Notwithstanding Greer’s bestseller, it is generally accepted that the initial impetus behind the feminism of the second wave came from the USA. With hindsight an impressive list of causal factors may be assembled. The image of modernity and emancipation of the American woman was part of an American myth which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. By accelerating the dissolution of traditional values, modernity itself created the conditions for the liberation of women from their conventional roles. The USA, as the pioneer of mass higher education, produced a proportionately higher number of educated women than other countries. The struggle for racial equality, which prefigured the student movement of the late 1960s, had laid some of the foundations for a feminism dominated by the values of equal rights. No strong class-based party existed to monopolise these new struggles and anchor them to socialism. The non-structured, fragmentary and non-party based nature of American politics was better suited to the development of feminism than the system of parties which dominated Europe.

Marshall Aid, however, presents a paradox for both socialists and free marketeers. Politically, its aim was the furthering in Europe of ‘American values’ of which ‘free’ enterprise is the most crucial. It would follow from this that it should have been welcomed by free marketeers. The plan, however also implied that the European economies would not have survived had thy been abandoned to the invisible hand of the market. It was, after all, a plan launched by a state to help other states recover from the war and integrate their economies. The ‘free market’ may have been the desired end, but it was not the means…Socialists and their opponents resolved the paradox by the unstated and informal agreement to drop their long-term goals - socialism and unregulated capitalism, respectively.

What the Cold War meant, however, was that the socialists could accede to power only once they had accepted the international hegemony of the USA, the only capitalist power devoid of a strong socialist party. Thus, West European socialism had to develop under the international protection of a country whose ethos, traditions and outlook were deeply hostile to socialism and to a socialist project in any form. It was an international order which could tolerate socialism on certain conditions, but never encourage it.

This fundamental subordination of socialist ideas to the requiremetns of a bipolar world was an aspect of the decay of European power following the Second World War. The fate of socialism was inseparable from the political destiny of individual nation-states. With Europe divided and subject to outside constraints, socialists found themselves on hostile terrain. To them fell the painful task of living with a particularly grievous paradox: they must advance the cause of socialism, while fighting a ‘cold war’ against the only existing ‘socialist’ nation.

We hear the cry that this would be a unilateral declaration of independence by the Palestinians. If it were, it would not be so different from the previous unilateral declarations of independence by the new Israeli state in 1948 or, much longer ago, by the US. But in fact the UN vote would be a multilateral recognition by the international community that the Palestinians should have a state of their own and – even if they do not yet de facto control their own territory – they should be recognised de jure as an independent state. Recognition is, as Ban Ki-Moon said last week, “long overdue”.