A survey of Green parties in 12 European countries, by young academics from the United States and Europe, but all writing in the prevailing American idiom of the social sciences. Informative, but narrowly specialized.
German history teaches that malice and simplicity have their appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable. It also proves that democratic reconstruction is possible, even on initially uncongenial ground.
Daniel Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust--condemning the German "eliminationist" mindset toward Jews--has become an international bestseller and a datum in German-American relations. Pity, because it is a simplistic, monocausal, and unhistorical explanation of one of the most complex horrors in history. For Goldhagen, as for the Nazis, Hitler is Germany.
The Afghanistan crisis has dramatized and intensified antecedent changes and strains in the Western alliance. There was unanimous, if separate, condemnation of Soviet aggression, but there were also divergent, and often acrimoniously divergent, assessments of the causes of aggression and the nature of the challenge. The difficulties of orchestrating a common response or of at least preventing a discordant one suggest a new balance of forces within the alliance and a set of divergent interests.
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