The Commentator has published a piece of mine – Torture versus terror – a tale of two resignations – which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of ‘complicity in torture’ might produce. It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years […]
Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina – the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the ‘international community’ to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise ‘move forward’ the ‘peace process’? The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers […]
Nosemonkey praises the energetic start of the Polish Presidency, not least a feisty speech by Polish PM Donald Tusk. The text of this important speech is not (as far as I can see) on the Polish Prime Minister’s official website, even in Polish. So we have to do with some […]
Poland now assumes the six-month Polish Presidency for the first time. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski sets the scene: “EU success story” gets some 600 Google News hits. “EU crisis” gets 14,000 hits. What has gone wrong? Some people have a blunt answer: “Too much Europe!” EU structures and policies are […]
You all know where these came from: Art never expresses anything but itself All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art […]
Autonomous Mind kindly gave a link and supporting comments to my recent piece about Negotiation Training. And, via Twitter, he asked for More on the Carrot/Stick negotiating paradigm. So, here it is. The psychology of diplomatic negotiating is a vast, interesting and almost unanalysed subject. A couple of years ago […]
Ha ha ha! Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings! This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, […]
Anne Applebaum does a convincing job in demolishing what remains of the reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev who led the USSR to its own collapse: … the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev’s fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the […]
Sorry to have been a bit quiet, folks. I have been in Vienna with ADRg Ambassadors giving negotiation training to Senior Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency. These Inspectors have a unique and important job, namely to help check what is going on out there in the world’s civilian […]
A snappy young Serbian woman with two degrees from universities in the USA comes back to Belgrade to live and work. She gets a good job in a major Serbian bank on the corporate communications side. She gives a presentation to the bank top brass on how the bank can […]
