George Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute.

Originally, the European Union was what psychologists call a "fantastic object," a desirable goal that inspires people's imaginations. I saw it as the embodiment of an open society: an association of nation-states that gave up part of their sovereignty for the common good and formed a union dominated by no single nation or nationality.

The euro crisis, however, has turned the EU into something radically different. Member countries are now divided into two classes — creditors and debtors — with the creditors in charge. The EU is today held together by grim necessity. That is not conducive to a harmonious partnership. The only way to reverse the trend is to recapture the spirit of solidarity that animated the European project from the start.

To that end, I recently established an Open Society Initiative for Europe, or OSIFE. In doing so, I recognized that the best place to start would be where current policies have created the greatest human suffering: Greece. The people who are suffering are not those who abused the system and caused the crisis. The fate of the many migrant and asylum seekers caught in Greece is particularly heart-rending. But their plight cannot be separated from that of the Greeks themselves. An initiative confined to migrants would merely reinforce the growing xenophobia and extremism in Greece.

I could not figure out how to approach this seemingly intractable problem until I recently visited Stockholm to commemorate the centenary of Raoul Wallenberg's birth. This reawakened my memories of World War II — the calamity that eventually gave birth to the EU... 

Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister for eight years and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is currently chancellor of the Australian National University and co-chair of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect.

One of the worst atrocity crime stories of recent decades has barely registered in the world’s collective conscience. We remember and acknowledge the shame of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. We agonize about the failure to halt the atrocities being committed almost daily in Syria. But at least until now, the world has paid almost no attention to war crimes and crimes against humanity comparable in their savagery to any of these: the killing fields of Sri Lanka in 2009. Three years ago, in the bloody endgame of the Sri Lankan government’s war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, some 300,000 civilians became trapped between the advancing army and the last LTTE fighters in what has been called "the cage" – a tiny strip of land, not much larger than New York City’s Central Park, between sea and lagoon in the northeast of the country.

With both sides showing neither restraint nor compassion, at least 10,000 civilians – possibly as many as 40,000 – died in the carnage that followed, as a result of indiscriminate army shelling, rebel gunfire, and denial of food and medical supplies.

The lack of outrage mainly reflects the Sri Lankan government’s success in embedding in the minds of policymakers and publics an alternative narrative that had extraordinary worldwide resonance in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. What occurred in the cage, according to this narrative, was the long-overdue defeat, by wholly necessary and defensible means, of a murderous terrorist insurrection that had threatened the country’s very existence...

Linda K. Kerber is the May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and professor of history emerita, and lecturer in law at the University of Iowa. She is the author or editor of several books, including No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. She was president of the AHA for 2006.

Nearly 40 years ago, on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that turned out to be one of the most contentious in its history. Two plaintiffs whose names were changed to protect their privacy—"Roe" from Texas and "Doe" from Georgia—claimed that laws making abortion illegal undermined their own right to make medical choices for themselves and their physicians' right to practice medicine according to their best judgment. Less than a decade before, abortion had been illegal in every state, with very narrow exceptions—to save the life of the mother; or, occasionally, in cases of rape or incest. At the time of the decision, a small handful of states had reformed abortion law by widening the exemptions to include saving the mother's physical and mental health. The court's opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, with two dissents by Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist (who characterized the desire for abortion by a healthy woman as a matter of her "convenience") recognized that the long-established right to privacy "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

In the years since 1973, scholars have written fresh histories of reproductive rights in the United States, placing Roe v. Wade in deep political and social context. These histories recognize its link to the history of birth control and to the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird 405 U.S. 438 (1972), which treated as private decisions the use of birth control, first by married couples and, a full seven years later, by unmarried couples. Many of these books are already understood to be classics: James C. Mohr, Abortion in America : The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 ( New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984); Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), and the revised and expanded version, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002); Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraception in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).

Chapter 4 of Linda Greenhouse, Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey (New York: Times Books, 2005) traces Justice Blackmun's thinking as he wrote the Supreme Court opinion. Faye Ginsburg's Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998) follows the impact of Roe into Fargo, North Dakota. Johanna Schoen's Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005) places abortion in the general history of reproduction. Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002), and Elaine Tyler May's America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, published on its 50th anniversary (New York: Basic Books, 2010), place the subject of abortion in the context of women's recent medical history....

Amy B. Zegart is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community.

Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.

How relatively good or bad were the economic performances of our past presidents? The answers to this question remain unclear. Most evaluations of presidential performance cloud the issue with partisan bias and subjective judgments or mix economics together with other policy areas. To address these shortcomings, this article uses new data from the Measuring Worth Project to calculate the relative economic rankings of the United States presidents who served from 1789 until 2009. It analyzes up to 220 years of data on economic growth, unemployment, inflation, government debt, balance of payments, income inequality, currency strength, interest rates, and stock market returns to estimate an economic grade point average for each president. Then, these estimates are used to test for correlations with other variables to generate hypotheses regarding the conditions for superior and inferior economic performance.

John R. Bohrer's work has appeared at Esquire.com, Politico, Salon, The Awl, USA Today and other publications

Everyone agrees: Mitt Romney is not like his father.

The late Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate George Romney is remembered as a principled man of spontaneity and candor. His example is regularly invoked by both admirers of his son's disciplined campaign style and critics of Mitt's back-and-forth pandering. George, it is said, told the truth about the Vietnam War before it was popular to do so, with an unfortunately worded comment about “brainwashing” by U.S. government officials that cost him the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. “Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”

This rejection of his father’s example, the thinking goes, is what has made Mitt a more successful presidential candidate — self-controlled but hard to pin down, flipping from moderate to conservative to moderate once again. It is observed that Mitt would never draw a line in the sand like his father did in 1964, when George dramatically "charged out of the 1964 Republican National Convention over the party's foot-dragging on civil rights," as the Boston Globe's authoritative biography, "The Real Romney," put it earlier this year. Outlets from the New York Times to the New Republic have recalled this story of the elder Romney's stand against Goldwater's hard-line conservatives. Frontline’s documentary “The Choice 2012” reported it as a formative event: “when Goldwater received the nomination, Mitt saw his father angrily storm out.” A Google search for the incident produces hundreds of pages of results. In August, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne cited the episode to write that Mitt “has seemed more a politician who would do whatever it took to close a deal than a leader driven by conviction and commitment. This is a problem George Romney never had.”

Only George Romney did not walk out of the 1964 Republican National Convention. He stayed until the very end, formally seconding Goldwater’s eventual nomination and later standing by while an actual walkout took place. He left the convention holding open the possibility of endorsing Goldwater and then, after a unity summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, momentarily endorsed the Arizona senator. Then he changed his mind while his top aides polled “all-white and race-conscious” Michigan communities for a “secret” white backlash vote against LBJ’s civil rights advances — a backlash that might have made a Goldwater endorsement palatable at home. Finding the Republican label even more unpopular than civil rights in Michigan, Romney ultimately distanced himself from the entire party, including his own moderate Republican allies....

Sidney Blumenthal, journalist, author, historian, and former senior adviser to President Clinton, is completing a book titled The Man Who Became Abraham Lincoln: How He Won the Civil War and Was Assassinated .

The latest Lincoln boom—kicking off with the bicentennial of his birth in 2009 and the continuing sesquicentennial of the Civil War—shows no sign of abating. It may not even reach its apogee with the release immediately post-election of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a biopic starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role. Spielberg, according to a source familiar with the production, has deliberately withheld the film until the current, divisive presidential campaign is over in order to prevent Lincoln from being seized upon to score political points.

But lifting Lincoln above the fray doesn’t remove him from politics. While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution. In the end, Lincoln became the master of events because he was the master of politics.

The mythology of Lincoln as too noble for politics began at the moment of his death, with his body sprawled across a small bed in a house across from Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot. At the president’s last breath, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously pronounced, "Now he belongs to the ages." Every age since has invented its Lincoln. Martyred on Good Friday, Lincoln the Christ has rivaled Lincoln the Common Man and Lincoln the Idealist in America’s collective imagination.

The historical truth reveals one of the most astute professional politicians the country has produced...