Big meals, to be sure, are an indispensable tool of diplomacy. People who have come a long way need to be welcomed and put at ease by their hosts. They are more relaxed and friendly with good food and drink inside them. They feel under a greater obligation to be polite and cooperative. But the EU is not a club of ambassadors, or even of politicians. It is, whether we like it or not, a form of government, a bloated version of a country. It has a commission, a court of justice, a parliament, a legal personality, a passport and a foreign service.

On June 10 and 11, Kazakhstan hosted the Fifth Congress of World Religions.

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), armed with non-factual information and an anti-Russian agenda, might potentially add fuel to the fire and make the already unsteady relations between Europe and Russia even worse.

During a plenary session in Strasburg on Wednesday, MEPs came up with a tough resolution, calling the EU to re-consider its relations with Russia in the context of the Ukrainian crisis.

David Cameron's gastronomic diplomacy: 13 courses, from lobster terrine to mountains of cheese. As he fights for Britain's better deal in Europe, David Cameron enjoys some of the continent's finest cuisine in a 24-hour marathon of capitals

As the new government gets started, the main actors in the Mideast diplomatic drama are all pulling in very different directions. 

If you declare a nation that no other nation recognizes, is it still a nation? Such is the quandary of Vit Jedlicka, a Czech politician and founder of Liberland, a 3-square-mile speck of land between Croatia and Serbia that he plans to turn into a little dynamo of a country. If only the world will let him. 

The AIIB is an international financial institution whose founding was proposed in 2013 by the government of China. The general purpose of this multilateral development bank is to provide finance to infrastructure projects in the Asian region. Analysts of international affairs and finance in China, the United States, and Europe say that the unexpected success of the bank represents a major turning point in an undeclared contest for global influence between Washington and Beijing.