There is a difference between a politician deciding your fate and its being left to impersonal chance. But it isn’t a difference that matters much when lives are on the line. When something has to...
‘Our regimes are democratic,’ Pierre Rosanvallon states in the opening sentence of Good Government, ‘but we are not governed democratically.’ There has in recent decades...
Britain’s royal family is deplorable principally because it institutionalises the corrosive divisions of social class. Japan’s imperial house does damage of a different kind.
Now that the long-term confrontation between China and an assortment of countries – Australia, Japan, the US, Vietnam and other less committed fellow travellers (including the UK)...
The RSS presents Hindu nationalism as a cultural nationalism of which Hinduism per se is the defining ingredient. Indian culture, it’s argued, is so deeply defined by its Hindutva essence that no non-Hindu...
What to do about overseas aid has long been a problem for the Conservatives. The Department for International Development (DFID), set up by the Blair government in 1997, is widely seen as a success. To...
In February 1947 the Ministry of Labour had sent officials to recruit displaced people languishing in camps in Germany, including Balts, Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The programme was bizarrely...
If you’re over the age of 50, the odds are that you’re happy with how it’s all worked out. If you’re under the age of 50, the odds are that you’re not, and if you’re under the age of 30, you...
Watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on 4 February, I felt that we had crossed a line. This president was setting up as the benevolent ruler of – it wasn’t...
What is clear above all is that this prime minister does not even pretend, as previous prime ministers have usually pretended, to be merely primus inter pares. He is the Capo, the Duce.
The day I arrived in Lahore, two stories dominated the newspapers’ front pages. The Supreme Court had declared the Ministry of Railways the most corrupt department in the country. No...
Despite abundant evidence from around the world, many people still find it hard to accept that flagrant lying is no longer a disqualification in public life, and that it might in fact be an attraction.
Corruption and hypocrisy tend to be systemic: if you see them at the top you’re sure to encounter them at the bottom. Liberia has been rebuilt with impressive speed; the road networks are now even better...
Perhaps Soviet dissent was always less remarkable as an actual political movement in the domestic context than for the magnified reflection it gained in international media.
It may be satisfying, though it isn’t terribly surprising, to find that the Economist has mostly come down on the side of capital in the major political conflicts of the past. More interesting would...
On 14 April 1988, right at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a US navy frigate, Samuel B. Roberts, hit a mine and was badly damaged. Ten of the crew were injured. The US blamed Iran – even...
Negotiations, as Trump and Pompeo see it, are for sissies; Iran only understands the language of force. As neoconservatives used to say at the start of America’s invasion of Iraq, ‘Boys go to Baghdad:...
Accidents are likely to happen, as demonstrated by what appears to have been the unintentional shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane. At the same time, Trump and his administration are peculiarly...