A reader and fan of the Holy Roman Empire writes: Before you write another article on European history you ought to read Peter H.Wilson’s book on the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Only then will people understand German and also European history. Europe most likely would or could […]
Over at the FT (££) is an elegant piece by David Allen Green on the legal/constitutional steps that would be expected following a Brexit vote. Key point: A vote for Brexit will not be determinative of whether the UK will leave the EU. That potential outcome comes down to the […]
Here is my piece on UK/EU/Brexit that’s just gone up over at Huffington Post: … our decisions today are part of bigger trends, even if in all the noise it’s hard to spot them. Here are three. First, the European Union is like every other attempted pan-European project of the […]
Back in 2009 I wrote two hefty pieces here about ICTY and its role in bringing to justice Balkans war crimes suspects. This one, on the occasion of the viewing of a film Storm: I said that in this sense the film had done a good job, bringing out a […]
The arrest of Radovan Karadžić back in 2008 prompted me to write at some length about him and his life and times. See here. Two pieces read nicely now. This one: Karadžić looks to have been a second-rate romantic who became improbably entangled in Bosnian nationalist politics and then was […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, on the EU and its refugee/migrant crisis: Who exactly is a citizen of state X? And what rights (if any) does a person who is not a citizen of state X have (a) to enter state X and (b) to stay there? The answer? […]
Once again I return to the Foreign Office for the annual ceremony of remembrance for FCO colleagues who have fallen in the line of duty. See this earlier account that tells of some of the names on the list. The name of a locally engaged Afghan employee who worked with […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT tackles the morality of the #Eurozone crisis. What happy days they were, when that was all the EU had to fret about! Thus: When the Cold War ended and the eurozone was set up as a massive stride forward in European integration, one of the […]
Remember my piece at DIPLOMAT late last year? Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state […]
As Mark Steyn (and others) have noted, the future belongs to those who show up. For the next century or so, those people largely fall into two categories. Africans and Indians. With added Arabs. The UN’s Population Division churns out all sorts of numbers about global demographic trends. They used […]
