In the summer of 1941, Adolf Hitler's apparently invincible Wehrmacht was grinding hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union, spreading mayhem all the way.

Americans aren't much for history these days. History is for Europeans--for Germans, with their thickets of theory, and the French, who are forever going on about their revolution.

Listen to a debate among drug policy advocates and you're likely to hear impassioned claims about the brilliant success (or dismal failure) of more "liberal" approaches in certain European countr

President Boris Yeltsin's firing of his fifth Prime Minister in seventeen months and Russia's renewed war in the Caucasus are stark signs of his regime's instability, desperation and "agony," the

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

On September 28, 1973, seventeen days after the bloody coup that brought Gen.

"Austria had many geniuses, and that was probably its undoing."
    --Robert Musil

Northern Ireland's peace process faces its gravest crisis since George Mitchell negotiated the Good Friday accord--graver even than after last summer's bombing in Omagh by a small band of breaka

NATO's nightly airstrikes against Yugoslavia have ceased, but the periodic Anglo-American bombing of Iraq continues.

If Russia is not to dissolve like the Soviet Union or, worse yet, end in a cataclysm like Yugoslavia's, it must negotiate peacefully across a welter of emotional claims to self-determination.