Musical musings on the English nation have tended towards the cosily nostalgic.
The Solidarity-led coalition government has worked well, but a bit too cosily: Poland now lacks a proper opposition, the clear-out of the communist nomenklatura has been slow and, after starting bravely with its Big Bang in January, the government has failed to push privatisation through fast enough.
Normally a model of cosily consensual industrial relations, Austria saw more than a million people take to the streets to demonstrate their grievances over pensions.In France and Italy, political leaders have repeatedly backed down when strikes over pension reform have threatened to paralyse their countries.
Instead, NTT was cosily remodelled last year as a holding company with two local carriers and a long-distance operator under its wing.Earlier this year, the ministry buckled again under political pressure, being forced to abandon a new way of calculating connection charges that would have led to a 41% rate cut.
WHEN Hugo Chavez, a former paratroop lieutenant-colonel and coup leader, was elected Venezuela's president in December his stated aims were clear enough: to end the corruption spawned by 40 years of rule by a cosily clientelist two-party system, and to reverse the impoverishment and economic malaise into which his oil-rich country had sunk.
Voters have told Labor and Liberal alike that they can no longer expect to control power cosily between them.
The current thaw with Saudi Arabia was also hard to foresee; but the Saudis came to last month's Islamic summit in Tehran, and the ex-enemies are now being cosily called the "two wings of Islam".
Oil prices, though down from record highs, are cosily above the long-term average.Then there is the question of where Dubai actually put its money.
Politics can be fiercely factional or cosily nepotistic.
Middle-aged Lorenzo is cosily retired and living in Denmark with a wife and child, when a German anarchist newspaper asks him to revisit his radical youth.On April 2nd 1969, you learn, a group led by the three Rivas brothers had tried to take by force a local television station on the Mexican-American border.
Mr Fortuyn said aloud what many voters had not dared to say for themselves: that they were tired of crime, of ill-assimilated Muslim immigrants and, more widely, of orthodox politicians too busy talking cosily with each other to notice these discontents.
