Britain

The news has flown a bit under the radar here in the United States, for understandable reasons; but the results earlier this week of the Scottish parliament elections are historic. Whether this is good or bad history, of course, remains to be seen. For the first time, and much against the odds and recent opinion polls, Alex Salmond's Scottish Nationalist Party has won an absolute majority in the Edinburgh parliament--something that the Hollyrood system was designed to prevent, and which now puts the future of the United Kingdom itself in jeopardy. Let me explain.

Among Barbara Tuchman’s many sins as an historian was the notion, propagated in her popular volume The Guns of August (1962), that the Great Powers had more or less blundered into conflict in 1914, and that smarter diplomacy might well have prevented the Great War.

For almost 11 years, Kosovo has been ruled by foreigners: mainly the United Nations through its former mission in the country (UNMIK), along with the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Most Americans are aware of the derelictions of the U.N. in crises afflicting countries from Rwanda through Israel to Kashmir. And Americans have a healthy suspicion about the EU, because of its political competition with the U.S. and its intrigues with Russia. Unfortunately, few Americans have heard of OSCE, to which the United States belongs, alongside (among others) Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—bastions of antidemocratic politics and sources of regional instability. Yet the OSCE intervenes boldly and often crudely in “managing” the transition to democracy in the troubled Balkans and other states.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle here have been devoting almost all of their energy and attention to two things: the battle over the president’s plan to take the health care sector under the government’s wing, and the battle over competing plans to solidify the current fragile economy recovery.