Over at the FT (may be paywalled) is an interesting article by Wolfgang Münchau explaining why the ‘pro-Europe’ tendency is struggling to articulate a coherent position (basically because if they do, it won’t get supported in Germany). One reader William Thayer Snr offers this terse thought: Let me state it quite […]
Walter Russell Mead produces smart analysis and informed wisdom at a rate that puts the rest of us to shame. He blogs at The American Interest. Try any of his recent pieces and marvel at the breadth of his knowledge and insight. This one on the problems facing Europe caught […]
Here’s a story I haven’t told before. Back in the Moscow Embassy in 1994 or thereabouts a bizarre telegram arrived from London. The EU had to negotiate aluminium trade quotas with the new Russia and the EU team was coming to Moscow to do so. But, unusually, the EU aluminium boffins […]
Should there be a UK referendum on our EU membership? If so, when? The answers these days divide neatly: Yes! Now! Maybe. But if we do, let’s choose the right moment and the right question! That latter view of course enrages anyone inclined to the former view as a piece […]
I have not been writing much here or anywhere else. Too busy trying to survive and attending the latest Oxford Programme on Negotiation event. Last night BBC reporter and troubleshooter Lyse Doucet gave a spirited talk to the Programme about international mediation. I of course disagreed with quite a lot […]
I have never seen astounding effort before, or at least don’t remember it. Hat-tip to the FT. Monty Python blast one into the back of the net – and describe the Eurozone Crisis with unerring wit and prescience:
American generosity in the form of the Marshall Plan transformed Western Europe after WW2. Hurrah. Everyone knows that. But what did that Plan do or not do? Precisely what did it do? Why did it work? How might any lessons from that initiative be applied to (say) Greece today? Good […]
Here is my latest Telegraph Blog piece about the striking success of young Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, who has beaten a senior Lithuanian colleague to become chair of the UN General Assembly in 2012/2013: The position had been uncontested since 1991, the different regional groupings deciding for themselves in […]
I have linked before to the magnificent economic analysis of John Mauldin – freely sent to your Inbox once you sign up. We mere voter-taxpayer drones have no real idea of what is needed to save the Eurozone or indeed us, given the startling multi-dimensional mess the whole system has […]
What a dire article over at Bloomberg by one Catherine Hickley, comparing the issues of the possible break-up of the Eurozone with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here’s how not to write such things. First, it seems to me to stretch things a bit to describe the post-Soviet space […]
