Category Archives: India

China in the World: Chapter 3 Sino-US relations – a stable instability.

There is a paradox at the heart of Sino-US relations: as Professor Yan Xuetong has written, they are inherently unstable;[1] yet the structure in which their relations is cast is very stable indeed. They are stable in the sense that … Continue reading

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Brexit and the British Constitution: Part V. Modernisation or Vandalism?

This is the last in the series of articles on Brexit and the Constitution. It is based on four books which have dealt with the subject over the last twenty years: Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at King’s College, London, … Continue reading

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Brexit and the British Constitution: Part III. Efficiency, Parliamentary Sovereignty, Bureaucracy.

The Three Simplifiers. “What is the origin of this seemingly inexorable tendency to get rid of the old checks and balances, asks Ferdinand Mount, to peel off the ancient gnarled bark and hack away the tangle of intertwining and overhanging … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Europe’s slippery slopes: a book review.

There are never enough books to satisfy the reading public’s appetite for ideas about how to overcome Europe’s travails. Our three authors provide us with plenty: all focus in different ways on the two key questions of nationality, and Europe’s … Continue reading

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Corbyn’s Coda: in the shadow of the Swastika

Whenever Jeremy Corbyn has an opportunity, he makes the following statement, and then adds what seems to be a repetitive coda. “There is no place for anti-Semitism or any form of racism in the Labour party”. Sir Eric Pickles, currently … Continue reading

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Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, London, Pocket Books,2007.

Alex von Tunzelmann has written a lovely book on the last days of the British Raj, lovely because it is a moving account of the people, their characters, foibles, and passions who presided over the birth of modernIndia. But it … Continue reading

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