Peter Lawler

Scandinavian exceptionalism and European Union

In contrast to more usual interest-based accounts, this analysis of the Scandinavian national debates about EU membership focuses on the conflict between different normative standpoints on the implications of membership for the future of the Scandinavian exceptional state. The debates shared a number of crucial features, notably the prominence of exceptionalist (i.e. progessivist and internationalist) critiques of the European project, but distinctive national settings also produced significant variations. It is argued that normative analysis of the debates identifies some key issues concerning the future of Scandinavian exceptionalism and, more generally, questions overly exogenous accounts of foreign policy change in small states.

The good state: In praise of 'classical' internationalism

The end of the Cold War has seen Western internationalism migrate from the margins to the centre of International Relations theory and practice. As a consequence the modest ambitions of what we might now call ‘classical internationalism’ have come under challenge from more thoroughly cosmopolitan varieties from both the right and left of the mainstream Western political spectrum whose commonalities, moreover, are arguably becoming as prominent as their differences. This article attempts to recover the classical internationalist project and, more specifically, the understanding of statehood that underpins it. Some observations on the distinctions and tensions between varieties of contemporary internationalist and cosmopolitan thinking about international politics are followed by a critique of a pervasive scholarly disinterest in the varieties of Western internationalist states. These two exercises form the backdrop to advocacy of the idea of ‘the Good State’ as a response to dominant forms of contemporary Western cosmopolitanism and their critics.

Janus-Faced Solidarity Danish Internationalism Reconsidered

With domestic political cultures in which the values of solidarity, equity and social justice figure large and a long history of internationalism in foreign policy, the Nordic states offer themselves as prototypical ‘good international citizens’. Danish foreign policy long had a passive quality to it, nonetheless it has been broadly consistent with the Nordic internationalist tradition, especially with the adoption of ‘active internationalism’ after 1989. Since the 2001 Election of the first Fogh Rasmussen government, however, the ethico-political rationales underpinning Danish internationalism appear to be changing at the same time as Denmark has enacted a controversially much more restrictive and, critics argue, strongly culturally framed immigration and refugee policy. Although the Fogh Rasmussen governments have not abandoned internationalism, and key aspects of current Danish foreign policy resonate fully with the Nordic internationalist tradition, Denmark is now much more closely aligned with the US and the muscular internationalism that it promotes. It may now be the case that a normatively re-jigged internationalism helps to legitimate an overtly exclusionary Danish national narrative. Since the ‘cartoon crisis’, however, there are signs of a greater sensitivity to cultural politics in Danish foreign policy, but it remains moot whether this will flow through into the government’s handling of the relationship between the peoples that comprise contemporary Denmark.

A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies

Davis, M. 2000. Late-Victorian holocausts: El Niño families and the making of the Third World. London: Verso. ———. 2005. The predators of New Orleans. Le Monde Diplomatique (October). Georgescu-Roegen, N. 1971. The entropy law and the economic process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gunn, C. 2005. Review of The enemy of nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? by Joel Kovel. Review of Radical Political Economics 37 (3): 405–07. Kovel, J. 2002. The enemy of nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? London: Zed Books. ———. 2004. House organ. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 15 (4): 1–3. Levins, R. 2005. How Cuba is going ecological. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16 (3): 7–25. Lummis, C. D. 1996. Radical democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Perelman, M. 1987. Marx’s crises theory: Scarcity, labor and finance. Westport, CT: Praeger. Skillman, G. L. 2005. Review of Dollars and change: Economics in context, by Louis Putterman. Review of Radical Political Economics 37 (3): 420–22. World Health Organization. 1998. Health care systems in transition: Russian federation. Copenhagen, Denmark: WHO Regional Office for Europe.