Choosing between loyalty to country and consideration for fellow global citizens has all along been a false choice.

Despite the good intentions of those who wish to create a common identity, the recognition of a person's race is paramount in overcoming the growing racism.

If you want the people of Iran to rise up against their leaders, why give the leadership an easy target to blame for the economic conditions that adversely affect the standard of living of average people?

After 1989, some of the dissidents of East-Central Europe went back to their original job. Others threw themselves into politics, as Vaclav Havel somewhat reluctantly did. And then there was the smallest category of them all: the dissidents who turned professional.

Institutions such as the International Criminal Court and various treaty bodies are the tide. However, the capacity to recognize the human being in the other is at the source of a new "Golden Rule" that will fashion relationships of compatibility, even synergy over adversity.

It has not been easy for the countries of East-Central Europe to establish stable, functioning democracies. Strong-arm leaders -- like Victor Orban in Hungary or, until recently, Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic -- have persistent appeal.

Croatia is still on track to join the EU this July. The more difficult question -- the degree of control that Croatia will retain as an EU member -- remains unanswered.

The party's platform mixes a left-wing critique of globalization with a frankly nationalist approach to minority policy. He wants to replace Bulgaria's flat tax with a progressive tax, but he believes that all ethnic Turks are just Bulgarians forced to convert to Islam in centuries past.

News of the 10-billion-euro bailout for Cyprus should not be cause for celebration. Europeans are rightly insecure about what comes next, as they should be given the precedent that has been set.

Even today, the country in Europe with the largest population of internally displaced persons (IDP) is Serbia. More than a decade after the end of the wars in former Yugoslavia, more than 200,000 people remain in limbo in Serbia.

I recently traveled by train from London to Berlin and was struck by a different divide that has opened up in Europe. These "two nations" are the mobile and the stationary. And this divide has had an equally profound impact on the politics of the moment.

In the wake of a huge pro-independence rally in Barcelona on September 11, Catalan president Artur Mas decided to call an election two years ahead of schedule. The result was an extraordinary fiasco.

The government deserves credit for having stopped these attacks before they could be carried out, but the impression that is left is that terrorism will remain an influence in the Indonesian landscape for some time to come. So what does all this mean for foreign investors?

A recent cover of the Economist showed a picture of a few small islands and asks "Could China and Japan really go to war over these?" There are many reasons to believe that this conflict will not escalate into a war, or at least, not a wide-ranging one.