Politics Roundtable
A Fistful of Euros
Breaking news in the last hour is that Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade. Karadzic, you may recall, was the President of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He’s under indictment for about twenty different war crimes, and has been on the run since 1996.
Few details are ...
Well some times I agree with Wolfgang Munchau, and sometimes I don’t. This is one of the occasions when I do, especially the following passage which can be found in his Financial Times op-ed this morning:
“Some degree of competitive adjustment is probably needed but the huge scale of the ...
(This story is a week old. Somehow, inexcusably, I missed it until now.)
Anyway: the Miss Universe pageant was held last weekend. It was in Vietnam this time, and a nice young lady from Venezuela won, but what’s interesting to your hardcore Balkanologist is that
1) the ...
“Look, Doctor, he’s just faking……. Even now in the hour of his death he has to trick us.”
The opening sentence: ‘There’s a long silence, and then I say …’ indicates the three functions of this book. It is an attempt to find a self through utterance, after a lifetime of ...
Nicolas Sarkozy is going to Dublin for a few hours on Monday. Going by the Elysee website, his agenda for Barack Obama’s visit on Wednesday is far clearer than for his visit to Ireland. On what is ostensibly a listening tour to understand the reasons for Ireland’s rejection of ...
Via the invaluable Osservatorio sui Balcani comes a fascinating report on crime in the Balkans. It’s by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (ONODC), and it offers some surprising conclusions:
[The] Balkans is safer than thought…
With detailed, comprehensive statistics, the report concludes that the Balkans, ...
The Prime Minister of Belgium has offered to resign, setting up an unwanted rematch with Serbia to see which European parliamentary republic can go the longest without a national government. Serbia’s recent entry in the contest is a mere 57 days. The
Back in January, I posted about how Macedonia’s young Prime Minister, Nikola Gruevski, was for some reason the most popular head of government in the Balkans.
Well, they had Parliamentary elections at the beginning of June, and Macedonia said: yes. Gruevski’s center-right coalition won a whopping 63 ...
So the Turkish government indicted 86 people earlier this week for various nefarious plots involving Ergenekon, the secret far-right secular nationalist group linked to the military.
The timing of this is sort of interesting, since Turkey’s Supreme Court (which is dominated by secularists) is expected to deliver a decision ...
An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with little in common except allegiance ...