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A Citizen’s Guide to Greece 2015

So many candidates

By Dimitris Diamantis and David Wisner “So many candidates, so little time to choose,” reported one interlocutor to us in early May. How can one decide about new parties and about personalities that had until recently resid...

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The New Byzantine

By David Wisner Byzantine: …excessively complicated and detailed… (Oxford English Dictionary) I went to my local mall this past weekend. Malls are interesting places to observe human behavior, and it strikes me that they ma...

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Circle dancing with the Greeks

By David Wisner I first drafted this note over a year ago. If anything, the tendency I described, and its implications for the future of Greece and the EU, are all the greater. A worldly Greek acquaintance likes to tell the fol...

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Right to know

By David Wisner Several months ago one of my Greek undergraduate students wanted to do a bit of research on the incidence of ministerial amendments to Greek legislation. We asked a renowned specialist, who informed us that gove...

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Right, left, and Nixonian

By David Wisner “No one,” writes David Hawkings in his blog in today’s Roll Call, “expected Obama would get to a second term and find his legislative agenda suddenly frozen in the face of a bipartisan wa...

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Lustration and the Arab spring

By David Wisner The Dukakis Center hosted well-known Greek blogger Kostas Kallergis in April for a talk on lustration as a means of dealing with corruption in Greek politics. Hearkening back to attempts in various countries in ...

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United in grievance

By Politis Is there a global explanation for the rise of so many disparate protest movements across the globe since 2008? John Kay thinks so in his column in today’s Financial Times. “The financial crisis of 2008 wa...

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Political extremism and violence

By David Wisner Takis Michas has written about political extremism and violence in today’s Protagon. “Is there really a difference,” he asks, “between the violent tactics used or condoned by SYRIZA (riot...

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Youth and public service: satisfaction and peril

We share two poignant reminders of the lure — and challenges — of engaging young people in public service. In Afghanistan, a young American foreign service officer, Anne Smedinghoff, was the victim of a suicide car ...

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Open the doors/where are the people?

By David Wisner Growing up my friends and I used to play a small game with our hands. We would start with our hands clasped, thumbs aligned, index fingers erect. “Here is the church/here is the steeple/open the doors/wher...

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Tax paying as civic duty

By David Wisner I file my tax returns in Greece and in the US. I read this comment by Lawrence A. Zelenak in the New York Times as a welcome counterpoint to all the negative press generated throughout the Western world about t...

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Who — and where — are we?

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The new sick man of Europe

By David Wisner “The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in ...

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Gaming the election?

By David Wisner Researchers Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson have prepared a paper in which they argue that an Internet search engine, not Google necessarily but “a future Google,” might be able to manipulat...

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Wanted: the right kind of Greeks

By David Wisner A contestant in a British reality show called “The Apprentice” has indicated in an interview that there are certain types of children she will not allow her own kids to play with. For one, they need ...

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Tribalism and postpartisanship: competing visions of the state of nature?

By David Wisner These are interesting times for the analysis of European politics, from a hung Parliament in the UK, to the rise and fall of the Pirate Party in Germany, to the triumph of M5S in Italy, to the surge of Golden Da...

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Saying of the day: 2/27/13

“What does a congressman do? He works a lot and produces little. That’s the reality.” — Tiririca (Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva), Brazilian Congress

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Ready to govern?

By David Wisner I read Guy Dinmore’s characterization in today’s Financial Times of the members of the M5S party of Beppo Grillo elected to one or the other of the houses in the Italian Parliament with a sense of w...

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Seeds of revolution

By David Wisner Anger and despair. The words do not do justice to the display of emotion I had just beheld. A lady in the flower of her years, seated in an auditorium, had just broken down into bitter tears of recrimination and...

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The cruel fact

By David Wisner I faced a small crisis the other day when one of the students whom I advise failed a course in his last semester at college. I discussed the issue and solicited from colleagues ways to resolve the student’...

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