Grand narratives then and now: can we still conceptualise history?

Reading the Communist Manifesto today, it is impossible not to be struck by the confidence with which it conceptualises history. The positive energy of this bold grand narrative stands in such stark contrast to the negative and jaded mentality of our times, which conceives of grand narratives only to tell us that there can be none. Such talk as there is of history today is more likely to be of "the end of history". There are three senses in which references to the end of history feature in contemporary debates: apocalyptic prediction, postmodernist pronouncement and capitalist triumphalism. This paper addresses the crisis of historicity in our time in relation to these positions and asks what is it about our age that produces them. It explores the widespread rejection of grand narratives, as well as grand narratives, which nevertheless persist, implicit and explicit, right and left. It looks at the position of marxism in the 1990s, counterposing it to postmarxism and postmodernism in particular on the question of grand narratives. It calls for resistance to the detotalising pressures of the age and revival of a totalising (as opposed to totalised) philosophy of history

(Re-)mapping the centres: membership and state

The twentieth century has been marked by both drama and trauma. This has been particularly so within Europe and from a European perspective. Two murderous world wars saw civilisation almost destroyed by barbarism. The Cold War and an arms race threatened to exterminate humanity itself. The twentieth century has seen the end of Empire in a European context and the consequences of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century expansionism by European powers. We have seen shifts of populations throu..

(Re)Mapping the centres Membership and State

How is it possible to belong to a territory when its boundaries are no longer exclusively physical? How can we define the centre, or allegiance to that centre, at the beginning of the third millennium, if that centre cannot hold? 2In an age when appeals are made both to sovereignty and "the global village", when terms such as "subsidiarity" and "the international community" have become common currency, the notion of membership is irrevocably plural. 3This obviously invites reflection upon the fluctuating relations between central authority and secessionist tendencies in a historical perspective. Today one might consider that the issues of federalism and devolution are not necessarily incompatible. Another case in point would be the tensions between competing conceptions of nationhood experienced in America, between the "melting pot" and a genuinely multicultural society, and between the various linguistic, social, religious and ideological identities