Suchergebnisse

We are told that this is a new world, with which old theories cannot cope. But the dynamic driving the current global transformation is not as new as our pundits and politicians pretend. The global market-place of our day may have little in common with the tamed welfare capitalism of the post-war period but it is uncannily reminiscent of the untamed capitalism of 100 years ago. Keynes and Beveridge may be dead, but Marx, Malthus and Ricardo have had a new lease of life. In these timely essays, David Marquand challenges the fashionable amnesia of the 1990s and addresses the crucial quest

Has Europe's extraordinary postwar recovery limped to an end? It would seem so. The United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, and former Soviet Bloc countries have experienced ethnic or religious disturbances, sometimes violent. Greece, Ireland, and Spain are menaced by financial crises. And the euro is in trouble. In The End of the West, David Marquand, a former member of the British Parliament, argues that Europe's problems stem from outdated perceptions of global power, and calls for a drastic change in European governance to halt the continent's slide into irrelevance. Taking a searching look at the continent's governing institutions, history, and current challenges, Marquand offers a disturbing diagnosis of Europe's ills to point the way toward a better future. Exploring the baffling contrast between postwar success and current failures, Marquand examines the rebirth of ethnic communities from Catalonia to Flanders, the rise of xenophobic populism, the democratic deficit that stymies EU governance, and the thorny questions of where Europe's borders end and what it means to be European. Marquand contends that as China, India, and other nations rise, Europe must abandon ancient notions of an enlightened West and a backward East. He calls for Europe's leaders and citizens to confront the painful issues of ethnicity, integration, and economic cohesion, and to build a democratic and federal structure. A wake-up call to those who cling to ideas of a triumphalist Europe, The End of the West shows that the continent must draw on all its reserves of intellectual and political creativity to thrive in an increasingly turbulent world, where the very language of "East" and "West" has been emptied of meaning. In a new preface, Marquand analyzes the current Eurozone crisis--arguing that it was inevitable due to the absurdity of combining monetary union with

We are told that this is a new world, with which old theories cannot cope. But the dynamic driving the current global transformation is not as new as our pundits and politicians pretend. The global market-place of our day may have little in common with the tamed welfare capitalism of the post-war period but it is uncannily reminiscent of the untamed capitalism of 100 years ago. Keynes and Beveridge may be dead, but Marx, Malthus and Ricardo have had a new lease of life. In these timely essays, David Marquand challenges the fashionable amnesia of the 1990s and addresses the crucial quest.

Britain urgently needs a national conversation about the economic, political and moral predicament it now faces. It should start with the economic crisis of 2008–09. Keynesians and neoliberals alike still seek to return to pre‐crisis business as usual, albeit with modifications. But the untamed capitalism that came to grief in 2008 had three major flaws. First, it undermined the public domain of equity, citizenship and civic virtue, whose creation was one of the great achievements of the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries, exposing it to invasion by the market domain. Second, it led to a remorseless rise in inequality of resources and life chances, rendering British society one of the most dysfunctional in Europe. Third, it encouraged the emergence of a debased form of democracy, best called 'market populism', that mocks the dream of political equality that lies at the heart of the democratic ideal. Yet growth points of a better society can be detected amidst the gloom. Informal institutions and social movements like London Citizens and the burgeoning environmental movement show that the notion of the public good is still alive. So do the survival of Edmund Burke's communitarianism in the conservative tradition, of John Stuart Mill's social liberalism in the liberal tradition and of ethical socialism in the social‐democratic tradition.