The ongoing take over of Crimea by Russia, and its intense political campaigning to annul the results of the Kiev revolution, took most observers of international politics by surprise. Normally, one has not been considering Russia as a serious contender of the United States for hegemony, as a country with serious economic or military resources, or even as a country with a particularly serious ideology. American and European political science has for decades been busy with “transitions to democracy” and the evaluation of their relative successes (even though there is a recent shift toward the study of authoritarianism), and in International Relations, China seemed to be the only possible opponent to U.S. unilateral hegemony. European Studies examines the various neighborhood policies of the European Union, measuring their relative success in “democratization.” The U.S. and European leaders therefore reacted to the events in Russia and Ukraine with surprise: John Kerry spoke of Russia’s “nineteenth-century behavior,” and Angela Merkel described Putin as being delusional, living “in another world.” This correctly describes the huge discrepancies in worldviews and values, but the views and values of Russian leadership, whether delusional or not, have very real effects, and therefore represent a repressed part of the reality about which the Western leaders do not want to think.
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Don’t forget: the Eighth Annual Telos Conference will be held this upcoming weekend, February 15–16, 2014, in New York City. Registration is now closed, but if you are still interested in attending the conference, please RSVP to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Please note that some of the talks are limited to registered attendees only. Additional details about the conference, as well as the complete conference program, are available at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. We look forward to seeing you this weekend! Paolo Morisi’s “Twentieth-Century British Christian Democratic Movements: The Search for a Political Space” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store. The Egyptian military has drowned the already weak hope for a transition to democracy in Egypt in blood. That during the storming of the Muslim Brotherhood’s protest camps, 600 people were killed and snipers fired at unarmed demonstrators cannot be justified by any state declared emergency. The military has thus shown that it is willing to unleash ruthless violence in order to sustain its power interests in ways almost reminiscent of the massacres of the Syrian regime. Reem Bassiouney’s “Language and Revolution in Egypt” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store. The Difficulty of Democracy: Diagnoses and Prognoses In spite of its advantages as an ideal form of government, democracy has proven to be remarkably difficult to establish and to maintain in reality. While it remained a rare exception for much of human history, its spread in the modern world has not had the character of a triumphant march but rather of a tortured path dominated by failed attempts, transformations into dictatorship, and degenerations into civil war. Even the most successful cases, Great Britain, France, and the United States, were marked by a concurrence of the rise of democratic institutions with an imperialist expansion that created a de facto hierarchy of citizens and non-citizens familiar also in ancient Athens. The purpose of the Eighth Annual Telos conference will be to analyze the key characteristics of democracy in order to determine, first, the precise advantages and disadvantages of this form of government in comparison to alternatives, second, the reasons for its rarity and volatility, and, third, the factors that are essential for its stability. We welcome paper submissions that address issues such as classical and modern theories of democracy, case studies of successful or failed democracies around the world, antinomies and conflicts within established democracies, revolutionary movements as progenitors of democracy, degeneration of democracies into other forms of government, the importance of culture and representation for founding and maintaining democracy, and the economic requirements and consequences of democracy. Please send an abstract and short c.v. to dtpan@uci.edu by August 31, 2013. |
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One of the major British political anomalies vis-à-vis Europe is the lack of a Christian Democratic political party. In most European countries these parties are part of the political fabric of the nation, but in Britain Christian Democracy never developed into a party. Research has shown that during the twentieth century there were British groups that inspired by Catholic social thought were the closest approximation to Christian Democracy. They not only sought to influence the parties, but also introduced into domestic politics typical Christian Democratic concerns. Thus, this essay seeks to address the following questions: What were their aims and policies? How and in what ways did they influence the parties? What was their ideological outlook? Finally, were there ideological differences among these groups? 
