Global Politics

In the tribute he wrote in 1954 for Robert Jackson, his friend and Supreme Court colleague, Justice Felix Frankfurter explained the profound effect that the experience of prosecuting the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg had on Jackson’s endeavour to understand the human condition. “An essentially good-natured, an even innocently unsophisticated temperament, was there made to realise […]

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“Viruses know no borders and they don’t care about your ethnicity, the colour of your skin or how much money you have in the bank.” The words of WHO official Dr Mike Ryan about Coronavirus (COVID-19) would seem to many of us common sense. What appears ‘common sense’ does not, however, always manifest in the […]

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Europe is currently facing a fundamental shift in its approach to armaments procurement: cooperation both between countries and manufacturers in the development and production of armaments is considered the only way forward in the coming decades. With Germany and France representing the vanguard of the European defense industry, the fate of their KANT project symbolizes […]

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This article was originally published by The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in Carnegie Ethics Online on 17 August 2015. In Klaus Harpprecht’s 1995 biography of Thomas Mann, he highlights a statement which Mann wrote in 1947, which, as Harpprecht puts it, “one reads with a distinct shiver half a century later”: In […]

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Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is clearly starting to believe his own (Turkish) press, which is increasingly unlikely to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. Foreign Policy magazine reports here on the German satire show that has got Erdogan so worked up. The video shows footage of Erdogan’s most absurd public moments, intercut with crackdowns […]

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CC Image courtesy of Rareclass This piece was also published in Huffington Post on 23rd June 2016 Something we in Scotland learned the hard way in 2014 is that referendum questions are dangerous because they make both choices on the ballot paper seem equally plausible. By giving the people a choice we somehow assume that […]

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Just three weeks after entering office, Polish President Andrzej Duda’s first official visit to Berlin on August 28 allayed concerns in some quarters that his presidency would resurrect the combative foreign policy his right-wing party, Law and Justice, practiced the last time it was in power from 2005 to 2007. Back then, prickly ties with […]

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With Greek debt negotiations reaching a critical point, it may be time for a reminder that there are more problems within the eurozone than just southern European debt. Austerity rightly remains firmly in the headlines, but looking beyond the struggles in Athens reveals that economic changes may be needed further north. Indeed, while the new […]

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I haven’t been wildly impressed by how Angela Merkel has handled the eurozone crisis, but this speech to the German people shows why (for my money) she’s easily the most impressive political leader in Europe, if not the world, right now. At a time when too many UK politicians have been pandering to extreme tendencies in a craven attempt […]

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