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"Europe After The Minotaur": free e-book from the new Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis
The
Troika has been shaken this week by Syriza's stunning election victory
in Greece. Promising a backlash against EU fiscal policy, Alexis
Tspiras' young leftist party looks to shake up the status quo of the
austerity regime punishing Europe.
At the centre of the political storm sits Yanis Varoufakis,
the erstwhile economics professor newly appointed as the Finance
Minister of the new Greek coalition government. Varoufakis has already
described austerity as a form of "fiscal waterboarding", and promised that Syriza will "destroy the Greek oligarchy system".
Varoufakis outlined what he sees as the cause of the financial crisis -
and his plans for pulling Greece out of it - in his powerful book The Global Minotaur.
In
recognition of this sea-change in European politics, Zed Books have
released a special free e-book containing key extracts from The Global Minotaur. Europe After the Minotaur outlines his economic and political thinking and how he believes Europe can move beyond cuts and austerity.
Varoufakis shows how today’s crisis in Europe is one inevitable symptom
of a global ‘system’ which is now as unsustainable as it is imbalanced.
With powerful clarity and conviction, he lays out the options available
to us for reintroducing reason into a highly irrational global economic
order.This is a unique insight into the thinking of a key figure in the
Syriza government, who is set to become a hugely influential figure in
European politics.
To download your free copy of Europe After the Minotaur, just follow this link.
[An earlier edition of this newsletter contained an incorrect link to
the ebook. This has now been rectified - please accept our apologies!]
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More on Greece and the Eurozone Crisis
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Europe on the Brink: Debt Crisis and Dissent in the European Periphery
Tony Phillips
Europe
is suffering from a bipolar economic disorder. Financial journalists
divide the continent into two groups of nations - centre and periphery -
not by geography but by credit rating. Europe on the Brink is a
critical investigation of the root causes of this sovereign debt crisis,
and the often misguided policy choices made to resolve it.
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, together with two other finance experts,
compares debt contagion in Europe with regional financial crises
elsewhere, while Roberto Lavagna, former economics minister in
Argentina, provides a poignant comparative analysis with his own
country’s experience. Crucially and uniquely, Portuguese, Greek and
Irish economists provide hard-hitting case studies from the perspective
of the periphery.
This much-needed book offers a heterodox economic perspective on the
causes, symptoms and solutions of the biggest economic issue currently
facing Europe.
Paperback / £18.99 / $29.95 / 9781783602131
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The Great Eurozone Disaster: From Crisis to Global New Deal
Heikki Patomäki
The last couple of years have seen the eurozone lurch from crisis to
calamity. With Greece, Portugal and Ireland already driven to the brink
of economic catastrophe, and the threat that a number of other EU
countries are soon to follow, the consequences for the global economy
are potentially dire. In The Great Eurozone Disaster, Heikki Patomäki
dissects the current crisis, revealing its origins lie in the
instability that has driven the process of financialisation since the
early 1970s. Furthermore, the public debt crises in the European deficit
countries have been aggravated rather than alleviated by the responses
of the Commission and leaders of the surplus countries, especially
Germany.
Providing a captivating narrative about how Europe ended up in its
present predicament, Patomäki presents a radical new vision for 'global
economic democracy' as the only viable way out of the current crisis.
Paperback / £12.99 / $19.95 / 9781780324784
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Êtes-vous Charlie?
Just
who is Charlie? Following the terror attacks earlier in January on the
French satirical magazine millions marched in Paris under the slogan "Je
suis Charlie", whilst world leaders (many with less-than-glowing
records on protecting journalistic freedoms) joined in. It seemed, for
many, old narratives regarding a "Clash of Civilizations" between the
West and the Muslim world seemed to describe what has been happening.
But is this a particularly eurocentric view? And is Islamism itself a
tired, eurocentric ideology? Author Hamid Dabashi suggests so, seeing in
political Islam a post-colonial narrative that continues to flatter the
West's fantasies of being a culturally dominant bastion of
Enlightenment values. Writing for al-Araby, Dabashi says:
"Over
the last two hundred years, marking a seismic change in world history,
Islam in its vast civilizational spectrum was transformed into a
singular site of ideological resistance to European colonialism—and no
one is more responsible for this calamitous degeneration than Muslims
themselves, their self-declared leaders and their prominent
intellectuals in particular. Acts of murderous violence are symptomatic
of this historic synergy between the coloniser and the colonised...By
the force of the cold and calculating globalised capitalism, those
colonisers and their colonised are now brought together to live under
the same skies in Paris or Amsterdam or Madrid or London or Berlin. They
share a public sphere."
It's a position he elucidates in his powerful foreword, republished in full on Zed's blog, to Bobby S. Sayyid's pivotal and prescient book on the rise of Islamic extremism, The Fundamental Fear, published in a new edition by Zed Books next month:
"But Sayyid had identified something else: the politics of identity,
which has become particularly poignant for Muslim émigrés to Europe and
the US, where in the face of rabid Islamophobia that particular politics
of identity has become even more acerbic. There are an increasing
(however limited) number of disenfranchised Muslim youths in Europe who
are attracted to the murderous adventurism of ISIL, which seems to them
to be the only way to combat the racist Islamophobia – from mass murderer Anders Breivik to the so-called new atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris
– that engulfs Europe and the US. That politics of identity is today
definitive to the European Union, or its spectre, to the degree that
this ‘Europe’ only recognizes itself in so far as it can imagine its
alterity in the bearded face or scarfed head of a Muslim person."
Hamid Dabashi is the author of The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. His new book Can Non-Europeans Think? is published in April.
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New Titles from Zed Books
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Edward Thomas
After a long liberation struggle, South Sudan won its independence in
2011. Two years later, the world's youngest state erupted into new
torment, with civil war pitting ethnic communities against each other.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Edward Thomas provides a
multi-layered examination of what is happening in the country today.
Paperback / £18.99 / £27.95 / 9781783604043
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David Henley
Why have Southeast Asian countries been so successful in reducing levels
of absolute poverty, whilst in African countries like Kenya, Nigeria
and Tanzania, despite recent economic growth, most people are still
almost as poor as they were half a century ago? Henley's convincing
comparative study suggests the explanation lies with a lack of serious
intent from national leaders.
Paperback / £21.99 / $32.95 / 9781783602773
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Nice jeans, where did they come from? You don't know? In Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes author Andrew Brooks stitches
together the rich story of the worlds of high-fashion and international
clothes recycling. Following a pair of jeans across their lifetime,
Brooks reveals how fast fashion and international charities are
embroiled in commodity change and political system that perpetuate
poverty, from Mozambican markets and Nigerian Smugglers to London's
vintage fashion scene and Vivienne Westwood's high-end fashion house.
Paperback / £14.99 / $21.95 / 9781783600670
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Critique. Influence. Change.
Zed's acclaimed series Critique. Influence. Change.
brings together seminal texts by activists and academics in recent
times, bringing back important ideas to current debates. These
affordable, great-looking books feature new prefaces by leading
scholars, including Noam Chomsky and Ariel Salleh. We have three new
additions to this great series over the next couple of months, exploring
the history and dominance of Europe in intellectual discourse and the
relationship between eurocentric cultures and postcolonial narratives -
increasingly relevant books as issues of racism and Islamophobia
continue to provoke protest and activism across the world, from Ferguson
to Leipzig.
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edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood
Why is it still so difficult to negotiate differences across
cultures? In what ways does racism continue to strike at
the foundations of multiculturalism?
Bringing together some of the world’s most influential
postcolonial theorists, this classic collection examines
the place and meaning of cultural hybridity in the
context of growing global crisis, xenophobia and racism.
Paperback / £12.99 / $18.95 / 9781783601615
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Bobby S. Sayyid
First published in 1997, before 9/11 and before the austerity that has
bred a new generation of far right groups across Europe and the US, A
Fundamental Fear warned of a spectre haunting Western civilization. In
this ground-breaking book Bobby S. Sayyid offers an analysis of the
conditions that have made ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ possible and a
provocative account of the ways in which Muslim identities have come to
play an increasingly political role over the last two decades.
Paperback / £12.99 / $18.95 / 9781783601912
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Victor Kiernan
Using a stunning array of sources - missionaries' memoirs, the letters
of diplomats' wives, explorers' diaries and the work of writers as
diverse as Voltaire, Thackeray, Oliver Goldsmith and, of course, Kipling
- Victor Kiernan teases out the full range of European attitudes to
other peoples.
Paperback / £12.99 / $18.95 / 9781783604296 |
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