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Susan Watkins,
‘America—China’ Introducing a triptych of perspectives on the PRC, as the drumbeat from Washington grows louder. Is the American imperium now so vast, so overweening in its demands, that any rising power must grate against it?

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CONTENTS

  1. Susan Watkins: America vs China Introducing a triptych of perspectives on the PRC, as the drumbeat from Washington grows louder. Is the American imperium now so vast, so overweening in its demands, that any rising power must grate against it?
  2. Peter Nolan: The CPC and the Ancien Régime Roots of the PRC’s legitimating ideology in the longue durée of Chinese history, as source of the Party’s confidence that it need not imitate Western models in the coming century. Peter Nolan sets out the view from Zhongnanhai on the desirable relation between market and state—a potential alternative to the current world order?
  3. Christopher Connery: Ronald Coase in Beijing On the eve of the financial crisis, Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing posited the advent of a world-equalizing market state in China. Christopher Connery now takes a sardonic look at the country’s ‘institutional economics’ through the eyes of an idiosyncratic English Hayekian.
  4. Robert Brenner, Victor Shih: China’s Credit Conundrum Interviewed by Robert Brenner, Victor Shih discusses the one-off factors that enabled China’s rise as workshop of the world and its subsequent dependence on state credit as driver of growth. Contradictions between the conditions for political and financial stability, as the Xi regime superintends an unsteady slowdown.
  5. Didier Fassin, Anne-Claire Defossez: An Improbable Movement? The policies and pretensions of a Bourbonnais president as background to the political insurgency of provincial France. Origins and complexion of the gilets jaunes mobilization, with the Elysée resorting to the worst police violence since May 68.
  6. Mark Burton, Peter Somerville: Degrowth: A Defence Counterblast to Robert Pollin’s programme in NLR 112 for a green-growth new deal, arguing that a radical reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions requires a smaller global economy. Proposals for a drastic overhaul of production, construction, transportation and agricultural practices.
  7. Lola Seaton: Green Questions A survey of the ‘green strategy’ debate in recent numbers of NLR unravels the threads of twin disagreements about GDP growth, which appears, by turns, a political-economic necessity and an ecological death-sentence. Steady-state, half-earthing, degrowth, green new deal? All have questions to answer.
  8. Frederik Van Dam: Fictions of Culture Frederik Van Dam on Francis Mulhern, Figures of Catastrophe. Elegant elucidation of an unsuspected literary genre centred on culture as a ground for social conflict.
  9. Alexandra Reza: Imagined Transmigrations Alexandra Reza on Stephen Smith, La ruée vers Europe. Projected convergence of African demographic growth and economic stagnation as conditions for a migratory ‘scramble for Europe’.
  10. Rebecca Lossin: Mutinous Territory Rebecca Lossin on Mauvaise Troupe, The ZAD and NoTAV. Oral history and barefoot ethnography combine in a participants’ account of territorial struggles in Piedmont and Brittany.
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Articles:

Editorials:

  1. Which Feminisms?, The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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?
  10. 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.
  11. 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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