My previous piece on the ECFR Report about the EU’s growing ineffectuality at the UN quoted this: … The assembly kicked off this week in New York with the west bracing itself for another debacle. Serbia is to use the session to demand a vote on the "illegality" of the secession […]
What is the precise mechanism which makes people start to talk in arch post-modern jargon? Like this: Labour needs to provide a convincing new narrative if left-of-centre politics are to remain the driving force in Britain. Or this: Mr Brown and Mr Darling must find new ways of telling a […]
Russia’s PM Putin and President Medvedev have been hosting groups of Western journalists, to quite good effect from the Russian point of view. Even if some of the language used by Putin might have been a bit … overvivid. A tendency also visible these days in the robust style of Russian […]
So many examples, so little time. Try this one. An EU Embassy in London wants to move away from its expensive and old-fashioned practice of employing only people from its home country for every job (ie to have a mixture of ‘home-based’ staff and ‘locally employed’ staff’). It approaches the […]
Brian Barder describes a failed attempt to pull together a letter to The Times from a group of British ex-Excellencies about ‘the profoundly mistaken policies of the British and American governments’ towards Russia/Georgia: … some of those who had occupied key positions in the area during their diplomatic careers, and […]
Sometimes being an Ambassador is excruciatingly painful. Back in 2006 the marvellous Croatian Ambassador in Warsaw Nebojsa Koharovic hosted a group of us to watch Croatia play England. I was given a front-row seat as Ambassadorial Guest of Honour. It was not going well, with Croatia a goal up. Then […]
The piece by PM Gordon Brown in Monitor magazine which gives a positive word to the Obama campaign is here. It has caused a fuss. Bad form for a foreign leader to make remarks of this sort? But listen to this: Labour party sources have suggested may have in fact […]
I previously linked to Christopher Hitchens and Michael Totten analysing why the Kosovo case is quite different from the cases of either S Ossetia or Abkhazia, rendering spurious/dishonest Russia’s recognition of the latter two as new states. Here for good measure is former US Ambassador to Zagreb and Belgrade, my friend Bill […]
Christopher Hitchens back in February tried to build the case that Kosovo was never ‘internationally recognised as part of Serbia’: [After WW1] legal instruments agreed between [Yugoslavia and the no-less-new state concept calling itself republican Turkey] recognized Belgrade’s sovereignty over Kosovo, but solely in the sense that they recognized Belgrade as […]
The Guardian today: Russia to leave Georgia after EU deal How utterly shamefully absurdly useless these people are. The ensuing article: In a press conference yesterday afternoon, after four hours of talks, Medvedev made clear that Russia’s withdrawal of forces depended on Georgia signing a "non-aggression pact" with South Ossetia and […]
