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Things I have posted recently
- The Year of Covid: Political religion and the Cultural Wars. Part 2.6. The Utilitarians: the birth of economics as a science. 18/04/2023
- The Year of Covid 19: Political Religion and the Culture Wars. Part 2.5. The Utilitarians I: Elie Halévy and the Philosophical Radicals 1750-1867. 12/02/2023
- The Year of Covid 19: Political Religion and the Culture Wars. Part 2.4. The EU’s legacy: 1789-1914: Science, Nature, Necessity. 29/03/2022
- The year of Covid 19: Political Religion and the Culture Wars. Part 2.3: The EU’s legacy, 1492-1789: Europe enters into the Devil’s Anus. 03/02/2022
- The Year of Covid 19: Political Religion and the Culture Wars: Part 2.2: The EU’s Legacy from the Middle Ages. 30/06/2021
- The Year of Covid 19: Political religion and the culture wars. Part 2. 1. Europe’s legacy: the first fifteen hundred years to AD 410. 26/02/2021
- The year of Covid-19: political religion and the culture wars.Part 1. 16/12/2020
- The UK Internal Market Bill: Supranational v. International law 14/09/2020
- China in the World: Chapter 3 Sino-US relations – a stable instability. 11/07/2020
- China in the World: Chapter 2 China becomes the prime global manufacturing and trading platform. 27/06/2020
- China in the World: Chapter 1. From backwater to world power. 16/05/2020
- China, coronavirus and the politics of paranoia 25/04/2020
- Brexit and the British Constitution: Part V. Modernisation or Vandalism? 09/04/2020
- Brexit and the British Constitution: Part IV. The pre-1945 Roots of British Supranationalism. 10/01/2020
- Brexit and the British Constitution: Part III. Efficiency, Parliamentary Sovereignty, Bureaucracy. 02/12/2019
- The Supreme Court’s judgement on Prime Minister Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament: Part IV. New law or constitutional aberration? 06/11/2019
- The Supreme Court’s judgement on Prime Minister Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament: Part III. Assessment. 06/11/2019
- The Supreme Court’s judgement on Prime Minister Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament: Part II. The Arguments for and against. 06/11/2019
- The Supreme Court judgement on Prime Minister Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament: Part I: Definitions and timeline. 06/11/2019
- Apocalypse and Guilt: Why Savonarola and Greta differ. 01/10/2019
Category Archives: Asia
China in the World: Chapter 1. From backwater to world power.
Time hangs heavily on Chinese civilisation. For nearly four thousand years, depending on when the first dynasty is dated, up to thirty dynasties have ruled for varying lengths of time over the Middle Kingdom. Not surprisingly, the prevalent Chinese interpretation … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, China, The United States, World politics, business and economics
Tagged Asia Pacific, China, United States, world politics
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China, coronavirus and the politics of paranoia
The over two hundred independent countries of the world face similar problems dealing with the coronavirus, but the responses from each country are unique. This is one of the fundamental lessons so far from the pandemic. As the proverb says, … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, China, Europe, The United States, World politics, business and economics
Tagged Asia, China, Coronavirus, Europe, Globalization, United States, world politics
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America and the World: Part III. The Crash of 2008 and Eurotragedy.
The two books under review analyze the financial crash of 2008 from different perspectives. Adam Tooze, the historian and director of the Columbia University European Institute in New York, authors Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed The World, … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, Europe, North America, The United States
Tagged Asia, China, Euro, European integration, globalisation, Japan, United States
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President Trump and the global multilateral order
President Trump is destroying the multilateral trading system, which previous US administrations have done so much to promote, and on which the world’s continued prosperity depends. He is doing so as an “American Firster”, thereby setting an example for the … Continue reading
Is it Trump or the EU that is swapping big ideas for bad ideas?
Philip Stevens writes in the FT about“How the world swapped a big idea for a bad idea”. The big idea was “the revolutionary thought that the selfish interests of rich and rising states could be accommodated if everyone played by … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, Europe, France and Germany, Greece, Italy, Russia, Spain, The United States, Ukraine, Uncategorized, United Kingdom, World politics, business and economics
Tagged Asia, Brexit, democracy, EU, France, Germany, globalisation, Post-modernism and the international order, Robert Cooper, United States, world politics
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America and the World: Part II. American century or Asian century?
How fares the American Century is a common question running through our three books. Joseph Nye, in Is The American Century Over? locates its starting date from February 1941, when Henry Luce, editor and owner of Life magazine, wrote an … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, China, Europe, India, Japan, Oil, the Mid East and Gulf, Russia, The United States, World politics, business and economics, World war
Tagged Asia, China, global economy, Globalization, hegemony, Henry Luce, India, interdependence, Japan, melting pot, power shift, Russia, The American Century, The Farewell Address, tribalism, United States, world politics
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America and the world: Part I.
The key words in this cluster of books, focusing on the US, are emerging , retreat, closing and anger. Pankaj Mishra, in Age of Anger: A History of the Present, says that the paranoid hatreds of the present world have … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, China, Europe, France and Germany, India, Italy, Oil, the Mid East and Gulf, Russia, The United States, United Kingdom, World politics, business and economics
Tagged Asia, Brexit, China, democracy, EU, European integration, France, Germany, globalisation, India, interdependence, liberalism, marxist-leninism, nationalism, pos tmodernism, Russia, supranationalism, technology, UK, United States, world politics
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Realpolitik and the European Union. Final Chapter: Part 2. The true challenge facing the Merkel-Macron tandem.
The UK’s certain idea of Europe. A USE maybe attainable. But the hurdles along the path towards it are innumerable, and as likely as not unknown. Not the least of these is that a USE would be at the very … Continue reading
Posted in Asia, Europe, France and Germany, Greece, Oil, the Mid East and Gulf, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, World politics, business and economics
Tagged Asia, EU, Euro, Europe, France, Germany, Globalization, Greece, interdependence, monetary union, Russia, supranationalism, UK, world politics
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Realpolitik and the European Union. Chapter 11. Europe in the World. Part II. Russia, energy, demography.
The theme of Chapters 10 and 11 is the tension between a shrinking Europe living in an expanding world of nation states, while all the while seeking to dis-establish European nation states which experience global developments differentially. Chapter 10 discusses … Continue reading
Realpolitik and the European Union. Chapter 10. Europe in the World:Part I. The US and the rise of Asia.
The transformation of the world. In the key years of 1989-1992, it was Europe, not the U.S., which had the distinction of being both source and origin of the process which came to be called “globalization”—understood driven as technologically conditioned … Continue reading
Writing about history, politics & economics 