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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

If you want to lecture the French on “economic reform”, it pays to have some knowledge of French economic history. If you insist on doing so despite knowing nothing, “Big Mouth Strikes Again” is not a good headline. Of course, it could be some downtrodden sub-editor’s revenge.
Anyway, Chris Walker writes in today’s Independent that Nicolas [...]

Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa will need all of his namesake’s wisdom, and none of his taste in last drinks, as he takes over the rotating presidency (careful, the page has an annoying soundtrack) of the European Council this weekend.
Chancellor Merkel’s quiet persuasion has brought the EU much closer to a [...]

Remember when Labour couldn’t win an election and the UK’s Conservatives made much of their reputation as “the natural party of Government”? Remember when all that changed? Eppur si muove.
Daniel Davies got the timing almost exactly right when his model showed that the greatest gap between the incentive for MPs to keep Blair and to [...]

PwC was auditor for what was then one of Russia’s largest oil companies, Yukos. The Russian government took a serious disliking to Yukos and its then-president Mikhail Khodorkovsky, eventually putting the company effectively out of business (with key bits sold off to state-owned or state-controlled companies) and Khodorkovsky in jail. Now the Russian government is [...]