Europe's intellectual class turns to history and theory to decode 2026's uncertainties

The books European policymakers and journalists choose to read in January often reveal more about the continent's anxieties than any summit communiqué. POLITICO's 2026 reading list, compiled by editors and correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic, runs from Suetonius's account of Roman emperors to Isaac Asimov's robot stories, with stops at the 1929 Wall Street crash, Hitler's rise, Simone Weil's critique of political parties, and the moral corrosion of Putin's Russia. The common thread is not comfort but clarity: a shared sense that the old categories no longer hold.

Ancient history as a mirror for modern power

Jamie Dettmer, POLITICO's opinion editor, places Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars at the top of the shelf. The second-century historian's conviction that no personal foible is too minor to measure a ruler finds unexpected resonance in an era of larger-than-life leaders. Dettmer notes the Victorians bowdlerised the sex lives of the Caesars; today the parallel is drawn more soberly. The personal and political are inseparable, Suetonius argues, and the translation by Tom Holland makes the case that intimacy reveals character. For European diplomats watching the return of transactional diplomacy, the lesson is that personality is not a sideshow but the main event.

This turn to antiquity is not escapism. When the European Council debates strategic autonomy or the European Commission drafts defence industrial policy, the assumptions about leadership behaviour matter. Suetonius offers a taxonomy of caprice, vanity and cruelty that predates modern institutions but describes their current stress test with uncanny precision. The book does not predict 2026; it reminds readers that the pathologies of power are constants.

Financial history as political warning

Russell Hargrave, the UK energy and climate editor, selects Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929. The Wall Street crash did not merely destroy wealth; it reshaped European politics, clearing the path for populist movements that left scars across the continent. Sorkin, a New York Times journalist known for Too Big To Fail, frames the collapse as a cautionary tale about institutions and politicians failing the countries they are meant to serve. The warning is explicit: when markets wobble, democracies do too.

The relevance is not abstract. The European Central Bank has held interest rates restrictive through 2025 while growth stagnates in Germany and France. Banking sector exposure to commercial real estate remains a supervisory concern. Sorkin's narrative of ordinary citizens pumping savings into supposedly never-failing investments echoes in the retail flows into crypto and thematic ETFs that European regulators at ESMA have flagged repeatedly. The book is a reminder that financial stability is a democratic prerequisite, not a technocratic afterthought.

The anatomy of missed chances

Éric Vuillard's The Order of the Day, recommended by James Kirchick, retraces the lead-up to the Second World War through four vignettes: Göring's secret meeting with industrialists, Schuschnigg's humiliation at Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain and Ribbentrop playing tennis as troops enter Austria, the shambolic state of the Wehrmacht during the Anschluss. Vuillard's verdict is chilling: "We never fall twice into the same abyss, but we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread." The phrase has circulated in Brussels corridors since the book's French publication, cited in private briefings on the EU's enlargement policy and its response to hybrid threats.

Kirchick, author of The End of Europe, pairs Vuillard with Simone Weil's 1943 essay On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Weil wrote as exiled French politicians bickered while Hitler's armies rampaged. Her argument, that parties kill the sense of truth and justice in all souls, substituting conformity for the desire for truth, lands differently in 2026. European Parliament groupings have fragmented; national parties fracture over Ukraine, migration and climate policy. The European Parliament now hosts seven political groups plus non-attached members, the highest number since direct elections began. Weil's diagnosis of factional capture feels less like history than current affairs.

Technocrats under siege

Jacopo Barigazzi, POLITICO's defence correspondent, turns to Raffaele Alberto Ventura's Radical Shock: The Rise and Fall of the Competent. Ventura traces the rise of the technocratic class from Galbraith's warning that the US administrative apparatus had grown larger than many socialist countries, through Weber's insistence that real power resides in the administration, to the current populist assault on experts. The phrase "deep state", once a Turkish import, is now standard rhetoric from Washington to Warsaw. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticises the European Commission for excessive regulation, Barigazzi suggests it may signal a reckoning with the political legitimacy of experts rather than mere populist theatre.

The tension is structural. The Commission's regulatory output, from the AI Act to the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, reflects a model of governance by expertise. Yet the European Council increasingly demands political control over implementation. The 2024-2029 legislative cycle has seen a measurable slowdown in tertiary legislation as co-legislators assert oversight. Ventura's book, published in 2020, anticipated a conflict that now defines Brussels' daily rhythm.

Russia's moral corrosion from the inside

Our Dear Friends in Moscow, by two leading experts on Russia's security services, breaks with the Putin-centric literature dominating Western shelves. Through the stories of former friends and colleagues who once shared liberal convictions, the authors trace a gradual conversion to nationalist imperialism. The book combines top-down repression with personal choice, a combination that makes it essential reading for Europeans concerned with safeguarding democratic values individually and institutionally. The question it raises, what remains after Putin, has no comfortable answer.

The EU's Russia policy has oscillated between sanctions packages and selective engagement. The European External Action Service maintains a strategic framework last updated in 2021, predating the full-scale invasion. Member states disagree on visa bans, cultural exchanges and the pace of decoupling. The book's intimate portrait of complicity suggests that any post-Putin transition will confront a society where the line between victim and perpetrator runs through families and friendships, not just institutions.

Realpolitik, left-behind places, and digital paranoia

Nicholas Vinocur, chief foreign affairs correspondent, recommends Jérémie Gallon's Henry Kissinger: An Intimate Portrait of the Master of Realpolitik. Structured around unexpected themes, humour, style, the biography neither glosses over controversial episodes nor reduces Kissinger to a moral caricature. In a year when diplomatic relations are strained by wars, shifting alliances and the uneasy balance between ideals and realpolitik, Vinocur finds lessons in Kissinger's ability to hold contradictory truths. The book's reception in Paris and Berlin has been cooler than in Washington, reflecting a European discomfort with power politics that the continent may no longer afford.

Maura Reynolds highlights Fiona Hill's semi-autobiographical account of economic collapse in the UK, US and Russia. Hill, the daughter of a coal miner from northeast England who became a top US presidential adviser, writes: "These left-behind people deserve better. As long as they feel there is no hope for them, there will be no hope for the rest of us. There will be nothing for us, anywhere." The passage circulates in Commission discussions on the Just Transition Fund and the Social Climate Fund. The Eurostat data on regional GDP per capita shows the gap between northwest and southeast Europe widening, not narrowing, despite cohesion policy.

Gerardo Fortuna, author of Brussels Playbook, reaches for Alexander Lernet-Holenia's 1930s noir I Was Jack Mortimer. A taxi driver picks up a dead passenger; his frantic attempt not to seem guilty becomes a monologue of self-incrimination. Fortuna calls it a parable for the digital panopticon where the mere act of existing feels like evidence. The metaphor extends to political staffers who communicate on Signal, ministers whose WhatsApp chats are subpoenaed, and citizens whose browser histories could become public. The EU's AI Act and the ePrivacy Regulation still under negotiation are attempts to write rules for a surveillance capacity that Lernet-Holenia anticipated in Vienna's elegant decay.

Search data, robot laws, and the European vacuum

Nahal Toosi, senior foreign affairs correspondent, returns to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's Everybody Lies, eight years after publication. The premise, that Google search bars elicit honesty denied to pollsters, family and friends, feels more relevant as misinformation spreads and political targeting shifts to phones. The book's insight that digital flair can equal real-life political wins predates the 2024 European Parliament elections, where TikTok strategies outperformed traditional canvassing in several member states. Stephens-Davidowitz's database is the internet itself; the question is who controls the query.

Toosi also recommends Asimov's Robot series. The Three Laws of Robotics, designed to prevent harm to humans, contained loopholes Asimov exploited across decades of stories. Earthlings distrusted robots; Spacers lived with them but barely tolerated other humans. The parallel to Europe's fragmented AI adoption is direct: the AI Act establishes risk categories, but implementation will vary across twenty-seven member states with different industrial bases, legal traditions and public attitudes. Asimov would have enjoyed writing sequels in today's Brussels.

Two novels close the list. Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection portrays a Berlin expat couple whose aspirational remote-work existence masks a political vacuum: they cannot even imagine contributing to a better world. Laurent Mauvignier's La Maison vide, winner of the Goncourt, reimagines the EU as a big empty house full of memories and convictions from another era. Both books diagnose a hollowing out of European purpose that no regulation can fill. The urban elite's insubstantial existence and the family home's fading photographs are different metaphors for the same condition.