Articles

In theory, the European Union’s parliamentary elections are the most international in the world. The winners serve in a multinational legislature. They speak to one another with the help of hundreds of translators. They are members of transnational parties: In the parliament buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg, center-left MEPs from across Europe sit with the […]

The brain of Homo sapiens has a fatal attraction to secrets. What we see before our eyes is never sufficient; we want to know what lies behind it, what explains it, what’s the deeper meaning. The compulsion to get beneath the surface of things lies at the heart of what makes some people scholars or

On Sept 10, 2001, I published a column about Belarus, the former Soviet republic squeezed between Russia and Europe. It described how the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko was stealing elections, keeping tight control over the media and the economy, harassing political opponents and occasionally murdering them. Lukashenko, I wrote, was Europe’s longest-standing dictator. Yet only

In the weeks leading up to the declaration of war in 1914, the British were supremely confident. “It will be over by Christmas” said the optimists; pessimists reckoned the war might last two whole years. Almost nobody predicted the trenches, the destruction of farms and fields, the loss of an entire generation of young men

In almost any field of human endeavor — football, acting, plumbing — failure has a price. If you can’t push the hockey puck into the goal, you get kicked off the team. If your jokes don’t make people laugh, your career as a stand-up comic is brutally short. If the house you built has a

During his first NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump refused to state his support for NATO’s most important treaty obligation. During his first British visit, the president managed to offend everybody, from tabloid journalists to the queen. But although there are many incidents and relationships to choose from, the most embarrassing European foreign policy failure

Fire, flares and tear gas scorched Paris on Saturday night; on Sunday morning, the carcasses of burned cars littered the streets, and graffiti covered the Arc de Triomphe. Smaller, and mostly more peaceful, marches had also played out across the country, where for the past couple of weekends protesters have occupied French toll booths, blocked speed cameras

On Saturday evening, three small Ukrainian naval vessels left the Ukrainian port of Odessa and headed for the Ukrainian port of Mariupol. Along the way, they had to pass through the Kerch Strait, a sliver of water that lies between the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula and the Russian mainland. The Ukrainian ships were well within their

We are now more than two weeks into a new sanctions regime on Iran, and it will be a long time before it ends. The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has listed 12 conditions that Iran needs to meet before that happens. They include a permanent cessation of Iranian support for revolutionary groups abroad, as