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The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,

Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.

The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.

He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope

presenting Princip his victims at close range.

on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,

As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.

So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992

in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,

which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.

Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union

To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are

ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,

Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.

Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.

“Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.

Not only have pro-Palestinian rallies been stopped or broken up by police

ermany’s unwavering official support for the Israeli government’s actions leaves scant room for humanity. It is also counter-productive, serving to spread fear, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism

In addition to banning Hamas-related symbols schools are now free to also ban “symbols, gestures and expressions of opinion that do not yet reach the limit of criminal liability”, which includes the keffiyeh, the Palestinian flag and “free Palestine” stickers and badges.

The stifling of opposition to the killing of civilians in Gaza even extends to Jewish people. A Jewish Israeli woman who held up a placard in a Berlin square calling for an end to violence was approached by German police in a matter of seconds and taken away in a police van. She was later released. Anyone showing solidarity with Palestinians is automatically suspected of being a tacit Hamas sympathiser.

German education senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch has also sent out an email to schools saying that “any demonstrative behaviour or expression of opinion that can be understood (italics are mine) as approving the attacks against Israel or supporting the terrorist organisations that carry them out, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, represents a threat to school peace in the current situation and is prohibited

Having grown up in the shadow of collective guilt for Nazi war crimes, many German intellectuals seem almost to welcome an opportunity to atone for ancestral sins. The atonement, of course, will fall on the backs of Palestinian children.

It should come under the “stating the obvious” category, but still has to be underlined: historically, Islamophobia has only led to more terrorism. Having grown up in Bosnia, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the vicious circle is never-ending. There is always another dead body to be weaponised.

Living in Germany, I see it as my human responsibility to call it out for its one-sidedness, its hypocrisy and its acquiesence in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Walking by Lucie’s stone every day, I am reminded of that responsibility. I am reminded of what silence can do and how long it can haunt a place and a people. I come from a silent place soaked in blood. I never thought I would feel that same silence in Germany.

I am appalled by Hamas’s actions and offer my thoughts for their victims, but I have no say in what they do. None of my taxes go to the funding of Hamas. Some of my taxes, however, do fund the bombing of Gaza. In the period between 2018 and 2022, Israel imported $2.7bn-worth of weapons from the US and Germany.

Either you are against fascism in all its forms, or you’re a hypocrite. You condemn a terrorist organisation as well as the terrorism committed by a government

This and other recent acquittals have effectively absolved Serbia of any responsibility for atrocities committed by proxy armies in Croatia and Bosnia and by the covert network of paramilitary combat units trained, paid and supervised by the secret police.

“The entire doctrine of command responsibility has been ditched,” said Eric Gordy, who teaches the politics of Eastern Europe at the University College London and follows the trials closely. “So has the liability for aiding and abetting.”

“This and several other recent decisions have become completely irrational,” he said, citing as evidence the Serbian attack in late 1991 that virtually leveled the town of Vukovar in eastern Croatia, where both Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were present with special units and giving directions. “There is no way they could not have known there were crimes involved,” he said.

While never a monolith, Bosnian Americans in St Louis – which is home to an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Bosnian Muslims – have near-universally been put off by Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric and are wary of the Republican candidate’s popularity among Serbian nationalists.

Serbian nationalists’ support of Trump has also raised red flags. During the Republican national convention, a man wearing a “Make Serbia Great Again” hat was photographed several times. When Vice-President Joe Biden visited Belgrade earlier in August, hundreds of Serbian nationalists gathered to chant, “Vote for Trump!” The group was led by rightwing Serbian politician Vojislav Seselj, who was accused of helping to orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and other non-Serbs from “greater Serbia” in the 1990s.

built in 1020 by Werner

in the Aargau

in what is now Switzerland

rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950

Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232)

Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408

Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins

the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers

Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy

The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him

his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I.

Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s

Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance

Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued

To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial

Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy.

Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720

Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line

he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts

The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward

By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza

acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession

Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy

The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands

her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of Habsburg–Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs

An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it

the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory

when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany

The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772)

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes

On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted

a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise

The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire

German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia–Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy

Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia.

Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”

he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary.

The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars

Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864

In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey

World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper

Iraq was the bad war and Libya was the good war and Afghanistan was the necessary war and Bosnia was the moral war and Syria is now another necessary war.

They are all the same war.

multisectarian societies, most of them Muslim or Arab, are held together for decades by dictators ruling vertically, from the top down

how the people in these countries respond to the fact that with the dictator gone they can only be governed horizontally

own social contracts for how to live together as equal citizens

without falling into Hobbes or Khomeini.

Saddam to Jefferson

“the army of the center.”

Iraq, we toppled the dictator and then, after making every mistake in the book, we got the parties to write a new social contract

“army of the center.”

Ditto Afghanistan.

Libya: No boots on the ground. So we decapitated that dictator from the air.

Hobbes took hold before Jefferson.

For any chance of a multisectarian democratic outcome in Syria, you need to win two wars on the ground: one against the ruling Assad-Alawite-Iranian-Hezbollah-Shiite alliance; and, once that one is over, you’d have to defeat the Sunni Islamists and pro-Al Qaeda jihadists.

both will be uphill fights.

The center exists

weak and unorganized

pluralistic societies

lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism

tolerance, cooperation and compromise

pluralistic society but lack pluralism

not without an army of the center to protect everyone from everyone.

not just poison gas, but poisoned hearts

self-governing, largely homogeneous, ethnic and religious units, like Kurdistan

modus vivendi, as happened in Lebanon after 14 years of civil war

smaller units will voluntarily come together into larger, more functional states.

“arm and shame,”

spare me the lecture that America’s credibility is at stake here. Really?

Their civilization has missed every big modern global trend

learning to tolerate “the other.” That struggle has to happen in the Arab/Muslim world

quality of local leadership and the degree of tolerance

The impact on Ukraine’s 45 million people would be tragic. Historic cities like Kyiv, Lviv or Odessa could be left facing the destruction inflicted on Aleppo or Sarajevo. The European Union would have to cope with an unprecedented refugee crisis that would risk undermining traditional democratic parties as far-right groups exploit discontent over such an influx from the east.

As casualties mount among civilians and pro-Western forces, pressure would grow for international intervention, perhaps along the lines of NATO’s airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo

Crimea — a largely Russian-speaking Black Sea region, where the Russian navy maintains a major base — could be a flashpoint.Russian officials have said Moscow would be prepared to fight to regain it if Ukraine shifts westward. Moscow has history here. It has supported breakaway movements to undermine other westward-leading former Soviet nations like Georgia and Moldova.

2. Victory for Yanukovych and Putin

The EU’s “eastern partnership” plan to build an arc of Western-style democracies along its borders would be left in tatters. In its place would be a new, Cold War-style division of the continent.

3. PartitionA glance at results from the 2010 presidential election that brought Yanukovych to power will show the extent of Ukraine’s divisions. The north and west voted solidly for pro-Western candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, who is now in jail, the south and east supported Yanukovych.

If President Viktor Yanukovych’s ongoing crackdown succeeds in crushing the demonstrators, Ukrainians can expect their country to be sucked back into the Russian orbit. The hoped-for “association agreement” with the European Union setting the country’s limping economy on a Western path would be buried.

4. RadicalizationUkraine’s protesters are not all brave democrats fighting for freedom. Among them are hardline nationalists with xenophobic and anti-semitic leanings.

5. Ukraine resurgentThis week’s violence has seriously damaged hopes that Ukraine can emerge peacefully from the crisis as a democracy that maintains good relations with both Russia and the West.

Yet there remains some hope of a solution — if Putin, Yanukovych and the opposition see that the dangers of confrontation outweigh those of compromise; if Russia and the West agree to jointly help rebuild Ukraine’s weakened economy; and if they allow the country to choose its own path which could enable continued economic ties with both.Should that happen, a stable and prosperous Ukraine could still become an important partner for Europe and the United States and a bridge between east and west.

The conference, moreover, took place against the background of many new commemorative publications, including the Australian historian Prof. Christopher M. Clark’s account of World War I’s origins, titled “The Sleepwalkers.” An astounding global success, Professor Clark’s book has prompted a substantial revision among historians of the war’s causes. Whereas in the past German nationalism and bellicosity were singled out as disproportionately culpable, Mr. Clark lays equal blame on the other great powers, France, Russia, and Britain.

Furthermore, he argues that Princip was directly or indirectly an arm of Serbia’s intelligence services, not a Bosnian teenager acting on his own. Mr. Clarke also links Serbia’s expansionist campaign at the beginning of the 20th century, and its brutality, to the ethnic cleansing and war crimes of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The Serbian news media has rallied to the country’s defense with headlines like “Austrians Planned the First World War a Year before the Murder of Ferdinand”; “Vienna had a War Plan in 1913”; and “We are not to Blame for the War.”

“I admit that I wholly underestimated the passionate approaches to the topic and its meaning for today’s politics in the region,”

Mr. Bieber said that Serbs had overreacted to the Clark book and to the intention of the conference. “Clark doesn’t blame Serbia for the war, but rather the Great Powers — all of them,” he said. “Clark is hard on Serbia, more so than most historians, but in Serbia his theses are deliberately misread,” he added, attributing this to domestic politics.

The controversy around the conference, Mr. Bieber wrote in a recent essay in Balkan Insight, suggested that forthcoming commemorations would “not be shaped by reflecting on the past, but by making use of the past for the present.”

“We have seen the signs of this already and we do not want to see any development of this nature taking hold in this country, and we have the historical analogies fresh in our minds,” Ms. Johnson said, in a seeming reference to conflicts in Bosnia or Rwanda.

He spent the rest of his life in exile in the Netherlands, where he died at age 82.

Wilhelm’s childhood was shaped by two events, one medical and one political. His birth had been traumatic; in the course of a complicated delivery, the doctor permanently damaged Wilhelm’s left arm. In addition to its smaller size, the arm was useless for such ordinary tasks as cutting certain foods with a knife at mealtime.

In 1881, Wilhelm married Princess Augusta Victoria (1858-1921) of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple would go on to have seven children

Wilhelm damaged his political position in a number of ways. He meddled in German foreign policy on the basis of his emotions, resulting in incoherence and inconsistency in German relations with other nations. He also made a number of public blunders, the worst of which was The Daily Telegraph affair of 1908. Wilhelm gave an interview to the London-based newspaper in which he offended the British by saying such things as: “You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares.”

The kaiser supported the plans of Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930), his chief admiral, who maintained that Germany could gain diplomatic power over Britain by stationing a fleet of warships in the North Sea. By 1914, however, the naval buildup had caused severe financial problems for Wilhelm’s government.

Wilhelm’s behavior during the crisis that led to war in August 1914 is still controversial. There is little doubt that he had been broken psychologically by the criticism that followed the Eulenburg-Harden and Daily Telegraph scandals; he suffered an episode of depression in 1908. In addition, the kaiser was out of touch with the realities of international politics in 1914; he thought that his blood relationships to other European monarchs were sufficient to manage the crisis that followed the June 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Although Wilhelm signed the order for German mobilization following pressure from his generals–Germany declared war against Russia and France during the first week of August 1914– he is reported to have said, “You will regret this, gentlemen.”

In late 1918, popular unrest in Germany (which had suffered greatly during the war) combined with a naval mutiny convinced civilian political leaders that the kaiser had to abdicate to preserve order. In fact, Wilhelm’s abdication was announced on November 9, 1918, before he had actually consented to it. He agreed to leave when the leaders of the army told him he had lost their support as well. On November 10, the former emperor took a train across the border into the Netherlands, which had remained neutral throughout the war. He eventually bought a manor house in the town of Doorn, and remained there for the remainder of his life.

After two decades in exile, he died in the Netherlands on June 4, 1941, at the age of 82.

With more than 91,000 deaths, the country has one of the highest death tolls in Europe.

More than 4.2 million infections have been reported in France since the start of the pandemic,

Traffic jams were reported as thousands of people tried to leave the French capital ahead of the lockdown on Friday. Traffic volume and train reservations were both up 20%

Earlier in the week, Italy — which was the first country in Europe to impose a lockdown last year — issued new national restrictions to stop the spread of the virus. Hungary, Bulgaria and Bosnia have also tightened their restrictions in recent weeks. Other countries, including Germany, have warned of a possible return to stricter measures in the days ahead.

Under the country's lockdown rules, only essential businesses — such as grocery stores and pharmacies — will stay open. The country will also cancel all in-person classes and return to online education over the course of the lockdown.Over 49,000 people have so far died in Poland from the virus,

Poland is taking its measures a step further and embarking on a nationwide three-week lockdown on Saturday after cases jumped 44% week-over-week. Health officials attribute the recent spike to the U.K. coronavirus variant, according to the country's health ministry.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn urged residents on Friday to diligently follow coronavirus safety rules, warning that vaccines won't arrive quickly enough to prevent a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With Germany set for a four-day-weekend in early April to mark the Easter holiday, Spahn said the country is not yet ready to relax travel and physical distancing rules. In fact, he said, Germans should be prepared to revert to tighter restrictions.

In the United Kingdom, the conversation has turned away from lockdowns as the nation celebrated a milestone in its fight against the virus on Saturday with the news that half of its adult population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the country set a new record for daily vaccinations on Friday.

in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan is self-isolating at home after testing positive for COVID-19, a tweet from his office said.The prime minister is suffering a "slight cough" and the "mildest of fevers," according to two government officials.

news of the prime minister's positive test result came just two days after he received his first vaccine dose for the virus.The proximity of those two events could raise concerns that will deepen vaccine hesitation in the country. Health officials have tried to stress that Khan, 68, had likely been infected before he was vaccinated on Thursday.

Vaccine hesitancy is an issue in Pakistan, with a poll earlier this month showing that it is also high among healthcare workers. Hours before the announcement, authorities shut down restaurants across the Pakistani capital as the U.K. variant of the virus spreads.

How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?

I posed these questions to a wide range of experts. This column explores their replies.

While most acute among those possessing high status and power, Anderson said,People in general are sensitive to status threats and to any potential losses of social standing, and they respond to those threats with stress, anxiety, anger, and sometimes even violence

White supremacy and frank racism are prime motivators, and they combined with other elements to fuel the insurrection: a groundswell of anger directed specifically at elites and an addictive lust for revenge against those they see as the agents of their disempowerment.

It is this admixture of factors that makes the insurgency that wrested control of the House and Senate so dangerous — and is likely to spark new forms of violence in the future.

The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Weatherman bombings in protest of the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the assassination of abortion providers, may be motivated by different ideological beliefs but nonetheless share a common theme: The people who did these things appear to be motivated by strong moral conviction. Although some argue that engaging in behaviors like these requires moral disengagement, we find instead that they require maximum moral engagement and justification.

“lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment.”

This increased vigilance, Brinke and Keltner continue, createsa bias such that relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power

there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those occupying higher classes, and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members — that is, those that occupy higher classes.

Before Trump, many of those who became his supporters suffered from what Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, describes as pervasive “unhappiness, stress and lack of hope” without a narrative to legitimate their condition:

When the jobs went away, families fell apart. There was no narrative other than the classic American dream that everyone who works hard can get ahead, and the implicit correlate was that those who fall behind and are on welfare are losers, lazy, and often minorities.

What, however, could prompt a mob — including not only members of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois but also many seemingly ordinary Americans drawn to Trump — to break into the Capitol?

One possible answer: a mutated form of moral certitude based on the belief that one’s decline in social and economic status is the result of unfair, if not corrupt, decisions by others, especially by so-called elites.

There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.

violence is:considered to be the essence of evil. It is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do it because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.

“Most violence,” Fiske and Rai contend, “is morally motivated.”

A key factor working in concert to aggravate the anomie and disgruntlement in many members of Trump’s white working-class base is their inability to obtain a college education, a limitation that blocks access to higher paying jobs and lowers their supposed “value” in marriage markets.

In their paper “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare, professors of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote that the “most striking” data in their research, “is the decline in odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.”

there isvery consistent and compelling evidence to suggest the some of what we have witnessed this past week is a reflection of the angst, anger, and refusal to accept an “America”’ in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance, be it political, material, and/or cultural. And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power. A more racially, ethnically, religiously diverse US that is also a democracy requires White Americans to acquiesce to the interests and concerns of racial/ethnic and religious minorities.

In this new world, Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market whereyou can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.

The result, Federico notes, is that “group consciousness is likely to emerge on the basis of education and training” and when “those with less education see themselves as being culturally very different from an educated stratum of the population that is more socially liberal and cosmopolitan, then the sense of group conflict is deepened.”

A major development since the end of the “Great Compression” of the 30 years or so after World War II, when there was less inequality and relatively greater job security, at least for white male workers, is that the differential rate of return on education and training is now much higher.

Trump, Richeson continued,leaned into the underlying White nationalist sentiments that had been on the fringe in his campaign for the presidency and made his campaign about re-centering Whiteness as what it actually means to be American and, by implication, delegitimizing claims for greater racial equity, be it in policing or any other important domain of American life.

Whites in the last 60 years have seen minoritized folks gain more political power, economic and educational opportunity. Even though these gains are grossly exaggerated, Whites experience them as a loss in group status.

all the rights revolutions — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — have been key to the emergence of the contemporary right wing:As the voices of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized communities grow louder the frame of reference from which we tell the story of American is expanding

The white male story is not irrelevant but it’s insufficient, and when you have a group of people that are accustomed to the spotlight see the camera lens pan away, it’s a threat to their sense of self. It’s not surprising that QAnon support started to soar in the weeks after B.L.M. QAnon offers a way for white evangelicals to place blame on (fictional) bad people instead of a broken system. It’s an organization that validates the source of Q-Anoners insecurity — irrelevance — and in its place offers a steady source of self-righteousness and acceptance.

“compared to other advanced countries caught up in the transition to knowledge society, the United States appears to be in a much more vulnerable position to a strong right-wing populist challenge.”

First, Kitschelt noted,The difference between economic winners and losers, captured by income inequality, poverty, and illiteracy rates within the dominant white ethnicity, is much greater than in most other Western countries, and there is no dense welfare state safety net to buffer the fall of people into unemployment and poverty.

Another key factor, Kitschelt pointed out, is thatThe decline of male status in the family is more sharply articulated than in Europe, hastened in the U.S. by economic inequality (men fall further under changing economic circumstances) and religiosity (leading to pockets of greater male resistance to the redefinition of gender roles).

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

On top of that, in the United States.Many lines of conflict mutually reinforce each other rather than crosscut: Less educated whites tend to be more Evangelical and more racist, and they live in geographical spaces with less economic momentum.

for the moment the nation faces, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a civil insurgency. What makes this insurgency unusual in American history is that it is based on Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidency, that the election was stolen by malefactors in both parties, and that majorities in both branches of Congress no longer represent the true will of the people.

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

“white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

nlike most European countries, Kitschelt wrote,The United States had a civil war over slavery in the 19th century and a continuous history of structural racism and white oligarchical rule until the 1960s, and in many aspects until the present. Europe lacks this legacy.

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president.

What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

In Poland, the government has just passed an emergency law allowing authorities to turn back refugees who cross into the country “illegally”. It is the latest development in a diplomatic standoff with Belarus, which has cynically been encouraging people from Iraq, Iran and parts of Africa to cross into the EU, in response to sanctions imposed on it earlier this year. Poland’s hardline response leaves many people trapped in the no man’s land between the two countries.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, claims this is an essentially benevolent measure: if boats in the Channel are turned around, it will eventually stop people attempting the dangerous trip in the first place. In fact, it undermines a key principle of international maritime law that makes it a duty to rescue people in distress.

In the UK, the Home Office has quietly tried to amend its draconian nationality and borders bill, currently at committee stage, by introducing a provision that gives Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if they fail to save lives at sea.

These developments are harmful in their own right, but they also set a disturbing precedent for how countries in rich parts of the world might deal with future displacements of people – not just from war and persecution, but from the climate crisis as well.

Three recent stories, from three different corners of Europe, suggest that governments are crossing a new threshold of violence in terms of how they police their borders.

This is not only a problem for today: it is a dress rehearsal for how our governments are likely to deal with the effects of the climate crisis in years to come.

a new report by the World Bank projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by water shortages, crop failure and rising sea levels by 2050.

Unfortunately, many of our politicians are primed to see displacement first and foremost as a civilisational threat. That was the logic of Boris Johnson’s comments ahead of the launch of Cop26 in Glasgow, when he claimed – incorrectly – that “uncontrolled immigration” was responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, and that a similar fate awaits the world today

In this telling, an environmental disaster that affects us all is transformed into a question of how the wealthy and powerful can preserve their privileges.

they are backed up by a burgeoning border security industry. A recent report by the Transnational Institute warns of what it calls “the border-industrial complex”, a growing multibillion dollar industry that ranges from security infrastructure to biometrics and artificial intelligence. The global market in fences, walls and surveillance alone is projected to be worth $65-$68bn by 2025.

Richer parts of the world have already begun to militarise their borders, a process that has accelerated in response to the refugee movements of the past decade.

What’s required, instead – beyond action to reduce emissions – is a plan to help people adapt to changing living circumstances and reduce global inequality, along with migration policies that recognise the reality of people’s situations

A major new US study commissioned by the Biden administration recommends new laws to protect climate migrants, but it is strikingly light on detail.

Big questions remained about East Germany’s integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans, and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against the threat of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders.

in my view, whether it happened depended less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts, or seek to re-create a version of its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military?

In 1994, Russia became the first country to join the Partnership for Peace, a program for practical bilateral cooperation, including joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries.

Beginning in 1995, after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War, we made an agreement to add Russian troops to the peacekeeping forces that NATO had on the ground in Bosnia. In 1997, we supported the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs, and supported Russia’s entry to the G7, making it the G8. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces.

Throughout it all, we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin.

Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.

When my administration started, in 1993, no one felt certain that a post–Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable, and democratic.

Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary

The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for Central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go-it-alone strategy of militarization.

At the time I proposed NATO expansion, however, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side.

As Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December 2021, “It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go West.”

Or as Havel said in 2008: “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.” To reject Central and Eastern European countries’ membership into NATO simply because of Russian objections would have been doing just that.

Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliance’s then-16 members; two-thirds consent of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate; close consultation with prospective members to ensure that their military, economic, and political reforms met NATO’s high standards; and near-constant reassurance to Russia.

Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine

She understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic, and other tribal divisions that threatened it. She used every item in her famed diplomat’s toolkit and her domestic political savvy to help clear the way for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO in 1999.

The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever-larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security.

Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO

Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil.

And it is the strength of the NATO alliance, and its credible threat of defensive force, that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe.

Anne Applebaum said recently, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years … We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn’t done it.”

The failure of Russian democracy, and its turn to revanchism, was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin.

Hitchens argued that unfettered free speech and inquiry would always make civil society stronger. When he wrote the introduction to his collection of essays For the Sake of Argument in 1993, he had a specific left-wing tradition in mind: the left of Orwell and Victor Serge and C.L.R. James, which simultaneously opposed Stalinism, fascism, and imperialism in the twentieth century, and which stood for “individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism.”

he argued that these values are for export. Hitchens believed in universal human rights. This is why, at a time when his comrades were still manning the barricades against the “imperial” West after the Cold War, he argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should intervene to stop a genocidal assault on Bosnia. It’s why he argued that American power could be used to defend human rights and promote democracy.

He didn’t just despise religion because he regarded it as a form of totalitarianism—he also recognized that it’s an infinitely replenishable wellspring of tribal hatred.

He also opposed identity politics, because he didn’t think our social and civic lives should be reduced to rigid categories based on melanin, X chromosomes, and sexuality.

He recognized that the Enlightenment values of individual rights, freedom of expression and conscience, humanism, pluralism, and democracy are universal—they provide the most stable, just, and rational foundation for any civil society, whether they’re observed in America or Europe or Iraq.

As many on the Western left built their politics around incessant condemnations of their own societies as racist, exploitative, oligarchic, and imperialistic, Hitchens recognized the difference between self-criticism and self-flagellation.

Hitchens closes his book Why Orwell Matters with the following observation: “What he [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”

One of the reasons Orwell accumulated many left-wing enemies in his time was the fact that his criticisms of his own “side” were grounded in authentic left-wing principles

he criticized the left-wing intellectuals who enjoy “seeing their own country humiliated” and “follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong.” Among some of these intellectuals, Orwell wrote: “One finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the Western countries.”

This is a predictable manifestation of what the American political theorist Michael Walzer calls the “default position” of the left: a purportedly “anti-imperialist and anti-militarist” position inclined toward the view that “everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.”

the tendency to ignore and rationalize even the most egregious violence and authoritarianism abroad in favor of an obsessive emphasis on the crimes and blunders of Western governments has become a reflex.

Much of the left has been captured by a strange mix of sectarian and authoritarian impulses: a myopic emphasis on identitarianism and group rights over the individual; an orientation toward subjectivity and tribalism over objectivity and universalism; and demands for political orthodoxy enforced by repressive tactics like the suppression of speech.

These left-wing pathologies are particularly corrosive today because they give right-wing nationalists and populists on both sides of the Atlantic—whose rise over the past several years has been characterized by hostility to democratic norms and institutions, rampant xenophobia, and other forms of illiberalism—an opportunity to claim that those who oppose them are the true authoritarians.

He understood that the left could only defeat these noxious political forces by rediscovering its best traditions: support for free expression, pluralism, and universalism—the values of the Enlightenment.

He believed in the concept of global citizenship, which is why he firmly supported international institutions like the European Union

Despite the pervasive idea that Hitchens exchanged one set of convictions for another by the end of his life, his commitment to his core principles never wavered.