Uncommon Decency

On May 23rd, a Ryanair plane flying from Athens to Vilnius is instructed by a military jet to land in Minsk as it enters Belarusian airspace, on account that Hamas has a bomb planted on board. One passenger in particular couldn’t be fooled. Blogger...

As a generation, the under-30s in Europe have been fed by the textbook a worldview that sees the European Union (EU) as the sole conduit for enlightened, pacified and efficient relations among the nations of the continent. “Ideals” or “values”...

If the West relies on external shocks to border up, Covid may be falling the test of criticality. If anything, the pandemic is exposing Europe's southern frontier as shockingly porous. As many as 8.000 migrants, predominantly Moroccan, have illegally...

A fog of war clouds the Israeli airspace as this episode goes to press. The country’s ability to secure its citizens is once again being put to the test by the more than 1,000 rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza over the past 40 hours. This reawakened...

“Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! Though fallen, great!” Lord Byron published these lines in 1818 not knowing what a major figure in Greece's History he was destined to become. Three years before dying in its...

“That is the secret of propaganda: those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in its ideas, without ever noticing that they are being so”. These principles outlined by Hitler's master propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, continue...

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". If you've ever been introduced to a History of global power balances, this quote from the Melian dialogue in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War may ring familiar. And yet...

“I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it."...

Piotr S. Wandycz, the Yale historian, once that “what to the Poles was the Polish cause, to the outside world was the Polish question”. To be sure, he was writing in 1980 about the successive European conferences of territorial partition, from...

In (2011), Fukuyama described the problem of creating modern political institutions as one of “getting to Denmark”. The country, in his own words at the time, was “a mythical place known for its stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous and...