In this video from the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference, Benjamin Martin talks about his research on the idea of European culture, arguing that its emergence among intellectuals after World War I and its subsequent embrace by the Nazis and Italian Fascists serves as a cautionary historical lesson.
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In today’s New York Daily News, Joel Kotkin writes about the death of New York’s middle class. Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, recently published by Telos Press, is available for purchase in hardcover format in our online store, as well as in ebook format at Amazon.com (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (Nook). In this video from the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference, Christopher Coker discusses why the idea of the West is an idea whose historical moment has come and gone, and how the collapse of the Western project is reflected in the crisis of liberal internationalism and the problems arising out of identity politics. |
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At the beginning of the 1950s, Reinhold Niebuhr used the Christian concept of “irony” to explain the difficult condition of the United States in the international system. In The Irony of American History the protestant theologian analyzed the ambiguity of American foreign policy during the first years of the Cold War. According to Niebuhr, the United States was involved in an ironic confutation of its sense of virtue, strength, security, and wisdom. This confutation was due not only to its lack of (Christian) realism but also to its false claim to dominate history. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when America became the most powerful nation of the international system, the irony of its history did not disappear. Even in a totally different situation for structure and distribution of power, compared to the one of sixty years ago, the ambiguous situation of the United States can be spelled out through irony again. This article discusses the lasting validity of the concept of “irony” used to explain the American present and, perhaps, its future. 
As the first wars to be waged on European soil since the Second World War, the Balkan crises constituted a defining moment for post-Cold War Europe, and particularly for the newly united nation at its center: Germany. The political and humanitarian crises that ravaged the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999 had a significant impact on migration patterns to Germany; the BRD took in 48% of all refugees from the war-torn region, vastly more than any other European country. This was not just a test of whether or not Germany would welcome migrants, a large portion of whom were Muslims. It was also a test of how Germany, in light of its own genocidal past, would react to the Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing” and how it would treat its position in NATO, a membership that would cause the first mobilization of German troops since World War II. When we consider these various factors and dilemmas, Germany’s role in the conflict is certainly fraught, especially when we recall that the German government under Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher exacerbated the Yugoslav crisis through its hasty recognition of Slovenia and then of its World War II ally Croatia as independent states. These decisions undermined the legitimacy of the Yugoslavian multiethnic state and set off a chain reaction that led first to the evacuation of Serbs from the new Croatian nation and eventually to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs.[1] 
