Editorial

Citation

Coleman, J. and Rankin, A. (2003), "Editorial", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415cab.001

Editorial

EditorsJohn Coleman andAidan Rankin

The two unifying and intimately connected themes of this issue are the question of identity and the restoration of human scale to political and economic processes. Both are highly pertinent to Sidney Du Broff's powerfully argued contribution, "Will Israel survive?". To the founders of the State of Israel, human scale was important. Their ideal was a co-operative commonwealth with many of the characteristics of a European city-state. Ironically, however, it was Israel's small size and vulnerability to larger and sometimes mortally hostile neighbours that led to the growth of a militaristic culture, and the eclipse of many of Zionism's original humanistic goals.

Israel was created to redress ancient and more recent wrongs, protect the Jewish people from persecution and resolve a larger question of Jewish identity. After 1967 especially, the survival of that identity was linked in many Jewish minds with the survival of Israel itself. Sidney Du Broff reminds us of that sense of vulnerability. It is a useful reminder, because it helps us to understand Israeli thinking – which we must do in Europe, if we are to play a useful role in resolving the problems of the Middle East, including the plight of the Palestinians. Du Broff also questions the received wisdom that Israel and the USA are inextricably linked, finding evidence of a far more complex, ambivalent relationship between the two powers.

Identity, and the betrayal of ideals, preoccupy Peter Dollins, too. At a personal, as well as political level he has witnessed the decline of the Left, in particular the Communist tradition in Britain and Western Europe. In the Cold War years, the whole of the West defined itself essentially in relation to Communism (i.e. for or against it) and so the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Communist Party produced a far wider crisis of identity. This hole in the heart of the Left has been plugged, inadequately, by "politically correct" obsessions, such as race and gender, and an uncritical acceptance of market mechanisms. Dollins, although a trenchant critic of the Communist past, regrets the present moral surrender of the Left. A strong left-wing identity is needed more than ever to counter the power of big corporations and address historic injustices based on class. In post-Cold War, "globalised" world community, the emphasis of the Left should be on human scale and dignity for all human beings – men as well as women, white as well as black, for all are interconnected.

This emphasis on interconnectedness leads logically to David Haenke's contribution. Haenke was a pioneer of the American green movement, which was influenced profoundly by the emergence of "eco-politics" in Europe. The basis of his green philosophy is living within limits. This means a recognition not only of human but also of ecological scale. Haenke therefore shares Aristotle's view that there is a natural limit to the size of states, just as there is a limit to the size of plants and animals. He is part of the stubbornly decentralist tradition in American politics, which favours the devolution of power from the centre to the locality. Unlike Dollins, Haenke is a conservative thinker. He identifies the human scale with conservation – of human communities, traditional wisdom and craftsmanship, as well as natural resources. He therefore regrets the predominance of left-wing, modernising tendencies in the green movement, and seeks a more holistic approach to political economy. This involves opposition to state as much as corporate monopoly and support for a localised version of capitalism: small and medium-sized businesses, rooted in and accountable to local communities, working with the grain of humanity and the rest of nature. Although their flavour is American, Haenke's ideas are quite compatible with those of European thinkers such as Leopold Kohr, whose writing has been a powerful influence on New European.

Haenke's vision of green politics is at once radical and conservative. The same can be said of the Romantic Movement two centuries earlier, with which many European greens identify today. In England, William’Wordsworth was one of Romanticism's leading exponents. His verse combined optimism about political change with a love of nature and a strong sense of local identity: the English Lake District influenced his poetry and his thought throughout his life. His love of country was, quite literally, a love of the countryside and its people, true patriotism without bellicosity. As he grew older, and the revolutionary dreams of Europe turned into nightmares, the conservative element in Wordsworth's disposition became apparent, as Stuart Millson's evocative and lyrical account of the poet's life testifies.

Common to both the radical and the conservative strands in Wordsworth's thought was opposition to the dehumanising effects of industrialism. This human-scale theme is taken up by Aidan Rankin, who resurrects a classic critique of mass schooling, or "compulsory miseducation" as the American cultural commentator Paul Goodman described it. Illich is another conservative radical, and in his Deschooling Society he blames self-righteous "progressive" educators for the decline of traditional skills, crafts, oral traditions and local identities, in the interests of standardisation and uniformity. Illich, who died in 2002, has been a neglected thinker because he asked difficult questions about the nature of social progress. However his defence of the human scale – in spirituality as well as economics and politics – is celebrated in a collection of essays by younger scholars, also reviewed by Rankin and rounding off this edition of New European.