Big data? No. Vast data, enormous data, unimaginably colossal data ties our world together. Some have said it also ties us down, since departments like the National Security Agency are combing through a part of our huge reservoir for intelligence on foreigners who might threaten the U.S. Yet this behavior is now the status quo, one that will not go away, nor diminish. It’s a doleful one if you deem it an open invitation to 1984-style tyranny, or an exhilarating one if you see a world of ever-expanding knowledge and opportunity.

Regardless, data culture is growing at a stupefying rate. It’s estimated that 90 percent of all the data in the world has been generated in the last two years, and the rate itself is increasing. We humans, ordinary people going about our business, are creating most of that data, because we have come to need it to shop, to bank, to access benefits, to be part of a health service, to educate our children, to be secure, to play games, to form and maintain modern friendships, to find partners… in other words, to live in the world.

To live outside of this networked world we would need to live in isolation, growing and hunting your own food without utilities. Or we would have undergone a catastrophe, the kind of thing contemporary dystopian fiction likes to conjure up. Since few of us want to try the first and none of us wish to be victims of the second, we’re stuck in the Net.

We’re stuck, and we have to adapt to it — as we have adapted to the other technologies that we have invented and produced. We have adapted to the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. We’ve adapted to the telephone and the television. We must now adapt to a world where public and private centers of power and authority know or can discover wads of information on us. And we must become comfortable with the reality that it is information we have half-unconsciously handed over.

To adapt, we must trust. We have to trust the state, the government, the politicians, the businesses, the bureaucracies, the police, the security forces, the journalists and, yes, ourselves.

We’ve become used to believing that trust in public figures and institutions is a dwindling commodity, a precipitous falling away fromwhat we used to have so much of, at least in some things and some people. How do we acquire it again?

We need to realize that trust is a relationship. Trust needs work, from us. We need to hold the powers that be to realistic account, which means we must understand what is reasonable to ask of them, and how much we are prepared to engage, or give up, or pay, in order to get it.

But we can’t trust in ignorance, or we are simply being naïve. Most of us can’t handle too much complexity in fields we don’t understand — and when we hear that in a couple of years global data will amount to a zettabyte, which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, and that in three years global Web traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes a year, we tune out, and leave it to others.

Yet we need to somehow grasp the size of the data or we become immensity’s victims: we need to pioneer something like an Open Digital University, a resource available to all which will take us through at least the lower slopes of understanding of what our modern, connected universe is — building on courses that our kids get at school.

Further, since our democratic and political systems depend on representatives and officials who know how to navigate the Internet, they have to be trained in the ways of digital democracy — with the accent on the second word. They must know not just what the great banks of information, public and private, have on us. They must also assure us that this information is safeguarded, open to inspection and as transparent as possible. They have to be our guardians and pathfinders in this world.

So must the news media. As the late James Carey wrote, “In the Fourth Estate view of journalism, journalists would serve as agents of the public in checking an inherently abusive government.” But the media, too — as the phone hacking scandal in the UK amply demonstrates — can abuse the public in its search for information. The philosopher Onora O’Neill, in her Reith Lectures given over a year ago, argued that the media was constantly demanding transparency from every institution butitself. It’sime that was reversed.

Less obviously but much more worrying, the great engines of our informational and social world (Google, Facebook, etc.) could currently or soon have at least exabytes (1000⁶) of information on us. This means that we have to know much more about them: secrecy in corporations as powerful as these can’t continue.

And we must create the office, as dignified and powerful as that of a Supreme Court judge, of a Digital Ombudsman, one who, with a large staff, is empowered on behalf of the public to investigate and report on the nature of the informational ecosystem that surrounds us; how it is increasing; what its increase brings; what we are giving to which institutions in the way of data on ourselves and those we know. Such an official must become integrated into our society and in our politics.

Trusting ourselves means we have to wise up to how much we are enmeshed in the Net; what gains this gives; what losses it demands. It means supporting those institutions that are prepared to hold to account not just others, but themselves. It means holding them to the promises and the mechanisms of oversight. There’s no way out of feeling trapped in the coils of a net than by actively ensuring that it isn’t choking you.

PHOTO: Passengers watch a television screen broadcasting news on Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), on a train in Hong Kong June 14, 2013. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

The End of History and the Last Man is 21 years old this year. The book of that name, by Francis Fukuyama, has, in the view of many, matured badly. Published in 1992, it was much lauded for its view that, with the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc, liberal democracy and free markets were the only long-term politics and economics for the globe.

After 9/11, the disparagements came quickly. The terrorist attacks were held to show that history may have paused, but it had reignited with a vengeance. Clearly, there were other powerful forces in the world than the “inevitable” liberal democracy; sharply different ideologies were alive, well and seeking power by any means.

Fukuyama was seen as a man of the right, though he is quite heterodox: he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, and has recently said that the German social democratic model is better for workers than the U.S. free enterprise one. He has not given up thinking freely, and though he has modified his views, he has not abandoned them.

Shouldn’t he, though? A tour of the contemporary world reveals much that would give Fukuyam-ists pause. Democracy of any kind is often a corrupt façade when it’s not missing altogether.

The Syrian conflict appears to be swaying to the advantage of President Assad, as the city of Qusair in Western Syria was retaken by government forces. Determined oppression, for which the Fukuyama thesis left little room, remains a regime’s possible response. Syria still has powerful friends and every chance of victory.

China is not in the Syrian brutality league, but the world’s largest state will remain a one-party, authoritarian bastion. (No matter that Barack Obama described talks at the end of last week between him and the Chinese President Xi Jinping as “terrific.”) China’s Communist Party is likely to remain authoritarian, its leaders fearful of class and ethnic divisions. But without the checks and balances that a functioning, recognized and legal opposition offers, there is nothing but the consciences of its leaders to stop a descent into bloodshed, should a strong challenge to monopoly rule arise.

Nor do many of the new democracies offer compelling models. The Egyptian government of President Mohamed Morsi has disillusioned both the country’s liberals who saw in the fall of President Hosni Mubarak a springtime of the nation. It is not (yet?) a tyranny, but its general drift is towards the religious intolerance which is the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter providing one part of Egypt’s ruling class — the military, as before, providing the other.

Turkey, meanwhile, has a Prime Minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, doggedly determined to ignore demonstrations. Those protests started as a push against the destruction of a park in Istanbul’s center, but have since flowered into a general critique of what many protestors say is a threat to democracy. Turkey threatens to show that a government elected by a majority without a strongly liberal orientation tends to neglect the rights of minorities and drifts to authoritarianism. This, at least, is what Turkey’s most famed author, Orhan Pamuk, fears.

In Russia, high-profile liberals — such as the economist Sergei Guriev and the opposition leader and chess champion Garry Kasparov — leave their country for self-imposed exile, warning of Kremlin crackdowns. In Venezuela, the late Hugo Chavez’ successor, Nicolas Maduro Moros, lacks his mentor’s charisma but not his determination to brand the opposition as traitors. Even India cannot bask too smugly in its democracy: there, poverty is more stubbornly entrenched than in China, corruption is ingrained and mass murders between religious groups and by Maoist terrorists erupt frequently. In most authoritarian states, democrats and liberals are minorities — sometimes quite small ones.

But the democratic proposal, and Fukuyama’s vision, are robust enough to survive. It does not, in the end, depend on the perceived success of the democratic states (most of the European ones certainly aren’t succeeding, for now). It doesn’t depend on loving America. It doesn’t depend, even, on the perception that wealth and democracy have tended to go together, which the leaping success of China may be about to damage.

It depends on the wish of people to live, think, read, watch, talk and publish freely. The assumption that most people do wish that (when relieved of fear of its consequences) isn’t naïve or ill-founded. It has tended to be proven by time and events — not just in the convulsions of 1989 that shaped Fukuyama’s thinking, but after, and now, too.

Democratic politics may be — as Fukuyama claimed — the only form of government that can offer every citizen a promise of both economic development and a framework for how to live amongst one another and beneath a government.

The growth of the global middle class, nearly two-thirds of which will live in Asia by 2030, is something of a bedrock for participatory politics. A middle class with some property, private wealth and higher education is not necessarily either liberally or democratically inclined, but its members are more likely to be so than those for whom existence is an exhausting, all-consuming struggle.

“Liberal democracy,” said Fukuyama in a 2008 interview, “is still really is the only game in town worldwide, in spite of all of its shortcomings.” He’s right to stick to his opinion. And so should the world’s democrats.

PHOTO: Protesters stand behind a barricade during a protest at Taksim Square in Istanbul June 11, 2013. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

The only other divorcee among Russian leaders before President Vladimir Putin was Czar Peter I, or Peter the Great.

Peter’s first bride, Evdokiya Lopukhina, was chosen for him by his mother — a mistake, at least for her son. Evdokiya, a deeply religious, conservative but strong-willed woman, didn’t like her husband’s modernization drive. With her equally niggly relatives, she so roused Peter’s ire that he secured a divorce and bullied her into a convent.

He took up instead with a beautiful German, Anna Mons, whom he met on a visit to Moscow’s German colony. She remained semi-openly by his side for more than a decade but when — apparently fearing that he had lost interest — she flirted with and then fell for the Prussian ambassador, he imprisoned her, along with her mother and sister. Then married someone else.

No record of anything as disgraceful has happened since — either in tsarist or Soviet times. (Catherine the Great was estranged from her husband, had him arrested and may have ordered his death: But she never divorced him.) The Tsars’ wives varied in the degrees of independence they showed. Some – for example, Alexandra, wife of the last Tsar Nicholas II and murdered with him and their five children by the Bolsheviks in May 1918 – were strongly opinionated, in her case (like Evdokia) harshly conservative and autocratic.

The Soviet wives, lacking the status grand aristocratic families lent the tsarinas, were largely invisible. But then came Raisa Gorbacheva, whose elegance threw their dowdiness into much-remarked relief, and whose closeness to and influence on her husband, Mikhail, was as evident as his grief from her death in 1999.

Raisa Gorbacheva was rightly seen as a sign of modernity. A woman of independence and intelligence unafraid to display it. (Though she was much disliked for doing so.) Lyudmila Putina is not like Gorbacheva, in her visible shrinking from public meetings. But she, too, with her husband, performed another act of modernity. She has, in a dignified fashion, said she doesn’t want to live with someone who has cut her out of his life.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich is completely drowned in work,” she told a respectful interviewer earlier this week. She was standing a little behind her husband, praising him and agreeing that it was, as he said, “a civilized divorce.”

This rehearsed interview may have tactfully glossed over the fact that Putin was drowned in more than work.

The rumors of Putin’s affair – with the Olympic gold medalist gymnast Alina Kabayeva – have been in the global public domain for five years. That was when a bold Russian journalist put the rumors to Putin when he was visiting then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the latter’s Sardinian estate in April 2008. “Not one word of truth” snapped Putin to the reporter – while Berlusconi, shaping his hand into a pistol, took imaginary aim at her.

In the relationship between the former KGB officer and the Italian plutocrat – one of the closest between leaders on the international scene – is likely to lie some of the explanation for Putin’s divorce. “Putin mirrors himself on Berlusconi,” says the Dutch publisher and longtime Moscow resident Derek Sauer. Though he adds Berlusconi has the intellectual advantage over the Russian.

Berlusconi’s divorce from the actor Veronica Lario in 2009 – he has been told by the court that he must pay a monthly settlement of 3 million euros ($4  million) – was far from civilized. She went public, in the center-left La Repubblica, of her distress that he consorted with “minors.” He has recovered: he has been seen on several occasions with the 27-year-old Francesca Pascale, a local councilor for his party. Berlusconi’s delight in young women is frank and often repeated: and for most of his periods in office, appeared to do him no electoral harm.   As a role model for the macho style, he is world-class.

Putin has been loyal to a fault over his friend’s sins of the flesh, telling a 2011 investors’ conference in Sochi – while Berlusconi was still prime minister – that “however much they nag Signor Berlusconi for his special attitude to the beautiful sex, and, by the way, they nag him mainly because of jealousy, he has shown himself as a responsible statesman. ”

Russians (they are not alone in this) have long seen Italy as a demi-paradise – for its climate, its food, its beauty. Today, Russian is heard often in the more exclusive resorts of the peninsula, and several oligarchs have villas there.

Putin’s fascination is, to that extent, traditional, and adroitly channeled by a master of Italian charm. The relationship may also have a more material side. As loud as the gossip about Putin’s affair are rumors of a joint financial interest that both men have in the deals which energy-poor Italy has made with energy-rich Russia. Among the leaked cables published by WikiLeaks – for which Private First Class Bradley Manning is now standing trial – was one where the U.S. ambassador to Rome, Ronald Spogli, reflecting that Berlusconi admired the Russian’s “macho style,” added that “contacts in both the opposition center-left Partito Democratico and Berlusconi’s own PDL party … have hinted at a more nefarious connection. They believe that Berlusconi and his cronies are profiting personally and handsomely from many of the energy deals between Italy and Russia.”

Putin is now free. Free to marry his alleged lover (who is also said already to have one or two children by him); free to find another companion; free to drown himself even more deeply in his work.

He has much with which to occupy himself: large figures, as the former chess champion Gary Kasparov and the leading economist Sergei Guriev, have in the past few weeks quit a country they see as heading for more repression; and the economy is buoyed up only by high oil prices. In addition, Putin’s popularity ratings, once high, are now falling, as did Berlusconi in the months before he was pushed out of office at the end of 2011.

But he may still have more comfort to take from his Italian mentor. Berlusconi’s party, the People of Freedom, is again Italy’s most popular, and the man himself is again riding moderately high. “Italian voters,” explained Francesco Giumelli, “have always been attracted by the uomo forte, the strong man, a charismatic leader who is capable of singlehandedly solving the country’s problems.”

Putin is now free to solve all of his country’s problems: and may, like Berlusconi, gain admiration rather than contempt if he succeeds, at 60, in uniting with a much younger woman.

All the world loves a lover. Or, at least, sees him as reassuringly human.

PHOTO (Insert A): Vladimir Putin (L) and his wife Lyudmila attend a service to mark the start of his term as Russia’s new president at the Kremlin in Moscow, May 7, 2012. REUTERS/Aleksey Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Pool

Photo (Insert B): Former Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, in a 1994 file photo. REUTERS/files

PHOTO (Insert C): Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (R) and his fiancee Francesca Pascale walk at the Rome train station Dec. 29, 2012. REUTERS/Tony Gentile

This is what we, who like precision in such matters, call “a lot.” The millionaire population in the UK – the fourth-largest in the world – stands at over half a million households. This is so many that when I reminded a wealthy friend of mine, who was complaining about a personal setback, that she was a millionaire, she snapped, “Isn’t everybody?” Tactless as the response seemed, the rich hobnob with the rich. After a while it becomes the prevailing wisdom.

Within rising global wealth, BCG sees a sign that Western economies are edging upward at last. Indeed, the United States seems to be set for appreciably faster growth. But Europe is stuck in recession; If there is growth, it’s anemic and is happening outside the euro zone.

Some 6 million young people are unable to find work in the European Union. This is fewer than the more alarmist figures of a quarter or more of youth unemployment, but it is a vast army nonetheless ‑ one governments hope will not do what armies do, which is stop marching and start fighting.

These doleful figures have plagued Europe for several years. But most of us assume – or are assured – that things will get better, since they have in postwar years, until now. Stephen D. King, the group chief economist of the banking giant HSBC, wrote the recently published When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence (Yale University Press), in which he says:

Our societies are not geared for a world of very low growth … persistent postwar economic success has left us with little knowledge or understanding of worlds in which rising prosperity is no longer guaranteed.

Before they helped to create a world of rising prosperity, Europeans developed two powerful streams of political thought that ultimately allowed for the peaceful governance of their societies when they came into their own after World War II. One – which could date its beginning to 150 years ago in May 1863, with the founding of the German Workers Association – was social democracy. It was an ideology that in its early years swung between revolution and reform, but which, especially in its British incarnation, the Labour Party, chose the latter route of seeking to tame capitalism and improve the conditions of the poor with the weight of the popular vote.

The other route – Christian democracy – is a little over 120 years old, seeing its foundation in the encyclical Rerum Novarum -  literally, “Of New Things” and in its common meaning, “Of Revolution.” Pope Leo XIII, who wrote the encyclical, was alarmed both by the greed of the capitalists and by the rising discontent of the industrial proletariat. He sought to describe the mutual dependence and differing responsibilities of the worker and proprietor – the first was to work “faithfully,” the second to pay “fairly.” A worker who could not obtain a fair wage was, says the document, “a victim of force and injustice.”

Over time the substantial claims of these two great and antagonistic ideologies came to resemble each other. Social democrats like those in the Catholic Church rarely admire capitalism, but they no longer wish to destroy it. The best-known theorist of modernized social democracy, Anthony Giddens, wrote in Beyond Left and Right that “the only common characteristic of socialist doctrines is their ethical content … ideas brought together by a condemnation of the evils and injustices of capitalism.” It is a claim that rests on the fact that few leftist governments hew to the once-standard policies of nationalization, workers’ control or the high taxation of the rich.

Both social and Christian democracies are weaker today. The Catholic Church is led by the Argentine Pope Francis, who has stressed the need for solidarity, observing tartly that “while the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling.” Francis’ power to shame the wealthy minority into renouncing their pursuit of riches will be limited, as was the futile gesture of the Socialist Party president of France, Francois Hollande, in making the actor Gerard Depardieu pay the 75 percent wealth tax last year (an action later judged unconstitutional).

In a lament for the passing of a social/Christian democracy that enjoyed widespread support through much of the Western world in the decades after the war, the late scholar and writer Tony Judt argued in one of his last public appearances that the only impetus to revive such a political economy and to escape from what he saw as the dire consequences of a steadily fragmenting and unequal world, was a “social democracy of fear.” The fear, of course, would be of social disturbances that such a fragmented world would bring, as well as of the poverty it would re-impose.

The ethical energy of these two versions of democracy that have been dominant in Europe for the past six decades is diluted today. King is likely right in his view that the more we face aging societies, ascendant new nations and increasingly costly resources, the less likely it is that we will not recover the fine, careless assumption that growth is our birthright. The United States, too, faces higher health and welfare bills over the next two decades – at the end of which the federal debt is forecast to be 90 percent of gross domestic product. The “end of Western affluence” in King’s title may be more than hyperbole.

We will need to find, within fear or in a change of heart (fear seems more likely), a way of identifying which economic arrangements will keep democracy on the road. The way is not easy to glimpse; but it’s a central task for the coming generations of politicians.

PHOTO: Protestors scuffle with French CRS riot police in front of tyre maker Goodyear Dunlop France headquarters during a demonstration against job cuts in Rueil Malmaison, near Paris March 7, 2013. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

These companies are nothing like the robber barons that were rebuked by the U.S. government a century ago. They are not locking out workers or running sweatshops. On the contrary: They’re hiring people. Led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advocacy group FWD.us, they are agitating for immigration laws to be loosened so they can hire clever Chinese, Indian and other citizens and pay them lots of money. Those lucky enough to get into their now-sprawling campuses gain access to a kind of gold-plated welfare state where choices of delicious food, health centers and dental clinics are theirs for the using.

The companies say transparency and freedom of speech are at the heart of all they do. Transparency is a Google “Core Value”; Facebook has signed up to the Global Network Initiative, dedicated to advancing freedom of expression to help “shed a spotlight on government practices that restrict expression and seek over-broad requests for user data.”

Freedom and transparency make up one of the largest battlegrounds between states and citizens today, and the fact that the Silicon Valley companies put themselves on the side of citizens has attracted high-profile recruits to their offices. In the UK, two big-time journalists renounced their trade to work for Google: John Kampfner was editor of the leftist New Statesman and head of the NGO Index on Censorship. He is now an external adviser to Google on free expression and culture. Peter Barron edited the BBC’s probing Newsnight program and, while a reporter on the program, won a 1995 award from the Royal Television Society for reports on the arms-to-Iraq scandal. He’s now head of external relations for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Google.

As unlikely as it is that the rich, clever people behind these companies will lead their employers to tragic fates, they have a very large problem on their hands. Relative to their earnings, these companies pay very little taxes. This is not, it seems so far, a crime. But it may be worse than a crime; it is a product of their philosophies.

Last year, Facebook paid “negative taxes” – that is, the taxpayer paid the company $429 million because Facebook had written off the value of the stock options awarded to Zuckerberg and other executives. The company received a huge tax deduction of $16 billion. This is quite legal, but, as Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in a debate on the Senate floor last April, “As with so much of our tax code, it’s not the law-breaking that shocks the conscience, it’s the stuff that’s allowed.”

Levin’s governmental affairs investigations subcommittee interviewed Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and other top executives a few days after the release of a congressional report that claimed Apple uses a complex “highly questionable” tax-minimization strategy. Part of this strategy involved the shift, more than 30 years ago, of a major part of the company’s ostensible central control function to Ireland, where corporate taxes are very low. As Levin put it, “Folks, it’s not right.” After the hearing, even critical observers concluded that Cook wasn’t really rattled.

Across the Atlantic, another feisty committee chairman and former labor minister, Margaret Hodge, also thinks it’s not right. As Cook faced the senators, Google Vice-President Matt Brittin was being warned that it was a serious offense to mislead Hodge’s committee – an offense he might have committed when, last year, he argued that no sales transactions were done in the UK by Google but were routed through a subsidiary in Ireland. Google, like Apple, has a center in Dublin that is nominally its European hub. Hodge said the committee was alerted to the discrepancy by a report by Reuters’ Tom Bergin (who received the Orwell Prize for the piece). Hodge said, “It was quite clear … that the entire trading process and sales process took place in the UK.” Google’s sales in the UK are worth 3.2 billion pounds, but most are routed through Dublin. In 2011 it paid 6 million pounds in UK corporation tax.

The various executives of these companies don’t exhibit much sense of guilt when confronted by irate lawmakers. The British new technology writer Dick Pountain wrote in his blog that when Google CEO Eric Schmidt came to the UK earlier this month, he “treated UK PM David Cameron with the amused air of a cheeky schoolboy talking to a nagging teacher … a mask for the fact that he now wields more power than a mere PM and knows it.” Pountain also quotes the former Facebook employee Katherine Losse from her book, The Boy Kings, that Schmidt’s philosophy is, “If you want to change the world … start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.”

In a fine piece of close reporting, George Packer reveals a world where the magnificent headquarters buildings “keep tech workers from having even accidental contacts with the surrounding community.” The spirit that imbues the engineers who work there carry Schmidt’s belief: that companies are king and governments are at best passé. This view, once framed as state-of-the-art idealism, is now seen as deeply self-serving and destructive of societies that depend, for their infrastructure, social services and much else, on the tax that these companies are determined not to overpay. Not all lawmakers see it this way.  Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) spent his time on the Levin committee hearings seeking to protect Apple from “bullying.”

At times over their 100-year history, corporations have vied with governments for primacy and for the moral high ground. A new battle is now joined, and governments in Germany, France and other European states are following the UK and the U.S. into the trenches. It’s a battle not just for more tax revenue but also for the concept and practice of the nation-state and its provision of public goods. That makes the issue central to us all.

PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook is pictured as he confers with staff during a break at a Senate homeland security and governmental affairs investigations subcommittee hearing on offshore profit shifting and the U.S. tax code, on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 21, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed

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