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Alexander Clapp,
‘Romania Redivivus’ After 2017’s mass anti-corruption protests, Alexander Clapp sets Romania’s sui generis political system in the context of its longue durée. Peculiarities of Iron Guard fascism and Ceauşescu’s West-oriented, Kim Il-sung-inflected Communism, deep state and external influence, crumbling infrastructure and Europe’s most vital cultural scene.

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NLR 108 was mailed on 28 December

CONTENTS

  1. Alexander Clapp: Romania Redivivus After 2017’s mass anti-corruption protests, Alexander Clapp sets Romania’s sui generis political system in the context of its longue durée. Peculiarities of Iron Guard fascism and Ceauşescu’s West-oriented, Kim Il-sung-inflected Communism, deep state and external influence, crumbling infrastructure and Europe’s most vital cultural scene.
  2. Marco D'Eramo: Geographies of Ignorance De-exoticization of the faraway in the age of inter-continental travel, matched by growing blanks in the map of national space. Marco D’Eramo on the selective epistemologies of globalization.
  3. Jacob Collins: Thinking Otherwise Politico-philosophical profile of Jacques Bouveresse, close friend and colleague of Bourdieu, examining the relation of his large, idiosyncratic body of work to the French philosophical traditions it explicitly disavows. Can thinkers as divergent as Wittgenstein, Musil and Kraus be mobilized to provide a coherent and countervailing ‘Kakanian’ tradition?
  4. Melissa Myambo: Africa's Global City? Global-city status is the new grail of competitive modernity. Can the hipsterfication model spearheaded in Brooklyn’s dumbo district be replicated in the harsher conditions of downtown Johannesburg—and if so, at what price?
  5. Mike Davis: The Year 1960 Prelude to the explosive struggles of the sixties in California, as the social actors, left and right, gather in the wings. Black student militants, white aerospace workers, City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.
  6. Chin-tao Wu: Fashion Seduces Art After the debate on value-setting between Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre and Nancy Fraser in NLR 106, Chin-tao Wu examines relations between the luxury industry and high art. Why are James Turrell, Daniel Buren and Olafur Eliasson producing works for Louis Vuitton and Chanel?
  7. Peter Osborne: Redemption Through Discourse? Peter Osborne on Stefan Müller-Doohm, Habermas: A Biography. Life and times of the Eurozone’s most decorated philosopher.
  8. Francis Mulhern: William Empson, Nonesuch Francis Mulhern on Michael Wood, On Empson. Reclaiming the heterodox thinker for literary criticism.
  9. John Newsinger: Much to be Modest About John Newsinger on John Bew, Citizen Clem. Hawkish celebration of Labourism’s post-war hero.
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Articles:

  1. Jacob Collins,
    ‘Thinking Otherwise’ Politico-philosophical profile of Jacques Bouveresse, close friend and colleague of Bourdieu, examining the relation of his large, idiosyncratic body of work to the French philosophical traditions it explicitly disavows. Can thinkers as divergent as Wittgenstein, Musil and Kraus be mobilized to provide a coherent and countervailing ‘Kakanian’ tradition?

Editorials:

  1. Erdoğan’s Cesspit, As the AKP’s crackdown on political dissent continues and Erdoğan’s autocratic ambitions become ever more apparent, his Western apologists lament the fall from grace of a man—moderate and liberal-minded—who never existed.
  2. Portugal, How and why has Portugal differed from Spain since the downfall of their respective dictatorships in the mid 70s? The course of political and economic development since the Revolution of 1974 was contained, and its current discrepant outcome: a conventional social-democratic government obliged to break with Euro-austerity under the pressure of a pact with the radical left.
  3. The French Spring, How did Emmanuel Macron become President of France virtually overnight? What are the likely consequences of his rule? The long epoch of collusive alternation between Centre-Left and Centre-Right, and its abrupt ending; the realities of Le Pen’s Front National, and the riposte of Mélenchon’s La France insoumise. Has neo-liberalism finally arrived in force in Paris, and if so what are the implications for Europe?
  4. Casting Off, How to assess the latest set-back for the European Union: the vote to leave by its second-largest state? Complex determinants of the Brexit protest—party-political contingencies played out against topographies of class and sub-national disaffection—met by single-minded condemnation of it by the global elite.
  5. Oppositions, After years of economic crisis and social protest, the cartel parties of the extreme centre now face a challenge to their dominance from outside-left forces in a number of Western countries. Contours of the emergent left oppositions, their platforms and figureheads, from Tsipras to Corbyn, Sanders to Mélenchon, Grillo to Iglesias.
  6. Europe, Debt, deflation and stagnation have now become the familiar economic stigmata of the EU. But what of its political distortions? A survey of the three principal—and steadily worsening—imbalances in the outcome of European integration: the oligarchic cast of its governors, the lop-sided rise of Germany, and the declining autonomy of the Union as a whole in the North Atlantic universe.
  7. Annexations, After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.
  8. 2011, Echoes of past rebellions in 2011’s global upsurge of protest. Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers?
  9. Arab Concatenation, From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.
  10. Wall Street Crisis, 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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