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Peter Gowan,
‘Crisis in the Heartland’ Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.

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NLR 55 was mailed out to subscribers on 22nd December 2008

CONTENTS

  1. Peter Gowan: Crisis in the Heartland Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.
  2. Francis Mulhern: Culture and Society, Then and Now The idea of culture in Raymond Williams’s classic work, and discrepant readings of it, fifty years on. Gestation amid CP debates on the English tradition, hidden affinities with the Frankfurt School, and counterposition to the verities of today’s liberal multiculturalism.
  3. Luciana Castellina: European? A former MEP discusses the actual workings of the Europarliament, and the realities of ‘European construction’ in the realm of culture. What have been the outcomes of efforts to build a continental political identity?
  4. Peter Campbell: The Lens of War Reviewing the Brighton Photo Biennial, Peter Campbell writes on the aesthetics, ethics and technology of war photography: images as evidence, cameras as combatants, from the Crimean War to Abu Ghraib.
  5. Monique Selim: Notes from Tashkent The life-world of social scientists in Uzbekistan, seen through an ethnographic prism. Monique Selim traces the material and intellectual struggles of post-Soviet scholars, and the instrumentalization of ethnicized knowledge by the Karimov regime.
  6. Amit Chaudhuri: Cosmopolitanism's Alien Face The interweaving of literary affinities and cross-cultural influences, occluded by postcolonialist discourse, that characterized a vanished cosmopolitan modernism. Amit Chaudhuri explores paradoxes of belonging and defamiliarization in Bloomsbury and Bombay.
  7. Carlos Medeiros: Asset-Stripping the State Within the global wave of privatizations, those enacted in Latin America stand out for their breathtaking speed and scale. Medeiros contends that the principal motivation was not economic but political, driven by new capitalist coalitions emerging from the 1980s debt crisis.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Fredric Jameson on Christoph Henning, Philosophie nach Marx. Austerities of a German rejection of social philosophy, in the name of the Moor.
  2. David Woodruff on Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built. A vocal advocate of shock therapy casts a blinkered eye over its results in the former Eastern Bloc.
  3. Ronald Fraser on Henry Kamen, Imagining Spain. Excavation of the historical myths that have shaped peninsular self-perceptions.
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Articles:

  1. Luciana Castellina,
    ‘European?’ A former MEP discusses the actual workings of the Europarliament, and the realities of ‘European construction’ in the realm of culture. What have been the outcomes of efforts to build a continental political identity?
  2. Peter Campbell,
    ‘Lens of War’ Reviewing the Brighton Photo Biennial, Peter Campbell writes on the aesthetics, ethics and technology of war photography: images as evidence, cameras as combatants, from the Crimean War to Abu Ghraib.
  3. Francis Mulhern,
    ‘Culture and Society’ The idea of culture in Raymond Williams’s classic work, and discrepant readings of it, fifty years on. Gestation amid CP debates on the English tradition, hidden affinities with the Frankfurt School, and counterposition to the verities of today’s liberal multiculturalism.
  4. Perry Anderson,
    ‘Scurrying towards Bethlehem’ Behind the second Intifada lies a century of conflict in Palestine. What are its roots, and what are its prospects? The Oslo Accords, the Israeli landscape and the Arab world.
  5. Tariq Ali,
    ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’ As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.

Editorials:

  1. Susan Watkins,
    ‘Lulling Nuclear Protest’ What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.
  2. Perry Anderson,
    ‘On the Conjuncture’ A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.
  3. Afghanistan Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.
  4. Europe, Europe’s political landscape, revealed by the protest votes in France and the Netherlands. Mutation and dilation of the EU in the age of liberal hegemony, and lessons to be drawn from the unprecedented irruptions of discontent against it.
  5. Chechnya, Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.
  6. Iraq, With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.
  7. New Labour, Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.
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