Hmm. Is the UK going to try to ‘repatriate’ powers from Brussels? And if so, what are the chances of success? It isn’t clear to me why the other EU member states would go along with this, unless we block something horribly important to them (such as the next Budget) […]
An interesting and instructive visit to Riga for this year’s Riga Conference. Thoughts. First, Riga itself. Latvia took an enormous (and partly self-imposed) hit as the Euro zone crisis began, opting for radical austerity measures. Views now differ. Yes, the economy is growing once again at a pretty good rate. […]
A super resource for looking at demographic trends as between 1950 and 2100 – a graph that allows you to follow the trends in 50 countries and world regions and easily make comparisons. Thus (say) in 1950 Egypt and Pakistan combined had some 60 million people, not that many more than the […]
Off tomorrow to this year’s Riga Conference, the distinguished Northern Europe security and wider policy forum. My first time at this event. Plenty of meat on the menu, including legendary Polish economist and intellectual Lesek Balcerowicz on the subject of the Eurozone. I appear in full hoot at Night Owl […]
Normal service may or not be resumed after the Olympic Games – I am hooked on all sorts of sports I never knew existed. Anyway, I previously have analysed Russian negotiating techniques: Russian negotiators aim to neutralise that approach by conveying a very different proposition: “It doesn’t matter how much […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here are the answers I have given to some questions about Russia, over on the Russia Insights website: What are 3 positive things you would say about Russia? Russia’s sense of itself – a quite different idea of scale, and what that means both for national policy and in historical and […]
