Iraq and the Arab Spring: a thought experiment
VERY few things about the political state of Iraq can accurately be described as clear. But now that the flag has been cased and the last 4,000 US troops are on the way home, some sort of preliminary balance sheet is finally possible. As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort [...]
European Union: gamechanger for the left
I’M sure Milton Friedman would have appreciated the irony. The neoclassical economic prescriptions developed by him and others in the name of competition and freedom of choice is about to be awarded a continent-wide ideological monopoly, by force of state decree. If Merkel and Sarkozy get the new treaty they need to save the euro, [...]
Europe: the last touchstone issue in British politics
OPPOSITION to the European Union resonates with the Conservative right to a degree that no issue seems to excite any section of the Labour Party anymore, in ways that are essentially unfathomable to those that stand outside the tribe. For that reason alone, David Cameron’s decision to veto treaty changes designed to prop up the [...]
Cambodia: the trial of Brother Number Two
YOU have to wonder whether Nuon Chea believes his own defence. But the man they called Brother Number Two in 1970s Cambodia now insists that it was the Vietnamese and unspecified ‘rogue elements’ that did the killing in the country’s now world famous killing fields. ‘I don’t want the next generations to misunderstand the history,’ [...]
Marxism in China: it’s a museum piece
SOMEHOW the most vibrant capitalist economy on the planet still lends itself ideological legitimation by claiming adherence to Marxism. What is happening in China plays havoc with key theoretical assumptions of the socialist left and the free market right alike. How does the obvious disjunction between base and superstructure, at least at the level of [...]
Greece, Italy: now markets choose prime ministers
I AM not entitled to vote in either Greece or Italy; even if I were, I would not support either George Papandreou or Silvio Berlusconi, anyway. In the normal run of events, I would greet their departure from office with Zen-like equanimity. But what we have seen in the last week or so is not the [...]
UK Border Agency: let’s sign up to Schengen
ONE of the few political positions that sections of the far left and the free market right alike hold dear is opposition to immigration controls. So I am still not quite sure whether it was the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Adam Smith Institute that sneakily managed to take over the UK Border Agency while [...]
Italy deserves better than Berlusconi
IT IS fortunate indeed for New Labourite lawyer David Mills that he took a £400,000 bung from Silvio Berlusconi in 1999 rather than 2000. Were it not for Italy’s equivalent of the statute of limitations, he would now be a quarter be around a quarter of the way through a four year jail term in [...]
PASOK, PSOE: the suicide of social democracy
AFTER three decades during which the centre left first adapted to neoliberalism, and then adopted it wholesale, it is sometimes difficult to establish what exactly social democracy stands for these days. All of the major European parties that occupy this political space initially came into being to articulate working class demands, and were nominally committed [...]
Greece’s uncertain future
AS SOMEONE who has been thinking and writing about politics for three decades, I like to think I have a handle on what goes on in countries with which I am familiar. But watching events unfold in Athens this week has left me as astonished as everybody else. One minute Papandreou is holding a referendum [...]
