Families falling apart

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the senior United States Senator from New York. He is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy of the Committee on Finance, and of the Subcommittee on Water Resources, Transportation, and Infrastructure of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. He is also a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. He is the author or editor of 14 books, including Beyond the Melting Pot(with Nathan Glazer) and his most recent work, Came the Revolution: Argument in the Reagan Era.     

Israel and its enemies

He has written widely on international relations and international law. His work Security Or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategyremains the authoritative treatment of the subject. His newest book is Force, Order and Justice: International Law in an Age of Atrocity.     

Compulsive gambling

He has written widely on gambling, crime, and addiction. He is author of The Chase: Career of the Compulsive Gambler,and editor of Journal of Gambling Studies.He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association work group on disorders of impulse control. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Council on Problem Gambling.     

Public pensions and demographic change

He is a former John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies of Harvard University. He has written several books and articles on issues of labor market theory, work time, and social policy. He is author of Motive und Interessen im Arbeitszeitkonflikt: Eine Analyse der Entwicklung von Normalarbeitszeitstandardsand Zeit und Geld in privaten Haushalten: Gelegenheitsstruktur und Bedarf für Eigenarbeit als Determinanten sozialer Ungleichheit.He is also co-editor of Working Time in Transition: The Political Economy of Working Hours in Industrial Nations.     

Famine,genocide, and refugees

He has written widely on the subjects of genocide, famine, and refugees. He is co-author (with Frank Chalk) of The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies.     

Why stalin? A national debate

He is also the codirector of the Wiener Library of Contemporary History in London. He is the author of major studies on terrorism, political movements, ideological trends, and cultural forms. His books include: Soviet Realities; Culture and Politics from Stalin to Gorbachev; America, Europe, and the Soviet Union;and The Political Psychology of Appeasement.He is also editor of European Peace Movements and the Future of the Western Alliance.     

Planning theory as political practice

Howell S. Baum is associate professor, teaching planning theory, social planning, and organizational behavior at the University of Maryland Institute for Urban Studies and School of Social Work and Community Planning. He has done research on planning in bureaucratic organizations and is author of Planners and Public Expectationsand The Invisible Bureaucracy.He is completing a book on the experience of working in bureaucracy, Membership Without Intimacy.     

Downtown malls and the city agenda

He is the author or editor of eight books and more than 50 articles on housing and city development. He has served as Chairman of the Faculty at M.I.T. and as director of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. His most recent book, written with Lynne Sagalyn, is Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities,from which this article is extracted.     

Public enemies

He is author most recently of Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel.     

Meritocracy revisited

Michael Young is author of The Rise of the Meritocracy,reissued in paperback by Transaction. Among his other books is Family and Kinship in East London (with Peter Willmott).He is founder and director of the Institute of Community Studies in London. He is a past chairman of the Social Science Research Council of the United Kingdom and founder of the Open University. He is a member of Parliament as Lord Young of Dartington.     

Book Reviews

Book review in this article: Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. By Donald Savoie. Administrative Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards Public Sector Reform in Post-Communist Societies. Joachim Jens Hesse, ed. Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars. By James Davison Hunter. Social Security and Medicare: A Policy Primer. By Eric R. Kingson and Edward D. Berkowitz. The Political Psychology of the Gulf War: Leaders, Publics and the Process of Conflict. Stanley A. Renshon, ed.     

International organized crime

He has served as a consultant to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the National Security Council, and related agencies of the U.S. government. He has written, coauthored, or edited over sixteen books on intelligence and national security.     

All the president’s reporters

His most recent book is Live from Capitol Hill! Studies of Congress and the Media.He is presently researching how the American media cover international news.     

Declining options/increasing needs

Before that, he served at the National Institute of Education. He has held teaching appointments at the Universities of Illinois and Oregon and at Cornell University, and is now adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has authored fifteen books, including Finding Work: Cross National Perspectives; Program Evaluation and the Management of Government;and he has edited the last four volumes of Policy Studies Review Annual.     

Security,Not Defence,Strategic, Not Habit: Restructuring the Political Arrangements for Policy Making on Britain's Role in the World

The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has committed itself to a Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDR) in 2010. The government and the country face very hard choices to bring United Kingdom defence and security policy back from the brink of bankruptcy—both financial and strategic (Gow). To succeed, it must overcome the failings of the past (Chisnall, Dorman, Rees) and take a truly open and radical look at all aspects of policy and process—including the Trident independent nuclear deterrent (Allen), relations with Europe (Witney) and the importance of cyber‐issues in the future security context (Fisher). It must get strategic concepts right to provide flexibility with credibility (Stone). It must deliver ‘what the military wants’: true strategic prioritisation, radical defence acquisition reform, and credible balancing of resources and commitments (Kiszley). The scale of the challenge facing the United Kingdom in—and beyond—the 2010 SDR is why The Political Quarterly convened a workshop early in 2010 involving MPs, practitioners, retired military personnel, journalists, commentators, business people and academics, and publishes these associated papers. Most of all, to overcome the failings of the past, there must be a radical move beyond the welcome first steps of the Cameron–Clegg government to introduce a National Security Council and a National Security Advisor, to reconfigure relationships within government, across departments and with Parliament to have a government figure of accountability and responsibility—a Secretary of State for Security Policy, primus inter pares with other Secretaries of State—to make sense of the questions needing to be asked and answered (Gearson and Gow).     

The silence of the tapes

He is author of The challenge of the Borderline Patient;and The Reality of Mental Illness(with Martin Roth). His research interests include diagnostic and therapeutic issues of personality disorders, adjustment problems of Southeast Asian refugees, and comparisons of self-injurious behaviors in medieval Europe and contemporary society.     

War,security and system change in the Pacific

Missile Defences and Asian Pacific Security, by Michael J. Mazarr. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, 1989. xii + 226 pp. £29.50. ISBN 0–333–48228–X.

Asian Security 1988–89, compiled by the Research Institute for Peace and Security, Tokyo. Brassey's Defence Publishers, London, 1988. viii + 173 pp. £17.95. ISBN 0–08–036263–X.

Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice, edited by Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield. Unwin Hyman Ltd, London, 1988. xv + 239 pp. £28.00 hardback, £8.95 paperback. ISBN 0–04–355034–7 and 0–04–355035–5.

Border Crossings: Studies in International History, by Christopher Thorne. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1988. x + 313 pp. £29.95. ISBN 0–631–16062–0.

The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American commitment to Southeast Asia, by Andrew J. Rotter. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, and London, 1987. $29.95 hardback, $9.95 paperback. ISBN 0–8014–1958–1 and 0–8014–9620–9.

Security and Economy in the Third World, by Nicole Ball. Adamantine Press, London, 1989. xxvii + 432 pp., 32 tables, 18 figs. £29.95. ISBN 0–7449–0021–2.     

Political legitimacy and china’s transition

This study reveals a distinctive Chinese cognitive model of political legitimacy, and analyzes how political leaders in Beijing have maintained its legitimacy through cultivating different elements of this traditional model. The central argument developed in this study is that so far the government in Beijing has shown remarkable adaptability to a changing political environment. However, the transition towards a market economy has redefined the meanings of the century-old cognitive model. Consequently, the existing system of legitimization is being seriously challenged. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Brandies University. His recent articles appeared onAsian Survey, Modern China Studies, Twenty First Century (Hong Kong), andAmerican Review of China Studies. The author wishes to thank for the helpful comments made on earlier drafts of this paper by Yang Zhong, A. Jack Waskey, He Li, Jim Stevenson, John Hebestreet, Tang Wei, and anonymous reviewers.     

Book notes

Susan Bambrick (ed.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Australia Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 384pp. £40. ISBN 0–521–365112.

Paul M. Evans (ed.) Studying Asia Pacific Security: The Future of Research, Training and Dialogue Activities Ontario: University of Toronto‐York University Joint Centre for Asia‐Pacific Studies/Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Indonesia, 1994. 388pp. ISBN 1–895296–15–3.     

Reviews

The recent discourse on ‘new antisemitism’ and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sometime gives the impression that Europe is fundamentally and irredeemably antisemitic. Klug maintains that, while there is a persistent vein of antisemitism in the culture, and while there is evidence of an increase in anti-Jewish attacks since 2000, this perception of Europe is exaggerated. He argues that it is part of a mindset that tends to overstate hostility towards Israel and Jews, or to assume that this hostility is antisemitic, or both. Often this goes along with a tendency to connect antisemitism, via anti-Zionism, with anti-Americanism. Klug believes that notion of a mindset, Klug turns to the question of definition, examining the view that antisemitism is indefinitely mutable. Invoking recent work on the subject, he suggests that at the core of antisemitism is the stock figure of the ‘Jew’. This gives us a criterion with which to judge whether or not a given text—including an attack on Israel or Zionism—is antisemitic. On the basis of the analysis so far, Klug critiques the view that hostility to Israel in general is a new twist on an old antisemitic theme. In this connection, he discussed a 2003 Eurobarometer opinion poll in which 59 per cent of respondents said that Israel is a ‘threat to peace in the world’. Some see this as proof that Europe is antisemitic; Klug rejects this interpretation and traces it back to the mindset he has describing. He argues that people in the grip of this mindset tend to take a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This can lead to ‘antisemitism in reverse’: projecting the figure of the antisemite on to someone who does not fit the bill. Klug concludes that the prospects for the European debate on antisemitism are poor unless it can be disentangled from partisan Middle East politics.