Karl Marx said that ideology is part of the social superstructure, merely a decorative overlay on the brutal truth of the economic base. Millian liberalism was really just an expression of the pounding steam engines, Jacquard looms and downtrodden apprentices of 1840s Manchester, just as absolutism had been built on the assumption that society would [...]

So Kosovo continues to creep — soooo slowly — towards some sort of independence.
Serbia is having a Presidential election this weekend, with a runoff two weeks later. There’s a tacit agreement that nothing should happen before then… the assumption being that Kosovar independence might tip the balance between the incumbent President (moderate [...]

Jamie Kenny and Nosemonkey wonder why Labour is pro-EU. Enlarging on this post a little, I think it’s worth looking at some data. I suspect the data support that post. For example, despite all the bashing, a solid majority supports EU membership and has done consistently over time.
Further, the public does not worry very much [...]

Christopher Caldwell, senior editor of neocon house journal the Weekly Standard, once wrote a six-page feature in the New York Times magazine in which he claimed that Robert Kilroy-Silk would “transform European politics”. Despite this, he is still taken seriously by some people; disturbingly, this includes the editors of the Financial Times. In his column [...]

As long as they’re in Spain, that is..
Less snarkily, the article asks the very important question whether this is an answer to the problem of aging populations, and contrasts Spain with Denmark and Nicolas Sarkozy’s election campaign. And it even tackles Edward Hugh’s concerns that the Spanish construction boom may pop with unpredicted consequences.
Meanwhile, [...]

Who can forget it?
I spent the day driving from Bosnia to Austria with an American colleague. We were on a mission to the IKEA shop in Graz, to buy furniture for our office. But we spent the evening discussing the collapse of the Conservatives and the imminent change of government; the constitutional reforms for Scotland [...]

Fritz Stern was born in what was then Breslau, Germany, grandson of Jews who converted to Christianity, son and grandson of physicians and researchers, at a time when medicine was truly becoming a science and Germany was leading the way. His godfather and namesake was Fritz Haber, who discovered how to fix atmospheric nitrogen, won [...]

So Serbia had parliamentary elections yesterday.
Short version: could have been better, could have been much worse. There will be a new government, but probably not much will change.
A bit more below the flip.

Read more… or Read more right here… »
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Bulgaria has a Presidential election this weekend. There’s no question who’s going to win, but there’s still some nail-biting suspense.
Why? Well, the current President is former Socialist Georgi Parvanov. (”Former” Socialist because the Bulgarian President must not be affiliated with any political party.) He seems to be a decent enough fellow. [...]

The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the [...]