24 July 2008 Karadzic: A Victim of Soft Power By Gwynne Dyer Radovan Karadzic’s disguise was quite elaborate, but he didn’t spent the past thirteen years hiding from the Serbian authorities. They knew where he was all along. Only ten days after the government changed, the police plucked him off the 73 bus that he …
5 June 2008 The Irish Referendum and the European Union By Gwynne Dyer Out of 27 countries in the European Union, only Ireland is holding a referendum on the new constitution. Sorry, it’s not a “constitution.” It’s just a “treaty,” because French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution back in 2005. Now they’ve repackaged it …
17 May 2008 Serbia: When the Sulking Stops By Gwynne Dyer The rhetoric before the Serbian parliamentary election on 11 May was ugly enough, but it has got worse since. President Boris Tadic spun the outcome as a victory for the pro-European Union forces when only half the votes were counted, which served his purposes …
22 July 2007 The Turkish Election By Gwynne Dyer The best thing about the outcome of the Turkish election on Sunday is that now the army can’t make a coup. It may still want to: it was certainly making menacing noises about it recently. But after almost half the voters (47 percent) backed the incumbent …
4 May 2007 Scotland: The Road to Nowhere By Gwynne Dyer On Thursday, 4 May, the Scottish National Party, which promises to hold a referendum on independence by 2010, won the largest number of seats in the election for the Scottish Parliament. It’s the first time that Labour has lost an election in Scotland in …
18 January 2007 Frangleterre? Or Brance? By Gwynne Dyer “The Almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen,” Winston Churchill told the British House of Commons in 1942 — but only two years before, he had publicly offered to merge France and Britain into a single …
16 October 2006 Keeping Turkey Out By Gwynne Dyer Words matter. The Holocaust of the European Jews during the Second World War was a genocide. The mass deportation of Chechens from their Caucasian homeland during the same war was a crime but not a genocide, even though half of them died, because Moscow’s aim was …
11 September 2006 The D – Day Package By Gwynne Dyer “More people have died between Africa and our coasts than in the Lebanon,” said Manuel Barroso, president of the European Union, in Brussels last week-end. “The massive arrival of illegal immigrants to the EU, mainly to the Spanish, Italian and Maltese coasts, is a …
22 May 2006 Yugoslavia R.I.P. By Gwynne Dyer Within days of Montenegro’s successful referendum on independence on Sunday, Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic will be arriving in Brussels to open talks on joining the European Union, while other Montenegrin diplomats arrive in New York to seek admission as the 193rd member of the United Nations. A …
28 April 2006 The Utility of Euroslaps By Gwynne Dyer “Sofia gets Euroslap,”shrieked the headline in the Bulgarian newspaper Trud in early April, and it was true. Olli Rehn, the European Union’s Commissioner for Enlargement, reporting to the European Parliament on Bulgaria’s readiness to join the EU next January, had said that “the jury is …