Europe

BY ALEXANDER MEDGETT In March 2017, Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, stated that the two percent of GDP defense spending goals agreed upon by NATO members at the 2006 Riga summit were ‘totally unrealistic’ for Germany. Gabriel’s statement comes in light of Rex Tillerson’s recent appeal that all NATO member states should remain committed to […]

BY PATRICK WHITE ‘Crush the saboteurs’ proclaimed the Daily Mail newspaper as Prime Minister Theresa May announced that for the fourth time in four years a major national poll would take place in the UK this summer. My concern is that rhetoric like this will only serve to widen further divisions in British society. The […]

BY THOMAS KARL E. HOCKS Yes, Angela Merkel may lose power this year. No, it won’t be like Brexit or the United States presidential election. After the recent turmoil around Brexit and the administration of President Trump, eyes are on the French presidential elections in the spring and the German federal election in the fall. […]

Russia intervened in the Syrian war to redefine the international balance of power, not as a brotherly commitment to defend his Arab ally.

BY PAUL-ADRIEN HYPPOLITE AND NINA ROUSSILLE The 12 July 2015 Euro Area summit ended with a last minute agreement that avoided an imminent Greek exit from the Eurozone (“Grexit”).[i] Even before engaging talks about the third bailout program in 2015, the Greek government had accepted several prior bailouts with accompanying conditions negotiated with their European […]

BY MATTHEW FLUG After being stoked for years by British politicians, “Euroskepticism” has finally had its moment. Voters in the UK have decided to depart from the European Union (EU) after an once-in-a-lifetime ballot on the Referendum of the United Kingdom Membership of the European Union. This news has reverberated around the world and left in its wake […]

BY NYASHA WEINBERG At 3 a.m. on June 24, I lay awake stunned. Results came pouring in confirming that the debunked polls of the previous week were right, and the markets were wrong. The UK was leaving the EU. Alienated voters had let out a collective “roar of rage,” turning their back on Europe and […]

BY PATRICK WHITE Last night as I sat watching the results come in from around the UK on the Brexit referendum, anxiety slowly turned to anger as the votes for leaving the European Union began to pull away from the votes to remain. That anger was not primarily directed at the growing Brexit vote tally. Instead it was directed at the […]

BY CHARLIE SAMUDA Back in 2013, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, bowing to pressure from within his own party, announced plans to hold a vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU). The short-term consequence has been an emotional and often ugly campaign, which comes to an end today—voting closes in just a few […]

BY PATRICK WHITE On Thursday June 23 voters in the United Kingdom will finally vote on Brexit—whether the United Kingdom should leave or remain a member of the European Union. The campaign has come a very long way since Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to include a referendum pledge in the Conservative Party manifesto for the […]

This is an open letter signed by French, Francophone and Francophile members of the Harvard community. This page will be updated with more signatures: if you’d like to add your name to the list, please contact Hugo Zylberberg. The dust of the explosions has hardly settled in Paris and it is still hard to put […]

Introduction Both French and post-independence Algerian rulers imposed a simplistic, narrow definition of identity on Algeria. These choices were dictated by ideologies associated with colonization and Pan-Arabism, marginalizing other key components of Algerian identity. In doing so, both the colonizer and the dictator were able to effectively maintain power in pitting cultural, linguistic, and ethnic […]