Even if Augusto Pinochet eventually escapes trial for the widespread torture and terrorism that characterized his regime in Chile (1973-1991), the efforts to bring him to justice in Spain (and lately France, Switzerland, and Belgium) mark a pivotal moment in …
Kosovo is where the final disintegration of Yugoslavia began. It is there that the Titoist settlement of the national question in Yugoslavia broke down irreparably in 1990. The immediate issue was the decision of Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia, …
Bob Chase, the president of the National Education Association, recently declared that its members should “move beyond ideology” and “Politics must stop at the school door.” As I daily try to weave my way through the politics of schooling in …
Italians have been talking about the third way for thirty years, from our first center-left government in the early 1960s to the collapse of communism. But we spoke of a different kind from today’s: it was a third way between …
In Britain, the intellectual credibility of the third way is at its lowest ebb since the election of May 1997. Many commentators now declare that reality is catching up with a flawed idea. Harsher critics dismiss the suggestion that there …
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age by Daniel Rodgers Harvard University Press, 1998, 508 pp., $35 It is one of the oldest and most cherished of American conceits that the United States of America possesses a unique and …
Globalism has become the buzzword of American political elites. It symbolizes wildly free markets in every corner of the world and in every aspect of economic life—trade, foreign investment, finance, and even labor. Among both Democrats and Republicans, the battle …
The best thing about the impeachment fiasco is the failure of the Republicans to tempt the public into hypocrisy. The electorate refused to treat lying about one’s sex life as a big deal. This is a great boon for the …
Bill Clinton’s climb in the polls—a gift of the self-destructive Republican handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal—has reinforced the punditry’s conviction that Clinton’s centrist politics define the only sensible path for Democrats to follow into the twenty-first century. It is …
Two vast worlds co-exist in the capitalist universe we now know: one, the world of finance (banking, insurance, and securities markets), and two, the corporate “real economy” that produces nonfinancial goods and services and provides the underlying “fundamentals” of the …
For five months, the Ethiopian government has been tracking down citizens of Eritrean descent and expelling them by the thousands. This is a peaceful and mild version of ethnic cleansing, so far without the mass murder and rape characteristic of …
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and The Making of the Jewish State by Zeev Sternhell Princeton University Press, 1998, 464 pp., $29.95 The Jews, Heinrich Heine is supposed to have said, are like everyone else but more so. …
I first read about the Algebra Project in February 1993, in a New York Times Magazine article profiling Bob Moses, the legendary former field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who in the 1960s had courageously promoted black …
