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.

He came, he threatened, but he didn’t conquer. The French Riviera will not be the first important region in Europe to be ruled by neofascists.

From February 6 through February 10, more than 1,700 delegates to the French Communist Party’s twenty-fifth congress met in the roofed-over sports stadium at Saint-Ouen, a suburb of Paris.

The rulers of the capitalist world who came to Paris for the bicentennial celebrations last month were in a smug mood.

Europe’s landscape is changing–dramatically in its Eastern half, which is groping toward capitalism, and less spectacularly in the Western part, which is on the road to a single market.

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

When in London, if you have some time to spare, go east to the Isle of Dogs to visit what was to have been Europe’s biggest office-plus-housing project.

Voici le temps des assassins, the bilingual Algerians could exclaim, echoing Rimbaud, when nearly a year ago, their intellectuals began to be slaughtered by Islamic fundamentalists.

The miracle did not happen. Dynamics, as Lionel Jospin had hoped, did not defeat arithmetic. On his third try, Jacques Chirac made it. The Socialist interlude is over.

In the medieval city of Gdansk, in a courtroom packed with police, three men stand in the dock.