A classic, Mark Twain once said, is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll are precisely that kind of classic: often quoted but rarely reopened.
As Europe looks out at a world full of contradictions, blurred norms, and shifting alliances, Alice may be the most relevant political primer we never knew we needed. It is strikingly familiar. And increasingly, Alice reads like a stand-in for Europe, wondering about a world turned upside down.
Carroll’s Wonderland is governed not by chaos, but by a kind of precise absurdity. As Alice falls into a world of talking chess pieces and backwards logic, so too do we doomscroll through our daily news cycle – one headline more disorienting than the next.
And each time we look, what we see is not just strange. It’s strangely logical in its madness.
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone: “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
It is, isn’t it? Once you accept that you can’t take less than nothing, taking more becomes not only possible, but surprisingly easy. In certain circles, it’s considered a skill. Some even call it “the art of the deal.”
Take global trade in the past weeks, where tariffs appear and disappear by tweet or whim, where “economic certainty” is often a polite fiction.
One day, a tariff; the next, a backtrack. One leader calls it protection, another, provocation. And all the while, billions ride on a kind of economic tea party logic: take more of nothing and call it “growth.”
And in other corners of Wonderland, all it takes is the wrong outfit to spark a diplomatic crisis.
“Am I addressing the White Queen?”
“Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing,” the Queen replied.
Dressing. Addressing. In Wonderland, these are the same. And in our world, appearances still carry more weight than intentions. It’s not what’s said that causes offense – but what’s worn while saying it.
Across the Atlantic, we’ve seen rooms grow tense not over policy and military alliances but over fabric and attire. Carroll, with his maddening precision, may have offered a simple rule for avoiding diplomatic drama: when addressing Queens or Kings in Oval Offices, be well dressed.
And you’ve probably heard that now-familiar phrase: “You don’t have the cards right now.”
Wonderland has plenty of them, in fact. The Queen of Hearts is made of cards – paper-thin authority propped up by volume and fear. She rules with theatrical cruelty, shouting “Off with their heads!” at anyone who dares interrupt her logic. And when her subjects are brought to trial, the order of things is spectacularly reversed:
“Sentence first - verdict afterwards!”
Sound familiar?
In Wonderland, this isn’t a miscarriage of justice – it is the justice system. Decisions first, reasoning later. For anyone following the pace of modern diplomacy or the whiplash shifts in global alignment, the resemblance isn’t just literary, but quite literal.
Like Alice, Europe now navigates a world of loud threats and “Off with their heads!” diplomacy.
It looks West, it looks East, and encounters characters who may appear absurd but wield influence that’s anything but. And Carroll, with a touch of defiant clarity, offers a kind of foreign policy prescription disguised as whimsy:
“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she added to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!”
Perhaps Europe, too, needn’t be afraid – not if it learns to recognise the bluff behind the bluster. Not if it meets absurdity with calm, clarity, and a bit of Wonderland’s paradoxical wisdom.
It’s the kind of wisdom that comes from the White Knight, rambling softly about a song he's about to sing to Alice, making perfect nonsense:
“Everybody that hears me sing it – either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else –”
“Or else what?” Alice asks.
“Or else it doesn’t, you know.”
That may be Europe’s task now: to move forward without guarantees, to stay steady as meaning shifts. Not every threat is solid. Not every question needs an answer. Or else...
Or else what?
Or else it doesn’t.
It’s simple logic, and somehow it still works.
