A major review of Europe's water policies next year will pave the way for savings targets to be adopted by member states and industries, according to a senior EU official who was speaking on World Water Day. READ MORE

All revolutions have their own distinct trajectories, and any attempt to locate what is happening in the Middle East within the framework of what has gone before will get us only so far. READ MORE

When the financial crisis erupted in September 2008 President Nicolas Sarkozy was quick to seize the European lead. He summoned Britain’s Gordon Brown to emergency talks in Paris. He urged Europeans to stimulate their economies. He taunted Germany’s Angela Merkel for hesitating over a stimulus plan, declaring that “France is working on it; Germany is thinking about it.” The French counted at least as much as the Germans—indeed, they were setting the pace (in part fortuitously, as France held the European Union presidency at the time). READ MORE

Chairing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010, Kazakhstan showed that it is possible to bring a successful chairmanship to a failing organization. Prerequisites to a successful chairmanship include strong motivation as the starting point; ambition to demonstrate a young state’s national competence at the international level; and carefully calculated initiatives which, even if thwarted in the veto-bound OSCE system, become reference points in the organization’s annals as sound and creative responses to major challenges. READ MORE