It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference

This paper attempts to deconstruct the free speech defense of the publications of cartoons offensive to many Muslims in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe in order to highlight the deep philosophical tensions between the characterizations of religion and race, between free speech and hate speech, and between the freedoms of expression and of religion. A scrutiny of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) reveals the difficulties inherent in defining permissible limits on expression, particularly as it involves the identification and prioritization of interests that are worthy of protection under a state's law. The struggles over the characterization of certain interests as fundamental rights, in turn, raise questions over the ‘fundamental-ness' of rights and the valuation of foundational social and political values that the rhetoric of rights presumes as incontrovertible. This study seeks to advance the argument that fundamental rights, such as the freedom of expression, are legal constructs whose value is contingent on the ends they are employed to serve in a given socio-political environment. While the contingency of fundamental rights is palpable in debates over their definition and over what they include or exclude, it is most clearly visible in the clash of fundamental rights, in particular the freedoms of expression and religion.

The Fundamentalism of Liberal Rights: Decoding the Freedom of Expression Under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms

The state of the union

Marx’s favourite author was reputedly Balzac, an author not of the left, but one who accurately reflected relations within the bourgeoisie. Trotsky similarly cautioned against judging art by the political positions of the creators. This book has neither the redeeming feature of good politics, nor that of good prose. There are occasional passages which made me laugh, but this reaction was almost certainly entirely against the author’s intention: there is little lightness, conscious humour or inspiration here.

Anmeldelse af Bo Rothstein: "Just Institutions Matter. The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State

In The Choice for Europe Andrew Moravcsik develops a “commercial” interpretation of Charles de Gaulle's European policies. Moravcsik claims that his revisionist analysis succeeds because he, as opposed to almost all other students of European Community policymaking, has relied not on “soft” sources but on hard primary sources. An investigation of his claim shows that it cannot be substantiated. Both the quality of his sources and his handling of them are poor. His commercial interpretation of de Gaulle's policy is based on a serious misreading of the two sources on which his argument depends. Finally, his restatement in 2000 of his original argument a restatement intended to overcome the problem that, as his critics pointed out, he failed to produce any direct supporting evidence leads only to further problems.

De Gaulle, Moravcsik, and The Choice for Europe: Soft Sources, Weak Evidence

Bespreking van: H. Spruyt, Ending Empire : Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. London : Cornell University Press, 2005. ISBN 0801489725

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.ap.5500163.pdf

Ending empire. Contested sovereignty and territorial partition

/pdf/european-variations-as-a-key-to-cooperation-2j66hhtsy2.pdf

European Variations as a Key to Cooperation

The outcome of the 2003 compliance crisis showed once and for all that the nature of the stability and growth pact (SGP) is highly political. While the existing literature often presents the content of EMU and SGP as an unqualified triumph for the German financial elite, the available primary sources point in quite another direction.

Behind the Veil of Budgetary Discipline: The Political Logic of the Budgetary Rules in EMU and the SGP*

This contribution offers an introduction to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. It places the Special Issue against the background of the debate on free markets versus social protection in the European Union and the inclusion of the notion of ‘social market economy’ in the Treaty on European Union. It sketches the meaning and development of the social market economy concept, and introduces the key questions underlying this Special Issue and the contributions included in it.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jcms.12820

Mathieu Segers

Papers

De Gaulle, Moravcsik, and The Choice for Europe: Soft Sources, Weak Evidence

Ending empire. Contested sovereignty and territorial partition

European Variations as a Key to Cooperation

Behind the Veil of Budgetary Discipline: The Political Logic of the Budgetary Rules in EMU and the SGP*

Rethinking the European Social Market Economy: Introduction to the Special Issue