New Left Review 224. [antikvár]

themes The proposed establishment of a Parliament for Scotland seems like a straightforward measure. It figured prominently in Labour's manifesto and will be endorsed by a popular referendum. But, as Tom Nairn explains, the convocation of a Parliament in Edinburgh is quite unlike the periodic upheavals of regional government in Britain since it goes to the heart of the historic compact on which the United Kingdom is based, a compact with roots in a pre-democratic era. The Union of the Scottish and English Crowns in 1603, and the Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707, created the modern British state, Wales having been incorporated in the sixteenth century. In the absence of a democratic constitution, the Union was cemented by Protestantism, Empire, industrial revolution and the welfare state, but we now live in a secular, post-imperial and de-industrializing country in which welfare is on a drip feed. New Labour supposes that it can simply add an Edinburgh Parliament to an otherwise largely unchanged Ukanian order. It is oblivious to the logic of Scottish self-determination, and unwilling to countenance a renegotiation of the Union by sovereign bodies representative of its constitutive national entities. Instead of facing up to the necessity for some such Constitutional Convention, the Government is intent on pretending that the Scots Parliament can be treated as a glorified parish council. The shadow the Nazis cast across twentieth-century history also fell across the work of Ernest Mandel. Of Jewish extraction, he lived through Nazi occupation and suffered the loss of close friends and relatives. As one of the foremost Marxists of his generation and a student of Trotsky, he had a special insight into the political logic of fascism. Yet, as Norman Geras shows in a remarkable essay of reconstruction, it cost Mandel much time and effort to come to terms with the enormity of the attempted extermination of European Jewry. Mandel challenged the specificity of the holocaust by arguing that Nazism recycled prior forms of colonial brutality and racism, and that its exterminist ferocity was visited also upon Gypsies, homosexuals and other untermensch. Geras notes that Mandel's most acute reflections were written in the last years of his life, when confronting revisionist arguments from the Right. But even in these writings, he failed sufficiently to register the specificity of the Nazi terror against Jews. <11 I , ¦ I i I In a contrasting but complementary essay Norman Finkelstein takes apart the extravagant claims made by Daniel Goldhagen and those who have