History Returns, with a Vengeance  

Hungary: Between Democracy and Authoritarianism by Paul Lendvai, trans. Keith Chester. Columbia University Press, 2012, 236 pp. In March 1990, I served as a member of an international team of observers to the first postcommunist elections in Hungary. It was …







Shlomo Avineri Responds  

For a quarter of a century, Iran has been ruled by a militant theocracy. After the shah’s regime–authoritarian, brutal, and backed by the United States–was overthrown, the new regime quickly proved itself to be authoritarian, cruel, and self-warranted by Islamic …





Failed Democratization in the Arab World  

Because al-Qaeda’s ideology is rooted in an extreme version of Islam, post-September 11 discourse has focused mostly on ways that Islam may, in certain circumstances, give rise to bin Laden-like phenomena. This sort of approach is both facile and wrong, …



Ten Years After 1989: Shlomo Avineri  

The fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc initiated a sweeping transformation of world politics. How should we think about these momentous events and their implicatons a decade later? Dissent asked a group of European and American …



The Communist Manifesto at 150  

One hundred fifty years after its publication, and almost a decade after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, can something still be learned from The Communist Manifesto? The Manifesto is perhaps the most unabashedly rhetorical and flamboyant of Marx …



The Return to Islam  

A specter is haunting Europe—and the world in general: the specter of Islamic fundamentalism. All the world powers have entered unto a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the pope and the president of Russia, Helmut Kohl and Françors Mitterand, …





Beyond Saddam: The Arab Trauma  

In the Gulf War that Saddam Hussein forced on the whole world it was only natural that the Iraqi president should be portrayed as if he were the essential problem. If Iraq were routed, Saddam destroyed, and the Iraqi military …



Toward a Socialist Theory of Nationalism  

Of all the historical phenomena discussed by Karl Marx, his treatment of nationalism, nationalist movements, and the emergence of the nation-state is the least satisfactory. It also left a problematic heritage to the socialist movement, with a veritable “black hole” …