President Obama stands accused of political correctness for his unwillingness to accuse groups such as the Islamic State of “Islamic extremism,” choosing a more generic term, “violent extremism.” His critics say that you cannot fight an enemy you will not name. Even his supporters feel that his approach is too “professorial.” But far from being […]

In Anders Breivik’s manifesto, the ostensibly Christian defeat of the Ottoman armies at Vienna in 1683 is the central historical event. He imagines a European rebirth in 2083, four hundred years later, and names the Polish king Jan Sobieski, whose troops were crucial to raising the Ottoman siege, as one of his heroes: “John III […]

In 1932 and 1933 a few starving Ukrainians made their way to Leningrad, where they had family connections. They narrowly escaped joining the seven million Soviet citizens who perished from malnutrition in the early 1930s, as the Soviet leaders brought peasant farms under collective control. Josef Stalin punished Soviet Ukraine particularly harshly for the shortfalls […]

It was 20 years after I chose to become a historian that I first saw a photograph of the woman who made my career possible. In the small photograph that my doctoral supervisor, her son, showed me in his Warsaw apartment, Wanda J radiates self-possession, a quality that stood her in good stead during the […]

Europe is facing the biggest wave of migration since that from the East at the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. And it is indeed Central Europe, whose peoples regard freedom of movement as the greatest benefit arising from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, where today […]

What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Recent events in Paris inevitably prompt these questions. In particular, is the kind of satire that Charlie Hebdo has made its trademark—explicit, sometimes obscene images of religious figures (God the father, Son, and Holy Spirit sodomizing each other; Muhammad with a yellow star in his […]

The year 2014 will be remembered in Europe for the West’s rickety consensus on how best to minimize the damage caused by Russia’s resurgence as a revisionist power. Developments along Europe’s periphery marked the unequivocal end of aspirational “positive geopolitics,” built around the belief that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 began a […]

Ronan McCrea is a barrister and a lecturer at the Faculty of Laws at University College London. His latest book is Religion and the Public Order of the European Union (2010). he European relationship between religion, law and politics is a strange creature. Religious influence over political life is weaker in Europe than in almost […]

COMMENTING on the flow of migrants making their way through Hungary to Austria and Germany, a Hungarian journalist told me recently: “We don’t have cities anymore. Only an extended railway station.” Twenty years ago, Hungary and its Eastern European neighbors were transitional, post-Communist societies, and several — Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia — still are. Now, overnight,
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THOSE of us outside Europe are watching the unbelievable images of the Keleti train station in Budapest, the corpse of a toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, the desperate Syrian families chancing their lives on the night trip to the Greek islands — and we keep being told this is a European problem. The […]

Viděli jsme, že ve Spojených státech vzkvétají vedle etablovaných církví i četné kulty a sekty, zatímco v Íránu a jiných oblastech Středního Východu, v severní Africe a na indickém subkontinentu se dynamicky rozvíjí islámský fundamentalismus, jenž úspěšně vzdoruje západním vlivům. Severní Irsko zůstává po staletí ostře rozděleno na
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Politickou stranu lze definovat jako organizaci usilující o získání legitimního podílu na vládě prostřednictvím volebního procesu. Za určitých situací existují politické organizace, které se sice snaží o získání moci, ale je jim odepřena možnost k ní směřovat obvyklými prostředky. Dokud jim toto právo není přiznáno, lze je považovat spíše za
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