British Journal of Politics & International Relations最新文献

This article critically engages with Peter Burnham's recent call for a ‘return to fundamentals’ and specifically to Marx as a basis for understanding the global financial crisis (GFC) and its still unfolding aftermath. The article criticises Burnham's ‘Open Marxist’ account of Marx's capital theory and his reading of the crisis in terms of ‘depoliticisation’ and the reassertion of the law of value over the state. The article focuses on Schumpeterian and Keynesian theories of crisis and crisis management as derived from fundamentals. It argues that Keynes, in particular, offered a theory of crisis that, while consistent with Marx's circuit theory of capital, was also distinct in its focus on money. In short, Keynes politicised money and its management. How the current global crisis is ultimately resolved depends crucially on understanding both the limits and possibilities for the repoliticisation of money in the post-neoliberal era.

This article analyses the micro-level factors affecting public opinion in Britain towards the long-running war in Afghanistan, a major foreign policy issue in the post-9–11 era. It examines the effects of social and attitudinal factors, including perceptions of how the war is going. There is a strong evidence of a ‘gender gap’, with men more in favour, while those with higher educational attainment are more supportive. Perceptions of the war's progress play a strong role in shaping general support. Labour partisans are more supportive while political knowledge is positively-related to support for the war. There is weaker evidence that the effects of partisanship are mediated via political knowledge. This article contributes to the scholarly understanding of public attitudes in Britain on foreign policy issues and to the wider literature on public opinion and military intervention.

In this article we examine how party political competition in Northern Ireland impacts on understandings of national identity and citizenship both within the region and elsewhere in the UK. These dynamics can be seen in expressions of political identity and through organisational change and electoral strategies. The consociational framework in which Northern Irish parties operate is one of the most powerful dynamics and we assess how it has shaped intra-community party competition, most notably through the emergence of the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin as the strongest unionist and nationalist parties respectively. However, our analysis of campaigning and voting in the 2010 General Election and 2011 Assembly elections also shows that the transformation of party political competition in the UK after devolution is an important dynamic and one that has shaped unionist electoral strategies in particular.

New Labour staked much politically on its ability to enact a trouble-free shift in underlying economic subjectivities so as to nurture responsibly self-sufficient welfare citizens. This policy began merely as the requirement for benefit claimants to become active worker subjects in the interests of enhanced employability. More problematically from the perspective of its own macroeconomic policy, it ended as the requirement for as many people as possible to become much more tension-prone active worker-saver-investor subjects in the interests of enhanced private pension insurance. The article charts the collapse of New Labour's reputation for economic governing competence as these latter subjects’ accumulated asset wealth threatened to implode during the recent financial crisis. In its last days the Brown government inadvertently placed itself in the paradoxical position of being able to defend either the financial interests of responsibly self-sufficient welfare citizens or its own reputation for macroeconomic responsibility, but not both.

This article traces the roots of ideas currently influencing the Labour party relating to the role of the state in Britain's political economy, exploring the trajectory by which such ideas have entered contemporary debate and how they continue to shape the party's agenda. Subsequent sections explore diverse interpretations of New Labour, the economic legacy of the Blair and Brown governments, the re-imagining of British political economy undertaken by Labour under Miliband's leadership, and the interlinking ‘progressive dilemmas’ that have so far emerged. The article concludes by suggesting that the ambitious rediscovery of interventionism will only be realisable if Labour confronts historical dilemmas relating to the structure and efficacy of the British state. Such a confrontation requires serious engagement between the doctrines of British social democracy and the overlapping and interlinking narratives of liberal political thought.

The article considers the reasons why New Labour's political economy failed to insulate Britain from the economic crisis that emerged in 2007, and the characteristics of a political economy platform that would provide Labour with a solid base for a progressive social democratic programme moving forward. The article argues that Third Way political economy failed to appreciate or address the inherent crisis dynamics of market economies, especially the extent to which profit-seeking behaviour tends to contradict social interests more broadly conceived. The article argues that mutual organisation offers an opportunity to mute the crisis dynamics in capital by re-establishing links between production and community, and that the Labour party should seize on this opportunity at a moment of crisis to form the basis of a progressive programme of social democratic reform.

Overcoming the limits of the New Labour project requires both a re-examination of its strengths and weaknesses relative to those of Old Labour, and a serious reflection on the content of the Miliband–Poulantzas debate that established the international reputation of the present leader's father. From both sources, it is clear that this generation of Labour leaders need to turn party policy deliberately leftwards again, and to engage in a progressive hegemonic campaign in support of that shift prior to the next election. For only if Labour returns to office with an electoral base mobilised to support a fundamental resetting of power can the party ever hope to escape the ‘dull logic of Labourism’ so criticised by Ralph Miliband and his academic followers. The thesis of this article is that now is the time for one generation of a famous Labour family to disprove the pessimistic thesis of its earlier generation.

This article argues that ideational and institutionalist approaches to the study of policy continuity and change should be complemented by research into political ideologies, and with exploration of an ‘intermediate’ public sphere in which there is extensive intra-ideological dispute. Exploring contemporary left-wing debate about political economy in Britain it is shown that ideational change takes place in the context of disputes rooted in ideological tradition, involving the rearrangement of concepts, the emphasising of some and the marginalisation of others. In the present moment that debate is marked by what may be thought of, heuristically, as ‘Keynesian’, ‘Polanyian’, ‘Schumpeterian’ and ‘Schumacherian’ points of reference. Assessing the likelihood of this debate developing into a coherent ‘crisis narrative’ it is shown that the development of the relationship between these poles will be decisive but that at present they stumble over the conceptualisation of ‘equality’ and ‘the state’.

This section examines the reasons why New Labour's political economy failed to insulate Britain from the recent economic crisis, and what the basis for building sustainable social democracy in the UK might be moving forward.