In the confusing aftermath of Catalonia’s messy independence referendum, the Catalan regional government’s president, Carles Puigdemont, wanted to have his cake and eat it.His long-awaited speech to the regional parliament, in which he promised to declare independence from Spain,

“We must educate our masters,” Robert Lowe, a British statesman, told colleagues after the passage of the Second Reform Act of 1867, a law that added over a million voters to the Parliamentary Register.For Lowe, an educated populace was the best means to secure participatory gove

Some in the United States have praised President-elect Donald Trump for his supposed realism.He will do what is right for America, they argue, without getting caught up in thorny moral dilemmas, or letting himself be carried away by some grand sense of responsibility for the rest

After four long years of talks in Havana, Cuba, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has negotiated an end to successive governments’ armed conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the most resilient insurgent group in Latin America.Colombia’s civil war,

The late American diplomat George Ball once argued that Israel needed to be saved from its own suicidal policies “in spite of herself”.In a 1977 Foreign Affairs article, he called for an even-handed push by the United States for an Arab-Israeli peace.But while Ball’s realistic po

Belgian historian Henri Pirenne linked Europe’s birth as a Christian continent in the eighth century to its rupture with Islam.Pirenne probably would never have expected a Muslim ghetto in Brussels to emerge, much less become a hub of jihadism, with marginalised and angry young M

Israel’s persistent occupation of Palestinian lands is irreparably damaging its international standing — or so the conventional wisdom goes.In fact, Israel currently enjoys a degree of global influence unprecedented in its history, as a slew of new international challenges give i

The European Union is a remarkable achievement of modern statecraft.

According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the ongoing wave of knife attacks on Jews by young Palestinian “lone wolves” can be blamed entirely on incitement by Palestinian Authority and Islamist websites.Netanyahu evidently expects Israelis, and the world, to believe