Section: New Statesman (The United Kingdom)
Best of the NS in 2015: World
Our best pieces from the past year. In this selection, our favourite writing about world affairs. Russia vs the west: the consequences of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine By Elizabeth Pond Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed the peace in Europe for a generation. What the west can learn from Japan’s “lost decades” By Roland...
The art of the possible: rediscovering the meaning of realpolitik
Realpolitik: a History by John Bew reviewed. Many years ago I studied history as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. My motivation was a fascination with the future more than with the past: without historical study, as my fellow Scot Niall Ferguson has argued elsewhere, our reference points for understanding the future are limited to...
What does Vladimir Putin want from the UN’s next secretary-general?
The shadow of an American or Russian veto will colour the next year at the United Nations. In the years of crisis and decline that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, three things enabled Russia to hold on to its status as a great power. The first was the large stockpile of Soviet nuclear weapons that confirmed it as America’s only...
Cameron needs to decide what he thinks about Russia
David Cameron’s words suggest one thing, his actions quite another. David Cameron needs to decide whether he takes Russia seriously. He certainly talks a good game, calling Vladimir Putin to account for crimes against Ukrainian sovereignty and for supporting the wrong side in Syria, claiming credit for bolstering the post-Crimea sanctions...
Is Ukraine finally getting to grips with its corruption problem?
Two years of war, illness and economic pain has followed Ukraine’s revolution, and reforms are still slow to arrive. If you want to know why Ukraine had a revolution, consider this: it has one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics, and yet officials deliberately overcharged their own health ministry for anti-retrovirals to make...
John Gray: World hunger is the result of politics, not production
We can’t know when the next famine will occur, but it will be a by-product of war and politics. “If you had asked most mainstream development experts in the year 2000 to name those factors they thought would most imperil their efforts to reduce poverty globally in the new millennium, it is highly unlikely they would have mentioned a sudden...
An escalator deep under Kyiv has the power to change the rider’s existence
There should be some way of apprehending the wondrousness of even our most banal transports. The alternative is everyday murderousness. Here’s how Louis-Ferdinand Céline characterises travel in his trippy 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night: “An infinity opens up just for you – a laughable little infinity; and you fall into it.”...
Why has the government taken international law out of the Ministerial Code?
The developments are sinister. First published in 1992, the ministerial code sets out the standards expected of ministers and makes them accountable to the Prime Minister for their conduct in office. It has been updated by successive Prime Ministers, but one small change in the latest edition, published this month, has left both constitutional...
How long until Putin bans Echo of Moscow, Russia’s last bastion of free speech, from the airwaves?
Sergei Buntman, deputy editor of opposition-friendly radio station Echo of Moscow, gives us an insight into how long outlets like his have in Russia until they are shut down. Almost exactly 25 years ago, the Law on the Press came into force in the USSR, establishing freedom of speech, banning censorship and allowing independent media outlets to...
Reading the Pussy Riot act
Nadya Tolokonnikova, of female punk protest collective Pussy Riot, on the danger of UK conservatism, living in Moscow, and how the middle-class anti-Putin movement is waning. “Moscow calling!” The Belarusian rock band Brutto tear into their adaptation of the Clash classic. A roar erupts from the audience packing out Koko, the opulent late...
