One of the many games pundits and politicians are playing these days is to spell out why and how the European Union (EU) is going to collapse. Anyone who follows the news worldwide knows all the standard explanations.
Neoliberal ideology has dominated world discourse for the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. The mantra has been that the only viable policy for governments and social movements was to give priority to something called the market.
The term “nation” has had many different meanings across the centuries. But these days, and ever since the French Revolution more or less, the term has been linked to the state, as in “nation-state.” In this usage, “nation” refers to those who are members by right of the community that is located within a state. The issue is why states create nations, and what should be the attitude of the “left” to the concept of the nation.
When Bernie Sanders announced that he would seek the presidential nomination of the U.S. Democratic Party, few people took him very seriously. Hillary Clinton seemed to have so much support that her nomination seemed assured without difficulty. Sanders however persisted in his seemingly utopian quest.
On January 2, 2016, the Sunni government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) executed the leading imam of the Shia community in KSA. The Shiite government of Iran denounced this execution, as did governments throughout the world, and avowed there would be consequences. Since that time, the rhetoric has continued to escalate.
The story of the BRICS is a strange one. It starts in 2001 when Jim O’Neill, at that time the chairman of the Assets Management division of Goldman Sachs, the giant investment house, wrote a widely-commented article about what we have come to call “emerging economies.”
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019