Ecological socialism and human needs∗

The proposed Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) is the keystone of India's Narmada Valley Project, consisting of 30 large, 130 medium, and 3000 small dams. Backed by the Indian government and the World Bank (the tatter to the tune of $450 million in loans), the SSP has generated unprecedented opposition from farmers and others whose lands would be submerged by the project, as well as from many Indian environmentalists and environmental and human rights groups around the world. In 1990, under tremendous pressure, former World Bank President Barber Co noble called for the Bank to make an independent review of the project. The Team's Report of the Independent Review, which evaluated the resettlement and environmental impacts of the SSPt backed up the criticisms of the projecfs opponents. One of India's best known engineers, CNS Editorial Consultant KM. Datye, his associates, and other scientists working on sustainable development alternatives have produced a wealth of critical studies of large dam projects including the SSP project in India. Their conclusion is that there are technical alternatives to the project which better serve the interests of democratic control of water and energy resources, economic and social equity, and economic efficiency.     

A century of health reform

He has written numerous books on human resource policy and has served as chairman of the National Manpower Advisory Committee and the National Commission for Employment Policy. Among his books are The Eye of Illusion; A World Without Work: The Study of the Welsh Miners;and My Brother’s Keeper: Personal Memoirs of Public Life;all published by Transaction.     

The definitive deng: Biography,memoirs, speeches and writings

Wode fuqin Deng Xiaoping, Volume One [My Father Deng Xiaoping] by Mao Mao (Deng Rong). Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe [Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Party Literature Publishing House], Beijing, 1993. 672 pp., maps, name index. Rmb13.80.

Deng Xiaoping wenxuan Volume III [Selected Writings of Deng Xiaoping], Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian bianji weiyuanhui [Editorial Committee on Party Literature, Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party] Renmin chubanshe [People's Publishing House], Beijing, 1993. 418 pp. Rmb6.50.     

Au Revoir to “Sacred Cows”? Assessing the Impact of the Nouvelle Droite in Britain

This article assesses the impact of the Nouvelle Droite on the extreme right in contemporary Britain. Occupying a central focus is the role of Scorpion magazine, edited by Michael Walker. The author examines the promotion of the Nouvelle Droite by Scorpion, and in particular Walker's attempts to encourage the British far right to bury two of its “sacred cows”: conspiracy theory and biological racism. He then identifies how Nouvelle Droite thought influenced the ideology and discourse of the 1980s National Front, before moving on to discuss its impact on Nick Griffin's recent attempts to modernize the ideology of the British National Party.     

Germany and the new Europe

where he directs the Europe-America and Global Security Projects. He has been Director of Studies of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and taught on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He served the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was staff member for Western Europe on the National Security Council. This article is a condensed version of his forthcoming book, America, Germany and the Future of Europe.     

Modernist art in the service of Nazi culture: Baldur von Schirach and the Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich exhibition

ABSTRACT

Maertz's essay offers a history of a modernist art exhibition that opened in Vienna's Künstlerhaus under the patronage of Baldur von Schirach, the Führer's personal representative in that city, the second largest in Nazi Germany. The significance of the 1943 Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich (New Art in the German Reich) exhibition lies in its assertion of a modernist variant of ‘official’ National Socialist art that clashes with the orthodox aesthetic system typically associated with the Third Reich.     

Sudpolitik: the political economy of Taiwan's trade with Southeast Asia

Abstract

In December 1993 the Taiwan government adopted a policy called nanjin zhengce or sudpolitik, a policy aimed at diverting part of Taiwan's trade and investment flows from China to Southeast Asia. This paper addresses the following questions: what is sudpolitik? why adopt such a policy? what are the economic, political, and strategic considerations in the pursuit of this policy? which countries are its specific targets? how do the countries directly affected by this policy respond to it? The paper also discusses the issue of Taiwan's aid in connection with sudpolitik. While the effectiveness of the policy is far from clear at present, the paper concludes with four observations: Taiwan's trade and aid are beginning to intertwine; Taiwan's diplomacy is largely economically or commercially led; Taiwan has achieved some positive results in improving its relations with Southeast Asian countries; and, Taiwan has reached a new stage in its economic development whereby it needs to invest overseas in order to sustain its economic growth. Overall, sudpolitik represents a novel step in Taiwan's diplomatic practice.     

A Tale of Two Inquiries: Sans Everything and Ely

The government acknowledged scandalously poor care of long‐stay patients in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in 1969. This followed the Ely Hospital inquiry, which emerged in the aftermath of revelations of abuse at seven hospitals described in Barbara Robb's book Sans Everything: A Case to Answer (1967). Allegations in Sans Everything and at Ely were similar. However, the inquiry committees which investigated, ‘disproved’ those in Sans Everything and upheld those at Ely. The Ely inquiry became pivotal to NHS policy reform for long‐stay mental illness and mental handicap hospitals, and for giving patients and their families a greater voice if they had concerns about inadequacies. This paper explains the relationship between Sans Everything and ‘Ely’ and analyses the impact of Robb's work—her high‐profile press campaign, networking, and determination to achieve improvement—which triggered revelations at Ely and elsewhere, and helped shape the course and constructive outcome of the Ely inquiry.     

The Committee on Standards in Public Life: Twenty Years of the Nolan Principles 1995–2015

In his recent memoir, William Waldegrave wrote that no country run by John Major and Robin Butler was likely to be in much danger of systemic corruption. The fact remains that a quarter of a century ago, John Major, with the guidance and support of his cabinet secretary, decided to establish the Committee on Standards in Public Life under the chairmanship of Lord Nolan. The apparent prevalence of ‘sleaze’ issues in public life—most notably the ‘cash for questions’ scandals involving Tory MPs—provoked the decision. Lord Nolan's committee immediately enunciated seven principles of public life: honesty, accountability, integrity, selflessness, openness, opportunity and leadership. Over the years, many of the Committee's recommendations have been accepted. There is today vastly greater transparency. The principles have been widely accepted; it is clear the public expects that they should be observed by public servants, including, perhaps especially, MPs. Yet it is equally clear that there is a widespread and still deepening mood of public cynicism on standards matters. The Committee is determined to defend the Nolan principles, but without more help from the political class it will be like Mrs Nupkins in The Pickwick Papers: inculcating moral lessons of great importance and generally ignored.     

Intelligence writings in Australia

Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier, Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in NSW 1930–32 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1989). Pp.312. $19.00 (paperback).

Michael Cathcart, Defending the National Tuck Shop, Australia's Secret Army Intrigue of 1931 (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988). Pp.216. $14.99 (paperback).

Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair, Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1987). Pp.310. $43.00 (paperback).

Mark Aarons, Sanctuary, Nazi Fugitives in Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1989). Pp.365. $24.00

Desmond Ball, Pine Gap, Australia and the US Geostationary Signals Intelligence Satellite Program (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988). Pp.121. $15.00 (paperback).

Desmond Ball, A Base for Debate, the US Satellite Station at Nurrungar (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987). Pp.122. $15.00 (paperback).

Desmond Ball, Australia's Secret Space Programs (Canberra: Australian National University, 1988). Pp.86. $15.00 (paperback).

Peter Morton, Fire Across the Desert, Woomera and the Anglo‐Australian Joint Project 1946–1980 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989). Pp.561. $99.95.     

Sampling CIA's New Document Retrieval System: McCone Telephone Conversations during the Six Crises Tempest

Documents recently made available at the National Archives by the CIA are accessed through non-traditional archival means: researchers use keywords at computers to obtain them. Most of the documents will be uninteresting or worthless to scholars. Some add important or colorful details to our knowledge of the Agency. An example is a small set of documents detailing 1962 telephone conversations of DCI John McCone with President Kennedy, former DCI Dulles, and former Vice President Nixon about the latter's best-selling book Six Crises, which charged Kennedy with having acted unscrupulously as a presidential candidate in 1960 by advocating covert action against Cuba.     

Strategy of Chinese policy entrepreneurs in the third sector: challenges of “Technical Infeasibility”

Studies of policy entrepreneurs have become a staple of public policy research. Very few such studies deal with the circumstances of China. This paper aims to remedy this oversight by exploring the mechanisms of policy change in China. Using John Kingdon’s Multiple Streams (MS) Model, the author develops the “Technical Infeasibility Model.” The paper tests the MS model’s applicability to China by examining strategies put forth by Chinese policy entrepreneurs in the third sector. It considers how they may successfully promote change by using a strategy of proposing a relatively radical policy concept that is politically acceptable and technically infeasible to policy makers. To illustrate such a strategy, this paper considers a case of policy change involving Chinese urban vagrants. The policy on “Detention and Repatriation,” which was first implemented in 1982, was challenged following the Sun Zhigang Incident in March 2003. Shortly thereafter law scholars filed two suggestion letters to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee calling for a constitutionality review of the Detention and Repatriation System. Though it was “technically infeasible” to air such a proposal in China at that time, the State Council initiated action to abolish certain provisions of the Detention and Repatriation System. However, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee did not conduct a constitutionality review.

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue. Democratic Flaws
RICHARD BOURKE The Life and Death of Democracy, by John Keane. Flawed democracy
Gianfranco Pasquino Democracy Inc. Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, by Sheldon Wolin. Democracy in the Land of Good Things (Britain)
Richard Mullender Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty, by Peter Kellner. The soldier's right to kill
Christopher Finlay Killing in War, by Jeff McMahan. Facts from Eastern Europe and elsewhere
Richard Briand Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name, by Timothy Garton Ash. The soul of Tony Blair
Ilaria Favretto Losing Labour's Soul? New Labour and the Blair Government, 1997–2007, by Eric Shaw. Greeks and Turks in Europe and Cyprus
Mehmet Ugur Turkey's Accession to the European Union: An Unusual Candidacy, by Constantine Arvanitopoulos. Cyprus: The Post‐Imperial Constitution, by Vassilis K. Fouskas and Alex O. Tackie. Obama's last chance
Tony Klug The Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, by David Gardner. Thatcher's grandchildren
Mark Garnett Thatcher's Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s, by Richard Vinen.     

The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle Revolution

Abstract

I argue that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exemplifies the concept of mourning play that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While others have interpreted the play in various ways, no one has attempted to understand Timon in a Benjaminesque manner that seeks to show the emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with, and liberated from, classical tragedy's mythical foundation and instead premised on historical time and progress. In my discussion, I question the view that Timon possesses inheritable or transmissible human social bonds that can be the subject of annihilation as is the case in Shakespeare's other tragedies. Rather, Benjamin sees in allegory, as illustrated by Timon of Athens, the social condition of modernity replete with suffering, chaos, and violence, but devoid of real human bonds; indeed, it is without human meaning.     

In search of international political economy a review essay

John Edelman Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977).

Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest. Raw Materials, Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Charles‐Albert Michalet, Le capitalisme mondial (Paris: Presses universi‐taires de France, 1976).     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Crosland Was Wrong The Future of Socialism, by Anthony Crosland, Introduction by Dick Leonard, Foreword by Gordon Brown, Afterword by Susan Crosland. Who represents what? Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, by Nadia Urbinati. Morgan's Foot Michael Foot, by Kenneth O. Morgan. No consensus on consensus Welfare Policy under New Labour: Views from inside Westminster, by Hugh Bochel and Andrew Defty. Englishness revisited The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, by Peter Mandler. Does oil lead to war? Oil Wars, edited by Mary Kaldor, Terry Lynn Karl and Yahia Said. Global health inequalities Governing Global Health. Challenge, Response, Innovation, by Andrew F. Cooper, John J. Kirton and Ted Schrecker. Charity without rationality? After Identity, by Jonathan Rutherford.     

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

Abstract

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts’—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically     

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: perverse effects,protectionism and Gemeinschaft

Abstract

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great Transformation is Gemeinschaft, understood dynamically. It examines the two central mechanisms by which, in Polanyi's understanding, Gesellschaft broke down in the mid-twentieth century: the ‘clash between democracy and capitalism’ and the ‘perverse effects’ whereby political intervention in markets impairs profitability and saps the vitality of the market system.     

Constructing patient–psychiatrist relations in psychiatric hospitals: the role of space and personal action

This essay investigates the role of space and personal action in the construction of patient–psychiatrist relations at psychiatric hospitals. In order to explore such a theme, the writings of R.D. Laing prove to be salutary. This is namely accredited to Laing's tenet that the staff and patients of a psychiatric hospital are institutionalised by both physical structures and personal action. A central approach taken in this essay is to explore Laing's theory through an inter-textual reading of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1967) and Erving Goffman's Asylums (1961).