The Nation has a cracking, snarky and sharply reported, story out about Rick Davies (John McCain’s campaign manager) and his role in the run-up to Montenegrin independence. Read the whole thing, as they say. What struck me about it was first that AFOE had a damn good little controversy of its own about the same [...]

In my work inbox this morning, a message from TeleGeography. Their latest report on IP transit pricing is out. This bit struck me: 1,000Mbits of transit over Gigabit Ethernet in Bucharest now costs no more than it does in London - and only a couple of dollars more than in San Francisco. That’s incredible, and [...]

The same reporter on the Globe & Mail is a fan of Randy McDonald’s blog.

Canada is interested in a huge bilateral agreement with the European Union, which going by the details given would almost amount to membership in the EEA. Cool.
Ironically, in the years when the British Empire was either trying to recast itself as an EU-like economic union or trying to get into the ECSC/EEC with all its [...]

The Austrian government has just abolished university tuition fees. Why depressing?
This is the only thing I’ve ever protested against that’s been reversed.

Nobody likes the European Parliament, and that’s probably why everyone had such low expectations about the “telecoms package” it was meant to pass. There was all kinds of horrible gunk in there - the French government, for a start, had outsourced its policy to the owner of a chain of record shops, who decided that [...]

It seems clear they done it; for God knows what reason - arrogance, hoping beyond hope, misjudgment - Georgia started something it couldn’t finish. The Russians, for their part, were playing for it for years; the harassment campaign, the motor-rifle regiments parked up on the southern road. But however wrong they were, I’m saddened by [...]

The Russian-Georgian war should remind everyone of a very important point regarding NATO and the European Union. Specifically, just as John Lewis Gaddis said about the Cold War, reassurance was as important as deterrence, and this made self-deterrence very important indeed.
NATO members benefited from a common deterrent towards the Soviet Union, but also from reassurance [...]

It’s strange, really; looking back at Radovan Karadzic’s career, the thing that strikes me is how he seems to have recapped most of Europe’s 20th century in his own life, barking his shins on the bits that didn’t fit.
First of all, he wanted to be a romantic poet, itself a dated idea. According to Tim [...]

An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with little in common except allegiance to a distant Parisian king; the [...]