Where did the former President of the USA give his interview recently?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Athens. The event the stem is reaching for is Barack Obama's exclusive interview with CNN's chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, recorded and broadcast from Athens on 22 June 2023, three months before this paper was written. CNN's own announcement of 16 June 2023 states it plainly: the special programme 'Obama & Amanpour: Will Democracy Win?' would air at 10 pm ET on Thursday 22 June, 'anchored live by Christiane Amanpour from Athens, Greece, the cradle of democracy, where the former President will be visiting with his Obama Foundation'. The conversation covered threats to democracy in the United States as the 2024 presidential campaign opened, and the wider contest between democratic and autocratic government while Russia's war in Ukraine continued; a second segment brought in three young leaders from the Obama Foundation. The interview was repeated internationally on 23 June on Amanpour on CNN International and on Amanpour & Company on PBS. The visit is independently documented from the other side. Obama also appeared in Athens in a public conversation with Andreas Dracopoulos at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation's Nostos Conference, and published the transcript himself on 23 June 2023 under the title 'My Remarks at the 2023 SNF Nostos Conference', noting in it that 'there's a reason I gave my last official speech here in Athens' — a reference to November 2016, when the city was the first stop of his final foreign tour as President. Two independent records, a broadcaster's press release and the speaker's own transcript, put the same former President in the same city in the same week. None of the other three cities carries a comparable, widely reported interview by a former US President in the months before this examination, and Athens is also the only one of the four that fits the framing a setter would have had in mind, since the whole point of the CNN programme was to discuss the future of democracy from the place where the word was born. One caution belongs in the answer rather than beneath it: this is our reasoned answer, not a published one. There is no official key for the 69th CCE. Athens is where the evidence points, and both independent readings of the question reached it, but the stem itself does not name the President, the date or the interviewer, and a candidate in the hall had nothing to go on except recall of that one news cycle.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A plausible-sounding capital with no matching event. Rome's standing in general studies comes from elsewhere — the Treaty of Rome of 1957 that created the European Economic Community, the Vatican City enclave that is the world's smallest sovereign state, and the three United Nations food agencies headquartered there, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. None of that has anything to do with a former US President's interview in mid-2023, and Rome earns its place in the option set only because it is a European capital of similar weight.  (b) The most historically loaded of the four, which is exactly why it is offered. Sarajevo is where Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914, the trigger of the First World War; it hosted the Winter Olympics of 1984 and then endured the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare, from 1992 to 1996 during the break-up of Yugoslavia. A candidate who associates the city with democracy and conflict can talk himself into it. But no interview of a former US President took place there in the run-up to this paper.  (d) The trap of familiarity — and it also hides a standard general-studies error. Amsterdam is the constitutional capital of the Netherlands, but the seat of government, the Parliament and the royal residence are at The Hague, which is where the international institutions sit too: the International Court of Justice at the Peace Palace, the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Criminal Court. So a candidate reaching for 'the Dutch city where world affairs happen' has usually picked the wrong Dutch city to begin with. Nothing links Amsterdam to a former US President's interview in 2023.

Concept: Athens is called the cradle of democracy because the word and the first working system both come from it: demos, the people, and kratos, power. Solon's reforms of about 594 BCE cancelled debt bondage and broke the aristocracy's monopoly on office by grading political rights by property rather than birth, and Cleisthenes went much further in 508–507 BCE, redistributing the citizen body into ten artificial tribes drawn from across the city, coast and inland so that old clan loyalties were diluted. The machinery that followed is what the term describes. The ekklesia, the assembly of all adult male citizens, met on the Pnyx hill and decided war, treaties and legislation directly; a boule or council of 500, fifty from each tribe chosen by lot for a year, prepared its agenda; magistrates and jurors were largely selected by lot rather than election, on the principle that any citizen was fit to govern; and ostracism allowed the assembly to exile a man for ten years without charge. Under Pericles in the fifth century BCE, pay for public service made office practicable for poorer citizens. Two qualifications matter for an examination. First, this was direct, not representative, democracy — citizens voted on measures themselves rather than electing legislators to do it, which is workable only in a small polity. Second, the citizen body excluded women, slaves and resident foreigners, so a large majority of the people of Attica had no political rights at all. And Athens was not alone in experimenting with collective rule: in India the gana-sanghas or republics of the sixth century BCE, the Vajji or Vrijji confederacy under the Licchavis with its capital at Vaishali in present-day Bihar foremost among them, governed through assemblies of their leading families rather than a king.

State PCS 2023 Q43 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q43 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer