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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (5481)	8/21/2003 3:57:11 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

Charles, let me recommend my current read: books.cambridge.org It's the second book by Pr Donald Nicol I'm reading to sort out the relationship between Europe and the US... Somehow, I use Pr Nicol's writings as a Kabbalah to understand today's world politics... The more I read on Byzantium and her relations with Western Europe the more I grasp the Transatlantic dynamics of our days. The superiority complex nurtured by Europeans against "unsophisticated Yankees" replicates the Byzantines' arrogance towards the Latins... For that matter, Michael VIII Paleologos was scornfully dubbed "Latinophoros", that is, "Latin-minded", because of his yielding to the Papacy... If you recall, some time ago, I compared WWI and WWII with the first and second crusades... well, I'm afraid I was wrong and missed the real matches: considering the horrific devastations brought upon (Continental) Europe by US and British bombers during WWII (Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Dresden,...), we can think of WWII as a modern FOURTH crusade --that is, a modern replica of the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204... A traumatic event that ushered in the so-called Latin Empire of Constantinople under the yoke of Baldwin II. Likewise, the Allies' victory in 1945 imposed the American hegemony all across Western Europe --both militarily (NATO) and economically (GATT in 1947, Marshall Plan,...) The USSR merely cast itself as a modern Bulgaria: back in the XIIIth century, Bulgarian rulers relentlessly sought to conquer Constantinople... The 1945/1204 match becomes even more fascinating when one realizes that it took 57 years for the Greek/Byzantine elites exiled in Nicaea (Asia Minor) to repossess Constantinople and put an end to the Latin occupation (in 1261). Similarly, it took 57 years for the Europeans to get assertive enough to challenge the US's geopolitical grip on Europe --Schroeder was re-elected in 2002 on a somewhat anti-US platform... Gus