Is Italy on the eve of a major political crisis? Is a change
of regime, or perhaps even the birth of a new republic,
imminent?

The sorcerer's apprentices could not even stage a
coup.

"How could anyone possibly say that the October Revolution was in vain?" the poet Tvardovsky angrily told Solzhenitsyn in what now seems another age.

On Sunday, October 27--the future as I write this--the Poles will elect their two houses of Parliament, for the first time in an entirely free vote.

In Maastricht twelve members of the European Community reached another stage on the road toward some form of union, notably with the pledge to introduce a common currency, the ecu, before the end

Forced out of office and deliberately humiliated, Mikhail Gorbachev nevertheless left the historical stage with the dignity of an actor who was aware of the crucial part he had played.

At the turn of the year, the Western media, like
latter-day Columbuses, suddenly discovered that
Europe was speaking with an increasingly strong
German accent. Their surprise was surprising.

CORRECTION: 28 percent of registered voters chose the Islamic Salvation Front. (3/2/92).

"At the burial of communism too many people want to jump from the coffin into the funeral procession." The Polish author of these lines tried to convey the idea that the former practitioners now

The specter haunting Europe today, as it approaches the twenty-first century, is the ghost of nineteenth-century nationalism.