Hubert Védrine is no ideologue. He never has been and Continuer l’histoire confirms it. [1] As both an intellectual and a politician, he has staunchly stuck to realism. An outsider in the French Socialist party, which he may have joined …
‘What then is the American, this new man?’ J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur asked in his Letters to an American Farmer in 1782 before describing the distinctly American character that was emerging on the eastern seaboard of a new …
In a celebrated essay written nearly 40 years ago, Isaiah Berlin invoked Schiller’s image of the ‘bent twig’ to portray the phenomenon of nationalism as a people’s aggressive response to persecution and humiliation – ‘an inflamed condition of national consciousness.’ …
If one idea crosses partisan lines in America, it is respect for jazz as a great indigenous art form. Jazz musicians played a key role as cultural ambassadors during the Cold War, under Democratic and Republican presidents. Richard Nixon, a …
The title of Cullen Murphy’s delightful book The New Rome should really be Are We Rome? That, at any rate, is the question that motivates the book – the ‘we’ in question being the United States. (Indeed, I strongly suspect …
Editors: Your readers will be interested to know of the initiative by Anthony Cox and others called Books to Iraq which Labour Friends of Iraq is pleased to support. It’s best to take a gander at the Books to Iraq …
Russia, it was said, was still reeling from the loss of its empire. It had formally accepted the right of countries like Ukraine to self-determination. But among its leaders, some sought ways to bring the ‘near abroad’ back into the …
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in New Fabian Essays, edited by R.H.S. Crossman, Turnstile Press, 1952. That external factors would one day dominate British politics was never conceived by the founders of British Socialism. Apart from one reference …
I have come to Ukraine today for one reason above all others: in the midst of the Georgia crisis, I want to re-affirm the commitment of the United Kingdom to support the democratic choices of the Ukrainian people.
In the course of reviewing the memoirs of N.N. Sukhanov – the man who famously called Stalin a ‘gray blur’ – Dwight Macdonald gave a serviceable description of the two types of radical witnesses to the Russian Revolution: ‘Trotsky’s is …
Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three US administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, and …
Editors Note: The introductory chapter of Supercapitalism: The Battle for Democracy in an Age of Big Business (2008) is reproduced here with the kind permission of Icon Books. (Copyright 2008 Icon Books). Robert Reich is interviewed in this issue of …
In the last two years I have been lucky enough to participate in three fact-finding delegations to Iraq. We travelled twice to the Kurdistan Region (each time for a week), first as a guest of its trade union movement and …
Editors Note: We reproduce below Michael Walzer’s preface to Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews (The Foreign Policy Centre, 2008).
The most visible challenge to the continued existence of the United Kingdom comes from the Scottish National Party which runs the devolved administration in Edinburgh and enjoys record popularity among Scots. This summer, commentators have been rushing to argue that …
