Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff, PCis a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 May 1947
CountryCanada
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Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.
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Loving a country is an act of the imagination.
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Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.
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'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.
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When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.
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a theater of displacement, in which political energies that might otherwise have been expended in defending multiethnic society at home were directed instead at defending mythic multiculturalism far away. Bosnia became the latest bel espoir of a generation that had tried ecology, socialism, and civil rights only to watch all these lose their romantic momentum.
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Democratic constitutions do allow some suspension of rights in states of emergency. Thus rights are not always trumps. But neither is necessity. Even in times of real danger, political authorities have to prove the case that abridgments of rights are justified.
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There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem.
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America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order.
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Ultimate authority in a global system remains with sovereigns. Governments will not have it any other way: politicians face instant rejection from their electorate if they allow transnational authorities to dictate terms.
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I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s. There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.
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I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s, ... There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.
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I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.
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I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.