The surprise victory of the militant Islamic group Hamas in recent Palestinian parliamentary elections is an ominous warning about the prospect of democratization that is either directly or, as in the Palestinian case, somewhat indirectly imposed from without. Perhaps Ghazi al-Jawar, the former provisional president of Iraq, was correct when he warned about the possible...

It has been more than four centuries since the last time that a German was elevated to the chair of Saint Peter. Pope Hadrian VI (1522-1523) was from Utrecht, a city within the Holy Roman Empire. Before his election as pope, he had been the teacher of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the principal representative of German...

In a strange way, it appears that Adolf Hitler is still ruling Germany.  In the Federal Republic of Germany, the forces of “democracy,” in the form of political parties, make political decisions by implementing the opposite of what they assume Hitler would have wanted.  Those political parties, the governing opposition, are “democratic” because American military...

The recent German federal election brought the remarkable defeat of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the establishment of the most leftwing parliament and government in the 50-year history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The drag of incumbency—Kohl had spent 16 years in office—does not provide the essential...

On January 9, 1997, in an open letter in the New York Times to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, American artists and intellectuals criticized the discriminatory treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Although the petitioners claimed not to be biased in their complaint by sympathy for this church, their objectivity has to be questioned, for there are...