I Love This Country, But

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.

Canadians Tend To Be A Bit More Religious Than Most Europeans - Though Not More Than The Poles Or Ukrainians. Most Important, Their Attitude To Immigration And Ethnic Minorities Is More Positive Than That Of Most Europeans.

If You Had Said To Anyone In 1945, At The End Of The Second World War With The Continent It Ruins, That You Could Have A European Union Of 28 Member States Stretching From Portugal In The West To Estonia In The East, All Of Them More-or-less Liberal Democracies - They Wouldn't Have Believed You.

America Should Do A Reverse Columbus. The World No Longer Needs To Discover America; But America Urgently Needs To Discover The World's View Of America.

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.