The European Union is struggling to develop a coherent policy for dealing with the influx of refugees into the 28-nation union. As is does so, it has to operate within the context of international laws and obligations that have grown up in the world system since te end of World War II. Refugees are accorded certain rights in international law, and The New York Times has an excellent article on some of those requirements. Nonetheless, the EU decision to force sovereign states to take actions of which they disapprove raises questions about the political autonomy of the members.
US President Obama and Russian President Putin will meet on Monday at the annual meeting of the United Nations in New York. The meeting is likely to be intense as both Ukraine and Syria are on the agenda, and both sides disagree quite strongly over the appropriate courses of action in both cases. There is an interesting debate over who asked for the meeting. The Russians insist that the meeting was mutually agreed upon; the White House insist that Putin asked for te meeting because of the effects of the sanctions on the Russian economy. It is unlikely that anything substantive will be decided upon at the meeting, but simply meeting is a good sign. There are, however, rumors that the Russians and the Americans have reached a “tacit” agreement on Syria, but the details are unknown.
US President Obama is meeting with Chinese President Xi and the Chinese are bringing to the table a new conception of “great power” politics. The idea is bold and directly questions US dominance in world affairs. The significance of the proposal is that it represents an exercise in imagination which seems to be quite lacking in American diplomacy right now. I doubt that the Chinese ideas will be greeted warmly by the US, but it is encouraging that such discussions are being held. The Americans seem either unwilling or unable to conceptualize a different world order even though the power configurations in world politics seem to be changing quite rapidly.
World Politics News 
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