Philip Bobbitt

Saturday

Philip Bobbitt

Russia’s aggression in Georgia is a portent of perils to come

From our UK edition

Philip Bobbitt says that the crisis reflects Russia’s determination to remain an old-fashioned nation state, dominating its region. Intellectual imagination will be needed to thwart that ambition: a recognition that the post-Cold War world needs new global institutions Georgia, which was admitted to the UN in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, was beset from the outset by the fatal conundrum at the heart of the national self-determination of the nation state: when is a nation — an ethnic, linguistic, historic-cultural idea — entitled to its own state? In Georgia, two nations — Abkhazis and Ossettians — were isolated within the majority population of ethnic Georgians.

Thursday

Philip Bobbitt

We haven’t absorbed the lessons

From our UK edition

Philip Bobbitt, the acclaimed author of ‘The Shield of Achilles’, says that the attacks were the work of an ultra-modern movement — closer to Mastercard than the IRA in structure. The worst is not inevitable: but it is distinctly possible With terror, the murderous act itself is always nihilistic; it is the reaction that gives the atrocity political meaning. The meaning of the London transport bombings is that a society accustomed to the predations of the IRA and, within living memory, the terror bombing of the second world war will not be easily shaken. This stoic reaction masks, however, several troubling, less reassuring reactions here in London and in the ethereal network that connects al-Qa’eda.