Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 32

Anne Applebaum: The long view with Russia

In an ordinary year, not all that much happens at the annual Munich security conference. NATO defense ministers murmur earnest platitudes. Experts furrow their brows. But this is not an ordinary year.This year, the normally staid audience laughed out loud at the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who seemed, at one point, to question the legality of German unification. Some of the room also applauded loudly when Angela Merkel, the German chancellor — just back from an apparently fruitle...

Forget left and right: Europe’s divisions lie elsewhere

For those who want a happy ending or an easy moral to the story, the election of a new Greek government last month poses some interesting quandaries. Progressives of various kinds at first hailed what appeared to be a victory for the radical left-wing party Syriza, but they were caught off guard when Syriza instantly struck a coalition deal with the Independent Greeks, a radical right-wing party that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a legendary European leftist, bluntly described as “ultranationalist” wit...

Greece’s bid for more control follows a similar push across Europe

For those who want a happy ending or an easy moral to the story, the election of a new Greek government last month poses some interesting quandaries. Progressives of various kinds at first hailed what appeared to be a victory for the radical left-wing party Syriza, but they were caught off guard when Syriza instantly struck a coalition deal with the Independent Greeks, a radical right-wing party that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a legendary European leftist, bluntly described as “ultranationalist” wit...

Europe has survived terrorist attacks before

LONDONIn the more than two weeks that have passed since the murder of more than a dozen people in Paris — cartoonists, policemen, customers at a Jewish grocery store — a number of European countries have called for new countermeasures to fight terrorism. The French prime minister announced a whole raft of policies. The British want databases to monitor travel in and out of Europe. At emergency meetings, European officials have discussed what one British paper called a “new era of travel surve...

North Korea’s incomprehensible regime

In the 1990s, a large group of prisoners was released from North Korea’s secret labor camps. These were not criminals, nor were they even political enemies. On the contrary, they were, in the words of a defector, the grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of “landlords, capitalists, collaborators with the Japanese colonial government, and other people with bad family background.” The Soviet Union once arrested the wives and children of political prisoners, and Russia recently sent the bro...

Taking democracy for granted

Imagine that you are a mother of a very poor family in Udaipur, India, and that you want to have your children immunized. But now imagine — as the economist Esther Duflo once demanded of a TED audience — that because you are very poor, you have an infinite number of small things to do, from fetching water to cooking food from scratch to running a small shop. In order to get your child immunized, you have to walk several kilometers to a health center that turns out to be closed. Would you both...

Another reason to avoid reading the comments

LONDON

If you are reading this article on the Internet, stop afterward and think about it. Then scroll to the bottom and read the commentary. If there isn’t any, try a Web site that allows comments, preferably one that is very political. Then recheck your views.

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Is Germany ready to assume a global role?

BERLIN

Far from the main events — the balloons, the speeches and the 25th-anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Wall — last weekend I joined a panel discussion about the future of Europe, as one does so often in Germany. Asked to say a few words about “threats to the West,” I spoke about the relative weakness of NATO, about the failures of European foreign policy, about Russia’s use of money and disinformation to divide Europe and the United States.

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Anne Applebaum: Jews celebrate their place in Poland’s history

WARSAW

There were ministers and presidents, and an audience full of people from around the world. But at the official opening of the beautiful Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw last week, there was one speech that stood out from all of the others. In the cold autumn sunlight, Marian Turski got up in front of the crowd and began with the following words:

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The myth of Russian humiliation

Looking back over the past quarter-century, it isn’t easy to name a Western policy that can truly be described as a success. The impact of Western development aid is debatable. Western interventions in the Middle East have been disastrous.

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