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The Consequences of 11 September: A Sceptical View
Robert Skidelsky
Centre for the Study of Global Governance
| Thursday, November 29, 2001
It’s fashionable to say that the suicide bombing of New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September has profoundly changed the world. All the press comment has been based on this assumption, with appropriately ‘deep’ analyses of its effects on international relations, the world economy, globalization, and so on.
I don’t want to deny that great events have great consequences; but these must be distinguished from events which whose greatness is mainly dramatic. The 11 September bombings were tragic for the innocent who died, but they weren’t comparable in scale or import to, say, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 28 June 1914, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941. We should be willing to
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How Much Freedom do Governments have in a Global Economy
Robert Skidelsky
Warwick Lecture
| Thursday, September 28, 2000
I.
It has become a cliché to say that governments have lost power to the global market. For the New Right this is a matter of some satisfaction: they like markets and they don’t like governments, or at least Big Government. To the Left, Old and New,who often talk as though global markets mean multinational corporations, it is a matter of regret. They don’t like markets, and they like Big Government. Although socialism is off the political agenda, the old Right-Left battle still rages. Both sides are increasingly defined by their attitude to globalisation.
Globalisation is doubly contested. People not only disagree about whether it is good or bad, but about what it means, or even whether it is all that new. It is clearly a process;
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Writing about Keynes
Robert Skidelsky
St John's College, Oxford
| Sunday, January 23, 2000
Now that I've finished the last volume of my three volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, I'd like to reflect on the main problems I've encountered in writing this biography. Some of them are problems common to all biographers; some have to do with writing about this particular subject; some are peculiar to me writing about Keynes. So my remarks this evening will be to some extent autobiographical.
But I have slanted them towards an audience of historians, and I hope they will help shed light on such matters as the relationship between history and economics, the role of ideas in politics, the nature of biographical explanation, and the place of biography in history.
Let me start, by way of preview, with a word about the peculiar
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The End of National Sovereignty? Kosovo and Blair’s ‘New Doctrine of the International Community’
Robert Skidelsky
Royal Institute of Civil Engineers
| Monday, June 14, 1999
Now that NATO’s air war in Serbia has been successfully concluded, this is a good moment to step back from the headlines and attempt an interim reckoning.
In my experience, the fiercest disagreements on the war have concerned two questions: first, the scale of the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Kosovo before the war started and which the war was designed to stop or prevent, and secondly, the effects of the war on international relations.
I will address both of these issues in my speech this evening. We have to remember, though, that this is an interim assessment. Many of the facts are not to hand. Some of them are still locked up in Serbia. And most of the history which this war will produce has not yet happened.
So we have to
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Constitutional Position of the Lords
Robert Skidelsky
Tuesday Club
| Tuesday, March 30, 1999
The Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie wrote in The Times on 26 March that 'in the 21st century only a chamber backed by the legitimacy of the ballot box can hope to command the public consent required to fulfil a constitutional role'.
One of those well constructed sentences which public persons are wont to use, but which merit careful unpicking.
Notice first the rhetorical flourish 'in the 21st century'. In the past, perhaps, a chamber not backed by 'the legitimacy of the ballot box' might have 'commanded the requisite public consent, but not after 31 December 1999. At this moment the historical clock stops, the past is obliterated; we enter a new era at the stroke of midnight.
OK - just politician's rhetoric. Serious point. Past doesn’t
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