Tariq Ali, Editorial
‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’

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CONTENTS

  1. 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.
  2. Yoav Peled: Zionist Realities: Debating Israel–Palestine A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?
  3. Virginia Tilley: The Secular Solution: Debating Israel–Palestine Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
  4. Francis Mulhern: Conrad's Inconceivable History The fascination of Joseph Conrad’s novels with the transformative pressures of capitalist modernity threatens a revelation so intolerable, Mulhern suggests, that it can only be contained within dense narrative strategies of deferral and disavowal.
  5. Peter Wollen: Necessary Love Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren.
  6. Robert Wade: Choking the South Charting the impact of fluctuating currencies, volatile stock markets and interest rates on the developing world since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Robert Wade contends that untrammelled mobility of capital—private funds above all—reinforces dynamics of debt and underdevelopment.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.
  2. David Laitin on Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus. Can world-system theory and sociological fieldwork explain the bifurcating fates of the post-Soviet Caucasus?
  3. Sebastian Budgen on Timothy Smith, France in Crisis. Spirited critique of the imbalances of the French model—coupled with liberal proposals for a ‘Dutch miracle’ in the Hexagon.
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Articles:

  1. Yoav Peled,
    ‘Zionist
    Realities’ A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?
  2. Virginia Tilley,
    ‘A Secular
    Solution’ Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
  3. Jean Baudrillard,
    ‘Pyres of
    Autumn’ Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
  4. Forrest Hylton,
    ‘Landslide in
    Bolivia’ What made the greatest Brazilian novel of the nineteenth century, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a masterpiece of world literature? The strange fate of realism in an ex-colonial society, in which liberalism was a ruling ideology, modernity a universal ideal, and slavery still an everyday fact of life.
  5. Julian
    Stallabrass,
    ‘Spectacle and
    Terror’ After Gopal Balakrishnan’s engagement with Afflicted Powers in NLR 36, Julian Stallabrass turns to the Retort collective’s conception of spectacle and its Islamist antagonists. Does a Debordian optic occlude the oppositional potential of modern technologies?
  6. Tom Nairn,
    ‘The New Furies’ Tom Nairn on Tariq Ali, Rough Music. Britain’s subservient foreign policy and fawning political culture as indices of decline. Terror bombings and the returning furies of Blair’s war.

Editorials:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
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