Twice in the last decade, Orwell’s seminal dystopia 1984 topped best-sellers list. In 2013, after Edward Snowden leaked revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance operations, 1984 sales rose dramatically amid an explosion of references to the book’s totalitarian, tentacular entity, the “Big Brother” . It spiked again, by more than 9500%, in late 2017, when a White House aide casually evoked the existence of “alternative facts” when faced with her own previous erroneous statements.

The Versailles system of treaties between 1919 and 1920, following World War I, replaces imperialism with nationalism and practically ends the process – which lasted for the whole 19th century – of the formation of the modern European states. The first country to separate from the Ottoman Empire was Greece, after a long Russian-Ottoman war, which ended with the Adrianopolis Peace Treaty in 1829 and recognised the autonomy of the newly emerged state.

From the Editor

Valentin Naumescu, a professor at the Faculty of European Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca and President of the think tank Initiative for European Democratic Culture, made an account of this year’s Munich International Security Conference, the most prestigious international security forum, while being interviewed by Vladimir Adrian Costea, for the Geostrategic Pulse.

In the beginning of the document which includes his peace plan, president Donald Trump states that throughout history there have been conceived several peace plans for the Palestinians and the Israelis, however, none of them took into account the actual situation. He claims his plan is different. Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Completely built from clichés and lies, the so called plan, just like the others before it, ignores the national aspirations and rights of the Palestinians. Even though Donald Trump claims the plan is realistic and achievable, it favours one side only - the Israeli.

We shall wrongly understand the political meaning of Brexit if we fail to make reference to the timeline of the Brussels-London negotiations, and to the economic, social and political evolutions specific to the United Kingdom. An overall analysis of the evolution of the United Kingdom towards its withdrawal from the EU and Euratom helps us understand the contrast between the initial concept of a lesser Europe and the dire need to cooperate after Brexit.

In the wake of last month’s (December 2019) “Normandy” summit (see EDM, December 11, 12, 2019), and awaiting the same forum’s April 2020 top-level meeting, Ukrainian officials are airing proposals to revise the Kremlin-imposed Minsk “accords” of 2014 and 2015. The “accords,” designed to legalize Russia’s control of the Donetsk-Luhansk territory and to disrupt Ukraine farther afield, remain unimplemented to date thanks to the previous Ukrainian government’s successful maneuvering and stalling. That work has made it possible for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration now to call for revising the Minsk “accords.”

After two years of wait, controversies, scenarios and contradicting hypotheses, on the 28th of January 2020 president Donald Trump revealed, at the White House, the contents of the long-awaited US plan regarding the achievement of a peace solution to the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, which the US president emphatically called “the Deal of the Century”. The ceremony took place in the presence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, White House officials, including the team (led by the son-in-law and presidential advisor Jared Kushner), who had been working for two years to develop and finish the massive dossier regarding the US peace initiative. Neither having been informed nor consulted when the US initiative was launched and – , developed, the Palestinians were not present when this “peace plan” was made official, a plan they had been contesting and rejecting since its inception.

At the end of the second millennium of its Christian history, Europe has changed.
After a nearly half-century long grim battle, communism abandoned the place, and suddenly vanished like an ugly nightmare at sunrise.
And capitalism has returned.

In the beginning of January 2020, the UN General Assembly announced that, according to Article 19 of the UN Charter the Lebanon’s right to vote in the General Assembly was suspended for not having paid its financial contribution (to the organization) for the past two years - a total amount of 459,000 USD. The Lebanese foreign minister, Gebran Basil, president Michel Aoun’s son-in-law and leader of the political party Free Patriotic Movement established by the current head of state, rejected any responsibility of his Ministry’s on the matter, which led to a denigrating polemic with his colleague in the Ministry of Finance. The resolution of the international organization and the conflict between the two departing Lebanese ministers was but a tip of the iceberg which hid the state of chaos Lebanon and the Lebanese had been in for these past months. Lebanon was not the only country incapable of paying its contribution to the UN - less than half a million dollars. Lebanon, which in the eye