Reappraisals (70 page)

Until and unless this changes, the electors of Longwy and Sarrebourg, like their fellows in Austria, Italy, and Belgium (not to speak of countries farther east), will be tempted to listen to other voices, less timid about invoking the nation-state and “national-capitalism” as the forum for redemptive action. Why are we so sure that the far political Right is behind us for good—or indeed the far Left? The postwar social reforms in Europe were instituted in large measure as a barrier to the return of the sort of desperation and disaffection from which such extreme choices were thought to have arisen. The partial unraveling of those social reforms, for whatever reason, is not risk-free. As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just wither away. It goes instead in search of more radical answers.

This essay was first published in 1997 in the journal Foreign Affairs, at the invitation of its then managing editor Fareed Zakaria. He asked me to write about any problem or development in foreign affairs likely to be of significance in years to come. I opted to discuss the new “social question” of poverty, underemployment, and social exclusion and the failure of the political Left to reassess its response to these and other dilemmas of globalization. Nothing that has happened in the intervening decade has led me to moderate my gloomy prognostications—quite the contrary.

PUBLICATION CREDITS

The essays in this book were first published in the following journals:

Chapter I: “Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual” in
The New Republic
, January 2000

Chapter II: “The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi” in
The New York Review of Books
, May 20, 1999

Chapter III: “The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber” in
The New Republic
, April 1, 1996

Chapter IV: “Hannah Arendt and Evil” in
The New York Review of Books
, April 6, 1995

Chapter V: “Albert Camus: ‘The best man in France’” in
The New York Review of Books
, October 6, 1994

Chapter VI: “Elucubrations: The ‘Marxism’ of Louis Althusser” in
The New Republic
, March 7, 1994

Chapter VII: “Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism” in
The New York Review of Books
, November 20, 2003

Chapter VIII: “Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kołakowski and the Marxist Legacy” in
The New York Review of Books
, September 21, 2006

Chapter IX: “A ‘Pope of Ideas’? John Paul II and the Modern World” in
The New York Review of Books
, October 31, 1996

Chapter X: “Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan” in
The Nation
, July 19, 2004

Chapter XI: “The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940” in
The New York Review of Books
, February 22, 2001

Chapter XII: “
À la recherche du temps perdu
: France and Its Pasts” in
The New York Review of Books
, December 3, 1998

Chapter XIII: “The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s ‘Heritage’” in
The New York Review of Books
, July 19, 2001

Chapter XIV: “The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters” in
The New York Review of Books
, December 2, 1999

Chapter XV: “Romania between History and Europe” in
The New York Review of Books
, November 1, 2001

Chapter XVI: “Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War” in
The New Republic
, July 29, 2002

Chapter XVII: “The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up” in
Ha’aretz
, May 5, 2006

Chapter XVIII: “An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers” in
The New Republic
, April 14, 1997

Chapter XIX: “The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba” in
The New York Review of Books
, January 15, 1998

Chapter XX: “The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy” in
The New York Review of Books
, August 13, 1998

Chapter XXI: “Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect” in
The New York Review of Books
, March 23, 2006

Chapter XXII: “The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America” in
The London Review of Books
, September 21, 2006

Chapter XXIII: “The Good Society: Europe vs. America” in
The New York Review of Books
, February 10, 2005

Envoi: “The Social Question Redivivus” in
Foreign Affairs
, September/October 1997

INDEX

Abel, Lionel

absurd, idea of the

Accumulation of Capital, The
(Luxemburg)

Acheson, Dean.

Acton, Lord

Adenauer, Konrad

Adler, Alfred

Adler, Max

Afghanistan

Africa

Aǧca, Mehmet Ali

Age of Capital, The
(Hobsbawm)

Age of Extremes, The
(Hobsbawm)

Agnew, Spiro T.

Agusta (Belgian company)

Albania

Algeria

Algerian war.

Allen, Richard

Allende, Salvador

Allon, Yigal

Alsop, Joseph

Althusser, Hélène

Althusser, Louis

America Houses

American Enterprise Institute

Améry, Jean

Anderson, Rudolf

Anissimov, Myriam

Annales

Annan, Kofi

Annan, Noel

anti-Americanism

Arab sources of

cold war policies and

Iraq invasion and

anti-Communism

Chambers and

Hobsbawm on

intellectuals and

John Paul and

Koestler and

McCarthyism and

anti-Fascism

anti-Semitism

Germany and

Israel’s critics charged with

Poland and

Romania and

Antohi, Sorin

Antonescu, Ion

Arab-Israeli conflict

Kissinger shuttle diplomacy and

post-change in

solution impediments for

See also
Israel, State of; Lebanon; occupied territories; Palestinians; Six-Day War; Yom Kippur War

Arafat, Yassir

Aragon, Louis

Arbatov, Georgi

‘Aref, ’Abd al-Rahman Muhammad

Arendt, Hannah

on Camus

Argentina

Arkan (Serb terrorist).

Armenia/Armenians

arms race

Aron, Raymond .

Arrival and Departure
(Koestler)

Arrow, Kenneth

Arrow in the Blue
(Koestler)

“Arsenic” (Levi).

Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind
(Cesarani)

Ashdown, Paddy.

Attali, Jacques

Attlee, Clement

Auschwitz.

Carmelite convent proposal for

Levi’s survival of

Sperber essays on

Austria

Avenir dure longtemps
, L’(Althusser)

Ayer, A. J.

Baader-Meinhof gang

Babelon, Jean-Pierre

Bachelard, Gaston

Badinter, Robert.

Bakunin, Mikhail

Balaguer, Escrivá y.

Ball, George

Bangladesh

Barak, Ehud

Barbie, Klaus

Barenboim, Daniel

Barnsley (South Yorkshire)

Barr, Nicholas

Barrès, Maurice.

Barrett, William

Barthes, Roland

Bartlett, Charles

Barzun, Jacques

Basque nationalists

Baudelaire, Charles

Baudouin (King of the Belgium)

Bauer, Otto

Bay of Pigs.

Bazaine, François, Marshall

Beard, Charles

Beauvoir, Simone de

Beckham, David.

Begin, Menachem

Beinart, Peter

Belarus

Belgium

fall of France and

Bell, Daniel

Ben-Ami, Shlomo

Benedetti, Leonardo de.

Benedict (Pope)

Ben-Gurion, David

Benjamin, Walter

Bentley, Elizabeth

Bergen-Belsen

Berle, Adolf A., Jr.

Berlin

airlift ()

crisis ()

Berlin, Isaiah.

Berlinguer, Enrico

Berlin Wall

Berman, Paul.

Bernanos, Georges

Bernstein, Carl

Bernstein, Eduardn.

Bernstein, Leonard

Beschloss, Michael

Bessarabia.

Beveridge, William

Bhagwati, Jagdish.

Biological Weapons Convention

Birnbaum, Pierre

Bismarck, Otto von

Blair, Tony

Blake, George

Blanchard, Georges

Bloch, Ernst

Bloch, Marc

Blocher, Christoph

Blücher, Gebhard von

Blum éon

Blumenthal, Sidney

Blunt, Anthony

Boff, Leonardo

Bohlen, Charles

Bolshakov, Georgi.

Bolshevism.

Borkenau, Franz

Borochov, Ber

Borowski, Tadeusz

Bosnia.

Brandt, Willy

Brazil

Bread and Wine
(Silone)

“Breakdown, The” (Kołakowski)

Brecht, Bertolt

Brezhnev, Leonid

“Bridge, The” (Levi)

Britain.
See
United Kingdom

British Communist Historians Group

British Communist Party

British National Party.

British Rail

Broadwater, Bowden

Brown, Gordon

Brussels

Brzozowski, Stanisław

Buber-Neumann, Margarete

Bucharest

Buckley, William F., Jr.

Bukharin, Nikolai

Bukovina.

Bulganin, Nikolai

Bulgaria

Bund

Bundy, Harvey.

Bundy, McGeorge ..

Bundy, William

Burgess, Guy

Burrin, Philippe

Bush, George H. W.

Bush, George W.

Europe and

liberals and

Caligula
(Camus)

Calvino, Italo

Cambodia

Cambridge University .

Camus, Albert .

Canovan, Margaret.

Can You Hear Their Voices?
(Chambers)

capitalism.

inequities of

John Paul on

Left’s reconciliation with

Marxism on

totalitarianism and

Western model of

Caradja, Princess Brianna

“Caritas” scam (Romania)

Carné, Marcel

Carnets
(Camus)

Carter, Jimmy

Casey, William

Castro, Fidel.

Catholicism

Belgium and

Communist Secretariat compared with

France and

Poland and

Vatican and.
See
John Paul

Caute, David

Cavani, Liliana

Ceauşescu, Nicolae

Celan, Paul

Cesarani, David

Chamberlain, Neville

Chambers, Whittaker

Charter(Czechoslovakia)

Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU)

Chateaubriand, François-René de

Chechnya

Chernobyl disaster.

Chesterton, G. K.

Chiaromonte, Nicolà

Chiave a stella, La
(Levi)

Children’s Rights Convention ()

Chile

China.

Communist takeover of

as potential great power

U.S. diplomatic opening with

U.S. similarities with

Christian Democrats

“Christianity and Revolution” (Arendt)

Churchill, Winston

CIA

Cioran, E. M.

class struggle

Clinton, Bill

Clubb, O. Edmund

coal mining

Cobbett, William

Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea

Cohn, Roy

Cohn-Bendit, Daniel

cold war

Cuban missile crisis and

détente and

Hiss-Chambers case and

illusions/errors about

John Paul /Reagan alliance and

Kissinger/Nixon policies and

legacies of

war on terror analogy with

See also
Soviet Union

Cold War, The
(Gaddis)

Colombia

colonialism

anticolonial violence and.

France and.

Israel and

Columbia University.

Comintern.

commemoration.
See
memorialization

Committee on the Present Danger

Common Agricultural Fund

Communism.

attraction of

Chambers-Hiss case and

failure of

Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to

ideas and

intellectuals and

Jews and

Kissinger’s policymaking and

Koestler’s portrayal of

Marxism transformed into

messianism and

revisionist

state’s role in

totalitarianism and

See also
anti-Communism; cold war; Marxism;
under specific countries

Compagnon, Antoine

Congo

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

Congress for Cultural Freedom

Congress of Bad Godesberg ()

Congress of Vienna ()

Constantinescu, Emil