Women usually want different things. Elizabeth Badinter’s Le conflit: la mère et la femme (“The conflict: motherhood and womanhood”) traces today’s women’s servitudes and dilemmas. In her book, she highlights the social pressure for mothers to breastfeed and the politics that have made this issue a priority worldwide without significant scientific evidence that breastfeeding is necessary. Badinter points out that in countries where water sanitation is problematic, breastfeeding makes a lot of sense. She asks however about the Western Woman, her aspirations to work and be Man’s equal and the consequences of breastfeeding policies and politics on women’s chances to reintegrate the workforce after having children. In a context where Europe’s welfare system is failing due to an ever decreasing birthrate and supports for parents that are quite arbitrary, what are decision-makers doing wrong? They just don’t know what women want.

The plight of structural unemployment and gaggles of working poor, it appears, are here to stay. But are they the inevitable consequence of economic liberalisation?They are not. If we balance the burden of economic transformation on labor and capital, and strengthen progression, we can have it both: near full employment and open borders.

The sentiment is right, but the policy is flawed. 

No, the answer is not a minimum wage. No, it’s not protectionism. No, it won’t hurt growth. But yes, it will require fundamental reform, hard work and international cooperation.

Foundations are booming in Germany and they are frequently cherished as the ideal way to harness private wealth for the common good.I’m critical about the efficiency, equity and legitimacy of civil society, and I think foundations are a case in point. This tax-exempt, free-roaming and supposedly benevolent capital is subjected to only minimal public accountability and may sometimes reflect a troublingly elitist vision of the common good.

Bertelsmann Stiftung/AG Berlin, via Flickr, originally uploaded by Gertrud K

Kommandantenhaus, Unter den Linden 1, 10117 Berlin: charity?

Civil society is everybody’s darling in politics and policy today. It’s hard to find a policy student who hasn’t interned at some NGO, founded her own grassroots initiative and isn’t excited about non-profits in any given policy field.

So is the third sector panacea? Uh, maybe not. A third sector? Non-governmental, non-profit? What kind of definitions are these, anyway? And what would be an uncivil society?

Whenever social sciences come up with such terms that convey little more but a vague sense of something being different, or gone (think postmodern) there is always the danger that really, we don’t know (exactly) what we’re talking about.

For all their shortcomings, we roughly know how markets and states function, and how they fail. By contrast, we appear to know relatively little about how whatever it is we call “civil society” works.

Is it then reasonable to assume that civil society is categorically devoid of dysfunctions? Hardly so, I think.

As long as we don’t know what we’re cobbling together in civil society, we’d better stick to our lasts: the market and the state.

I fear that amid all the self-righteous blameshifting and frantic second-guessing of the attack, which was launched from an American fighter jet, but ordered by the German Oberst Klein, we haven’t learned nearly enough.

We haven’t learned nearly enough about this mayhem of a failed state and the chaos that even the well-intentioned regime changes or peacemaking bring.

We haven’t learned nearly enough about the nightmares, that result all too often, when the high and mighty West comes to the rescue.

Tank Graffiti, via Flickr, originally uploaded by Luodanli

ISAF, MNF-I Go Home? - not so fast.

This isn’t a simple question of surging or withdrawing: from this nightmare, there is no waking up.

We need to learn a lesson, of what happens when we disrupt and exploit divided, traditional societies, equip them with technology and weaponry far outmatching their level of development. From this responsibility, there is no escaping.

It’s a simple lesson, we all accept before entering a store: if you break it, you buy it.

On May 1st, 2003 when then President George W. Bush, declared the end of major combat operations and the mission Iraqi Freedom to be “accomplished” aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, much of the failure and dying in Iraq still lay ahead.

Mission Accomplished Banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln

The invasion, starting on March 19, 2003, had been a remarkable military success, on schedule and with comparatively few casualties (139 US troops and approximately 7,500 civilians before May 1, 2003 according to CNN and Iraq Body Count estimates, respectively).

In the insurgency that followed (and has recently slightly abated), more than 4,000 US troops and 60,000 Iraqi civilians were killed (ibid.). To this date, seven years after “major hostilities” ended, the country is still plagued by sectarian violence and crime, marred by economic hardship and destruction and paralyzed by deeply divided politics and dysfunctional government. The vision and partial casus belli of the “Coalition of the Willing”, to turn Iraq into a role model liberal democracy for the Middle East, has not materialized. Instead, the suffering and dying continues.

What happened?

How to react to global warming? How do wean ourselves off that harmful oil - and still prosper?

I maintained that we’d better be safe with Sinn’s fears of a Green Paradox than sorry without him, notwithstanding the uncertainties of his argument.

Economist Hans-Werner Sinn is no easy read for a green German: he pretty much pulls german and European green policy into pieces. Much of his critique is plausible, if unsettling: without international cooperation, much of our unilateral efforts may be in vain.

But there’s one thing where I wholeheartedly disagree with Sinn: low-carbon technology, for the time being, does indeed require subsidies.

Renewables / via Flickr, originally uploaded by Chad Johnson

Yes, it may be hard for states to pick winners, but low-carbon technology still needs infant industry incubation, if it is to sustain us in the near future.

The Big Ask is on: These days, the leaders of the world convene in Copenhagen for the 15th time to address that “greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen“: Climate Change.

Will they ward off that Tragedy of the Commons of our time? We don’t know.

They are playing games in Copenhagen. Not of the entertaining kind, but of the intricately interdependent kind.

The Green Paradox is one of those intricacies: are we reckoning without our fossil-fuel supplying hosts? What are their stakes?

Let’s get the rules straight. Then let’s see what we can do to improve our collective odds for a cooler planet.

And while we’re at it, let’s level out this playing field.

The role of the United States’ decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, without the support of NATO or the UN Security Council (UNSC), in triggering the current crisis within the North Atlantic community is disputed. While the history of NATO from the very beginning is fraught with crises,[1] from the crisis over German rearmament in the early 1950s, the crisis over the Suez-Canal debacle in 1956 and the various Balkans crises in the 1990s, it is argued by one camp that the current crisis is “symptomatic of the larger collapse of the European-U.S. cold war alliance community”;[2] the other camp, while stating that it is “probably the worst in the history of the Western alliance”[3] feel that there is reason for optimism, given that the bonds that hold the alliance together are still stronger than the forces pulling it apart.

We are living a historic moment. After a struggle of eight years, the heads of state and government of the European Union will meet for dinner on the 19th of November to resolve the last remaining question before the entry of the Lisbon Treaty: who are going to be the President of the European Council and the High Representative?