Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan  

Many readers of Democratiya will also be readers of Harry’s Place, a blog that promotes leftwing critiques of Islamism. This June, its writer David Toube wrote about the launch of a Government funded organisation called Campus Salam: ‘designed to help …





The Age of Apology: Facing up to the Past  

One of the most characteristic features of our age is the search for recognition and moral equality. A key challenge for contemporary liberalism is finding the best model for accommodating the legitimate search for justice of aggrieved and historically oppressed …



Lessons for the West from the Georgian War  

The August war in Georgia underlines the fundamental deterioration in the global political situation in the 2000s and the increasingly sharp choices facing the democratic left. The easy bit is to condemn Russian aggression against Georgian cities and there has …



Georgia: The Commentariat Goes to War  

The Georgian War of 2008 has prompted a flurry of comparisons with other European crises that have occurred in years ending with the number eight. The Munich Crisis of 1938 is an obvious point of reference since it involved a …



The Last Resistance  

Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance is a fascinating, erudite, often dense, frequently insightful work. It is a collection of Rose’s recent public addresses and occasional writings, from periodicals such as the London Review of Books and the New York Review …



Editor’s Page  

On the third anniversary of the launch of Democratiya, Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer writes on the ‘two commitments’ that ‘give shape to the Democratiya project.’ ‘The first,’ he writes, ‘is to defend and promote a left politics that is liberal, …



Letter from Hungary  

The far-right in Hungary is resurgent. Not only has the open expression of antisemitic, anti-Roma and homophobic sentiment become more acceptable, even in circles tending toward the centre, but the forums for those expressions have grown in number, even as …



Letter To A Full Time Revolutionary  

Your latest outfit an arrangement in grey. You’d vanish into the wallpaper, but for the chopping movement your hand makes as you strike just the right note; wax ideological, now Venezuela, now the latest interest rate rise; put on a …







A History of Modern Israel  

Israel typically marks its independence day by calculating the price its citizens pay for Jewish sovereignty. Israelis not only remember the soldiers killed in wars and the people whose lives were cut short by acts of terror, they also count …



The Democratic Prospect in East Asia  

It is hard to think of a region of the globe so packed with both threats and opportunities as East Asia. Of course, the Middle East is as strategically significant as it is combustible. But none of that region’s states …



An International New Left?  

This essay was written for a special issue of the French journal Esprit, where it appeared in May 2008. The editors wanted to avoid the typical default of French exceptionalism, which is certain that the true origin and significance of …