The pace of European disintegration continues to quicken. Recession deepens in the 17-member euro zone; it is now the longest downturn since the currency was launched in 2000. In Italy, a new left-right government, launched on an anti-austerity program, finds the neighborhood more austere than it had hoped. In France, Maurice Levy, boss of the advertising giant Publicis, did a survey showing that northern Europeans – Poles, Germans, Brits – were moderately optimistic while southerners – Spaniards, Italians, Greeks and the French – were deeply pessimistic. France dipped into recession earlier this month, for the third time in four years. The union is pulling apart.

Nothing brings relief. In the Netherlands, a TV show persuaded the country’s deputy finance minister, Frans Weekers, to watch clips of Bulgarians boasting about how they had defrauded his country’s government of welfare benefits. Bulgarians and Romanians, the poorest members of the European Union, will be able to move to any state in the EU next year. What had been presented to the poor as a new freedom is now an imposition for the rich.

Those who have been most enthusiastic for the union now proclaim that it is in grave danger. In an interview earlier this month the financier and philanthropist George Soros said European leaders, in trying to find exit routes from the crisis, have “generated political dynamics that are leading toward the EU’s disintegration.”

“Euro-skepticism” – Euro-fury is more like it – has grown. A survey by the pro-EU European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) shows that:

“[S]ince the beginning of the euro crisis, trust in the European Union has fallen from +10 to -22 percent in France, from +20 to -29 percent in Germany, from +30 to -22 percent in Italy, from +42 to -52 percent in Spain, from +50 to +6 percent in Poland, and from -13 to -49 percent in the United Kingdom.”

The ECFR sees the crisis as rooted in a “clash of wills” between northern and southern states – with the richer north no longer willing to pay down the debts of others without tight controls, and the southern countries resenting the call for centralized control of budgets, taxes, pensions and the labor market. “Europeans now know,” writes Levy of Publicis, “that none of us can count on others to resolve our local problems. It may take years before we manage to recreate a real sense of union that can carry Europe into the future.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron is under pressure from the many in his Conservative Party to remove the UK from the EU. But he has embarked on a strategy that argues for fundamental reforms, mainly in the direction of returning powers taken by the EU to the nation-states. Other leaders, most obviously German Chancellor Angela Merkel, now take at least part of his point.

Left and right now propose different reforms. A German-inspired “manifesto for rebuilding Europe from the bottom up” is supported by, mostly, professors of the left led by the political scientist Ulrich Beck. Its call for the unemployed, the young, pensioners and low-paid workers to realize their European-ness (rather than protest against it) is good-hearted. But it’s undercut by the demand, apparently without irony, that the elite institutions – the European Commission, European and national parliaments – “create a Europe of nationally involved citizens”: the top down enabling the bottom to come up.

On the right, also in Germany, professors of the right have formed an anti-Euro party, the Alternative for Germany, which has signed up some 12,000 members but has so far attracted only some 3 percent of voters. Broadly, the right wants less Europe, the left wants more “Europe.”

The problem, underneath the dreary economic figures and the alarming spikes in unemployment, is democracy, and the lack of it. Pro-Europeans in every country – especially in what had been the motor of the union, the Franco-German alliance – would, off the record, quite cheerfully admit this was an elite project, but one conceived and implemented for the common good. It was formed to make another great European war impossible – and it remains inconceivable. It stimulated very large amounts of common action, common regulations, common approaches to problems. Its finest hour was in giving the former communist states that broke free from Soviet hegemony in the late 1980s an example and a challenge.

But the elitism of the project has been exposed, and at a time of adversity it becomes a handy target. The absence of democratic accountability and engagement of ordinary folk meant the elites felt free to accelerate the development of a more and more integrated union, of which the euro has been the largest innovation. Now, for many states, it’s the largest burden.

The union will survive only by becoming minimalist. Europeans – who are first of all Germans, French, Italians, Poles, Brits and others – may distrust their politicians, but they know them. They know their faces, their backgrounds, their accents, their tricks, their virtues. They will not – cannot – transfer that loyalty to those they do not know. They will not allow them to make decisions on how to spend the taxes citizens pay. The creation of a more integrated Europe – which sooner or later will look like a state, act like a state and thus be a state – has to be a process of small steps. Or it won’t be much at all.

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a conference on Europe at the German foreign ministry in Berlin May 16, 2013.  REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

A new era has arrived in immigration. Many countries – the United States, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands – have for decades taken in poor immigrants with the express intention that they would do work that native citizens had become reluctant to do. The labor was either too hard, too cheap or too dangerous for the locals.

Now the rich countries don’t want poor people. Many of the production-line jobs they came to do have been automated – or the industries they came to work in, as the cotton mills of Lancashire in the UK, have mostly closed. The Immigration Bill now before the U.S. Congress and Senate is crafted to legalize the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants and to “attract… the world’s brightest and best-educated people.” As automation takes over more unskilled work and as the demand for labor emphasizes skills that higher education usually teaches, the needs of the United States and other developed countries change.

The heated debates over immigration and its consequences power the rise of the populist parties in Europe and push centrist governments towards tougher curbs. But the debates may soon seem beside the point: The traditional emigrant states are beginning to want their best minds back. The hunt for clever people is globalized: Universities, companies, even government bureaucracies seek them here and seek them there. The needs of the developed world and the greater needs of the developing world now conflict.

Western immigration has a long history. Pakistanis were employed to staff the declining cotton industry in the north of England from the 1960s. Mexicans have come into California and Texas to work on farms since the mid-19th century: The massive flows have been in the last few decades, with nearly one-third of the Mexican foreign-born population arriving since 2000. Germany imported Turkish immigrants since the sixties with no right or prospect of citizenship, to work in its automobile and other industries.

These days, citizens (including ethnic minority citizens) see in immigration a threat to jobs, social services and their culture. The problems aren’t illusory or – as some liberals have maintained – merely the product of racist attitudes. Germany’s 3-4.5 million citizens of Turkish origin do pose a real problem of integration: The economist Theo Sarazin’s 2010 book, Germany Is Destroying Itself, was excoriated by much of the establishment for its uncompromisingly bleak picture of an unassimilated Turkish population — until part of his argument was accepted by Chancellor Angela Merkel. As the head of the Demos think tank, David Goodhart, stresses in his recent book, The British Dream, over the past decade and a half UK immigration has been unprecedentedly rapid and large, as it has been in France. It has meant a substantial change in the look and culture of some urban areas and increased ghettoization. Goodhart, a liberal himself, was also harshly criticized – only to later see some of his critics agree with him.

Tensions are present in emerging countries as well. Last month, the Turkish Industry Minister Nihat Ergun said that his country no longer wishes to transfer qualified labor to Germany; he has called for a “reverse brain drain.” Turkey is now economically successful; it wants to continue being so, and that takes skilled and ambitious citizens.

This wasn’t the first such declaration and won’t be the last. The rich Western states, many looking at shrinking populations, should all try to emulate Canada’s immigration policy and target highly educated immigrants. As Ergun’s comments show, highly skilled and professional workers were always part of the exodus: Now, the emigrant countries will strive to keep them or woo them back. At the same time, though, Western states will spurn most of the unskilled workers and their families, generally with little education, who had been the mass of immigrants, legal and illegal, in the United States (mainly Mexican), the UK (Pakistani), Germany (Turkish) and France (North African).

Emigration can help poor and relatively poor countries because emigrants send back money to their families – it’s estimated to be around 10 percent of the Philippines’ GDP, 2 percent in Poland and Mexico. It’s much higher in the poor states of Central Asia, whose men increasingly find low-paid work in Russia. But it tends to fall the more successful the emigrants’ countries become. In the mid-seventies, as workers flooded into Germany, the cash they sent back was more than 4 percent of Turkish GDP: Now it’s 0.12 percent. Emigration gives hope – but it’s also a sign of failure.

Mexico, presently undergoing a welcome spurt of growth, needs its professionals and skilled workersas Turkey does. The demands of countries that are leveraging themselves out of mass poverty should trump those of countries that did so decades ago. The rich world’s duty is not to take their best-educated people but to support growth that is sustainable and not corrupt. That can mean more aid, fewer trade barriers, the sharing of expertise, and investment. The influence of the poor who seek a better life has grown, is growing and will grow: As the barriers go up, they need hope at home.

The old arguments about racism, which have so exercised liberals, are not wholly beside the point – racism remains everywhere – but they are less relevant than they were. The fortunate rich countries will benefit at least as much when the aspiring poor countries grow; and for that they need their cleverest people. It’s truly liberal to say: Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…and your energetic, your aspiring, your entrepreneurial individuals – and improve their lives. Then the racism and condescension that thrives on the struggles of immigrants in unfriendly host communities will dwindle, and maybe even, over time, die.

PHOTO: Immigrants take the oath of citizenship during a naturalization ceremony to become new citizens of the U.S. in New York, April 17, 2013. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Russia is now in a hard, even dangerous, place. A series of shocks are coming, and it is not well placed to weather them. It has, to be sure, little debt: Vladimir Putin’s administration is proud that the state has borrowed little and has built up a multibillion-ruble national reserve fund. Yet even that is ending, and the basics of the economy are weak. The former Marxists among Russia’s ruling class will know that the economic base determines the political and social superstructure. It is not looking good for them.

What’s worse, Russia isn’t a major player in the global economy. According to Eurostat figures, it has 2.4 percent of world gross domestic product, slightly under that of India; and 2.6 percent of world trade, slightly more than India has. It’s important, especially to Europe, in one significant economic aspect: It ships very large amounts of energy: 63 percent of European Union imports from Russia is oil, a further 9 percent is natural gas, with a further 3 per cent for coal. Icy Russia heats Europe. In return, Russia has, for the past decade, been enriched, as a once impoverished nation, which defaulted in 1998, surged to a lifestyle that supports a burgeoning middle class.

But oil and natural gas prices are falling now, and don’t look like they will rise again soon: “Over the coming few years,” writes Forbes commentator Bill Conerly, “look for oil prices to decline at least below $80 a barrel and quite possibly more” because of increased production. Gas prices are worse: The once-mighty Gazprom, which had dictated prices and terms to those it supplied, has been forced to discount and saw its profits fall last year by $6.5 billion, or 15 percent. The warnings, inside and out of the country, that it was dangerously dependent on fossil fuels for its newfound wealth and strength are coming home to roost. Russia may face recession.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Modernization was the watchword of Dmitry Medvedev’s one-term presidency, but it remained largely rhetoric. During a public Q+A session with Putin, former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who has “flirted with the opposition” recently, said that the government had adopted “half measures and half reforms” and that it “did not have a program” to wean the country off oil and gas dependency. The powerful Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov, in London last week, told an audience at the London School of Economics that “so far Russia hasn’t made any money on something new, on something that’s been invented. No one’s become a millionaire on an idea. We need at least one success.” But the incentives, support and clean courts that entrepreneurs need to “become a millionaire on an idea” don’t exist.

The political climate continues to darken. In that same phone-in, the editor of the radio station Ekho Moskvy, Alexei Venediktov, said he detected a “whiff of Stalinism” in the air. His concern, and that of many in the presently quiescent opposition, is the trial of lawyer and activist Alexei Navalny, the closest the opposition has to a leader. Charged last month in the city of Kirov with corporate embezzlement, Navalny pleaded not guilty. He has thrown down a gauntlet to Putin, saying he intends to stand for the presidency, and if elected, would strive to throw Putin and his associates into prison. If convicted, he will face up to 10 years in prison himself. At the same time, raids on Russian – and some foreign – NGOs continue, with documents seized by the tax police under last year’s law that classifies all Russian institutions that receive money from foreign sources as “foreign agents.”

Modern Russia is wholly bereft of any “soft power.” In the communist days, especially during the high repressive period of Stalin, it elicited admiration from many left-leaning (not just communist) individuals in the West, including influential figures like the U.S. economist Harry Dexter Whiter, who passed secrets to the Russians through the then-communist (and later repentant) Whittaker Chambers.

Now, in a world shorn of naiveté about authoritarian leaders, Putin gets low marks from all concerned with human rights. Just look to Syria, where Russia’s stubborn support stems from the belief that President Bashir al-Assad may prevail over the insurgent groups, and a reluctance to lose Russia’s only remaining base on the Mediterranean. However justified some Russians may feel in that posture, it attracts widespread distaste, not exactly redeemed by admiration for the country’s musicians. Though Putin has embraced world-famous conductor Valery Gergiev warmly – the affection seems reciprocal – it’s a slim base for international approval. Putin must make a success of the Sochi Winter Olympics next year, without cracking down on dissidents and protestors (as the Chinese did in the 2008 Olympics) – or he faces further obloquy.

Corruption, which Putin now officially battles, announcing the arrest of a corrupt official at least every week, is deeply corrosive – and few seem to believe the anti-corruption campaign to be genuine. A new report from the UK’s Henry Jackson Society by the Conservative Minister of Parliament Dominic Raab argues that:

Corruption is the glue that holds together an unwieldy, vertically integrated system of power through elaborate, mostly unofficial, patronage. This phenomenon extends from the most senior officials and political allies within state-owned oil and gas companies like Gazprom and Rosneft, to the lower-level officials soliciting bribes to process permits for small business-owners.

The largest irony for the Russian president is that his greatest construction, the new Russian middle class, is at best skeptical of him and often hostile. His support hasn’t fallen to the low levels endured by some of Europe’s leaders – but polls show most people want him to leave office when his third term ends, in 2018. This middle class, many themselves tainted by corruption, nevertheless have become much more cosmopolitan, fearful for an economic-cum-political clash and dissatisfied by policies that now seem to be failing.

In the next few years, expect Russia to give the West a hard time – because it will have an increasingly tough time with itself.

PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Mariinsky Theatre’s artistic director Valery Gergiev visit the new stage of the theatre before the Grand gala concert in St. Petersburg, May 2, 2013.  REUTERS/Alexei Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Pool

Let’s begin with two glimpses of the workings of the Italian state.

First, it was announced last week that passengers would be required to mount a bus only at the door in the front, and pay the driver on entry. The present system, in which tickets are bought in cafes and other shops and stamped at machines on the bus after entry from any one of several doors, has resulted in such widespread evasion that it’s calculated that only a minority of riders buy tickets on publicly owned buses. In Naples, three out of 10 play by the rules. The wonder is that three bother to pay.

Second, the ruins of Pompeii, buried by lava from the volcano Vesuvius in 79 AD and thus preserved as a Roman town, is one of the world’s wonders. It is also among its worst-preserved wonders. The Italian authorities have taken such poor care of it that several buildings have collapsed, and much-needed European Union money has been withheld because of the bureaucratic chaos.

The Italian state is one of the most swollen in the democratic world. It has some 330,000 police officers in a dozen different agencies, more than any other country in the EU and twice the number in the UK, which is slightly bigger in population. The private sector in health, education and welfare is tiny. The administrations, at district, city, provincial, regional and national levels, have their own councils, bureaucracies and, in many cases, police forces.

The largest issue: The state is not only hypertrophied, it is thoroughly politicized. There are more elected politicians in the country than in any other European state.

Yet – or therefore – it is often deeply inefficient and substantially corrupt. It’s corrupt openly and covertly. The politicians, the upper administrative class and the top judiciary have awarded themselves salaries larger than their equivalents in other – and richer – European states. Meanwhile, large amounts of the money allocated by the state for various projects are stolen. Several investigations are now going on into the misuse of funds allocated to Pompeii in the past few years. “Pompeii,” says Sergio Rizzo, one of Italy’s most prominent investigative reporters, “is a beautiful place but … it also reveals the workings of Italian chaos.”

Italy’s ruling class has become – as the title of a best-selling 2007 exposé, La Casta (part-written by Sergio Rizzo), has it, a caste, insulated, overpaid, prone to theft and failing its state. The revelations of the crimes and misdemeanors committed by politicians and administrators in their quest to enrich themselves have been piled high in the past decade by journalists, academics and the courts. These have often been greeted with cynicism: So what? Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?

In harsher times, this attitude breaks down, and anger takes its place. The most recent, extreme example: The unemployed, psychically lost and dangerous Luigi Preiti, went to Rome on Sunday “to kill a politician.” Not being able to find one, he shot two military policemen (one may be paralyzed for life) and a pregnant woman.

There is also the Five Star movement, which still takes its cue from the ranting diatribes in public squares of its leader, Beppe Grillo. Some blamed Grillo for creating the context in which Preiti acted: a reckless claim.

Amid all this a new government, sworn in on Sunday, must find a way to get things done. The prime minister, Enrico Letta, a soft-spoken former No. 2 in the left-of-center Democratic Party, told MPs that his government was “the one last chance” to save Italy. The technocratic former prime minister, Mario Monti, said something similar when he took office 18 months ago. One more time it is the last time.

Letta gave an assured speech, designed to be upbeat, outlining his program in parliament on Monday. But he has a mountain to climb even higher than that which faced Monti. As the commentator of the right, Maurizio Belpietro, pointed out in Libero, Letta promised something for everyone but neglected to say where the billions to fund his pledges were to be found. That’s a particular issue because of Letta’s pledge to cancel 6 billion euros’ worth of tax rises.

However overused the “last chance” rhetoric is, Letta may be right. Tolerance is now thin. People who have borne the elite’s corruption and arrogance with a patient shrug now increasingly say they don’t see why they should take it any more. Young people, both those coming out of the overcrowded and cut-to-the-bone universities and those leaving school for the job – read, jobless – market now join an unstable populace with little stake in the system (a phenomenon not confined to Italy).

Grillo’s movement, though inchoate and unfit for governance, has identified the right target: the political-administrative caste. Healthy democracies can’t bear a caste system for long, just as buses can’t run forever if no one pays the fare.

PHOTO: Newly appointed Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta (C) smiles after the swearing in ceremony for 21 new ministers at Quirinale palace in Rome, April 28, 2013. REUTERS/ Remo Casilli 

Many men in Chechnya, the mountainous region in the Russian Caucasus that has been fought over for three centuries, define themselves as warriors. They see the title as both their birthright, and the source of their manly honor. Now, their example has gone global, like so much else.

Nearly 20 years ago, with Pilar Bonet of the Spanish daily El País, I persuaded two Chechens to drive us out of Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, to some high ground, so that we might catch a glimpse of the Russian army advancing on the city. It was the beginning of the first Chechen war, in 1994. Russian President Yeltsin had tired of the defiance of the self- appointed Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev, who had declared Checnya’s independence – one of Russia’s Caucasus republics. He sent in the army.

Our drivers, a father and son, sped their rattling Lada out of the city and headed west, in the direction of the advancing Russians. As we drove, the older of the two men reached under the seat and, grinning, produced a Kalashnikov submachine gun and a pistol. He announced the intention to strike a blow for freedom against the Russians. Not wanting to join them in a bloody ditch, we asked to be let out, to the evident scorn of the son. The older man, with a hint of apology, said you must understand: “Lyubim oruzhie”  – “we love guns.”

That scene came back, with cinematic clarity, when I read about the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, now suspected of planting the bombs at the finishing line of Boston’s marathon. As the evidence gathered by the security services accumulates and is fed to the news media, we are told that the two men, outwardly well adjusted to their adopted home, had become radicalized. We don’t know their motivations yet, but some are wondering whether they have been inspired by the images and myths of those of their ethnic kin still fighting in Chechnya  – fighting, now, for a sharia state purged of infidels. A scholar of the area, Christopher Swift, believes that the conflict in the Russian Caucasus, populated by a patchwork of peoples and tribes, “has metastasized into a kind of globalized jihadist theater, at least in the minds of the young people fighting there.” Those who read and ingest the stories of that conflict, and bring it home – wherever home is – are fighting “there” too. They, too, have come to love guns.

In Grozny I saw warriors everywhere and at every age. A four-year-old boy had a Kalashnikov – without a magazine – slung over his diminutive body, under the eye of his proud mother. A man who looked in his eighties carried another – with a magazine.

The Chechen-Caucasian code of manly honor – which Tolstoy celebrated in his last novel, Hadji Murat  – was again on display. The memory of Stalin banishing Chechens to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration with the German armies remained strong, and was burnished for visiting reporters. Many thousands of Chechens died there. The Tsarnaev family, banished to Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, survived.

The first Chechen war, from 1994-1996, ended with a sullen truce; the second, which took up the first few years of the new century, fanned into life by President Vladimir Putin, was a hideous affair, which saw Grozny all but flattened as a brutalized Russian army gradually ground down equally brutalized warriors. Arkady Babchenko’s memoir, One Soldier’s War, is a near unbearable account of two forces each avid to maim, torture and kill the other. In the end, Putin suppressed most conflict: But hundreds fought on, “going into the forest”‘ as the Chechen phrase has it, to carry on a struggle led first by the ruthless Shamil Basayev, then, on his slaying, by the no less fearsome Doku Umarov. Starting guerrilla life as an irreligious warrior, he then embraced the most radical Islamism and now calls for a sharia-governed state across the Northern Caucasus. Other leaders, similarly fundamentalist, confine their jihad to Chechnya: All now carry on the struggle in the name of Islam, even as most Muslims in the area reject them.

The near-20-year wars have Islamized a struggle that was once motivated by nationalism, as Umarov had been. Some units of his “Caucasus Emirate,” with reported links to Al Qaeda, are now fighting in Syria against the forces of President Bashir al-Assad. One commander of these units, calling himself Emir Saifullah, said on a widely distributed video that no distinctions should be made in the different theaters of a jihadist war – “to us, there is no difference between Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Caucasus, any place.”

Did that shift to violent jihad need to have happened? The few relative moderates among the Chechen fighters believe not. Ilyas Akhmadov, the foreign minister of the secessionists in the early 2000s, was received by a senior official of the U.S. State Department in 2001 – but his request for aid was refused. In his book, Chechen Struggle, Akhmadov argues that  “the lack of a principled assessment in the west contributed to the radicalization of the Chechen resistance.”

For the West to have supported the Chechen resistance would, of course, have been a strongly aggressive move against Russia. But by not doing it, the Western states may have contributed to a growing sentiment that Russia and the West were one and the same – common enemies of the one true faith.

For some impressionable young men, the example of war-hardened men of their kin cleaving to the most violently transcendent ideology on the planet is fatally attractive. “We are at war and I am a soldier,” said Mohammed Siddique Khan, a young British born man of Pakistani origin who led the four-man team that placed bombs in underground trains and a bus in London in 2005. His inspiration came from the fighters in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, fighting – now with a chance of victory – against Allied and Afghani troops. The Chechen warriors, in Chechnya and abroad, have joined others on the stage of the “globalized jihadist theater.”

We see a deadly mixture: a code of honor that is centuries old with a means of communication – the Net – that is little older than is this century. The latter transmits the former; the impressionable young everywhere consume it. Some adopt it as their own. For, as the Chechen commander now fighting in Syria put it, “There is no difference.” The war is “any place.” Any place, that is, where there are men prepared to be warriors.

PHOTO: Runners continue to run towards the finish line of the Boston Marathon as an explosion erupts near the finish line of the race in this photo exclusively licensed to Reuters by photographer Dan Lampariello after he took the photo in Boston, Massachusetts, April 15, 2013. REUTERS/Dan Lampariello 

There’s no time more apt for murmuring the ending of Brutus’s speech in Julius Caesar than the week of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral: “The evil men do lives after them/the good is oft interred with their bones.” No time better, either, to add that the “evil” that, in this case one woman, did is little examined by her detractors, who prefer to stick to a diabolical version of her 12-year rule.

Margaret Thatcher (narrowly) won the 1979 election because the Labour government of the 1970s, under Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, had unsuccessfully tried to make a contract with the trade unions. In such a contract, pay would have been calibrated to productivity, and increases would be low in order to bring down high rates of inflation and to keep up investment in the socialized education, health and welfare institutions that disproportionately benefited the lower classes. It was the kind of social deal that the Germans and the Scandinavians had and still – in part – have: one that produces economies that, not by chance, have escaped the worst of the economic buffeting of the past five years.

But the attempt failed. The turn of 1978-79 was called the “Winter of Discontent” – another Shakespearean tag, this time from Richard III. Power failed; transport was constantly disrupted; hospitals and ambulance services closed. Most memorably, some gravediggers in Liverpool struck, and bodies piled up in a factory. All that Labour had held out as its usefulness to the nation – the ability to bring organized workers into a lasting, productive and stable agreement – was shattered. The party lost, but so did working men and women.

Thus, Britain’s large problems were given the free market, rather than the social democratic, treatment. That meant withdrawal of subsidies and widespread closures and unemployment. That was the prompt for much of the bitterness toward Hatcher, since not just jobs were lost but whole communities were rendered rudderless. Yet a victorious war against Argentina for possession of the Falklands, and a chaotic Labour Party, which had lurched to the left, saved Thatcher – and let her grow in stature, as the economy improved, and flourished.

This is not the story today’s Thatcher haters will listen to. Their dancing on her grave has disfigured public life in the UK since her death last Monday. I went to see a planned demonstration against both the present government cuts and her memory in Trafalgar Square over the weekend. It numbered in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, on a dank and cold day. Many there were drunk, and some turned the old cry, “Maggie Maggie Maggie; Out Out Out!” into “Maggie Maggie Maggie; Dead Dead Dead!” Although virulent, it also seemed lifeless, as if the malign chants took up all the energy there was.

Some also sang an old song that has had a burst of contemporary popularity: the Ella Fitzgerald version of a song sung by the cast of the 1939 film,Wizard of Oz – “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead … Yes let the joyous news be spread/The wicked old Witch at last is dead!”

The song has climbed rapidly up the charts, reaching – over the weekend – No. 2. It produced an instant headache for the BBC: Should it play it on its Radio One Official UK Top 40 Singles Chart program on Sunday afternoon, as it would any other? Or should it, out of respect for a former prime minister, ban it?

The choice, between a ban and playing, split the country and even her supporters. The new director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, at first said it would be played, citing the importance of free speech. Later, the Corporation partially backed down and, groping for a compromise, played only a seven-second clip, together with a balanced news story on the song.

Groups of protesters were bellowing it as I walked away with my twentysomething son. He said, “My generation has only one view of her: that she was awful.”

I said, in the way of fathers, even of adult children, that it was complicated. In the early eighties, when she was in government, I had briefly edited a weekly of the center-left – The New Statesman – that had opposed many but not all of her policies. I saw her as one who too wantonly cut down the trade unions, with no sympathy at all for their deep roots in the British working class and their ability to organize and to give an example of racial tolerance and promotion of equal rights for women.

Later, as a reporter in East Central Europe and what was the Soviet Union for nearly a decade, I found that Thatcher was one of the politicians who gave the most support to those living under communism. The people I admired admired her. They saw in her someone who offered not just hope but also legitimacy to those striving for a freer and better life. That she was a woman was important: She presented a sharp contrast to the stony-faced men who ran the communist bloc. Her vividness and spontaneity differed from their dull repetition of subservience to an exhausted ideology and a woefully inhuman economic model.

Margaret Thatcher had a split mind. She was for freedom, compellingly so at times. Yet she was also authoritarian, increasingly so as her premiership went on. Her instincts wavered between the two poles.

That a children’s movie song adapted to celebrate the death of a democratic political figure should find popularity is shameful. But so is the BBC’s feeble attempt to have it both ways. Its choice should have been clear. The best part of the former prime minister was her invocation of liberty: and liberty, as British political writing has for centuries insisted, must be extended to that which many, even the majority, find repellent. She may, or may not, have thought it should have been played. But had the better self won, she would have defended its broadcast.

PHOTO: A man reacts as he attends a gathering of people celebrating the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, in George Square in Glasgow, Scotland April 8, 2013. REUTERS/David Moir

As Donald Rumsfeld used to say, there are known unknowns. Two of them are confronting the world today, and both stem from the Korean peninsula. 

One: What will North Korean leader Kim Jong-un do now? He’s ordered missiles to be ramped up, fired a gun on TV, watched missiles shoot down dummy planes and told his military they were cleared for an attack on South Korea and the United States. He said “a sea of fire” would engulf his enemies if they dared to provoke him. Earlier this week, South Korea’s Unification Minister, Ryoo Kihi-Jae, said “there are signs” that a fourth nuclear test is being prepared at the Punggye-ri test site. What is the next move? 

The other quandary: What will the newly installed Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose state has protected North Korea for decades, do now?

Let’s answer the second question first. North Korea survives, in large part, because of China. China wants North Korea to survive so it’s a buffer against the South; China also doesn’t want millions of refugees if the North Korean regime collapses. It doesn’t like what the latest Kim is doing, but it does have the best back channel into his thoughts. He’s reported as depending for advice on his aunt Kim Kyong-hui, the North’s most powerful woman, and her husband, Jang Sung-taek, chosen by Kim Jong-Il before his death in 2011 to be the closest consigliere to his son. Jang is the main contact man with the Chinese. It may be that he has reassured the new Party leadership that this is just business as usual: all strut and no strike.

President Barack Obama has pressured Xi to talk sense to the young ruler, but there’s no obvious sign of success there. Xi may know that the saber will (as before) rattle loudly but not strike. But we don’t know.

But what will Kim Jong-un do now? Kim has already achieved something of a coup: He’s got the world wound up. The United States, which had mounted threatening overflights of South Korea, has cancelled further proposed exercises in the interests of decelerating tension. That’s the kind of thing that can easily be represented as a triumph for Kim’s martial spirit. He’s unsettled business in the South: Investment is threatened, contingency plans are being made for worker safety and evacuation plans for foreign nationals are being drawn up. 

Yet I would make a large bet that if Xi doesn’t believe that his awkward protégé wants to commit national suicide, he’s right. I also believe, though, that there is a real threat: not of immediate attack, but of the North’s collapse.

 As the defense writer Fred Kaplan noted recently in Slate, “messages are sometimes misinterpreted … History is littered with wars that neither side wanted to happen. That’s what worries many officials and analysts when they look at the Korean peninsula.” Kim Jong-un may know how to threaten, but he lacks the experience to know when to draw back. No one knows if he can, or will.

In his book The Cleanest Race, B.R. Myers, an American professor in South Korea’s Dongseo University and an authority on North Korea, argues that the North, often called “the last Stalinist state,” isn’t that at all. Nor is it, as other scholars claim, a kind of tyrannical Confucianism. It is highly ideological, but the ideology is one of race, not of class struggle.

Since 1948, when the present Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, took the leadership of the north, until now, the family strategy has been to enfold Korea’s 25 million people in a myth that they are the most pure, unsullied, childlike and innocent race on earth. Their purity and innocence requires the tender care of paternal leaders like the Kims. The rest of the world are dirty mongrels.

This is the internal approach: Externally (with the major exception of China) the stance is one of contempt and bellicosity. The result is the most complete isolation of any state in the world: necessary, if the population is to be kept docile, united both in love of the leader and hatred of outsiders. As the 2004 British documentary, A State of Mind, showed, the love is real.

Westerners, accustomed to being skeptical of political power and to politicians’ being judged on delivering material prosperity, assume the devotion is a façade. It isn’t, any more than the mass adoration of Stalin, Hitler and Mao was. We have been here before.

Kim Jong-un lives a savage paradox. More absolute in power than any other ruler, with a population more cowed than in any other country, he must, still, fear collapse. His frontiers are more porous than they have ever been. A widening circle is coming to know, not only that their neighbors are much richer and freer, but also that they wish to bring the isolated state into the world community.

There has been no sign – as there has been in every other dictatorship of the 20^th century – of an underground: the hideous, starving punishment camps, and the sheer efficiency of isolation and propaganda, have seemed to work. They may not work much longer. Once dissent springs up, it may grow, spread, usher in a violent end to the regime. Of course, we cannot know that it will do that. But nor does Kim: And it makes his regime the more perilous.

PHOTO: North Korean soldiers with military dogs take part in drills in an unknown location in this picture taken on April 6, 2013 and released by North Korea’s official KCNA news agency in Pyongyang on April 7, 2013.        REUTERS/KCNA 

Jim O’Neill, head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, thinks Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement is a greater threat to Europe and the euro than the trials of little Cyprus. That’s because Grillo received more than a quarter of the votes in February’s election in Italy and has since gridlocked the political system by refusing any dealings with the established parties. A government can’t be formed.

O’Neill warned that if growth does not come soon to the euro zone’s third-largest economy, stalled for longer than any other in Europe, even more people will start to support Grillo’s movement and its call for a referendum on membership of the euro zone. What, he asked, does Grillo think? His response: “Does anyone really know?”

I do, Jim.

Grillo and his collaborator, the slightly mystic Gianroberto Casaleggio, believe that the Web is the new form of democracy, infinitely superior to the representative parliamentary kind in which, they say, leaders frame the politics and politics fail the people. The Five Star Movement, said Casaleggio in a recent book, believes the word leader “is a word from the past, a dirty word that leads you astray. Leader of what? It means that you attribute intelligence and the power of decision making to others, so you aren’t even a slave, you’re an object.”

Grillo, Casaleggio and their movement may be a flash in an Italian pan, as brilliant and tasty as many other things in Italian pans, but it may disappear just as fast. Elsewhere in Europe, the Pirate parties, which have largely fallen to quarreling and collapsing, have done just that. But Italian political fads can catch on. Think of Christian democracy, fascism and communism-with-a-human-face. The latter was the forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev’s politics, the unintended destroyer of the Soviet Union.

This present flash may illuminate the world because it says something about democracy, and not just Italy’s democracy. Grillo thinks politicians (and journalists) should get out of the way and let the people rule directly, through the Web. We who cleave to elections, parliaments and representatives find this horrifying. But we forget several things:

1.) Politicians (everywhere) disappoint. They promise much, and deliver little. Marine Bulard, the deputy editor of the leftist Monde Diplomatique, recently excoriated her country’s socialist leader. “In under a year in office,” she wrote, “President Hollande has abandoned all his election promises and turned towards the conventional, and rightwing, financial and social policy positions of his predecessor.” That this will happen is the assumption, especially of the young, about politicians. Yes, it’s often unfair, but it’s also sometimes not. Politicians in the 2000s identified global warming as threatening the future of the planet, and we were all treated to lots of pictures of sweet-looking polar bears standing mournfully on shrinking icebergs. The icebergs are still shrinking and the bears are still mournful, but the subject has receded.

2.) Politicians are corrupt. There’s a high level of political corruption in Grillo’s Italy; so, too, in France. There was a recent big money scandal in Spain that touched the prime minister. The new democracies of Central Europe –Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania – are bywords for the buying of politics. British MPs fiddled their expenses. German ministers fiddled their doctoral theses. Indian politicians corrupt most things they touch – at least according to Indian journalists, many of whom are themselves not above taking back-handers in return for favorable coverage. And those are just the examples from democracies.

3.) Politicians are slow. When they do their job properly, in modern democracies, politicians struggle to overtake snails. Democracies have become so democratic that it seems – certainly to politicians who want to do things – that their world is composed of two figures, Checks and Balances.

4.) Politicians – again, when they do their exacting jobs – are dull and middle-aged. They’re dull because most things they deal with are complex: They have to at least partially master the details; and they have to deal with them. Go to any legislature whose language you understand, and you’ll find that the speeches are as far from “government of the people, by the people and for the people …” and “We will fight them on the beaches …” as a mutt is from a borzoi. The men and women who mouth the rhetoric are middle-aged because they usually don’t get elected until they’re at least in their forties, since they have to work their way into their party’s good graces to be selected for election.

5.) Worst of all, politicians now mostly can’t do what democratic politicians in the West have been able to do since World War Two: ensure that the children of their voters will have a materially better life than the voters themselves. Youth unemployment in the southern European countries is rising at an alarming rate. Few European governments look forward to the summer, season of riots and angry youthfulness.

Grillo’s movement, whatever its immediate fate, is on to something large. Democratic politics cannot continue to be seen (and too often to be) corrupt, out of touch, unresponsive and unsuccessful in protecting living standards – and survive. Hectoring, arrogant and impatient, Grillo infuriates those who know how hard doing politics is – and enthuses millions who know nothing about that, except that it doesn’t seem to work.

In office, the Five Star Movement would be worse than the disease. But the disease does rage. Politics is very often a group of overworked people who believe in representing and serving those who elected them. But they’re presently seen to be failing, and Beppe Grillo and his comrades think they have a much better way of running our societies. They will not be alone in this.

PHOTO: The anti-establishment 5-Star Movement former comic Beppe Grillo waves as he arrives at Quirinale palace in Rome March 21, 2013. Italian President Giorgio Napolitano completed a first day of consultations with political leaders on Wednesday to try to find a way of forming a government after the deadlocked election last month left no party with a majority in parliament. REUTERS/Remo Casilli

Among the initial wave of Russian oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky was the first among equals, and among the last.

By the mid- to late 1990s, he had become the most powerful figure, after the ailing President Boris Yeltsin, in the Kremlin. A mathematician and engineer of ability, Berezovsky leveraged an early success as a car salesman at a time of rampant inflation into huge wealth and control of media, auto, aviation and oil assets.

He strongly backed Vladimir Putin for president after Yeltsin’s resignation; indeed, he was his main promoter. In Putin, the apparently modest and amiable former KGB officer, Berezovsky saw somebody with self-discipline. He also saw somebody with the need for financial and intellectual support from somebody who had much of both – somebody like Berezovksy.

It was a huge misreading of Putin, a man well-trained to appear bland. In 2000 the new president summoned the oligarchs to the medieval fortress of the czars and told them they could keep their wealth if they left the politics to him. Three oligarchs ignored the order: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in a Siberian prison colony; Vladimir Gusinsky, in exile; and Berezovsky, who died this past weekend at his Berkshire estate.

These men, whose Jewishness had kept them out of the Soviet establishment for much of the Communist period, were brilliant, bold and ruthless. They were forces of nature who created the first draft of capitalism in the ruins of a completely socialized economy. They built it the only way possible, through expropriation, state capitalist corruption and a wholesale disregard for the rules ‑ permitted to do so by the Yeltsin governments in the ’90s, which, though often chaotic, held to the belief that even corrupt private ownership was better than the party-state version from which Russia had just emerged.

Putin’s reassertion of the rule of the Kremlin made the remaining oligarchs, Berezovsky included, subject to Putin’s regime. Great wealth had to now bow low and remember that its business was only business, not politics and Kremlin power games. In the past 13 years the state has taken back much of the oil industry and has tightened its grip on the broadcast media. Russia has seen FoPs (Friends of Putin) take control of the strategically important corporations and institutions; it has allowed the creation of a state-business relationship that depends largely on a series of relationships that lead to the presidential administration, and whose lubrication is a system of bribes, kickbacks and privileges reckoned in the hundreds of millions.

In her just-published book, Can Russia Modernise?, the political scientist Alena Ledeneva writes that, according to the leading politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, corruption has an explicit price in Russia. It’ll cost $5 million to $7 million for the post of governor, $5 million to $7 million for a seat in the federation council and $2 million to $3 million for the head of a department in government or of a federal service. These entrance fees are paid by the office holder (who is fairly certain he can quickly recoup his investment) to whichever high official has the post. She quotes a businessman’s description of a “new normality code” for a high official:

One should take kickbacks openly so that others know about it. Moreover, one should give advance warning to one’s superiors and ask for feedback (approval). One should also share the spoil with subordinates. One should never think of the spoils as one’s own. Easy come, easy go.

This is the new order, and Berezovsky helped bring it about. It is one that grew out of the “robber-baron capitalism” period (as George Soros described it) in which Berezovsky, with Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky and others, reigned all-but-supreme. Berezovsky was the most frank: He saw a fusion between the raw capitalism he was furthering and the rawer democracy  Yeltsin guaranteed. His political interventions, of which few were secret, were “acceptable” because it was “necessary to interfere directly in the political process to defend democracy.”

Berezovsky overreached himself, and badly miscalculated. In their last meeting in 2000, Putin told him bluntly that he would relieve him of his TV channel (he did the same to Gusinsky). Berezovsky left the country.

Once in exile in the UK, Berezovsky could not reconcile himself to powerlessness. He poured money into anti-Putin projects, of which the most dramatic was the allegation that the president had organized bombs in apartment blocks in Moscow so the administration could blame Chechen terrorists. That then helped justify a fresh war in Chechnya that hugely boosted Putin’s popularity. Berezovsky’s  onetime bodyguard and friend, the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned in November 2006; the oligarch accused Putin of ordering the murder. Last year he lost a case he had brought against his onetime protégé, the much richer Roman Abramovich, claiming $5.5 billion for alleged underpayment of the shares he had in the oil company Sibneft. Berezovsky lost, and was saddled with huge costs – and a reportedly all-enveloping depression.

He was the last of an extraordinary band – not, to be sure, of brothers but of fractious, warring comrades-in-arms. They supported Yeltsin with money and media against the return of a political system that had excluded them from their just deserts. For Berezovsky, the irony was that the man who did succeed the anti-Communist Yeltsin had a reverence for the Soviet Union, and the will to use the state, in certain instances, as repressively as the Soviet leaders had done.

Berezovsky never, it seemed, grasped that he and his fellow oligarchs were deeply unpopular in a country that, through the ’90s, suffered huge material poverty. In his own estimation, he was the first among those who were building a future wealth on a foundation of freedom. But the first sometimes shall be last: Boris Berezovsky died in distress, frustration and despair. He was not likely to have been comforted by any reflection that he will have a vivid, if ambiguous, place in the history of the creation of the new Russia. For him, the rapid accumulation of raw power in a time of troubles was a drug from which he could not wean. In the end, as drugs tend to do, it killed him.

PHOTO: Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky speaks to members of the media after losing his court battle against Roman Abramovich, at a division of the High Court in London August 31, 2012. REUTERS/Olivia Harris 

Journalism gyrates dizzily between the dolorous grind of falling revenue and the Internet’s vast opportunities of a limitless knowledge and creation engine. On the revenue front, no news is good. The just-published Pew Center’s “State of the US News Media” opens with the bleak statement that “a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.” Not only, that is, is the trade shrinking, but those who once depended on its gatekeepers have found their own ways to visibility.

Journalists’ task, as large as any they have collectively faced in 400 years of their trade’s existence, is to find a way to continue the journalism that societies most need and citizens are least willing to pay for: detailed, skeptical, truthful, fair, investigatory writing and broadcasting. It’s a big ask. The British are in the process of not answering it. They are staging a sideshow: not an unimportant one, but in a minor key all the same.

Over the past two years, a series of alleged crimes – illegal interception of phone messages, bribery, blackmail, perverting the course of justice, theft – have been committed by journalists working for the British tabloids. The Leveson Inquiry, prompted by revelations of phone hacking, and subsequent police investigations have laid bare a shaming landscape of cruelty and criminality. Many politicians of all parties bowed before the perpetrators, adding to the shame.

Redress is planned. Over the past few days, the three main party leaders have agreed to a much stricter regime of press regulation. The political parties, sensing that the popular mood has been and may remain critical of the tabloids, have also agreed (it seems; the deal may still fall apart) to put their collective weight behind a regulator with the power to levy fines up to £1 million and to command prominent display for corrections. The tabloids, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, the most popular daily in the land, cry tyranny. That cry is most eloquently uttered by Trevor Kavanagh, the paper’s veteran political columnist, who warned on Tuesday that “once politicians seize control of that voice [a free press], whatever their promises and assurances, there is nothing to stop them gagging it altogether.”

British tabloid journalism, which often shocks foreigners with its brutality, sees itself, in the minds of its editors and owners, as in the great line of British arguments for press freedom – John Milton’s Areopagitica; John Wilkes’ “seditious” defiance; the caustic cartoons of Hogarth and Rowlandson; John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”; George Orwell; and the tradition, in print and broadcast, of investigative journalism. 

The regulations’ supporters, which include some of the “upmarket” (or, as tabloid editors like to say, ”unpopular”) papers, see the tabloids as mendacious, careless of ethics and shameless in their avidity for salacious detail – an avidity which prompted most of their criminal behavior.

Nevertheless, the government’s reaction is well-meaning but wrongheaded. The Internet has exposed a truth as old as journalism, disguised in the last two centuries by journalism’s professionalization. Journalism is not and cannot be a certified profession. Unlike medicine, or the law, or the academy, or for that matter plumbing, carpentry and auto mechanics, it’s not something that requires lengthy training, professional standards and a certificate of competence. It can be done by anyone who can observe, write and/or broadcast. It belongs not to a guild of protected practitioners but to the citizenry. Journalists ‘R’ Us. 

Because it’s us, journalism reflects the mess of people’s minds, curiosities, fears, envies, lusts and angers. What feeds those appetites – tabloid sex scandals, ranting polemics against political enemies, the tearing down of establishment figures – has long been popular. The large change is that people can now try their hands at creating such journalism for themselves.

There is nothing that can, or should, be done about that. Regulating such primal urges is what free societies, no longer under the tyranny of religious or secular dictatorships, have set their faces against. 

Journalism of the kind practiced by the company publishing this – which aspires to tell the truth, hold various powers to some kind of account, reveal inner workings of states and corporations – and which does need training, ethics and experience, exists in part because it’s (still) a business, in part because such a business assists citizens to a fuller citizenship, by informing them of what is significant in their societies and in the world.

The challenges facing journalists at the beginning of the third millennium are to expand the freedoms still denied to them in authoritarian societies (and blessedly many are the brave men and women who strive to do so); to sift the truth from ever-growing piles of obfuscating detail and downright misinformation; and to construct readable and watchable narratives that inform by telling that age-old thing: a story – in these cases, one which accords with the facts.

The Brits, in conformance with their best traditions, have lately discovered great wrongs through journalism and legal process, and seek to put them right. They will not, as the more inflamed tabloids allege, usher in Stalinist darkness. But in an excess of puritanical zeal they are creating a mechanism that will nevertheless proclaim that a country that has done much to give press freedom an underpinning philosophy will now dabble in futile, nanny-ish regulation. Journalism has always hovered between soaring ideals and base sniggering. Freedom demands it should continue to do so.

PHOTO: Copies of the Sun on Sunday are displayed for sale, on the first day of publication, in Wembley, north London February 26, 2012. REUTERS/Andrew Winning