IIRE

New book on the left in Europe

Details: Parent Category: Publications

With its latest publication “New Parties of the Left – Experiences from Europe”, the IIRE, in collaboration with Resistance Books, provides a much needed analysis of the European regroupment of the radical left. With its pan-European focus combined with detailed accounts from France, Denmark, Britain, Germany, Italy and Portugal this book offers a unique and unprecedented insight into contemporary political history of the radical left in Europe.

Social democratic and Stalinist parties, including the Labour Party in Britain and the Socialist Party in France, have shifted to the right across the continent and have fully embraced neo-liberalism. This has opened up a political space to the left of social-democracy which has been filled by new formations of the radical left over the last decades.

IIRE publishes Pierre Frank's "Revolution & Counter-revolution in Europe"

Details: Parent Category: Publications

pierrefrank Between 1918 and 1968, the forces of revolution and counter-revolution fought a ceaseless battle over Europe’s history. This new issue of the Notebooks for Study and Research, "Revolution and Counterrevolution in Europe" shows how the Moscow-led communist parties led the revolutionary movements to disaster In Germany, Spain, France and elsewhere.

In the decades after the Second World War, democracy was regularly threatened by right-wing movements which aimed to dramatically constrict democratic rights. This ‘Bonapartism’ continually threatened democracy in France until the 1968 worker- and student-revolt destroyed the foundations of Gaullism. In this book a participant and political leader within the revolutionary movement gives his perspectives on those struggles.

Sexual self-determination in Cuba

Details: Parent Category: Research and Fellows

In Cuba, there is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transvestite, Transsexual (LGBTT) movement whose gestation is found at the intersection of the state and organised civil society. This movement seeks to tackle the main themes of LGBTT reality from the perspective of human rights, health and social integration, while inserting itself into the national project of edifying a just society. Historically, the space for its existence was provided by the country’s Women’s Movement, which was largely responsible for making Cuba, in 2008, the first country in the Americas having the sex-change operation included in the package of universal health care that island’s citizens enjoy.

This January, IIRE Fellow Antonio Carmona Báez interviewed Mariela Castro, president of the Havana-based National Centre for Sexual Education (CENESEX) and a bulwark for the nascent LGBTT movement in Cuba.