In some ways, Americans have never felt closer to Europe than they do today. Social media collapse our sense of distance, so that people who live thousands of miles away can seem as proximate as our own neighbors. All it takes is knowing a few people who have recently spent time somewhere between Iceland and Turkey to appreciate the significance of today’s vote in the United Kingdom. (More…)
Some of us thought this day would never come. Others prayed it never would. The long awaited referendum on Britain’s EU membership will take place tomorrow. The results will be out by Friday morning. Project Fear is still going strong. But it looks unlikely to settle one of the biggest divisions in UK politics. (More…)
Historic tradition has given birth to the superstition among the French farmers that a man named Napoleon would restore to them all manner of glory. Now, then, an individual turns up, who gives himself out as that man because, obedient to the “Code Napoleon,” which provides that “La recherche de la paternite est interdite,” he carries the name of Napoleon. (More…)
The Norwegian Refugee Council’s Jan Egeland explains that without consistent education, Syrian refugee children risk becoming part of the lost generations – a phrase they have come to loathe. (More…)
It would be difficult to name anything that has so overwhelmingly occupied the American public mind in the last two years as the Sunni terrorist movement that styles itself the Islamic State. (More…)
What makes Donald Trump special? This is a question the man himself would presumably have little trouble answering. But for those of us interested in projecting his political future, trying to determine whether he represents an outlier or something far more significant, it is proving considerably more tricky. (More…)
BAQOFAH, Iraq – “Mike” left Iraq as a 12-month-old baby. Born into a Kurdish family, his parents fled to Norway as refugees following the brutal 1988 Anfal campaign, when the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s military killed up to 100,000 Kurds. (More…)
The Libyan crisis is not just the product of the NATO intervention. It has endogenous roots worth further examination. Libyan historian Ali Ahmida argues that the country ranks among the most brutal cases of colonial rule. In Africa, this means being in the ranks of Algeria and Congo. (More…)
The Social Republic appeared as a mere phrase, as a prophecy on the threshold of the February Revolution; it was smothered in the blood of the Parisian proletariat during the days of 1848 but it stalks about as a spectre throughout the following acts of the drama. (More…)
As was inevitable, the upcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU has exposed deep divisions in the Conservative Party. For an exercise that appears to have been intended to finally allow the party to move on from its endless civil war on Europe, the referendum appears to be making matters much worse. (More…)
Marah, a teenage girl from one of Syria’s besieged cities, recently arrived in Switzerland as a refugee, where she is struggling with her first pregnancy and the potential breakup of her family. (More…)
One of the few public matters on which there is general agreement in the United States is the dysfunction of the political system. Practically everyone believes that government in this country is broken. Just how it is broken, and how (and even if) it might be fixed are more contentious questions. The answers given vary widely with the political orientation and class position of whoever it is to whom one is talking. (More…)