Opinion pieces

  • Belarus blue, by Charles Grant
    The Wall Street Journal, 15 March 2006

    To a first-time visitor, the capital of Belarus seems normal. People look content, streets are clean and orderly, and cafés ring with lively and frank exchanges.

  • Drinking the Kool-Aid, by Mark Leonard
    Prospect, 01 February 2006

    Was the Iraq adventure doomed to fail or did the US administration mess it up? A new crop of books suggests that the nation-builders of Iraq were fighting the right war in theory but not in practice.

  • Viewpoints: Europe's way forward, by Mark Leonard
    BBC News, 30 January 2006

    Confidence - A lot of the sense of crisis is self-generated. As soon as European leaders start dealing with pressing problems in a visible way, like building up the foreign policy machinery, dealing with migration and terrorism and modernising their economies and welfare states, then citizens will be less sceptical.

  • Western European politicians should stop exploiting populist fears of low-wage competition, by Katinka Barysch
    European Voice, 26 January 2006

    Germany's new Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, revived an idea that was first mooted in 2004 by the then chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy: to cut EU regional aid to new member-states that engaged in 'tax dumping'.

  • The great firewall of China will fall, by Mark Leonard
    The Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2006

    Google, the popular search engine that floated on the stock market last year, has not abandoned its corporate motto: "Don't be evil".

  • India tilts to the west as the world's new poles emerge, by Charles Grant
    The Guardian, 12 January 2006

    Nothing is permanent in history, including America's domination of the global economic and political systems. Assuming China and India keep growing at their current rates, the unipolar world of recent years - topped by the US - will be replaced by a multipolar world within a few decades.

  • "Son problème, c'est l'Allemagne", by Charles Grant
    Liberation.fr, 10 January 2006

    Le Britannique Charles Grant, directeur du Centre pour la réforme européenne, à Londres, analyse les chances du président français de sortir l'Europe de sa crise institutionnelle.

    Jacques Chirac est-il crédible quand il propose de relancer l'Europe ?

  • The geopolitics of 2026, by Mark Leonard
    The Economist, 02 January 2006

    History is traced not is straight lines but in jagged and discontinuous strokes. But what if the future follows a more predictable path?