I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?