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He has publicly fixed his own limits to the French-American alliance - by pushing for stronger measures against global warming

Nicolas Sarkozy evidently wishes to avoid appearing as subservient to Washington as, for instance, Tony Blair was. #1He has publicly fixed his own limits to the > French-American alliance - by pushing for stronger measures against global warming >

The global imbalances created by this dynamic of American borrowing and foreign lending appear stable for now, but if they slip suddenly, that could pose serious dangers for middle- and working-class Americans through soaring interest rates, a crash in the housing market, and sharply higher prices for anything no longer made domestically.

was a run on the pound sterling and he blocked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from stabilizing the currency. With sterling on the verge of collapse, says Frankel, “Eisenhower told them, ‘We are not going to bail out the pound unless you pull out of Suez.’” Facing bankruptcy, the British withdrew. This incident, notes Frankel, “marked the end of Great Britain’s ability to conduct an independent foreign policy.”

In other words, we have come so far in the American postindustrial meritocracy that everyone has equal access to guilt-ridden feelings of fraudulence.

As the man who oversees about $20 billion of fixed-income investments at American Century Investments, we revisited with Keegan as part of today’s The Game column on the recurring foibles of Wall Street. Deal Journal: You were right back in April. You called it all. Why does Wall Street keep messing up? Jim Keegan: It’s too profitable to stop. It’s too profitable at the individual level, so the individuals interests are not necessarily aligned with the company’s interest. Pay me now and you pay for it later. There is no clawback. Employees can walk away with hundreds and tens of millions of dollars. And someone else will hire them to do it again.

To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care, and education that they lack at home. But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society – that is, a political order characterized by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernization.

The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along.

In 1988, NLR Editorial Board member Anthony Barnett distracted a disappointed left into the desert of Constitutional Reform to complete the bourgeois revolution with the organisation Charter 88; in 1995 Will Hutton retailed a version of the Nairn-Anderson thesis in his book The State We’re In effectively drafting Tony Blair’s apolitical modernisation agenda.

Far from being too theoretical the Review was not theoretical enough. The tendency to manufacture deep sociological explanations for transient events certainly showed literary productivity, but it would be wrong to see that as necessarily representing theoretical work. ‘Theories’ were produced that in the end only echoed contemporary trends, without really criticising them. So between them Anderson and Tom Nairn manufactured the theory that Britain’s political revolution was, unlike its Continental counterparts, incomplete; an argument that became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis. The idea was that the emerging capitalist class in Britain had done a deal with the old aristocracy to gain influence, leaving the old pre-democratic power structures in place; the inordinate influence of the City of London over the British economy, with its old-Etonian clubbishness, Nairn and Anderson thought, was evidence of the persistence of a ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’.

NLR is financially buoyant because of the library subscriptions from American colleges.

The answer is not the obvious one: This country has more machinery or tools or natural resources. Instead, according to some remarkable but largely ignored research—by the World Bank, of all places—it is because the average American has access to over $418,000 in intangible wealth, while the stay-at-home Mexican's intangible wealth is just $34,000.

Global Trade and Conflicting National Interest

"Our objective," Baumol told a policy conference last summer, "is to show how outsourcing can indeed reduce the share of benefits of trade, not only for those who lose their jobs and suffer a direct reduction in wages but can wind up making the average American worse off than he or she would have been."

The "end of the end of history" has many architects. Today, several states (an increasingly assertive Russia and China in particular) embody alternative political models that have come to challenge any notion of liberal-democratic hegemony; others (such as Venezuela and Iran) experiment with forms of rule that too take them further away from its orbit. These models and forms face many problems of their own, but they may not be quite as unattractive - either to the people of these countries or to many observers around the world - as lingering triumphalists in the west might assume.

There has been a tendency to focus the work of democracy-support in very practical ways: toolkits, implementation, strategy and policy. This was and remains essential; but there is also a need to reflect on the underpinnings of these practices in how democracy itself is understood in this new, testing global environment.

The dominance of a liberal-democratic conception with an American accent is reflected in the overwhelming predominance of United States institutions, academics, journals - and ideas - in the democracy-support "industry". Again, this is not in itself a problem: all discourses of democracy are grounded in specific social-political contexts and  power-relations. But the current circumstances of the kind described above - authoritarian challenges, stalled democratic transitions, discontent with democracy, deep and growing economic problems - suggest that an expanded understanding of democracy might be a route towards a healthy redefinition of democracy-support.