International politics

I am sitting in a busy café in Athens’s fancy Kolonaki district, watching the city’s elite stroll by in their well-fitting couture jeans, as the afternoon sun shimmers off the dusty streets. The women are weighed down by that most delightful of burdens — shopping bags from the local FENDI shop — and the latte I have just ordered comes at the recession-defying price of five euros.   The regular demonstrations, which block the city centre and bring the police out in force, are now greeted with resignation rather than concern. It may take a little longer to travel home when the shops close -– which they do mid-day on

Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and a number of top Polish officials, including the Central Bank president, the Polish ambassador to Moscow and an Army chief, were killed when the presidential plane crashed near an airport in western Russia.  The tragedy – the worst in modern Polish history – ends an extraordinary career for the actor-turned-politician who, alongside his twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, upended Poland’s political system when they founded the conservative party Law and Justice, and in 2006 controlled both the presidency and the government. The brothers first found fame as child actors, with angelic faces in a film version of the popular children’s book The Two That

A few days after President Barack Obama flew to Kabul to look Hamid Karzai in the eye and demand that he combat corruption, drugs, crime and the influence of notorious warlords in his government, President Karzai has blamed foreigners, including UN and EU officials, for “very widespread” fraud during presidential and provincial elections last year. He is quoted as telling a meeting of election officials: “There was fraud in presidential and provincial council elections – no doubt that there was a very widespread fraud, very widespread … But Afghans did not do this fraud. The foreigners did this fraud.” As insane notions go this one is quite extraordinary – even

In Britain, a lot of people think Parliament has either become useless, venal or both. Few would look to it for moral guidance. Not so in Serbia, where the nation’s legislature has condemned the 1995 Srebrenica murder of 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina – Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II – for the first time. In 2004, I was involved in getting the Bosnian Serb authorities to admit their role in the crime. Reluctantly, they admitted that their forces participated in the killings, but many condemned the resolution at the time. So the Serbian move is significant. But the road to reconciliation in the Balkans is still long. Although some

Could Britain and France share defence assets? Julian Glover’s column in the Guardian concludes: ‘As for the new carriers, they are, unlike much defence equipment, adaptable and manoeuvrable. They could sail to the rescue in Haiti or feed the hungry in Mogadishu as easily as obliterate Tehran. We should build and deploy the first, and persuade the French (whose own grandiose carrier doesn’t work) to complete and equip the second: a shared fleet for two European nations that have yet to reconcile themselves to their more modest place in the world.’ Politicians on both sides of the Channel speak eagerly of deeper entente. But there is not always a way

Week two and the US-Israeli spat has calmed. More than a dozen Republican and Democratic Congressmen have pressed the Obama administration to tone down its criticism, following initial outrage of Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to build 1,600 homes in the disputed East Jerusalem territory – announced during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit. Claims that the US-Israel relationship have sunk to the worst level for 35 years were rejected by Hillary Clinton. And in his first public comments on the controversy, President Obama downplayed criticism of the Israeli government over the illegal settlement expansion plan. But I am with Israel’s ambassador to the US: there is real risk of a lasting rift

It is more than 100 days since Guido Westerwelle became Germany’s foreign minister and the questions about Germany’s diplomatic introspection remain. They may have even grown and are becoming problematic for Berlin’s allies.   Chancellor Schröder appeared to follow a Sonderweg, a philosophy that saw Berlin move away from old notions of peacemaking and away from old alliances, such as that with the United States. At times, he seemed to want a new axis between Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, making Germany a go-between between East and West, a kind of post-modern Tito. Angela Merkel’s first term addressed the worst excesses of the Schröder years, but the vagaries of coalition government