Martin Jacques
Martin Jacques
Martin Jacquesis a British journalist and academic...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
closely government hugely labour linked main outset seen timid
Blair's support for the Americans should not be seen as an aberration; on the contrary, it is closely linked to the main contours of New Labour policy. This has been a government that has majored on hyperbole, but in fact, from the outset it was hugely timid and cravenly orthodox.
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Blair - except at the edges - was a Thatcherite. Brown, in contrast, regarded Thatcherism as something that had to be taken on board while at the same time seeking to retain as much as possible of the Labour legacy, or 'Labour values,' as he would put it.
almost behaviour behind believe interest invariably justify lies major power reason rhetoric seeks vigorous west
Every major power always seeks to justify its action on moral grounds. Such behaviour is almost as old as the hills. The west has been a particularly vigorous exponent of this credo; and there is no reason to believe that China, for example, will be any different. But behind the moral rhetoric invariably lies interest and ideology.
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Israel is the agent and surrogate of the United States and as such is treated entirely differently from every other country in the region. How can anyone expect Iran to accept that it is right for Israel to have nuclear weapons while itself being disallowed?
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The move towards neoliberalism in Britain was intimately bound up with the embrace of the U.S. as the country to be aped and copied.
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After its defeat in the Second World War, Japan, unlike Germany, failed to show true contrition or give a fulsome apology, though it showered its neighbours, including China, with generous economic assistance. Only in 1995 did it finally offer an apology, but this was of the most limited and formulaic kind.
assumption china countries equally history markets modernity product shaped simply technology west widespread
Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.
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The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.
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An increasingly multipolar world requires an entirely different kind of U.S. foreign policy: far from being unilateralist, it necessitates a complex form of power-sharing on both a global and regional basis.
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The starting point for understanding the deterioration in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia lies in Washington rather than Moscow. After 1989, Russia was a defeated power. Despite the fine words and some limited gestures, the Americans have treated it like one. Their policy has been one of encirclement.
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Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.
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Neoconservatism in all its pomp conceived - in the Project for a New American Century - that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world could be remade in the American image, that the previous bipolar world could be replaced by a unipolar one in which the U.S. was the dominant arbiter of global and regional affairs.
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One of the unique features of China is that, notwithstanding the fact that it has a population of 1.3 billion, around 92% regard themselves as Han Chinese. This is quite different from the world's other most populous countries, such as India, the U.S. and Indonesia, which are ethnically diverse.
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My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality.