- search:
-
hoover.org
-
archives
-
library
Jump to Featured Commentary | Interviews | Other Media
Their opposition to the Islamist regime must be remembered —a new book, film and report can help...
One harrowing year since the stolen election, the people of Iran need the world's attention to go beyond the nuclear issue...
Who wouldn't want to be in a successful, well-run country like Norway? But beware false analogies and fantasy projections...
Our leaders are peddling delusions. The eurozone has not been saved, the EU has no foreign policy, and others are making history...
If all goes well with this strange partnership, Britain's step into the unknown may lead to vital political and constitutional change...
Ignore siren calls for tactical voting. Keep head and heart together, and we will compel the change we need...
The Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that politicians were being coy about cuts. But voters want the truth...
If there is no clear winner two parties must rapidly agree voting reform and spending cuts. The bond market sharks are circling...
It's odd the Mail and Telegraph think readers will be put off by Clegg's class. They may not even mind his being pro-Europe...
As England starts to realise the amount of power devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Britain will change.
All parties herald a new politics. None will deliver it alone. The makeup of the next parliament matters more than ever.
This second Katyn offers a message of hope for a country that has won its place as a free fatherland.
Speaking to the three would-be foreign secretaries you find plenty of common ground, except on the thing that matters most.
On Saturday Helmut Kohl, the "chancellor of German unity", will turn 80. To mark the occasion the chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many others in Germany will deliver nice tributes to old king Kohl. . . .
Google versus China is a defining story of our time. . . .
When was the last time you heard anyone enthusing about Barack Obama's foreign policy? . . .
Every writer of reportage ought to learn from the Kapuscinski controversy. . . .
British voters must not be intimidated by an unholy alliance of currency traders and the Daily Mail. . . .
The spirit that once led Europeans into union has vanished, just as we now face the euro's widely predicted flaws. . . .
To keep us safe and free, a new government must set up a judicial inquiry into the entanglements of our secret services. . . .
Yanukovych's election is a startling historical turn, but the country can still have a more prosperous, free and European future . . . .
The tipping point is close when every country will want to be another nuclear France. . . .
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the right "to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers". . . .
Ideological differences between the parties are hugely exaggerated. . . .
From Denmark to Detroit the threat of violence is ever present. . . .
While the west has been on holiday, Iranians have again risked their lives to protest against an increasingly desperate, oppressive regime. . . .
An Islamist terrorist caught trying to crash a plane over Detroit creates a flash of illusory clarity. . . .
A new agency is to vet one citizen in four to see if we are abusers. . . .
What really matters is not minarets, but that we all, Muslims included, commit to the essentials of a free society. . . .
European states should not simply make foreign policy in reaction to Washington, but look to our own vital interests. . . .
The holders of the new top jobs can perfectly represent a Europe that does not dare to project its values as a continent. . . .
There needs to be a real conversation about competing values. . . .
Monday's celebration in Berlin was a brilliant closure. The opening of a European foreign policy looks more shaky. . . .
"Twenty eight years and 91 days!" said the elated east Berliner I met walking up the Friedrichstrasse soon after the wall was breached. . . .
Year of revolutions: Mired in the narcissism of minor difference, Europe is failing to face up to the world its revolution helped to create...
Now the European Union is damned if it doesn't and damned if it does...
History comes back to haunt us...
Unsurprisingly, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 has added to an already groaning shelf of books on the year that ended the short twentieth century...
Whatever happened to Britain's constitutional moment?...
Barack Obama is the most European president of the United States that there has ever been...
Once upon a time, and a very bad time it was, the world trembled when Germany spoke...
Let's get this straight: the people who will change Iran for the better are the Iranians...
'A golden dream by the sea" is how Arnold Schwarzenegger described California, when he was inaugurated as the state's governor six years ago...
"Change – I'd like mine back"...
The farce of David Cameron's Latvian legion becomes more ridiculous by the day...
The last year has seen the death of three extraordinary European thinkers who engaged deeply with the public life of their time...
Unless I've missed something, Britain has not just emerged from a war, revolution or declaration of independence...
So it's official...
“It was the bard wot won it.”...
How would you describe a British politician who prefers getting acquainted with the finer points of the history of the Waffen-SS in Latvia to maximising British influence with Barack Obama?...
Someone should institute an annual 4 June review of the Chinese, European and American models...
We, the people, need to make sure that this awakening of "new politics" doesn't end up like the last...
As a piece of carpentry, this table is nothing to write home about...
Fly-over country...
At work, we're told to be diligent and disciplined; elsewhere, hedonistic and self-indulgent...
The other day I heard a pro-European British politician say the most extraordinary thing...
There are two kinds of country: those in which ordinary, decent people are afraid of criminals but trust the police, and those in which ordinary, decent people are afraid of criminals and of the police...
One complaint I heard during a recent stay in China is that western media give a distorted picture of what's happening there...
There is a simplistic way to read this renaissance of an ancient tradition...
Today - 2 April 2009 - may yet be marked as the day on which, through the catalysis of a global economic crisis, China definitively emerged as a 21st-century world power...
When President Barack Obama comes to London next week, he will find one great power missing at the world's summit table: Europe...
Everything is being stress-tested in this crisis...
For 30 years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world...
GOVERNMENT and markets both have their place in a decent society, President Obama suggested in his Inaugural Address, but can become a force for ill if they are without restraint...
At five minutes to five yesterday afternoon, Tehran time, Iranian television viewers finally got the channel they have been asking for...
Weak, divided, incoherent, hypocritical and infuriating - that's how you hear the EU described privately in Beijing and Washington...
Happy new year? You must be joking...
As we mark the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's launching the country's world-changing economic reforms, I want to address the $65 quadrillion question of China's peaceful rise...
Across the world, people who have never heard of our leaders dote on our footballers, and the SAS is outshone by Quidditch...
The country's reformers seek incremental political changes to complement its gobsmacking growth...
Kangaroos, I read in the South China Morning Post, originally came from China...
As he embarks on the uphill struggle to translate dreams into realities, one strategic goal President-elect Barack Obama should embrace on his inauguration day is that of a world freed from the threat of nuclear weapons...
To join that ebullient crowd in front of the White House shortly after midnight on Tuesday November 4 2008 was to dance with history...
In Warsaw, Missouri, there's a ghost who keeps talking to me through the mouths of strangers...
From my observation perch in Stanford, and as an English European turned 24/7-cable news-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election...
Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory...
As Meltdown Monday (September 29) follows Meltdown Monday (September 15), the mountain of American capitalism is changing shape before our eyes...
As the two men who would succeed him train like Olympic athletes for tomorrow's foreign policy debate, pause for a moment to complete your final report on the 43rd president of the United States...
Even before Meltdown Monday, I was going to write about the politics of fear...
As you read this, another corner of Europe has been ethnically cleansed...
Next week, a bunch of political leaders will sit around a table at the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan, contemplating the state of the world...
Whether you believe in him or not, it's time to give God a helping hand...
After the Irish "no" vote, the question Europe faces is: does Germany really want to remain in this European Union?...
Today was a bad one for both liberty and democracy in Britain...
To say that Europeans will welcome President George Bush on his farewell visit to Europe next week would invite a charge of verb-abuse...
I divide my academic life between two universities, Oxford and Stanford...
This weekend, unless Burma's generals rediscover in their shrivelled souls some remnant of human decency, there will take place in the Irrawaddy delta one of the most grotesque events in the political history of the modern world...
In Krakow, Poland's Oxford, the Brits don't have a good reputation...
During the Velvet revolution of 1989 I spied an improvised poster in a Prague shop window...
Berlusconi does it again...
At the time of this writing, the dissemination on the worldwide web of the deliberately provocative anti-Islam film Fitna, made by the Dutch populist MP Geert Wilders, has not provoked violent protest on the scale of the Rushdie affair or the Danish cartoons...
France and Britain can plausibly claim to have the longest-running national rivalry in the history of the world....
France and Britain can plausibly claim to have the longest-running national rivalry in the history of the world....
Gordon Brown yesterday promised to meet the Dalai Lama when he comes to Britain in May...
I am glad to be a British citizen...
This presidential election is such a cliffhanger...
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another ...
This week David Miliband gave an excellent speech explaining why the promotion of democracy is too important a business to be left to American neocons...
In the early 21st century, American presidential elections have become the political equivalent of the football World Cup...
This has got to stop...
Wherever you turn in Davos, you see the World Economic Forum's modest motto: "Committed to improving the state of the world..."
Placido Domingo was supposed to stand up in Madrid next Monday and sing some proposed new words for the Spanish national anthem...
Everyone knows what the United States will be up to this year: electing a new president...
Who do you want to be the most powerful person in the world?
Is flooding the new terrorism?
When the leaders of the European Union (except for the curmudgeonly latecomer Gordon Brown) gather this morning at Lisbon's Jerónimos monastery, to sign what was once intended to be a European constitution, they will be congregating in a glorious building in Portugal's distinctive Manueline style, they will be welcomed by a prime minister called Socrates, and they will be endorsing a dog's dinner...
Some time in the next decade, two European countries will become members of the European Union...
A great debate of our time concerns how people with different religions, ethnicities and values can live together as full citizens of free societies...
What should we call the people who want to kill us?
Smiley swirled the last of the brandy in his balloon glass and muttered: "We've given up far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now we've got to take them back..."
Memories of the day have faded and capitalism has triumphed, but the event endures as a model of non-violent resistance...
Europe is slouching towards another foreign policy disaster on the scale of Iraq...
Every so often, just when you're getting tired of it, you are reminded what a wonderful thing democracy is...
The chief lesson of a unique polling project is that the EU's greatest worry is not Brussels - it's 23 different languages...
It's Groundhog Day in Britain's European debate...
In the Cameron Con, aka the Hague Hoax, they bash the very Europe they will depend on to achieve their goals...
There is frustratingly little Europe and the US can do to halt the unfolding tragedy...
This week General David Petraeus and ambassador Ryan Crocker have been in London, trying to persuade Britain not to pull all its troops out of Iraq...
To return from the United States to Europe is to travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism, but is not, to a continent which is on the front line but still has not fully woken up to the fact...
Even supporters of the Bush administration criticise its incompetence and the dysfunctional political system behind it...
Iraq is over. Iraq has not yet begun. These are two conclusions from the American debate about Iraq....
The American public has decided that its boys should come home, but the ghosts of Baghdad will return with them...
Some time ago, Brazil's census takers asked people to describe their skin colour....
Picture a man who is patiently and quietly enduring a rather painful medical procedure...
Liberal democracy can't flourish where rookie drug dealers earn more than teachers and the poor are treated like dirt...
Salman Rushdie, with a little help from her majesty, has again clarified the battle lines on which we stand...
It's delightfully easy to follow the development of the European Union through the American media...
You think you've reached bottom, then you hear knocking from underneath...
With 17 months to go, the 2008 race is already well under way, and the first signs are of a resentful, defensive America...
The US tightening of entry requirements is understandable, but it must not be at the cost of its welcoming reputation...
From Northern Ireland to Rwanda, and from Kosovo to East Timor, people face the problem of how to deal with a difficult past...
The trial of the year is about to begin - the national interest versus Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre...
All political careers end in failure, but it is not always the same failure...
As an Englishman, I've been trying to work out what I think about Scottish independence...
Sitting in the Downing Street garden, I ask him what is the essence of Blairism in foreign policy. 'Liberal interventionism...'
Just as Blair is leaving the stage, a kind of Blairism could prevail across the channel...
A new treaty and a fresh understanding of its relationship to the rest of the world will render the EU fit for purpose again...
Last week, while the European Union celebrated 50 years of peace, freedom and solidarity, 15 Europeans were kidnapped from Iraqi territorial waters by Iranian Revolutionary Guards...
If Europe were a person, he'd send her to a psychologist...
Are there credible versions of Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy as it has developed in the west?
In front of the towering golden sandstone entrance to the temple of Edfu stands an imposing granite statue of a falcon, some 12ft tall, representing Horus, a premier league Egyptian god...
In Egypt the US has retreated from its push for democracy in the Arab world. Europe should step into the breach...
Karl Marx's solutions haven't worked, but he was right about the global reach and potential unsustainability of capitalism...
After going through hell, the former Serbian province is in limbo...
We should not bomb Iran to prevent Iran getting the bomb...
Beyond boo-words like multiculturalism, the reality is that young British Muslims are deeply alienated...
If you want to see the world as a whole, the best view is from the moon...
The German justice minister has proposed that all EU states should criminalise Holocaust denial and ban the public display of Nazi insignia, as Germany itself does...
In recent years, the rightwing Catholic twins who run Poland have advanced two articles of political faith: first, that the strength and moral integrity of the Polish nation is built upon the rock of the Polish Catholic church; and, second, that the weakness and corruption of Polish public life results from the failure to cleanse it of former collaborators with the communist regime...
On New Year's Day, the silent empire expanded again...
In world politics, 2007 may be the year of realism...
Last weekend I went and sang a lot of words that I don't believe...
What an amazing bloody catastrophe...
In the next few weeks, the government will decide how much British viewers will pay for the BBC over the next seven years...
Sitting with my academic colleagues in the gilded discomfort of Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre earlier this week, discussing the future governance of England's oldest university, I thought of GK Chesterton's remark that tradition is the democracy of the dead...
Tony, jagshemash...
You may not realise it, but you are at this moment looking at a weapon more powerful than most in the possession of the US army...
Tuesday November 7 2006 marks the beginning of an end and the end of a beginning...
Whether or not a formal post-mortem into the Iraq war is launched by a newly Democrat-controlled Congress after Tuesday's midterm elections, no one doubts that this has been a war, one without end...
They died in vain...
What a magnificent blow for truth, justice and humanity the French National Assembly has struck…
I have been meaning for some time to write a column in defence of the hijab, on the same grounds on which I defended free speech last week...
Almost every day brings a new threat to free expression...
Here in Washington, five years after George Bush launched his "global war on terror" in response to the 9/11 attacks, I sense one of those subtle subterranean movements that may presage a significant shift in American foreign policy...
For anyone who has hoped and believed, as I have, that the British way of integrating Muslim citizens is more promising than the French one, the last year has been discouraging…
A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism…
It's taken me nearly a week to read all 353 comments posted on the Guardian blog in response to my column last week about cheese-eating surrender monkeys and fire-eating war junkies…
On the eve of the summit of the Group of Eight industrialised nations, which opens this week in St Petersburg, Europeans are faced with a delicate balancing act in their policy towards Russia…
Driving through Toronto last week I saw a shiny black 4x4 with an English flag sticking out of one side window and a German flag out of the other…
Having just returned to America after a year's absence, I'm pondering this question …
Driving through Toronto earlier this week I saw a shiny black 4x4 with an English flag sticking out of one side window and a German flag out of the other…
I want England to win the World Cup…
Next Monday is the 61st birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner…
Last Sunday I watched France playing football…
Well, it depends on what you mean by Europe — and what you mean by a country…
How many countries are there in Europe…
To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity…
Finding out why people blow themselves up is not an attempt to excuse their actions but to work out what to do about it
What kind of partner will the resulting EU-rope be for the United States?
In 1989, British writer and Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash reported on the wave of democratic revolutions that swept Europe, and witnessed some of its key events. . . .
UN investigator Richard Goldstone on his controversial Gaza report, Colombian President Uribe, and a global panel on Iran...
In the autumn of 1989, the term "velvet revolution" was coined to describe a peaceful, theatrical, negotiated regime change in a small Central European state that no longer exists. . . .
Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash discusses the demise of Europe's social democrats, threats to the European Union posed by populist nationalists, the imminent change of government in Great Britain and America's rapid slide to the left...
What does it mean to be European, and what is Europe's future?...
EXCLUSIVE - We interview British historian and journalist Timothy Garton-Ash in the run-up to June’s twentieth anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland...
In the run-up to the European elections, what issues are being debated in the United Kingdom?...
SPIEGEL ONLINE talks to historian and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash about the European Union's weak image in the world, the limits to EU expansion and how Europe should tackle Russia and Iran...
Granted: he was a member of the Waffen-SS...