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 …
3 October 2005 Turkey, Europe and the Clash of Civilisations By Gwynne Dyer “What do you gain by adding 99 percent Muslim Turkey to the European Union?” asked Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan last month. And then he answered his own question: “You gain a bridge between the EU and the 1.5 billion-strong Islamic …
23 May 2005 No Plan B: The French EU Referendum By Gwynne Dyer President Jacques Chirac’s tone now often verges on the desperate. “How can we renegotiate?” he asked French voters in early May. “Do you really believe it is serious to say that? There’s not the shadow of a chance….Renegotiation does not exist. There …
9 December 2004 The New Revolutions By Gwynne Dyer The Ukrainian revolution has won. There still has to be a re-run of the second-round presidential election on 26 December, but there is no doubt that it will be pretty clean this time, and that opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko will win handily. So the heavy-industrial, Orthodox, …
29 September 2003 Russia and Kyoto By Gwynne Dyer President George W. Bush did not instantly kill the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change just by pulling the United States out of the treaty in March, 2001, but it did mean that every other major industrial country on the planet had to ratify it before …
10 August 2003 Muslim Democracy in Turkey By Gwynne Dyer It goes against all the stereotypes about Turkey. Talk to the party secretary of the traditionally secular Republican People’s Party in a small south coast town and she sounds old-fashioned and anti-democratic with her talk of the Turkish army as the ‘last resort’ against the …
21 August 2002 Johannesburg: The Value of Hot Air By Gwynne Dyer It has been calculated that flying all 65,000 delegates to the ten-day World Summit on Environment and Development that opens in Johannesburg on 26 August will dump an extra half-million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — as much as one million …