-
The Invention of the Jewish People
Introduction to Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People by Bertell Ollman The Invention of the Jewish People is divided into two parts. The first is a long section on the theory of nationalism, whose main characteristic, according to Sand, is the tendency to invent a past that suits the current needs and […]
-
The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats
It is spell-binding to see how the U.S. establishment can inflate the threat of a target, no matter how tiny, remote, and (most often) non-existent that threat may be, and pretend that the real threat posed by its own behavior and policies is somehow defensive and related to that wondrously elastic thing called “national security.” […]
-
A New Role for the IMF?
Rescued from a state of near-irrelevance by the world recession and an infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars (mostly from the U.S., Europe, and Japan), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now thinking of expanding its role into previously uncharted territory. In Istanbul for the fall meetings of the IMF, Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn […]
-
Iran, Etc.
Hooman Majd Answers the Nuclear Question Question: How do you respond to concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Majd: Stop worrying. Don’t learn to love the bomb, but stop worrying. First of all, Iran is so far away from having a nuclear weapon. I know there are all these reports, these alarmist reports: Iran has enough […]
-
The Financial Crisis and Imperialism
BMR:What is the likely impact of the present financial crisis on geopolitics, especially if the crisis is considered in the context of the energy crisis including the peak oil issue, the food crisis, The Great Hunger, the environmental crisis, and the declining dollar? Will the world experience war(s) as an effort to survive? Will monopoly-finance […]
-
Socialism and Welfarism
Socialism consists not just in building a humane society; it consists not just in the maintenance of full employment (or near full employment together with sufficient unemployment benefits); it consists not just in the creation of a Welfare State, even one that takes care of its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”; it consists […]
-
American Public Still Ahead of Its Leaders on Foreign Policy
Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography. But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts. The […]
-
Immigration Past, Immigration Present: Confronting the Internal “Other” in Europe
Oliver Grant. Migration and Inequality in Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. 416 pp. $190.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927656-1. Leo Lucassen. The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 296 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07294-9. Elia Morandi. Italiener in Hamburg: Migration, Arbeit und […]
-
What Is Cosmopolitanism?
Chris Rumford, ed. Cosmopolitanism and Europe. Studies in Social and Political Thought. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. 272 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84631-046-1; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84631-047-8. Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 248 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13750-8. These two explorations of cosmopolitanism from quite […]
-
The “Cosmopolitan Century”: European Re-Membering
Natan Sznaider. Gedächtnisraum Europa: Die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus; eine jüdische Perspektive. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008. 153 pp. EUR 16.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89942-692-2. As Europe moves into the twenty-first century, its search for a shared identity continues to occupy academic journals, the feuilleton pages, and Eurocrats eager to underwrite a by-and-large successful administrative […]
-
The World Left and the Iranian Elections
The recent elections in Iran, and the subsequent challenges to their legitimacy, have been a matter of enormous internal conflict in Iran, and of seemingly endless debate in the rest of the world — a debate that threatens to linger for some time yet. One of its most fascinating consequences has been the deep divisions […]
-
Education and Its Cold War Discontents
Andrew Hartman. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. x + 251 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]
-
On the Increasingly Complex Relationship between Immigration Policy and (Inter)national Security
Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Simon Reich, eds. Immigration, Integration, and Security: America and Europe in Comparative Perspective. The Security Continuum: Global Politics in the Modern Age. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. xi + 480 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4344-0; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-5984-7. Migration and security have always been linked, but, as Ariane Chebel […]
-
Towards a Great German Oil Empire
Dietrich Eichholtz. Krieg um Öl: Ein Erdölimperium als deutsches Kriegsziel 1938-1943. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006. 141 pp. ISBN 978-3-86583-119-4; EUR 19.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-86583-119-4. Dietrich Eichholtz does not mince words. From the first page of this powerfully argued book, his underlying argument is clear: “The imperialist interest in oil played a role in the […]
-
Death on the Nile
Juan Cole. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Illustrations, maps. xi + 279 pp. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-230-60603-6. Juan Cole’s Napoleon’s Egypt tells the story of revolutionary France’s attempt to conquer Egypt and the cultural interchanges that resulted. Although various aims drove the effort, the main motive was a prerevolutionary […]
-
Energy (and Empire) in World History
Introduction Vaclav Smil’s Energy in World History (1994) provides an overview of global changes in human energy use from before the Neolithic Revolution to modern times. In various places in the book, Smil discusses the relationship between energy use and the rise of centers of economic and political power in world history. In explaining what […]
-
The Making of a Marxist in Capitalist Crisis
Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981). Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal. ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8. Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]
-
Deconstructing Labor: What Is “New” in Contemporary Capitalism and Economic Policies: a Marxian-Kaleckian Perspective
Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1. Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]
-
Why More of the Same Will Not Work
A visit to Western Europe in early March provided some slightly different — if unsettling — insights into global economic arrangements and their socio-cultural co-ordinates. As the crisis unfolds, people everywhere are questioning current economic institutions and processes, and naturally enough their fears, insecurities and concerns also affect their visions for the future. The fundamental […]
-
Why Labor Doesn’t Need a “House of Lords”
“Also being debated [at the AFL-CIO executive council meeting] is whether to create a mechanism to nudge past-their-prime union presidents to retire so unions are not stuck with tired, uninspired leaders. One negotiator [of AFL-CIO/ Change-to-Win/NEA unity] talked of creating an advisory ‘Labor House of Lords’ to encourage older union presidents to step aside.” — […]