CONTENTS

1. Perry Anderson: Force and Consent As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
2. Sebastian Budgen: The French Fiasco The collapse of the Centre Left in France, after five years of Jospin’s complacent government: the whys and wherefores of its electoral debacle this spring, and the panic-stricken prostration to Chirac that followed it.
3. Eduardo Galeano: The Noose A garotted Uruguay—‘dedicated to turning itself from a nation-state into a bank with beaches’—in the eyes of its greatest poet, as credits descend and the young depart.
4. David Rock: Racking Argentina Meltdown and pauperization in what was once Latin America’s wealthiest economy. David Rock analyses the social and political longue durée of the largest sovereign default in history, and worst casualty of doctrinal neoliberalism to date.
5. Emir Sader: Beyond Civil Society A Brazilian view of the World Social Forum, in its regional and international context. How the landscape of the world’s Left has changed, and whether the ideologies of non-governmental organization and civil society are capable of resisting what they criticize.
6. Tom Mertes: Grass-Roots Globalism Replying to Michael Hardt with an alternative look at Porto Alegre, Tom Mertes argues that while the variety of movements and forces in the WSF is not to be reduced to a single scale, the differences between them are less to do with organization than strategy.
7. Donald Sassoon: On Cultural Markets The ‘culture industry’ has typically been conceived as a unified, twentieth-century branch of production. Donald Sassoon reveals older, more variegated patterns of development, tracing international relations of cultural dominance from Scott and Verdi to the action movie.
8. Sven Lütticken: Secrecy and Publicity Can the legacies of the classical avant-gardes be renewed as effective strategies in postmodern conditions, or are they condemned to mere pastiche? After Bataille, Warhol and Smithson, the possibilities of counter-media, and uncertainties of counter-publics.
9. Gabriel Piterberg: Postcards from Palestine Gabriel Piterberg on Daniel Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation. Imaginations of the Dome of the Rock and Wailing Wall under the British Mandate, and their political decontextualization today.
10. Susan Watkins: Saffron Gastronomy Susan Watkins on D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow. The gastronomic legends and taboos of India’s modern Hindu chauvinism, as the BJP reshapes the country’s curricula.
11. Victoria Brittain: Cuba in Africa Victoria Brittain on Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions. The remarkable record of Cuban assistance to African insurgencies, in Belgian, French and Portuguese colonial zones alike.