Perry Anderson – A Symposium on Europe

The January/February 2012 edition of the New Left Review is out now.

This issue includes a fascinating and intellectually rigorous debate on Europe and the European Union in the form of a three-part critical symposium on Perry Anderson's The New Old World, with essays on the book by Phillipe Schmitter, Alain Supiot, and Jan-Werner Muller. These are followed by a reply from Anderson and a stand-alone essay by Wolfgang Streeck. The stated aim of the symposium is to, "broaden the debate on the nature of the institutional tensions within the Union, and the historical background to them." As the introduction puts it,

The zone that only yesterday was congratulating itself on combining prosperity, civility and democracy in a synthesis no other region on earth could match, has become a danger to the global stability of capital, watched not with envy but with anxiety by its partners and rivals in the rule of the plant.

The issue also includes Alan Cafruny and Timothy Lehmann on the ideological, military and economic legacy of US involvement in Iraq, and Pierre Brocheux on the Vietnam of his childhood and the cultural and political changes the country has undergone since. There are fascinating contributions from Julian Stallabrass on the 'Hockney industry', Ismail Xavier on the documentary movement in Brazil, and Mario Tronti on the Italian operaismo of the 1960s.

Visit New Left Review to read the essays in full.