Look! No Wheels!
The Cold War, or at least the First Cold War, is now long over. Curiously, it ended without a war. Afterwards, the US global hegemony that some predicted failed to materialise. As in other areas, victories in history don’t always amount to as much as was expected. Meanwhile the debate seeking a credible explanation for the implosion of the Soviet Union continues.
Easy Does It
Angela Merkel’s style, which is based on caution, analysis and calm calculation married with a commitment to tolerance in the public sphere, has seen her win three successive election victories. Will she be able to add political imagination to these virtues in the final phase of her career and so transform European politics?
On the Necessary Execution of a Prince
Was the recent arrest, trial and execution of North Korea’s number two politician just another sign of the madness of the regime? Or was it perhaps a sign to the people that things could actually change for the better and that no one – none of ‘them’ – was necessarily too powerful to evade punishment?
Warts And All
LBJ, the man the baby boomer generation loved to hate, was, even one of his political enemies has admitted, ‘for all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weakness of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity … a man of brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion and deep seriousness’.
Defying Big Brother
In the decades following the end of the Second World War, western Europe experienced the greatest long boom the world has ever known. This period of prosperity and security was not based on the rickety notion of “anti-fascism” but rather on liberty, constitutional freedoms and the solidarity of democratic nations uniting against the threat of the Soviet bloc.
HAVE A NICE DAY, DAY, DAY …
Fast food workers in the States don’t earn enough to eat … fast food. Too bad, say the employers, what they do can easily be done by machines.
Slim Pickings for the Soft Left
France has long been a beacon for social democrats but we may be looking at the beginning of the fall of social France. The political elites of right and left increasingly conform to Peter Mair’s idea of the cartel party, but the politically crucial fact is that they conform on the right of the spectrum.
Cold War Reinvented
It is more than a little depressing to contemplate the possibility that the old cold war narrative which restricted the potential of so many individuals and peoples over the latter half of the twentieth century has given way to a new overarching narrative ‑ equally laden with oppressive potential for anyone in the way ‑ that of multipolarity versus unipolarity.
Hope in Guatemala
The overthrow of Árbenz in 1954 was among the most ill-conceived CIA operations. In the hypercharged atmosphere of the early cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower, secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, decided that Guatemala threatened the United States.
The Road to Genocide
The ancient Christian communities of Syria, having survived the rise of Islam in the seventh century and the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth may be driven into the sea in the twenty-first.