Die erstaunliche und erschütternde Geschichte des Romans "Suite Francaise" ist bekannt. Die Verfasserin, Irène Némirovsky, entstammte einer reichen russisch-jüdischen Familie, der es im Gegensatz zu den allermeisten Emigranten-Familien gelang, ihr Geld zu retten und die sich nach der Revolution von 1917 in Paris niederließ.

In a recent address, UCLA historian James Gelvin compares Al Qaeda with historical anarchism (1880-1920) and, like some other recent writers, finds great significance in their common features. Such exercises are seldom wholly in vain, but how helpful are they for a better understanding of at least one of the sides in the comparison?

Pakistán no tiene esperanza, de Walter Laqueur en La Vanguardia

What is terrorism? There are more than a hundred definitions. The Department of State has one, Title 22 of the U.S. Code Section 2656: "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." The Department of Defense has another, and also the Federal Bureau of Investigation, while the present writer has contributed two or three definitions of his own. But none is wholly satisfactory.

If a friend or a cousin from abroad came to London 30 years ago and asked to see what was new in the British capital, where would we have taken him? Not an easy decision — the Barbican, perhaps, about to become a cultural center, with arts unlimited, galleries, home of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, as well as countless restaurants, pubs, and bars. Or perhaps to Canary Wharf, once the West India docks and cargo warehouses, but about to become the new business and banking center. "Vibrant" was the term to be used.

"History shows that terrorism can operate only in free, or relatively free, societies. There was no terrorism in Nazi Germany or in Stalin's Russia; there was (or is) none even in less harsh dictatorships. But this means that in certain circumstances, if terrorism has been permitted to operate too freely and become more than a nuisance, a high price has to be paid in terms of limitation of freedom and human rights to put an end to it." When the Cold War came to an end in 1989 with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, when the countries of Eastern Europe regained independence, and when finally the Soviet Union disintegrated, there was widespread feeling throughout the world that at long last universal peace had descended on Earth. The fear of a war in which weapons of mass destruction would be used had vanished. A leading political scientist wrote a book titled The End of History; this did not, of course, imply that history had come to a standstill, but he meant that serious, major conflicts between nations no longer existed and that on certain essentials all were now in agreement.

The advocates of closer European union have suf­fered a serious setback. It is, of course, not the end of Europe, but it is the end of certain delusions about Europe's future and its place in the world. Somehow a way will be found out from the present impasse. The reflections that follow were written before the French and Dutch referendum and the terrorist attacks in Lon­don; they deal not with constitutional questions of pro­cedure and organization for which eventually solutions might be found but with deeper, long-term issues for ' which no answers are in sight at the present time.