Ulrike Franke

@rikefranke.eu

Senior Fellow at European Council on Foreign Relations. #Drone politics PhD @ox.ac.uk. Teaches at @SciencesPo.bsky.social. Writes about all things #Germany #Defence #miltech. Podcast host at @SicherheitsPod.de & LeCollimateur

@rikefranke.eu

“In the first year of this war … I felt strongly that Germany was not yet doing what it should. Now, in the fifth year of a conflict that has already lasted longer than the first world war and shows no sign of ending, I can say without hesitation that it is.”

@davekeating.substack.comReposted by @rikefranke.eu

Luxembourg didn't request that their official language, the Luxembourgish dialect of German, become an EU official language. Nor did Belgium request it for Flemish or Austria for Austrian. But the Western Balkan accession countries are going a different route. And that will cost EU taxpayers a lot

@rikefranke.eu

Which, just to be clear, also means that there are people who may have lived in London, or England, for a very long time and indeed never really took on the identity. Therefore, this debate to somehow *settle* this is insane.

@rikefranke.eu

The only thing I have to add to the insane Englishness debate that is currently happening in the UK is that I never found anything that described the strangeness and, dare I say randomness, of identity better than this Peter Grant quote from @benaaronovitch.bsky.social’s River of London series:

“My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner."
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