Global Stage/edited by Susan Watkins

NEW LEFT REVIEW WAS FOUNDED IN 1960, and has since then maintained its position as the leading intellectual journal of the Western Left. Starting with highly influential translations of key fig ures in the Western Marxist tradition, NLR has published landmark texts by a range of thinkers-from Jean-Paul Sartre to Edward Said, Georg Lukács to Fredric Jameson-as well as critical analyses of contemporary events: May 68, Vietnam, the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, wars in the Balkans and the Gulf, and now the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq.

Strongly internationalist in outlook, the journal-published bimonthly from London-is flanked by a parallel edition in Spanish and by annual selections in Turkish and Portuguese. But although it has long been known to Indian readers, and though its content is now available worldwide in electronic form on its website at www.newleftreview.org, it has not previously been distributed in the Subcontinent. The present set of four volumes, which includes material from the last five years of NLR, and which we plan to follow with a single-volume selection each year from now on, is intended to increase the contribution NLR can make to ongoing debates within the country. The essays in 'The Global Stage' seek to map the political, eco nomic and cultural co-ordinates of the contemporary capitalist world, as well as indicating its contradictions, and points where resistance has begun to take root. In the second volume in this series 'Powers the focus moves to the strategic dilemmas and internal conditions of several of the world's major powers, while the third-Front Lines' turns to zones outside the advanced capital ist world, where the after-shocks of colonialism have combined with imperial aggression and neoliberal onslaught to devastating effect. 'Other Worlds the fourth volume explores alternative visions of reality and modes of social organization to those prevalent in the West,

The present volume opens with Perry Anderson's 'Renewals', a balance-sheet of the journal on the occasion of its relaunch in 2000 Anderson, NLR's editor from 1962-82 and 2000-2003, assesses its trajectory to date, and surveys the changed political and cultural scene in which it now finds itself. The essays that follow, and indeed those in the other volumes of this series, should be viewed as answers to the question of how a radical journal should respond to the current conjuncture.

The contemporary world scene is dominated by a single super power and the neoliberal ideology which emerged victorious from the Cold War. Peter Gowan's discussion of the American origins of the UN, and its usages by Washington up to the present, indicates the extent of US dominance over the central institution of the inter national postwar settlement. In the economic sphere, Ronald Dore notes the extraordinary success of the Anglo-Saxon' model, and asks whether Japanese or German alternatives to it are likely to withstand its advance, while Robert Wade explores the back-room deals through which the developed world shapes the global trade agenda at the WTO. Giovanni Arrighi tracks the regional roots of sub Saharan Africa's present disarray, and the structural transformations in the global economy that have overshadowed them.