The European Union, in the wake of Lisbon, has become an international actor. It now faces two major external challenges. The first is to develop strategic vision for a potentially tumultuous emerging multi-polar world. The second challenge is to help nudge the other major actors towards a multilateral global grand bargain. The price of failure will be a return to the jungle – a jungle in which European assets will count for very little.

Although conceptual boxes strip analysis of depth, how do we live, study and explore the world without any guidelines or pre-manufactured tools? And assuming this to be possible, isn’t tragedy only accessible to the few elites that are read enough to extract the very substance of tragedy that can be useful in our contemporariness?

Crime in the 21st century poses a major asymmetric threat to Canadian society, demanding enforcement that is flexible, responsive, and grounded in defensible strategic goals. This will require solutions beyond standard bureaucratic shifts, necessitating a broad change in organizational mindsets, shifting the emphasis of enforcement from a “statistics-based policing” model to a more strategic, long-term approach.

It is almost ten years to the day since the collapse of the Seattle ministerial, but a new trade deal seems no more likely now that at any other point in the negotiations. This does not necessarily mean that a deal cannot be reached. In fact with sufficient compromise on the part of both developed and developing countries it is even possible, albeit perhaps unlikely, that a deal could be struck in 2010.

Efforts to combat climate change will proceed apace regardless of Copenhagen; indeed, the possible shortcomings of the summit should not detract from the task that national governments have already embarked upon and will continue to face over the decades to come. This is because globalisation means that problems are precisely that: global.