved. But at its borderlands, there are constant wars for what should be included. Culture always evolves. We see the same Roman poets quite differently to how the Victorians did. At its core, things like Shakespeare sit firmly within the redoubt. But is Henry James worthy? And is Trollope not? Magrite - yes; Koons no?  Dr Jonathan Price is a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute. In my new show for Danube Culture,I want to explore the meaning of the Canon, by asking individual experts what they think it should contain. Each episode, we’ll have two guests. Each will argue to place one new artefact inside the Canon — and argue as to why one well-respected piece should be removed. You’ll hear passionate arguments about the meaning of art.  And hopefully, you’ll pick up some recommendations of great works to check out —  and those to swerve. After all, the canon is made by those who actually engage with it.  This is Who’s In; Who’s Out? 

We asked Calum T. M. Nicholson, Director of Research at the Danube Institute, about the similarities between the British and the Hungarian mentality, and the future for British and Hungarian conservatism. The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We all know what we mean by the Western Canon. Or do we? The Canon comes from nowhere and everywhere. A smelted down best-of-the best of the things our culture has truly loved. But at its borderlands, there are constant wars for what should be included. Culture always evolves. We see the same Roman poets quite differently to how the Victorians did. At its core, things like Shakespeare sit firmly within the redoubt. But is Henry James worthy? And is Trollope not? Magrite - yes; Koons no?  I’m Dr Jonathan Price, a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute. In my new show for Danube Culture,I want to explore the meaning of the Canon, by asking individual experts what they think it should contain. Each episode, we’ll have two guests. Each will argue to place one new artefact inside the Canon — and argue as to why one well-respected piece should be removed. You’ll hear passionate arguments about the meaning of art.  And hopefully, you’ll pick up some recommendations of great works to check out —  and those to swerve. After all, the canon is made by those who actually engage with it.  This is Who’s In; Who’s Out? 

We asked Lee J. Strang, a legal scholar and Executive Director at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University, about whether the Declaration of Independence, the "birth certificate" of the United States, was legally and lawfully adopted under the British laws of the time.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

In March of this year, The Danube Institute hosted a panel in London on the life and legacy of Enoch Powell. Powell was a poet, and a classicist, and a brigadier, and a monetarist. It is of course for his thoughts on immigration that he has fallen into the pages of history. We wanted to think about Powell in the round — this most impressive of men, the youngest this and the youngest that, who franked his personality into the Conservative Party, who saw the two great challenges of the late twentieth century coming a mile off — immigration and inflation. Yet whose actual political career was a footnote to his intellectual one. The talk was recorded, by a DI fellow, Alexander Pelling-Bruce, on his mobile phone. Alexander had put together the Powell seminar. With the help of our own David Oldroyd Bolt. And that was meant to be that — a quick recording for his own personal posterity. But a few chance conversations have lead us to the recording. And that, in turn, has minded us to putting it into the public domain. First - a word of apology. This is a phone recording, on a mic a fair way from the stage. We’ve used all the digital trickery in our possession to pull it up to scratch. But it is never going to reproduce the full bodied surety of a Rode SM7b. We hope the words — by John O’Sullivan, our president, Powell’s biographer Lord Simon Heffer, Lord Maurice Glasman the Labour Peer, Richard Vinen, a professor at King's College London, Tim Montgomerie, the former editor of Conservative Home, and Alexander himself, will outrun any fuzz or din. 

We asked Pierre-Hugues Barré, a French lawyer and academic, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute, about the origins, significance, and paradoxes of the French constitutional principle of secularism, as well as the historical struggle between the church and the state in France.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We asked Rock Missamou, a water management expert at the Department of Water and Environmental Policy and UNESCO Chair at the University of Public Service, Budapest, about African water shortages and their economic, political, and demographic impacts, as well as the Hungarian drought situation.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We asked Marek Magierowski, a Polish journalist and diplomat, former Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and former Polish ambassador to Israel and the US, about Donald Tusk's "militant democracy," the similarities and parallels between the Polish and Hungarian government changes, and about how Poles view the EU's common values and common policies.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

The past decade has been a blur. Trucks in Nice. Gay pride parades in Oslo. Westminster Bridge. London Bridge. Manchester Arena. The Bataclan. Wherever people have congregated, the forces of Islamic terror have massed to mow them down. To read Simon Cottee’s new paper for the Danube Institute is to be taken back on a bloody and terrible tour of recent European history. To so many flower-saturated memorials. So many breaking news bars. So many proclamations of never again, and they shall not divide us. Yet on it goes. What have we learned?  Not just at the political and civilisational level — but what can we say about the attacks of the post-2015 era, when we view them en masse, as a social phenomenon? Dr Simon Cottee is one of Britain’s leading criminologists. An author, who has delved deep into the question of Islam, and its most ghastly offspring, ISIS. He’s a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and has been a fellow at the Danube Institute for the past nine months. As part of that fellowship, Dr Cottee performed a complete survey and literature review of Jihadism in the modern era, focusing on a tight ten year stretch, from 2015 to 2025. Raking over hundreds of accounts of bomb plots and mass casualty incidents, to attempt to draw some conclusions. He found many things, but perhaps the biggest headline to come from his paper is that there has been a fourth wave — today’s Jihadists, unlike the local radicalisation of, say, the Dewsbury-born perpetrators of the 7/7 attacks, come as much from overseas. They were born outside of Europe, in the Middle East. 45%, he says of those involved in a fatal terror attack plot, came to the continent as effectively adults. Today, we want to go over his findings of this important paper — as much because, as Simon points out, there seems a reluctance in criminology to categorise people in quite such stark terms. So what is the situation — and is the wave a temporary phenomenon, driven by Angela Merkel’s disastrous 2015 opening of the borders to millions of unvetted migrants? What, if anything, could a fifth wave look like? 

We asked Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, an author, former Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See, and a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, about the turbulent history and the heritage of the Habsburgs, the former ruling family of Austria-Hungary, as well as about the EU, the institution of family, and Christianity.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.