America Is Replicated At Every Level Of

To Be In Florence Is To Reflect On Europe's Intricate Diversity - And Its Lost Creativity.

I'm A Historian By Training And By Conviction. And So The Thing That Has Throughout Informed My Thinking About International Relations Is History. I Think, For Example, The Reason That I Was Perhaps Able To See Sooner Than Some Others That The Soviet Empire In Eastern Europe Was Decaying--if Not Disintegrating--was That I Came To It Through History And Through Germany, Rather Than Through Sovietology And Through Moscow. And Therefore The Starting Point Was That No Empire In History Has Lasted Forever, And This One Won't Either.

Russia Has Lost An Empire But Not Yet Found A Role. Russia Has To Decide What It Wants To Be. And As We Know In Britain, That Takes Some Time. It Is Quite Tough To Lose An Empire And Russia Lost Its Empire Very Rapidly And Very Admirably, That Is To Say Peacefully, It Didn't Fight.

But Transitions From The Politics Of Violence To Democratic Compromise Are Always Messy.

Developments In Information Technology And Globalised Media Mean That The Most Powerful Military In The History Of The World Can Lose A War, Not On The Battlefield Of Dust And Blood, But On The Battlefield Of World Opinion.