Доминик
Моизи

“The United States, China, and maybe the European Union, if Great Britain stays within it” will lead tomorrow’s world; in fact, continued EU membership is the only way for the United Kingdom to secure “a future worthy of her past.” This sentiment could have come straight out of an old French discourse on the pursuit of grandeur through European integration. In fact, it came from former British Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Five years ago, when the so-called “Arab Spring” erupted, Turkey’s hour seemed to have arrived. Having been humiliated by the European Union after years of accession negotiations – talks marked by a chain of false promises from the EU – Turkey’s then-prime minister (and now president) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had the perfect plan for restoring his country’s pride and boosting its credibility: It would help to reshape a Middle East in turmoil. Needless to say, things have not unfolded exactly as planned.

Ever since the terrorist attacks in January on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, Parisians knew that barbarism lurked around the corner, and that it would strike again. But it is one thing to know something, to anticipate it, and another to be confronted with the grim reality. On Friday night, reality struck us with a vengeance. We are at war. It would be wrong – even dangerous – not to admit it. And to win will require clarity, unity, and firmness

This month’s agreements on the Greek crisis and Iran’s nuclear program are undoubtedly important achievements. But the comparisons that have accompanied both deals have tended toward hyperbole, impeding rational discussion of their implications for Europe, the Middle East, and the prospects for international diplomacy

“One must Europeanize the Balkans, in order to avoid the Balkanization of Europe.” I wrote those words with the French political scientist Jacques Rupnik in 1991, just as war was breaking out among Yugoslavia’s successor states. The fighting would last until the end of the decade, claim thousands of lives, and twice require the intervention of NATO (in Bosnia in 1995 and Serbia in 1999)

The tragedy of Russia is that it poses as great a threat to itself as it does to its neighbors. As Europe faces off with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, a larger and ultimately more important battle is taking place within Russia itself, one that pits the country’s rich culture against the cruel mendacity of its politics

Once again, Europe seems to have reached a fork in the road. In one direction lies the future as described by pessimists, who argue that rising populist movements and the plunge of the euro are evidence of the continent’s coming slide into geopolitical and economic oblivion. In the other direction lies a steep upward path to Europe’s integration and reemergence as a global power – the course, optimists say, that the continent will take as it wakes up and recognizes that it must have the capacity to weather the harshest storms

“France’s 9/11.” In the immediate aftermath of the massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the comparison with Al Qaeda’s 2001 attack on the United States has taken hold across France. Indeed, the January 7 attack was the most murderous France has known since the end of the Algerian War in 1962. But how accurate is the analogy?