Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
ONE OF THE signs of left internationalist commitment is a strong interest in the politics of other people's countries. For many years, internationalism required a steady focus on the Soviet...
...n The Arguments section of this issue is also strongly internationalist...
...The labor movement won't fully succeed anywhere, Howard argues, unless it becomes a global movement of workers everywhere...
...n Alan Howard's excellent piece on organizing workers across national borders, from Mexico to China, reinstates the older internationalism of class rather than country...
...It includes an exchange on the effort to boycott Israeli academics (initiated by the strangely powerful British Trotskyists...
...But Russia today looks more like it did in czarist than in soviet times...
...Other countries lived in the shade...
...We are opposed to all academic boycotts...
...The debate over Nick Cohen's book What's Left...
...n But France still commands special attention— because it is the country of 1789 (and 1830 and '48), of the Paris Commune, of the Dreyfusard struggle, of Leon Blum and the Popular Front—and because of the panache (and sometimes also the serious work) of its leftist intellectuals...
...It is a lively contribution to the debate about what leftism means today, which draws on earlier arguments in Dissent...
...Cohen's book has not yet been picked up by a U.S...
...Would anyone bother to do that in a report on an election in Britain, say—or in the United States, for that matter...
...publisher...
...We were lucky to have an editor in Paris this past spring and summer, but we would have written about the precedentbreaking candidacy of Ségolene Royal and the triumph of Nicolas Sarkozy, a Hungarian immigrant who exploited popular discontent with more recent arrivals, ran what looked like a classic right-wing campaign, and then filled his government with Socialists—we would have written about that from any distance...
...few of our readers are likely to have seen it...
...So now internationalism is more egalitarian: we pay our respects to everybody...
...We recommend its prompt publication...
...It is also, of course, the country of the Terror, the Napoleonic wars, the Restoration, the court-martial of Captain Dreyfus, the Vichy regime, the Algerian War—and the most famous intellectual defenses of Stalinism...
...Martha Nussbaum's position, developed at length in the Summer issue, is our own...
...M.W...
...but we publish here a piece by Mohammed Abed, who dissents, together with Nussbaum's quiet reply...
...For many years, internationalism required a steady focus on the Soviet Union...
...is more heated—we did not anticipate the heat when we published Johann Hari's review (Summer 2007...
...And it still seems necessary, when analyzing a French election, to tell readers how the leading intellectuals lined up...
...Well, that is what makes it so interesting...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
