Tag Archives: Euston Manifesto

The Guardian: Big idea

07May06 – 4:04 pm

James Harkin:

A fortnight after it charged forth from behind the fetid turrets of the blogosphere into real life, arguments about the Euston Manifesto still ricochet around the worldwide web. Named after the London road where the plotters met in a pub (O’Neill’s), the manifesto is a political movement born out of frustration among sections of the left with the anti-war movement. Prominent bloggers, journalists, activists and academics, including my Guardian colleague Norman Johnson, have already lent it their support.

The Euston Manifesto is a tiny alliance, but one indicative of a broader shifting of intellectual chairs. To their critics they are known as “muscular liberals”—to distinguish them, presumably, from the flabby and weak-willed ones. But there is much that is useful and spirited about their manifesto—the signatories score some eloquent points against the left’s opportunistic flirtation with radical Islam, its lazy anti-Americanism, and its retreat into flaccid relativism. Nor does it make any sense to label them as neoconservatives and apologists for American imperialism. The American neoconservative right and the Eustonian left might have arrived at similar positions, but they did so from vastly different premises and backgrounds.

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The Times: Euston, you don’t have lift-off

07May06 – 4:01 pm

…You might think, therefore, that I would greet with enthusiasm the publication earlier this month of something called the Euston Manifesto.

The what? In the weeks after the general election, a group of liberal commentators, led by the politics professor and blogger Norman Geras and the impressive columnist Nick Cohen began meeting in a pub to Euston, not too far from where Karl Marx used to write his polemics.

The result—a manifesto that calls on the Left to support universal human rights, to abandon anti-American prejudice, to see all forms of totalitarianism as being essentially the same, to be willing to support miltary intervention against oppressive regimes if necessary, to promote democracy and women’s rights and free speech all over the world. And so on. Read it yourself, it’s really very good…

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The Euston Manifesto Conference

03May06 – 3:42 pm

‘Solidarity and Rights: The Euston Manifesto one year on’

The Euston Manifesto Group will stage a one-day conference at SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, on 30 May 2007. The event will be hosted with the help of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies and take place in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG.
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The Weekly Standard: A Few good liberals

30Apr06 – 6:11 am

Liberalism stands strong in the United Kingdom.

“WHO TODAY IS CALLED a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?” Harvey Mansfield asked this question almost 30 years ago in the preface to his Spirit of Liberalism, and the answer was almost self-evident. This was during the Carter administration, and things haven’t gotten better since. There have been some exceptions to the rule of liberalism’s weakness, but these exceptions have been fleeting, and the rule seems stronger than ever in the America of 2006.

“Not so in Great Britain. There, Tony Blair has shown strength and confidence in defense of liberty, and it turns out he is not alone. A couple of weeks ago, a group of “democrats and progressives” released the “Euston Manifesto” (eustonmanifesto.org) proposing to draw a line between a soft and relativist left and the strong and confident democratic left that the signers seek to invigorate.”

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The American Spectator: Going back to Euston

30Apr06 – 6:02 am

I am European. I am liberal. I am a supporter of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq.

Sometimes it feels like a meeting attended by every person who shares those traits could be held in a closet.

“But that feeling, it has transpired, is wrong. Late last month, a group of left-of-center academics, journalists, and bloggers in Britain published “The Euston Manifesto.”

“The manifesto—which I played no part in formulating, but to which I am a signatory—displays clear-sightedness, realism and moral consistency. Those are precisely the values that I believe large swathes of the Left, in the U.S., the UK, and elsewhere in Europe including my native Ireland, have abandoned.

“The Euston Manifesto is not officially a “pro-war” document. The group that drew it up included some people who disagreed with the invasion. But the signatories are united in their recognition that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s “reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous” regime was “a liberation of the Iraqi people.”

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The Guardian: We live in changed times. The Euston group, alas, does not

27Apr06 – 1:19 am

A manifesto of the ‘pro-war left’ is a cry of pain and an argument about ownership of a corpse

You will have to read the Euston Manifesto in full for yourself. Likewise the churning arguments that are developing about it on commentisfree.com and other weblogs. But there are two big things you need to know as the debate on this latest leftwing prescription begins to move into the mainstream press. The first is that the authors’ main purpose is to rescue what remains of the British left from an obsession with the Iraq invasion and American imperialism and to shake it out of apologising for violent Islamists. The second is that the document is a cry of pain.

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The Observer: Why the Euston group offers a new direction for the left

23Apr06 – 1:30 am

A disparate set of left-wing thinkers meeting in a London pub has reopened an essential debate on the nature of democracy

To be on the left is to be both temperamentally inclined to dissent and to be passionate about your own utopia, which can never be achieved. Condemned to disappointment, you rage at the world, your party and your leader.

Relative peace comes when the right is in power and the left temporarily sinks its differences before the greater enemy. But to survive in office, the left leader must keep utopian factionalism at bay and that means making your followers understand hard realities and tough trade-offs and selling them the ones you make yourself.

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Welcome!

08Apr06 – 12:01 am

This is the Website of a new democratic progressive alliance.

You can read the Euston Manifesto here.

Please link to: https://www.eustonmanifesto.org/

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