Last night I was in the downtown bookstore to pick up some stuff for travel planning, and I glanced over at their bestseller rack. Number one was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In English. The German edition won’t come out until October.
The best-selling book in the store is in a foreign language. That’s some [...]

As most of you will have already picked up, Japan today is having upper house elections. Japan’s current leader Shinzo Abe is widely thought to be in for a drubbing. Normally elections to the Japanese upper house would not be considered to be particularly important, but this time there are reasons to believe that things [...]

Well, fresh from my recent exchange with the Economist’s Central European correspondent (and see my original Afoe post which sparked the reply), it is pleasing to be able to announce that that very same journal this week contains a series of interesting articles on some of the very topics which were at issue. In the [...]

We’ve just returned from two weeks on Formentera, the smallest and southernmost of the inhabited illes Balears. We try to spend some time on the island at least once every two or three years; for it is an unspoilt place, a place time has left behind, a place untouched by the imperatives of vulgar economics.
No, [...]

France needs to abandon its rejection of globalisation, right? Get with the programme? Join the war against terrorism? Or face simply becoming irrelevant? We’ve blogged plenty at AFOE about the bizarre notion that France and the United States are suddenly irreconcilable foes, but here is some definitive refutation. Defensetech.org reports that the USS Enterprise had [...]

The flipside of the European dream is that by its nature, the vision of “non-imperial empire” as Barroso calls it is a powerful encouragement to the paranoid imagination. Curiously, the vision remains much the same across different paranoid styles; almost uncannily so.
In Britain, a surprisingly large number of people in the Conservative Party - not [...]

Well, the financial markets are happy at any rate. The Turkish stock market jumped 5% on Monday while the lira closed at a two-year high against the US dollar. Tayyip Erdogan (leader of the victorious Justice and Development party, the AKP) was also a happy man: “The new government will bring peace and stability” he [...]

At least I’m not the only one.
Good discussions here, here, here, here and here.

It is Summer, the silly season. So, let me chase some chirping crickets here at AFOE with some silly thoughts on public discourse before my more interesting AFOE colleagues spring into action again. And they will, so stay tuned even if my little essay here should turn out to be a bit tedious.
Public discourse, or [...]

If the EU didn’t exist, would we have to create it? Arguably, one of the best reasons for doing so would be the power it has demonstrated to spread democracy, constitutionalism, peace, and other good stuff through the accession process. Today, we had an excellent example of this. On the 7th of July, the European [...]