After the first quarter century of development since the overthrow of Communism and the reunification of East and West Germany, how does one draw up a balance sheet? How can one assess the transfer of political institutions, the economic crises, the difficulties of women’s adjustment? There were substantial successes but also significant failures. Many of the international moves of the Berlin Republic can only be understood by considering the difficult process of adjustment during and after unification.

Ecuador and Bolivia have produced the two most powerful indigenous movements in Latin America and – along with Venezuela – two of the region’s three self-described “socialist revolutions” of the twenty-first century.

The founding fathers expected Congress to be the most important branch of government and gave it the most power. When Congress is broken—as its justifiably dismal approval ratings suggest—so is our democracy. Here, Robert G. Kaiser, whose long and distinguished career at The Washington Post has made him as keen and knowledgeable an observer of Congress as we have, takes us behind the sound bites to expose the protocols, players, and politics of the House and Senate—revealing both the triumphs of the system and (more often) its fundamental flaws.

European integration is the result of a series of policy initiatives with strong voluntaristic features. By far the most important of those initiatives was the adoption of the euro as a common currency for the 17 countries-members of the euro zone. The European edifice was designed for normal conditions and not for crisis situations. The budgetary and financial crisis of the recent years led necessarily to the adoption of an extraordinary system of economic governance of the euro area with entirely intergovernmental- and not community- features. While the countries in crisis are predominantly in the European South, Evangelos Venizelos, President of PASOK, argues that the notion of the European South is a political and not a geographic concept.